Foxtrot The Furryous scribed:

Hey, Zen, how do we get there if we want to look
up stuff ourselves?

The easiest way that Zen knows is (was) through the gate on the Gopher's
web page, but failing that, it can be accessed through FTP.Ranma.net...

the notes from the FAQ cover it better than Zen can...

<quote>

* IS THERE AN ARCHIVE FOR THE ML?

Every submission or message sent to this list is archived. This archive will
contain the last 1000 or so posts, and is continuously updated as messages
expire.

You can look at the header of every mail coming from this list to see under
what name it has been archived. The [X-mailing-List:] field contains the mail
address of the list and the file in which this submission was archived.

There are two ways you can access the archive.  The first is by using the
archive server.

If you want to access this archive, you have to send mail to the [-request]
address with the word [archive] as the first word of your [Subject:] . To get
you started, try sending mail to the [-request] address with the following:

 [Subject: archive help]

ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL INFO/COMMANDS

This archive server knows the following commands:

 get filename ...
 ls directory ...
 egrep case_insensitive_regular_expression filename ...
 maxfiles nnn
 version

Aliases for 'get': send, sendme, getme, gimme, retrieve. mail
Aliases for 'ls': dir, directory, list, show
Aliases for 'egrep': search, grep, fgrep, find

Lines starting with a '#' are ignored.
Multiple commands per mail are allowed.
Setting maxfiles to zero will remove the limit (to protect you against
yourself no more than maxfiles files will be returned per request).
Egrep supports most common flags.

Examples:
 ls latest
 get latest/12
 egrep some.word latest/*

The second way is to use anonymous ftp. Ftp to [ftp.ranma.net] and look in
the subdirectory [/wwolf/FanficML].  The ftp site holds almost all the
posts to the ML not just the last 1000.

====================

</quote>

Hmmmm, must check out Prachett's work.  He's got a style
of writing that interests me.  And I can't believe that
people have done that in the Real World(tm).

Foxtrot has not read any Pratchett?  Foxtrot needs to get her butt to a
bookstore doublepluskwik and get herself copies of all the disc-world
novels.  She will *love* them, Zen guarantees it.  (The boy makes Doug
Adams read like the Encyclopaedia Brittanica) The truly incredible thing
with Pratchetts work is that instead of going down hill with each addition
to the series (Zen will not mention Xanth as an example) Pratchett gets
better and better.

As for the happenings in the real world(tm) - Believe it.  Zen has seen it
happen personally.  *many times* *sigh*

Yup.  I went to take a look at the Usenet group for
McCaffrey, and the FAQ says that if you don't use her characters,
you can write fanfics.  It's as simple as that.

And they *do*

Also, what they must understand is that we're
not trying to rip them off, but trying to fill
the void left when some stories aren't complete
or something isn't explained to our satisfaction.

We don't do it to make money, just to keep that
little section of the fiction universe alive.

Long Live Anime!

Hmmmm, if that wasn't the perfect opening of
an invitation to prod, well....

Oh Henry!  Where are you????

heh....

Zen-