Site History

I wanted to put a page together that compiles everything I could find on the Internet with what I already have about Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches.  There are some good sites and images and there's so much more that could be added that I thought it would be fun to do it.

Why have yet another site about characters created by Anne Rice? And what does "gothic" mean?!

Why this website when there are so many devoted to books written and characters created by Anne Rice? There are even websites devoted strictly to the Mayfair Witches in one way or another so why build another site about them? The first answer is the most simple: I have a long-standing love of the Mayfair books. Their profound impact on my life demands a tribute of some sort.

That answer doesn't really explain the need for another Mayfair site, though, or my desire to make one quite as voluminous as this one. Let me address this before you begin exploring. I will do this in three ways: by giving a short overview of the kind of sites that did exist (and still do) before I launched this site, by a discussion of the term "gothic," which figures prominently in the first part of how I address the need for a site like mine, and a discussion of the other themes and events in the book that make the characters real life people with extraordinary abilities.

If you have been to the other sites devoted to characters such as Lestat, Marius, Pandora, Armand, Louis and numerous others from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, or Rowan Mayfair and particularly, Mona Mayfair, from Lives of the Mayfair Witches, you will see that the common denominator of the majority of these sites is the focus on the supernatural, or "gothic." In fact, a considerable amount of the criticism of particular Rice novels seems to use expected gothic elements as a barometer by which the reader gauges the book's overall effectiveness and value.

What I mean by that last statement is, if the book is not deemed "gothic" enough by readers and critics alike, it is not considered a worthy addition to the Vampire Chronicles or even the Lives of the Mayfair Witches. Consequently, you don't see much focus on those particular volumes in the Chronicles or the Lives in the numerous websites devoted to the characters in them.

One example is Memnoch the Devil. Because it has a great deal of focus on Heaven and Hell, God's role in human history and the ageless battle between Good and Evil, it was held in lower esteem because of its heavy focus on "Christian concepts." Somehow, Christianity and gothic tradition have been separated in the popular imagination and are deemed mutually exclusive. Meaning: it's not okay to write about both in the same series, let alone the same book.

A second example is Blood Canticle. In this book, Lestat as narrator does not sound "gothic" by any stretch of the imagination; rather, he sounds like he has naturally acclimated to the time he now lives in and the people he now lives among. In short, he has adapted via his speech, mannerisms and interaction with people both living and undead. Many times throughout the novel, in which he wastes no time addressing the criticism that Memnoch the Devil received (which I was devilishly amused by since I loved Memnoch the Devil), he is uproariously pranksterish and loves a good old fashioned joke.

So, to take a "gothic" character and bring in lush elements of Christianity and blatant, side-splitting humor by putting him in the middle of it? Help, murder, police! (Just had to pull that prank, folks).

Having said all of this, what exactly does "gothic" mean?

1Goth·ic

Pronunciation: \ˈgä-thik\

Function: adjective

Date: 1591

1 a : of, relating to, or resembling the Goths, their civilization, or their language teutonic, germanic c : medieval 1 d : uncouth, barbarous

2 a : of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a style of architecture developed in northern France and spreading through western Europe from the middle of the 12th century to the early 16th century that is characterized by the converging of weights and strains at isolated points upon slender vertical piers and counterbalancing buttresses and by pointed arches and vaulting b : of or relating to an architectural style reflecting the influence of the medieval Gothic

3 often not capitalized : of or relating to a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents (bold supplied by webmistress)

— goth·i·cal·ly \-thi-k(ə-)lē\ adverb

— Goth·ic·ness \-thik-nəs\ noun

~ from Merriam-Webster Online

As you can see, the term "gothic" is not a new one and it is not strictly related to how people dress, style their hair, paint their nails or choose their musical tastes. This term is often applied to fiction literature and musical styles that fit its definition both literally and in the popular imagination. Used widely to include any art or entertainment that meets the definition without measuring its qualifications based upon acceptance as such by popular culture, you could call the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris, the books that the HBO series TrueBlood is based on, gothic. Bon Temps, Louisiana is fairly remote and Sookie lives in the sticks - the Southern Fried version of the European spooky manse. It's scary for a girl to live alone in a big house in the woods - especially if those woods are frequented by vampires, fairies, shapeshifters and maenads.

So, now that we have established that many fan sites devoted to Anne Rice's characters do focus on the gothic, and now that we have a basic idea of what gothic is, I can get to the business of explaining why I felt like my time was well spent building yet another site to these characters.

When I first read these books at a young age, I was impressed by the gothic parts of the story like anyone else who reads to be informed and entertained. However, what impressed me more was that the events in these books were not happening in a fantastical world that reeeeaaaally demands that you suspend all disbelief in order to even enjoy them. The elements in these books that took them into the territory of gothic genre were extraordinary events that happened to ordinary people, and ordinary people with extraordinary abilities. Their possession of these talents and abilities could largely be explained by something ordinary and mundane on one hand but just as controversial as offering a strictly spiritual explanation for their existence - the very same genetics and heritable traits that make the Mayfairs a family in the first place.

In the books, the Mayfairs, via Rowan Mayfair, the Legacy Witch, enter a time where their entire family is threatened because the foundation on which they based their very existence has been shaken. By shaken, I mean it's crumbling from beneath their feet. The Legacy Witch has returned, the main family house has been recovered from the real family witch, Carlotta, restoration is in progress directed by the bridegroom of the legacy witch and everything is just ducky - until Lasher "comes through," attempts to murder Michael, abducts Rowan and leaves everyone in the lurch for more weeks than anyone cares to count. In the meantime, Mayfair women are dropping dead of massive hemorrhaging brought on by miscarriages that defy scientific and medical explanation. Massive funds from the legacy bank accounts are disappearing and not all of the transfers were initiated by Rowan Mayfair, making it a matter of extreme urgency that Rowan Mayfair and this male she has been seen with be found immediately. The problem is, the sketchy details investigators do have make the family uncertain if Rowan will even be found alive.

What do families do in a time of extreme crisis? To what do the family leaders fall back on in order to keep a sense of comfort and peace among the more vulnerable, excitable family members? The first answer is obvious - they pull together. The second answer is one that might be familiar to people from large and/or closenit families (sadly, not everyone has the good fortune of having such a thing) - they rely on traditions and beliefs that as a collective unit, have in the past strengthened and maintained family relations and brought a sense of a "united front" when trouble has happened before. We also have to remember that while the family as a whole is in crisis, its crisis is at the critical stage because the lives of individual members have been compromised by it as well.

It is not enough to say that the only lives compromised are those of the women who were Lasher's victims. Wealth or not, people have daily lives and responsibilities that have to be put on hold when a crisis interferes and demands their immediate attention. Not only do individuals commit to the family at this time, they must mitigate any possible damage to their own lives in the process. Much of this gets handled through normal, everyday, mundane and possibly unthrilling means. This is why we see the following methods used in the story:

Legal Methods: Not only does this enable cooler heads to hire private investigators and determine the amount of cooperation with local authorities, a realistic evaluation of what is at stake both legally and financially can be done, which it is - thoroughly. Family conferences called by Ryan are attended by other, junior partners in the firm and set aside fanciful notions of ghosts being born again through human mothers in favor of practical, boring solutions.

Science and Medicine: Even though Emaleth's healing Rowan with breast milk seems miraculous and as if it could happen only in fiction, there is a quantifiable explanation for why it was possible: growth stimulating nutrients with cells designed to rapidly repair tissue damage in a Taltos would be healing of traumatic injuries in far more delicate human tissue. Rowan Mayfair attempts to define Lasher as a ghost in terms of biochemistry. Later, the tragedy of Lasher's destruction of Rowan is that his overuse of her reproductive organs causes life-threatening injury to them and ultimately, sterility. Rowan was vulnerable to Lasher from the beginning because of her belief in her own scientific knowledge and diagnostic skill - she thought she could take the upper hand this way but was mistaken.

Modern Technology: Computers, fax machines, "state of the art" phone systems (for 1989), and later, laptops, email and cell phones - the Mayfairs are no strangers to technology and in fact, depend on it to function in the world. Indeed, Rowan uses the Caller ID function on her cell phone to trace Mona's call to Lestat's home (the same home he's had since Interview With the Vampire). Mona uses her computer (running MS DOS) to build a complete Mayfair family tree and later has a laptop in her hospital room at Mayfair Medical to exchange email with Quinn Blackwood while he is in Europe.

In short, I thought it would be fun to look at the other things that are in the Mayfair books besides ghosts and legends. Clearly, these are intelligent, educated, literate people who are not completely vulnerable to the gothic side of their lives. So why not look at what they've read, listened to, watched, or places they've gone, or traditions they love?

On the Parlor's new home is a section called The Archive.  You will not be able to view the YouTube video linked under the thumbnail image for now.  I will tell you this much: the video shows pages of the Parlor as they appeared when the site was new.  They also all used different templates Tripod provided to the point where my brother, who is no tech slouch himself and who contributed significantly to my redesigning my website, howls with laughter to this day.  

On Pages Locked in Time, a link to each page of the original Parlor on Wayback Machine archived from the Tripod Lycos site is provided.  At the times stated, I personally archived each and every page of the Parlor that was published at that time as snapshots on Wayback Machine.  I believe that is important for you to know--I did not just supervise, request or use anything that would have automated the process (if one even exists).  I archived each and every page myself, from my own device.  

Despite its archival appearance, be aware that I am still the owner of the site and of all intellectual property on it that belongs to me.  The rights of other intellectual property owners, including but not limited to AMC and Anne Rice herself, also remain intact.  

Regardless of the infernal ad banners, my website is not and never has been monetized by me.  Not on Tripod Lycos, not on Google Sites, not on YouTube, not on Facebook, not here, not anywhere.   Anyone who tries to monetize the content or otherwise use it fraudulently not only faces the prospect of civil penalties but also potential criminal charges.

For a period of years, I did have the comeintomyparlor domain, which just means I PAID Tripod Lycos to NOT put those fugly ads all over my Parlor.  It also meant I got to have more bells and whistles like those cursors with the trailing tails on them, and a lot more room for STUFF I didn't sell and no one bought from me.  Did you know they even had a music player at one time?  That was fun.

Still...

For those affected, I did discover that the Help Desk sites for Lycos and Tripod Lycos are still active.  Everything else is now gone.

From June 2008 to July/August 2025, Come Into My Parlor/The Mayfair Witches Parlor was hosted by Tripod Lycos.  Over time, the web host fell behind competitors and for several years, retained its features and its user interface that it had had since the 2000's.  Even I had trouble tracing its corporate structure and journey near the end.  

There was a great deal of service interruptions that resulted in an unholy amount of 502 errors that kept site owners from even being able to log in.  On top of that, security certificates were expiring left and right, renewed for a tiny bit of time and then expired again.  These interruptions seemed to primarily impact Tripod and its sister host, Angelfire.  

Now, many platforms do indeed have advertising in one form or another to cover costs for services they offered for free, and Tripod Lycos was no different.  Basically, the host runs ads on your free site and the host collects ad revenue for those ads.  Unfortunately, they never got past the banners and pop-up ads that scare the bejayzus out of people (with good reason) and were at best an affront to my aesthetic sensibilities.  What role this might or might not have played in ultimately bringing an end to Tripod and Angelfire, I do not know.

I include it here because this distinction is a critical detail when it comes to monetization, revenue, who got paid what and for what purpose.

Unfortunately, the situation became dire enough (I assume) that on March 6, 2026, Lycos placed a notice on their landing page that advised users of Tripod and Angelfire that both services would be shut down within 30 days.  Angelfire has more or less been down since January, but for Tripod, it was on or about Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, that the 30 days were up.

According to Archiveteam and my own checks, on or about April 24, 2026, Tripod Lycos went down for good. 

And do you know what movie just HAPPENED to be on TV in the days following that?  Titanic.  Oh, for...

Regardless of the difficulties, I will always be grateful to this pioneer of the early Internet for offering to me the same thing many other website owners through the years gained.  That is, a chance to learn new skills while sharing another of my passions that had a profound effect on my life: the Mayfair Witches novels.

It is with gratitude for hosting my website for so many years and for their positive contributions as a pioneer of the early Internet that the Parlor pays tribute to and nothing else.

I have taken the Parlor's Blogspot, Facebook and YouTube content away from the public for the time being.  I have either converted or closed the other social media that previously hosted Parlor content and made the vast majority of it private for the time being.

Come Into My Parlor is being reorganized.  There is only ONE live website for my Parlor content, which you are on right now.  Again, I personally archived the Tripod Lycos-hosted Original Parlor on Wayback Machine in February 2023 and in July 2025, when I finally unpublished the site from Tripod Lycos and moved most of its live content here.  You can find all of the Parlor's pages in The Archive, specifically on Pages Locked in Time.

After approximately 30 years online as a pioneer of the early Internet, Tripod Lycos finally went down for the last time on or about April 24, 2026.

Many of the things we have online today that we tend to take for granted--and others we still devise complex hexes against, like the popup eyesore intrusive ads--can find origins in Tripod and Lycos.  Blogs, social media profiles, expressing ourselves online in ways that this thing called "social media influencers" can also trace back to, among other things, this little "startup".

Tracing corporate history has never been my thang, although tracing my own family history is a thang of mine older than just about any other interest I have ever expressed even remotely publicly (by that, I mean online).  Family history is easier, believe it or not.

Trying to find these little companies like Tripod and Angelfire and Lycos and how they eventually became what seems to me to have spent the last decade or so as a trifecta of name-only services just does not come easily to me.  Ever tried to trace the corporate pedigree of a company that's had so much change?  A gal can trace lines of her own lineage across centuries totaling just over a millenia (I s***teth thee not--"we Americans' did not just hatch out of eggs one day in 1620, class), oceans, continents, and states full of "counties" and "parishes" and experience one Genie of the Lamp dropjaw moment after another.  ALL of which is worthy of mailing spit with all of this already recorded in a test tube.

Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest with family whose shared history with the timber industry goes back well over a century and can even be traced to the early textile industry in America and its roots from across the pond, I can follow that industrial history almost on its own.  I can even follow to a somewhat decent extent where and how timber and textile as industries became corporate as we know corporations today.

I can even recount an old family tale that involves timber, a river, a boom--and a production company.  Though the story is from 1925, I can even tell you what name that production company is known by today.  Perhaps I'll tell that story in a blog post.  Everyone likes an Old Hollywood story, even if it is most decidedly NOT a happy one.  Especially when it involves a production company that still exists today, but under another name.

You'll know it.

And I can STILL grasp all of that, even follow it to a degree, a lot easier than I can a corporate history that seems to have forgotten its own name over time.  

I've begun to suspect that I'm not the only one in this particular pickle, though.

I have also discovered an astonishingly great deal of this in the last few months or so.  Maybe that accounts for some of the many WTF moments I've experienced.

Tracing the corporate map of Tripod Lycos has been a series of WTF moments all on its own.  I had a terrible time trying to find the name of whatever the parent company called itself now.  I'd seen it once, my CRS kicked in, and I didn't find it again until I found a Reddit post about this.

The India-based Brightcom Group.

And it seems this came about around 2017--just in time for the Help Desks of Lycos and Tripod Lycos to never update their articles or system status again.

I am well aware that Lycos and ever'body has a Privacy Policy.  I am well aware of its 2018 PR advising the world of its readiness for GDPR.  But I am also aware that never once did I see a cookie banner of any kind from 2018 to the very end that was not mine.  

Never once did I see who actually owned the apparently non-firing and gradually obsolete Universal Analytics tag on EVERY. SINGLE. SITE. hosted by Tripod Lycos.  

Never once did I see any actual code for what turned out be a loooooooooooong list of vendors apparently used by this host actually on my site specifically.  Vendors I did not use.  Many of whom I had never even heard of.

There was far more to this, I believe, than I suspected at the time.  To understand why, let me first give an overview of why you see that cookie banner and the links you see under Blog Beezwax.  Let me explain...

Folks, that cookie banner you see on my Esmeralde's Grimoire blog when you first show up is indeed a GDPR compliant cookie banner.  I have analytics tags.  No, no ads.  But still.

This site has a basic cookie consent banner and more strict controls on what data goes where.

If you collect data from users that is sent somewhere else, the users must give their informed, explicit consent first.  You can't just say that by using a site, a user's consent is implied.  You can't just tell them if they don''t like it, they'll need to opt out.  That's not how this works.  

That banner with the lovely color coordinated buttons allows you to access the list of vendors I use on my blog.  The list is short.  It obviously includes Blogger, which is a Google product.  Yer Hostess (that would be me) also use Google and Microsoft for analytics, though.  These are the vendors for whom you are providing consent.  These are the vendors you will find in the Privacy and Terms of Use page.

The privacy and cookie policies are not merely there as a legal CYA.  Those are the non-smarta** pages of my blogs and websites that tell you who is dropping cookies and why.  They tell you how the data is collected and where it goes.  Yer Hostess makes sure it goes ONLY where it is supposed to, and this includes every page, every post, every piece of data you give if you leave a comment.  

The privacy and cookie policies will also tell you that it is customary to tip the Hostess--wait.  That's YouTube.  And nope, not monetized there...  

Anyway.

This is the basics in a nutshell.  There is GDPR, and the UK has its own GDPR since Brexit.  The main focus tends to be the European Economic Area of the European Union.  Just to point this out: Northern Ireland is a separate country from Ireland.  Northern Ireland is a part of the UK but Ireland is not.  Ireland is a part of the European Union, though.  

However, and this is critical: data privacy laws exist across the world.  In the United States, and yes, most notably, California.  Since California adopted its data privacy laws, many states have adopted their own data privacy laws as well, including Oregon.

If you collect data from visitors to your website or blog, you need a reason.  Then, you only collect what you need for the purpose you're collecting it.  If you sell products or services, obviously, you absolutely have to protect the data you collect when you collect payment.  If you collect other personal data from users for subscriptions or email campaigns, you have to protect any data they give you.  If you have a setup where users can create logins to access your site, you have to protect the data.  If you have a service that processes certain things for you like payments, that company, that vendor, had better be protecting that data, too.

But you are not in a position to protect the data unless you first obtain the user's explicit, informed consent to collect the data in the first place.  That is what cookie banners, privacy policies and cookie policies are for.

This comes from someone who has this process in place.  From someone who has also seen some pretty screwy things when it comes to those who might have been operating under the mistaken impression that the old rules were just ducky.

Going back to unrecognized vendors one does not use, here's an example to help illustrate for you when it's time to start asking questions.  First, if someone else tries to justify something by saying, "Google says..." when they are not Google, your response should be to confirm if the one saying this is, in fact, Google.  If the answer is no (and it usually is no), your answer needs to be, "Okay, then shaddup."  And then go directly to Google to see what Google actually says.

If you suddenly find a vendor added to your banner that you do not have any relationship with, business or otherwise, did not add to your site and likely have never heard of, that is a HUGE red flag.  That is when you need to ask just who threehornylittlepigs.com is and why they are a vendor in your banner when there is no connection between you and them whatsoever.

If you don't collect user data at all, if you don't even use analytics or anything like that and have no codes for any of these unknown vendors on your website, nor do you use anything to inject code and yet someone is claiming a ton of vendors you need to collect consent for...

Picture the scenario.  Class, what does this look like to you?

Because to me, it looks like nothing good.

Web hosts who host free websites, blogs, profiles historically run ads, yes.  THEY--the web hosts--run the ads, traditionally to help cover hosting costs.  Sites, blogs, profiles--when they monetize, they collect ad revenue.  Free websites, blogs, profiles, channels, etc are just that--free.  They are not monetized.  So why would they remarket data they don't collect to marketers they have no business relationship with whatsoever?  Why would they send user data to them at all?

It's not enough to simply SAY a platform is ready for GDPR.  They actually need to implement the tools necessary to actually comply.  Knowing what it is isn't enough, and neither is trying to pass the buck onto the website owners completely.

That mistake seems to have lowered the value of Lycos--or Brightcom Group? or are they one and the same?--significantly from 2018 on.  Lowered the value in such a way that the gap between the true value of the company and whatever revenue they managed to thrash out of the aging Internet giant created more of a smokescreen than anything.  The company looked successful and profitable on paper, but the reality was that the value of it was lowered so drastically by the fact that it was outdated and did spent as little money as possible was spent on its own infrastructure.  For "revenue", it probably relied on those atrocious banner ads and...eek?

They...might not have had users fill out the necessary digital paperwork GDPR required?

Askin' for a friend.

The true nature of that gap between the value of the company and earnings was, according to investigators in India, accounting fraud.  A deception meant to convince investors, shareholders, that the company was more successful and more viable than it actually was.   This had all begun to come to light in or about 2023, with some major accountability being served up and handed down in 2025.  The entire time, I was revitalizing and maintaining a website that had been there since 2008, all while being unaware of just how bad it was or that anything official was going on.

Because...I had a devil of a time just working out who owned what anymore.  Even search engine chatbots couldn't figure it out for a long time.  That was, as is usual in cases like this, no accident.

Companies who play musical names like this twisted mess I'm still confuddlepated on do that to cause that very confuddlepated state of mind meant to help keep unlawful, unethical, immoral actions from being found out.

Now, did Ybrant sell the devalued Lycos to Brightcom Group or did they just change their name to Brightcom Group?

A receivership appointing Daum Communications as the receiver (that's done by a court) because the company who was supposed to have bought it from Daum Communications in 2010 but never finished paying the purchase price for it definitely says this was an acquisition at the nicest.  But was it Ybrant who was supposed to have bought Lycos from Daum that turned around and was able to then sell it to Brightcom Group, or did Ybrant become Brightcom Group?

There is a Wall Street Journal article about Ybrant filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a result of the suit against them by Daum.  WSJ requires a subscription but I'll provide a link to the article anyway.

New tidbit: Apparently, Ybrant had bought Lycos from Daum in 2010 (I'm trying to recall that far back what I might have come across at the time about this), but...  By 2016, they had this...cash flow problem?  It resulted in Daum being appointed the receiver for Lycos as Ybrant had not paid for the Lycos acquisition.  Then, Ybrant filed for bankruptcy and reemerged almost immediately as Brightcom Group.  Or was that "Lycos Internet"? 

The sources I read referred to Brightcom Group's Lycos acquisition as "failed".

Wait.

WUT.

Oh. My. God.

At several points in gathering and reading all of this, I actually said out loud, "I don't like this."

As far as I can tell, whatever actually was Tripod or Lycos or Angelfire probably dissolved to the point that only the names still existed in the corporate sense.  Their servers and their aging infrastructures were just left to become increasingly unstable to the point of dangerous as security certificates lapsed, 502 Bad Gateway errors disrupted online businesses and attempts to back up legitimate websites, lunatic vermin disregarded the No Phishing signs, and people started receiving extortion emails that might as well have just said "Yoo send me dee creepto yoo sons ah dee beetches."  

Somehow, this Brightcom Group managed to hold onto Lycos...kinda...with a series of maneuvers that no doubt make the original founders of Lycos cringe at the very mention of anything connected to this corporate train wreck.  If so, I don't blame them one bit.  

In fact, from what I managed to find about the aftermath of what was termed a "failed" acquisition of Lycos by Ybrant, the "rebrand" to Brightcom Group came about because the legal and financial disputes involving Lycos led them to decide trying to continue to call themselves "Lycos Internet" would not be a good idea.  Yes, that was another one that threw me. 

It seems at one point, Ybrant had rechristened themselves as "Lycos Internet" to capitalize on the brand's then-reputation.  When Daum Communications took them to court because they still had not paid the whole $36M price set in 2010 and Ybrant filed for bankruptcy (among other things) in 2016, suddenly...the name Lycos wasn't a good look?  Oh, for...

This gives me a cramp in my a**.

You know what?

I just checked for this site on Bing and found that my old Tripod subdomain still comes up.  Along with a lot of old links that have never been cleaned out or updated.  I've no control over how social media updates their links.  

Now, I am just being honest when I say that when it comes to search engines, most seem to move at about the speed of an iceberg when it comes to updating anything.  However, one thing I do know from experience is that of all of them, Google has been the one to update their search index on a fairly regular basis.  Historically, once your site is indexed on Google, you didn't necessarily have to send them an ungodly amount of recrawl requests before it went, "Oh, did you need something?"

With others, it's not getting a site or a new page indexed that takes about a million years.  It's the removal of outdated content and links to sites and pages that went dark AGES ago that seems to be the problem.  You can send requests to remove, let them know about the 404 errors that are returned, but...they'll get to it when they get to it...seems to be the policy.

I don't recall if Lycos fell into this category or not, to be honest, as I admit I didn't use Lycos Search very often.  I also am looking at things historically speaking and I recall that it wasn't unusual for sites hosted by Tripod Lycos to appear in other search engine results under "Lycos Search".  So, if one search engine just pulls from another search engine, that might be another factor.  In which case, Lycos would have been pretty good about updating its index on a reasonably regular basis.

Although its search portal is still up (check it if you need to move your Lycos Mail, assuming there is still time), it doesn't seem to work anymore.    

Now, on Bing, it caught the part from the old Tripod site's landing page that announced moving day last summer and it shows in the snippet.  Thanks...?  But be assured: that thang is DOWN.  I just checked on at least two different browsers.  It's beyond 404 at this point, sweetheart; the server just cannot be found.

Despite all that has happened, and despite my opinion of the corporate goings on in recent years, I still feel a sense of loss when it comes to Tripod, Angelfire and Lycos.  Yes, companies come and go.  Every company, tech or not, makes blunders.  Sometimes they're huge.  But for those who were responsible for the Internet both in the beginning and as we know it today, it's unfortunate that they were felled more by having been acquired by a corporation who, by pretty much all accounts, excelled at fraud more than anything.  That is an outrage.

I would much rather have seen Lycos, Tripod, and Angelfire all be here today, would much rather have seen what they could have become that would have been positive than to see this happen.  

My website, one could argue, is something of a relic of an earlier Internet.  What I created on my original website is something that might have launched as a blog rather than a traditional website had I launched it later than I did.  It could have launched as a blog at the time.  Either environment was and is still an option for a site like this.

Throughout it all, I never monetized it.  Fan art is one thing, but I have never written fan fiction and frankly, never cared for it.  Why?  Ethics.  This is a fan site, which is not a mortal sin, by the way.  It is also about commentary, about educating and about entertaining.  People these days have blogs and social media to do the same thing.  Both of those things can trace their tech roots to the early Internet that was shaped by hosts like Tripod and Angelfire, by Lycos.

Facebook groups and pages are another example.  I can remember the days of newsgroups and message boards.  Those have transitioned, evolved into the kinds of communities such as one sees on Facebook.  Of all the social media platforms I ever linked to my site in any real way to first, YouTube would have to be it.

YouTube (and Facebook, for that matter) was only a few years old when I launched my site back in 2008.  Even then, I could see just what this video sharing platform might have to offer.  I could never imagine just how it would explode in popularity, nor could I imagine the kind of innovation that would evolve on it over the course of the two decades it's been here.

But--it did.  

Now, YouTube was and is a video sharing platform and a search engine.  Yessir.  A search engine.  Social media, I'd say, is a fraction of what YouTube is.

Whatever it is you need to learn how to do, whatever news updates you're looking for, whatever documentaries you want to find about topics you're interested in, music videos, videos with music in them, or you binge on truly WTH content creator moments like the nice train wrecks they can be...YouTube, honey.  A lot of my hilarious attempts cover specific points in the story of the Mayfair Witches, the occasional comparison between page and screen (hint: if you ever hear the book version of the wicked words actually come out of my mouth, you'll know I'm mad), and several that do show my 3D Brevard-Rice/Mayfair Witches house project at various stages.

Hey.  I've turned the candelabra on the dining room table since the remote control F-14 nearly toppled it while divebombing a cellphone in someone's hand, okay?  You don't bring a cellphone to the table, especially one that's livestreaming on YouTube during dinner.  It's rude.

Yes, I think YouTube has become something above and beyond what anyone might have anticipated when it was new.  A lot of that had and has to do with innovation.  Evolving, changing, growing...  Things I wish the Parlor's original web host had been able to do years ago.  Many platforms that exist today began a lot longer ago than the kids today might realize.  Many of them have that early Internet to thank for existing today.  Even if they changed the Internet, they started with an idea, a way to evolve or expand the technology.  I say this in the smallest of nutshells, of course.

Today, I want this Parlor of mine to remain a specialized subcategory of what else I create online.  Because it is something by me, from me, that I created to discuss, celebrate and pay tribute to a series of novels that had a profound effect on my life, and to the memory of Anne Rice and her extraordinary literary legacy.