I also quit Whyville, "retired" as it were. No more Bigfoot Bill or Times Editor. Feels weird to be done there.

Actually, Jen told me it was better to retire Bigfoot than the Editor, believe it or not! I gave her a funny look, but she insisted repeatedly.

Guess she didn't value Bigfoot as intellectual property, which is too bad for her. I think he could have been as valuable to them as Mickey Mouse is to Disney, give or take. Just goes to show you yet again how blind they are to what I always saw as incredibly important techniques of engaging users and encouraging a healthy community.

While Bigfoot Bill was a stand-out and fundamentally simple persona, the Editor was faceless and largely impossible to describe in a single sentence. Bigfoot was much more engaging and interesting and fun, while the Editor, well, he was a less refined version of me. Yes, both were me, but Bigfoot was one particular side, honed and practiced and really well thought out, while the Editor was pretty much all of me, with an emphasis on the editorial/work face, and only that because, well, I wrote in that voice while I was working as editor. LOL.

Don't know why I'm ranting here. Guess I should get a blog, rather than just update an old webpage. (This one formerly pointed you to my USC webpage, which is about to go away and was never actually updated anyway.)

I'll post a link to my blog once I have one. Meanwhile, enjoy my old diary entries, from before I knew there was such a thing as a blog!

-Joe Cook
-Joseph
-formerly the Whyville Times Editor, Bigfoot Bill, and many others
-and still Cyranojoe.
(That's MY intellectual property, for sure; Bigfoot is probably up for debate, though since they let me "retire" him as myself, I wonder how that works....)