Tea at the Ford

Archive
Name:	Tea at the Ford
Date(s):	2003-2013
Archivist:
Founder:
Type:
Fandom:	Jossverse
URL:	Tea At the Ford, Archived version
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Tea at the Ford is the public archive of the private mailing list, "tea at the ford with macha," which is devoted to in-depth discussion of the works of Joss Whedon and other genre artists. The website's structure is unusual in the way it reflects the list's organic, multi-threaded conversations rather than presenting discrete essays, providing a reading experience not unlike a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

first part of its splash page

Tea at the Ford also houses the fiction and art of its members, as well as their collaborative virtual season, Three Deep.

Teaattheford.net is currently in the process of relocating. (25 July 2009)

Contents

• Arts Museum (Non-jossian Matiere) The Arts

• Folly (Non-jossian San) Our Own Not-jossverse Work
• Footpaths (Non-Family San) JossVerse Work That Isn't Ours
• Garden (Family San) Our Own JossVerse Work
• Hearth (Jossverse Matiere) Joss's Own Work
• Home (Family Meta) Home for Tea (The stuff that's just for (and about) us. The whole wing's not visible to guestage at all: you might say it's ghostage.{g})
• Homework (Family Meta) Home Maintenance & Design (This is where we do maintenance and design for the physical plant of this place. Business: keeping the Ford running in the background. Working from Home: the invisible magic that makes a house a home. Mission: to make sure we can go right on making that tea.)
• Library (Non-jossian Matiere) In Front of The Books
• Movie Theatre (Non-jossian Matiere) Movies in the harsh light of day
• Observatory (Non-Jossian Matiere) World of Big Ideas
• Reflecting Pool (Ford meta) About the Ford, itself
• Tower (non jossian: About the Making of San) On The Art and the Craft of Making
• Vault (Best of the Ford) Treasure House ('Verses in Bound Volumes (Alt bverses in book form); Camera Obscura: (Shooting scripts); Critics Corner: (Anthologies of our own collected critical works): Crossing Lines/ Crossing Water: (Work that crosses the Lines Between to define the Ford): Lost in a Story: (Prose Works From the Ford); Multimedia Works: (Best of Multimedia at the Ford); Still Art: (Best of Still Art at the Ford); Window Seat on a Rainy Day: (Anthologies of our own collected poetry works)

• Watchers Council (Non-jossian Matiere) TV Studies

Fan Comments

Ok, back in the Olden Days, there was a BtVS forum called Tea at the Ford. (I think the website is still up, but be warned, the site navigation is a complete nightmare.) The idea of it was, the site owner invited fans whom she thought produced good fic or art or meta or vids or whatever, and all of us would talk about BtVS in the private forums behind the scenes, and she would take the best of the conversations and post them on the public side. It was supposed to be a sort of fannish salon. And it worked, kind of – the main problem was, the site owner valued aesthetics above pretty much everything else, and so they deliberately made the organization of the forum super obscure. Instead of categories like “Episode Discussion” with a topic for each episode, or anything along those lines, there’d be categories like “The Parlor” with topics like “A Slim Volume of Poetry On the Mantelpiece.” Added to that, all the curating of topics was done completely by hand, with the site owner going over every post personally and deciding if it was worth porting it to the public side, and if so, which obscure category and topic it ought to go in, regardless of how it had fit into the original conversation.

So the site ended up largely unusable for the average person, and barely more so for those of us doing the conversations – we had a back door which would take us into a slightly more comprehensible area to talk, and we at least could see entire conversations rather than just disjointed fragments. Which is a real pity, because we did have some fantastic conversations.