(The exact hours will depend on when I get up. And while I haven’t decided exactly how to do it yet, I will be providing a cover page about why these sites aren’t available and where to find more information.)

This is the same day that Wikipedia, reddit, and others are shutting down in whole or part for twelve to twenty-four hours.

I’m not trying to punish the people who use my sites, but I think it is vitally important to educate everyone about this topic. And not just people in the US - these bills can and will affect the internet worldwide.

They most certainly have the potential to affect Petopia and the rest of the independent World of Warcraft community.

Petopia, Warcraft Mounts, WoW Tabards, and Dark Urban Fantasy are not political sites. And yet at a very basic level, all of my sites embrace a very political ideal: the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds.

Here are two quotes from the Wikimedia Foundation that sum up my feelings about this action:

[...] although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not.

and

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression.

In the past week, we’ve seen the supporters behind the SOPA bill in tactical retreat. But the broader topic of an internet blacklist is not going away. To quote Wikimedia again:

All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.

So that’s why I’m doing this despite the fact that Petopia is not political. This isn’t about partisan politics. This isn’t about copyright infringement. This is about free as in free speech, not free as in free beer. This is about not screwing up the internet. And the internet is incredibly important to me.

Sorry about any confusion!

Flotsam is floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo. Jetsam is part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo that is purposefully cast overboard or jettisoned to lighten the load in time of distress and that sinks or is washed ashore. Lagan is cargo that is lying on the bottom of the ocean, sometimes marked by a buoy, which can be reclaimed. Derelict is cargo that is also on the bottom of the ocean, but which no one has any hope of reclaiming.

You learn something new every day. Now that I know the difference between flotsam and jetsam, I suspect that this blog is now jetsam, not flotsam. But that word reminds me too much of the Jetsons … whom I never liked very well, primarily because of Jane’s skirt.

At any rate! If you’ve been following this blog – and I apologize if you have because there’s been a whole lot of nothing to follow – you may have noticed that … well, there’s been a whole lot of nothing to follow. I posted all of seven times in 2011 (not including guest posts). That’s … not worth reading. (Although the guests posts were good.)

The truth is, all the interesting pet stuff has moved firmly and inexorably to the Petopia forums. You want pet news? It’s fresher there. You want to talk about pets? Show off your pets? Bitch about pet tames? All there. Mounts and mini-pets and general hunter stuff, too. The community there is way faster than I ever was with posting the news and figuring stuff out. It’s a great, friendly, knowledgeable community and I love them to death.

But it leaves the question open … what do I do with this blog? After thinking about it off and on for months, I decided to turn this into a more general purpose personal blog … despite the risk of boring my remaining three readers to death. Since my personal life, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around the internet – especially MMO games – I figure maybe it will be interesting enough to read.

I guess we’ll see.

By the way, I’ve adopted Google+ as my general social community of choice. Feel free to circle me there.

Some of the buckets are going to look a little odd until I get everything settled. (For example, as I type this there are a whole 3 books that have 4 stars.)

But the ranking of books (which series I recommend more than which other series) hasn’t been changed. So if you’re looking for something good, start at the top and work your way down.

Bundle is pretty self-explanatory: it marks a series that has a bundle of multiple ebooks available for one price.

Sometimes these are a really good deal and well-formatted; sometimes they are not. So you may want to check the comments before you buy one.

Cheap needs a little more explanation. I’m using cheap to mean that every book (not including any anthologies that contain stories) in the series costs less than $5 in ebook form.

As I mentioned earlier, I am starting to check out the really cheap ($0.99 to $2.99) UF/PNR books and finding some good stuff, but for the moment $5 seemed like a good cut-off.

But remember to check the price before you hit the buy button. I don’t think I tagged any series with short-term promotional prices, but I was doing this by hand so I may have missed something.

The visible outcome of the rewrite is the Anthologies page … which I admit needs some help right now – but hey, at least it’s there. Stories that appear in an anthology are still listed on the author and series pages as normal, but you can also find a link to their anthology from their individual story page.

As an example, Tempt Me Eternally is still listed in the Gena Showalter and Alien Huntress line-ups, but the page for Tempt Me Eternally also has a link to the anthology Deep Kiss of Winter.

I haven’t converted all of the stories already on the site over to anthologies yet – they each have to be done by hand – and for most of the anthologies I only have one or two stories in the database.

Some stories are available both in an anthology and separately and I haven’t quite worked out how to display those yet so for the moment I am just adding comments to the story page. (Dragonswan, I’m looking at you.)

I’m very happy to have the database work done, though. Next I just need to support books that aren’t in a series …

Be aware that these are affiliate links. That means that if you follow one of those links and then buy a book, I get a few cents. That money goes to help support this site – well, truthfully to help support me while I spend all my time reading *cough* – but if you’d rather not use an affiliate link I won’t yell at you or anything.

If there are other book sites that you’d like to see linked here, please let me know!

Most of the tags are pretty basic right now – vampires, elves, things like that – but I’ll be expanding them to be more useful for classifying books in the future. For example, I’ve already tagged the young adult books, a few erotica series, some historicals, and books written in a style that I have rather loosely decided to call modern – largely because I refuse to call it chic lit.

As always, if you have feedback or suggestions please contact me!

I also finally added the rest of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s *-Hunter books (Dark-Hunter, Were-Hunter, and Dream-Hunter). I mean no disrespect, but … too many books!

Anyway, the reason this is important: using Kindle for the Web, you can get free sample chapters for many books and embed them in a web page. Which is what I did today – at least for most of the 370 books on the site.

Here, take a gander at a sample from Pale Demon, the latest Hollows book by Kim Harrison.

The formatting isn’t always the best – and if I have any control over that I can’t seem to figure it out. And unfortunately the samples don’t work for all books. I had to verify the samples by hand, so there was plenty of room for mistakes. If you see something wonky, please let me know!