Pagan Tea House

I recently visited a 3D “Pagan Tea House” on the IMVU server. It was pretty cool. I couldn’t help thinking about how we would have drooled over this technology in 1992. If you don’t know what IMVU is, suffice it to say that it’s a web site where you can create an account and a three dimensional avatar, which you can then load into verious 3D chat rooms. Think of it as a 3D IRC chat. Imagine if you could enter a virtual room and interact in three dimensions with other visitors.

I don’t know if the creator of this room is Pagan (although he is part of a group called “Pagan-Wiccan-Witch”) or has any connection with any of the various PTH’s scattered across the Internet, or if this person just created a room based upon a cool name (we all know that’s happened many times), but at the moment there is a PTH on IMVU. If you’d like to check it out, head on over and create an avatar.

Be careful how you create your avatar, though. I created mine initially as female as a joke, but now can’t change the sex. Haven’t decided whether to delete the account and start over, or just live with the mistake. Hell, everyone thinks I’m female anyway because of my name.

Links

• Pagan Tea House @ IMVU
• lddragon – room creator

I created a Facebook page for this PTH web site today. It was one of those stubborn acts of defiance that has haunted me all these years. Despite every one of us agreeing that the entity we think of as “Pagan Tea House” is dead, I still can’t let it go. There was a time when I thought the Pagan Tea House was a wonderful, much needed compliment to our daily lives. In the early days of the Internet, when people were bandying about phrases such as “virtual community”, we already had a family in the original PTH. So perhaps I’m just an old dreamer for clinging to an out-dated ideal, but I once believe “Pagan Tea House” meant something.

It’s that, if nothing else, that keeps me coming back. I may not be the best steward for this idea, but I am certainly one person who refuses to let it go. If I serve no other purpose, let it be to keep alive our memories of “the history and legacy of a genuinely good idea”.

I’ve been looking over scripts, trying to figure out if this web site would benefit from some form of chat system or at least a forum. I’ve noticed in the comments that old friends are finding one another through this web site, and I’d like to facilitate that if possible.

Unfortunately, all of the web chat scripts that I found suck. Majorly. But then, really, doesn’t web chat in general suck? There’s nothing quite as useful where chat is concerned as Internet Relay Chat. So, since I didn’t really think of this web site as a PTH in and of itself, we’ll skip the chat function for now. Unless somebody comes up with a great idea.

Forums are another story. I could easily put up a forum script so that people could leave messages and what-not. The only problem is that I don’t have the time to moderate a forum, and an un-moderated forum is out of the question. The last time I had a forum up I spent inordinate amounts of time every week just deleting the bogus registrations. Spammers love forums. So if we were to put up a forum, we’d definitely need moderators. Any volunteers?

I’d appreciate any input from people who have ideas about how best to use this web site. With a nod to the old PTH Group, I don’t really want this web site to become a clique unto itself. I want every person from any PTH chat room, chat channel or networking system to feel at home here. So… I’m open to suggestions.

I just completed another low-level scanning of the Pagan Tea House landscape (as it’s scattered out across the vast inch deep sea of the Internet, littered with our debris). I’m happy to report back that there are survivors. I’m sad to report that there aren’t many.

I visited the various chat rooms on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and didn’t find any warm bodies. This seems to be a recurring theme. I’m beginning to wonder if chat is dead. What’s the point of 10 to 15 people being in a chat room or channel if no one ever speaks in the channel? If you’re going to log in and only talk privately to other people in the channel, what’s the point in being there? And one has to wonder if any of these people understand what the word “chat” means.

I’ve also perused the web sites that are out there. As usual there are surviving pages from the ancient days, drifting about in the ether like relics of a forgotten time. Then there are the pages that have been put up as shrines to the vanity of some channel operator, or just some dweeb who chose to claim the name “Pagan Tea House” for their own use.

This begs the obvious question; one which I will pose to the old-timers. Is the idea of the Pagan Tea House finally dead? Did we finally let it slip from the realm of possibility into the dark, depraved corners of distant memory? Did we pass the torch to a younger generation, only to discover that they’re only going to use it to light their tiki torches and cigars?

I don’t know, friends. It’s not good when you spend an hour in the EFnet PTH, rolling doughnuts across the proverbial floor and waiting for some kind of response, and getting nothing. It’s also not a good time that in that hour not one person joined the channel. The UnderNet PTH was no different, really. Is chat dead?

If the general idea of the Pagan Tea House is thriving anywhere, it’s on social networks like Newsvine and Ning. Those are the only places where I found any life. Has PTH culture finally morphed into something useful, beyond cutting backflips into a virtual hot tub and arguing over spirituality or who came before who in some chat channel’s pantheon?

Personally, I’d like to think so. The tag line of this web site is “the history and legacy of a genuinely good idea”. There are enough bad ideas in the world. I think we should hang on to the good ones as long as we can, and we should never let them go without a fight.

To those who sit quietly in chat rooms and channels under the banner of “Pagan Tea House” but do not welcome new arrivals or respond to the words of people you don’t know, I contend that you have no idea what “Pagan Tea House” stood for and you sully its memory.

But to those on Newsvine and Ning, who are engaging in dialogue and the free exchange of information, I want you to know that you remind me of all that was good about the original Pagan Tea House. And while you don’t need it, and certainly don’t seek it, I’d like to offer my sincere well wishes and blessing as one of the members of the first PTH. It’s not how I thought it would be done, but I’m glad to see that someone has picked up the banner and is carrying it farther down the line.

Establishing this web site seemed like a good idea at the time. It bothered me, and a handful of others, that no one seemed to know the history of the Pagan Tea House. Or, more specifically, that no one seemed to care. For me personally, it didn’t bother me so much that a lot of people didn’t know it, but that the information wasn’t out there on the Internet. One would assume that if it was out there, people might stumble across that history from time to time.

Unfortunately, now that we’ve established that basic goal, I have no idea what to do with this web site. The various PTHs that exist are happily insular, with no real interest in outside contact. The occasional old-timer who has wandered through has universally stated that this web site is a good idea, but has shown little interest beyond that. Therefore I suppose maybe we should approach this web site as something of a museum piece, and simply fill out the archives.

So… any suggestions?

Hello, all. I’d like to offer my earnest apologies for leaving that horrible hacker screen on this site for so long. Honestly, I thought I’d re-installed basic functionality and that the screen in question was long gone. Imagine my surprised when I checked in and saw that hideous thing blinking at me.

Anyway, the site is back online. I’ll be tinkering with more things regarding the PTH community, looking for ways to help us reach out to one another (although history has shown that most of us aren’t really interested in doing that).

Hi, all. I just thought I’d drop a line and let anyone who is interested know that I’ve been slow to update the site for fairly obvious reasons. Firstly, no one much cares where the phrase “Pagan Tea House” came from, so there’s no real hurry to put up a lot information. Secondly, I’ve run into the same old institutionalized disinterest and territorial wrangling that the PTH Group was crippled by; namely that everyone who has opened up a 3-4 person chat room somewhere on the Internet and dubbed it “Pagan Tea House” seems to want to believe that their particular PTH is the one, true, real deal. And, well, fraternizing in any way with anyone else might sink their individuality and all.

I promise I’ll get a lot more information up here soon. I’m going to be digging out all things related to the PTHs and listing them in some form on this site. I’m also going to be posting some links to PTH survivors who are out there on the Web doing what they do best.

I’ve set up a page on MySpace to facilitate the whole networking thing to those who might be interested. You can find it at;

http://www.myspace.com/paganteahouse

Hopefully, we’ll see some of you guys there. It would be nice to come together in the same way that we once did with the PTH Webring (back in the mists of time). I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

I figure this is fair warning to the members of the various Pagan Tea House communities across the web that I’ve decided to root around and figure out who is where, and to list them on this site. Unlike the PTH Group of yesteryear, I’m not going to try to get people involved in cross-community activities or fellowship. I’m just going to list what’s out there, for the benefit of those who might still be interested in the various PTH communities but don’t know where to begin. I’m also hoping that old-timers such as myself might find this web site and know that there are still those of us out there who care about what that original Pagan Tea House represented; a very real community, even if it was an online one.

- Wicasta Lovelace

This is a holding page, so there’ll be some changes around here in the next couple of days.

For the moment, it’s enough to know that this web site is going to be all about the history of the Pagan Tea House. I’m one of the original members of the original PTH on AOL (it was originally a member room, not a public one). In addition to providing a history, I hope to provide links to the gazillions of PTHs that are spread across the Internet. Hopefully this site can be what my last PTH related endeavour, the Pagan Tea House Group, failed to be. We’ll see.

Check back in soon. I’m working on it.

- Wicasta Lovelace