I wish I had some ambition...
I got some things done today, but nowhere near enough. Grocery shopping and a little bit of laundry, and no writing. Yesterday and part of the evening before was spent in coding some nice looking web pages for the Thunderbirds Lexicon, a new addition to my MSN Group, IR Central (and also doing some on the spot editing, as I don' t think the lexicon writer did any of her own). That was fun, and I had it down to a post-copy-paste-find/replace science before it was through.
The Lexicon moved over to my site because one of the sites that hosted it seems to have vanished into the ethernet. It's sad, because this was (as far as I know) the oldest of the still-extant Thunderbirds sites. It was also a Stingray site, and the owner preferred Stingray, but I think he got more feedback on the Thunderbirds pages. He hasn't been really heard from since 2005, when Lucie the looney plagiarist was out and about and stealing fanfic from seemingly abandoned sites to use in her own so-called fanfiction. That was the last time any of the site was updated, so in a way, I'm not surprised that it's disappeared, but I am disappointed. He had some wonderful plot synopses for the show, both of the Supermarionation movies, and for the 2004 film as well. I've written to him and asked if he wouldn't mind me harvesting them (via the Wayback Machine) for IR Central. Hope to hear back from him soon.
So many of the fandom messageboards are dying, with the exception of my two MSN groups (and even those are pretty quiet), and Daria's Yahoo group (and probably Samantha Winchester's groups, as well, but I wouldn't know about that). Willow gave up all of hers (with the exception of one) to Chibimax, who did some work on them and then pretty much left them alone. Another of the oldest MSN groups is infested with spammers, and any new posts are advertisements for dating services. Some of the fandom Yahoo groups are affected this way as well.
The fandom lj groups - what few there are - have been moribund for a several months now, too. The most recent update was 13 weeks ago - and that was me, posting one of my fanfics! The BBC's Thunderbirds page has a note on it that says they won't be updating it. Granada took down the official Carlton website over a year ago, and haven't replaced it with anything. Universal Pictures still has the movie site up, though.
You'd think, with all the gloom and doom I've been spouting here, that the fandom was dead. It's not. It's just that it's entered a new phase, one where older groups - and fans - have moved away, sometimes chasing that "new, bright, shiny", sometimes just growing up and out of fandom. But if you look at other litmus tests - such as the Thunderbirds fanfiction section at ff.net, there's always a new story, always a new author. Several new authors - mostly for movie-verse, but a couple for TV-verse - have added their work in the past two months. There's always new merchandise, too. And YouTube is rife with parodies, clips, and the occasional Lego adventure.
I wish I could measure the fandom on the other side of the ponds - my own forté is here in the US, and even then, I'm part of a fringe element. But how are things in the UK? In Oz? In Japan? I know there's been a spate of British commercials lately using the Thunderbirds - my personal favorites are the ones for Specsavers (looked and sounded like a snippet of the show!) and Drench (loved Brains dancing!). There's also the fact that Gerry Anderson is trying to get the rights to Thunderbirds again, to make a new show. Not sure where I stand on this one; part of what makes the show great is the characters - and their development was due in a large part to Sylvia Anderson.
Still, it's sad to see these older sites and older fans, these repositories of information, of memories about what things were like back in the day, just up and leaving us. And it makes me wonder what I can do to help stem this loss.