An Appeal For Sanity On December 6, Michelle Klein-Hass decided to pull the plug on Lawndale Commons, one of the famed Daria mega-sites. The decision came after an angry post about her moderation of the Lawndale Commons message board, which, according to many reports, had been declining in quality over the last few months. Michelle succumbed to the pressure of verbal attacks by ungrateful fans, which is exactly what she said forced Roweena Stubbs and Katherine Goodman of Planet Daria and alt.lawndale.com respectively, into retirement. Her essay "Daria Fandom: A Question of Gratitude" was a Cassandra's warning about this sort of thing getting out of control. So now the flames have been flying in the other direction as well, sometimes taking on a rather scary tone. On a related note, I recently moved my other web site, the one with my anthropomorphic, or "furry" art (which means animals with humanoid characteristics, or vice-versa, think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or even Looney Tunes), because the owner of the server and domain that it was on pulled the plug on it after a hard drive failure became the straw that broke his back after months of hard work maintaining the server that housed nearly 200 web sites. I felt bad for him, and even did a small drawing in tribute to this incident, but I didn't send it to him until it came to my attention that he was now the subject of many a rumor about how he was leaving the fandom, or was going to charge for his services, or even that he was "going elitist". The toll that all this took on him from average schmoes without a real important stake in the issue is truly sad to see. There are those people who make and maintain these web sites, and there are those who take a few minutes out of the day to enjoy them. To the former group, this is a large part of their lives, and to the latter, this is just a diversion, mostly. The fact that so much ill will can erupt over the spending of a little bit of your day in passive entertainment has never ceased to amaze me. Over the last few weeks, our good friend Martin has been late on a few updates (late to a deadline he set himself, I might add), or has neglected to post a few things, and some people decide to jump on him. This seems to me akin to yelling at the manager of a restaurant because your french fries are lukewarm. In short, there is a problem of perspective here. People like Michelle and Martin are taking much time and money out of their lives to put up something you can do in your spare time. I can't help but think of a certain line from a certain TV show that has already been used in the Outpost essay section. "It's Just A Show", or in this case, a web site, "You Should Really Just Relax". Before you hound the webmaster, or the other people who post to a message board, take a look out the nearest window.