triumphant return, or something

[jazzfish]

Over the weekend I realised that some of the people I most enjoy reading have either slowed down their posting rate, or abandoned LJ altogether (for Facebook or Twitter or "real life," who can say). In an effort to stem this tide, I'm going to try posting more myself.

(My thoughts on Twitter are best summed up by the closing of the Facebook Haggadah: "This year our ceremony still contains some time for reflection, and some ability to remain on the same topic for more than a minute or two. But next year, may our ceremony be faster, divided into bite-sized chunks, and with each utterance no more than 140 characters. And so we say together, NEXT YEAR IN TWITTER.")

Also, it helps out with one of the four things I want to do more of (write; run; play in a deeply character-oriented RPG; meet someone awesome), so there's that. (These goals have their own issues but they'll do for now.)

---

So, I spent the weekend (plus Monday) at the beach with my family. It was possibly the worst family trip I've had since I went to college. On the other hand, all the parts that only involved uilos totally rocked.

In retrospect it was sort of the film version of my last year or so of high school and first couple years of college. "Okay, so we compress the action down to the space of a weekend, and cut some of these extraneous girlfriend characters. Maybe make the sister into more of an antagonist, play up the sibling rivalry aspect. The parents need to be a little more sympathetic to compensate, they're kind of one-dimensional in the original. Keep the Arkansans around for background color, add in a kid. No, two. Kids'll amp up the chick appeal. Sound good? Do it!"

We drove down to uilos's parents' place in Richmond on Friday night, in what was probably the easiest Friday I-95 traffic I've ever seen. To make up for it, the three-hour trip from Richmond to Corolla took between five and six hours. Much of the delay can be directly attributed to taking 460 instead of I-64, with all the attendant traffic lights and fluctuations in speed limit and construction one might expect if one had been thinking a little more clearly. The rest came from the most rain I have ever seen in one place. Seriously. Visibility was about eight feet at times. The fields had flooded up to the rims of the tractor wheels. Route 12, the main road north on the island, looked like the Red Sea in places. Excitement and adventure and really wild things.

But we made it, little the worse for wear. I think we may have been behind Jennie Breeden for a brief time on 12 (black hatchback [ETA painted all over with octopi], with a large WWW.THEDEVILSPANTIES.COM bumpersticker and a whole lot of smaller moderately-clever stickers), until she turned off and took a shortcut into Duck.

And if I'm going to post this today I need to stop here. Tune in next time for RELATED TO PEOPLE I CAN'T RELATE TO, or, HOW I MET MY SISTER.

Comments

[cchan8.livejournal.com]

Over the weekend I realised that some of the people I most enjoy reading have either slowed down their posting rate, or abandoned LJ altogether (for Facebook or Twitter or "real life," who can say). In an effort to stem this tide, I'm going to try posting more myself.

Glad somebody else noticed. I was wondering if I was imagining that.

...going back to lurking

[jazzfish]

Not just you. Some of it's due to specific busyness or traveling or whatnot, the kind of thing that'll fix itself given time (I think I missed tamnonlinear's daily updates more than I realised). More seems to be due to people just. . . falling off.

LJ's maybe the third or fourth online community I've felt like a part of, and the only one that I've stayed involved in for more than a couple of years. I'd really rather not see it go. Especially not for Twitter/Faceborg.

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

The decline of LJ is very upsetting to me. In my social circle a lot of it is due to workplaces blocking the site, though.

[jazzfish]

Huh. Hadn't considered that aspect. I guess we could all migrate to Dreamwidth.

[faekitty.livejournal.com]

About the lj/fb thing, IMHO:
FB is where i can legally stalk (and in a non creepy way) people from my past to say "hi, I made it, i didn't fall down a hole!, btw, how are you?" and keep up with other people in a semi coffee shop line conversational - "how's your world?" sort of way.

Lj is still where i love to read my people's real thoughts, be they good bad or twisted; after all, journals are for the untwisting, no? It is also where i put my thoughts that happen after once or two sentences is over. It is where i talk to people i really trust and sometimes talk to noone at all and sometimes just do silly things all behind the safety net of my username.

And ah, the username, where you have to know me to find me. That, perhaps, is my favorite difference of all.

Anyhow, i don't know if you wanted all of this info; but something you said sparked it and so there you have it, my friend.

Loved the story, can't wait for the next part...and the movie (or would that be self defeating for you having written this down?)!

[jazzfish]

Agreed; it's sort of nice to find people on FB. Like the red-haired violinist I had a crush on in seventh grade (married, N kids, moved to New England, still a fundamentalist and homeschooler and Republican).

And ah, the username, where you have to know me to find me. That, perhaps, is my favorite difference of all.

:) There's that. For me it's just a small layer of indirection; if you know me as Tucker you probably know me as jazzfish. Still, it's helpful.

I just. . . miss the journaling. I miss it from a few people in specific, and from a bunch of people in general.

Anyhow, i don't know if you wanted all of this info; but something you said sparked it and so there you have it, my friend.

It's exactly the sort of thing I'm wanting from LJ these days. Thank you.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I got tired of all the links I couldn't follow and signed up for facebook the other day with a e-mail address I barely use and a name that probably only my husband would recognize. And from somewhere it pulled up a page of people it thought I should know, two thirds of whom I did. I was greatly disturbed. Fortunately I'm not planning on using it for anything other than as a passport to get to read other people's stuff.

Of course, I find that being on twitter, I tend to write longer lj posts when I do post, for whatever good that does. And any dearth of posting on my lists has been eclipsed by adding a bunch of authorial types who write interesting things from time to time. I do lament having missed the passing of robinmckinley, since I'm apparently too lazy to look up people who blog off lj, however interesting their style is.

[jazzfish]

. . . she what?

Oh. Just the LJ. Okay. Whew.

---

When Twitter started popping up I was hopeful that it would encourage people to make more long thoughtful LJ(/blog) posts. Instead it's mostly sucked off all the energy people would have put into LJ. I definitely appreciate your longer / more frequent posts these days; it's just that they seem to have been the exception.

Authorblogs etc help but aren't quite the same, somehow.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yes, passing from lj, not everything. Sorry. (although honestly, I'm not hugely enamored of anything she's written since I was in junior high, which is also sad...)

I am fond of the random nonsequetur (ok, I have so little idea of how to spell that I can't find it in my dictionary...) and of miscellaneous cryptic utterances, to which twitter is well-suited; it used to be that most of those ended up as lj subject lines. Also my increase of posting is partly due to having enough time to do it in at the moment; I tend to be somewhat cyclical about these things.

And yes, I'm still trying to decide quite how I feel about the author blog thing-- it has turned up some interesting brain-food, but the whole "I know bits about this person's life, while he/she has no idea who I am" is a bit odd. And I get intimidated by posts with 40+ comments on them. Still, it's a case of if there's enough to read, I tend not to notice as much when other people aren't posting, since my time spent online is about the same.

[jazzfish]

Me either, but uilos used to read me bits from her LJ and they were consistently amusing. (Used to until she realised that Robin was taking up half her friendspage and gave up.)

If more twits were genuinely clever I'd be happier with Twitter. Too many tweets are either baby-blog-posts that I'd really like to see some reflection go into, or just plain not that interesting. (Yes, the food is awful, and the portions are too small.)

Mostly what I want is some depth. For me, surface interactions grow stale quickly.

(Also, "non sequitur," thanks to four years' Latin.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Oh, the space was throwing me off. Oh well. I guess I expect English to bastardize more? [[eta- apparently my dictionary doesn't have that either? distressing...]]

I split my friends list up and read it in 4 (three gradations of people I actually know, which get pared down if I'm in a hurry, and one of communities and strangers-- and the first three tend to fluctuate depending on who posts things I want to read on a regular basis) so there's only a certain amount of taking over anything. My twitter following is split between people from the great before-lj, many of whom are hard to keep track of elsewhere, and people who deliberately post interesting things (storyprompts, etc.)

Admittedly, I still do miss my pre-lj blog site, which died the death of "we're all ready to move on with our lives and do other things now..."

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

While my brother informs me that the vacation pictures will be up on facebook, I still refuse to join because I am an antisocial person who is mildly horrified at the idea of a service whose main appeal seems to be "but everyone can find you there!". I don't want to be found!

And I just have to say:

But we made it, little the worse for wear. I think we may have been behind Jennie Breeden for a brief time on 12 (black hatchback, with a large WWW.THEDEVILSPANTIES.COM bumpersticker and a whole lot of smaller moderately-clever stickers), until she turned off and took a shortcut into Duck.

So she really did travel via duck?

[jazzfish]

Luckily my given name renders me all but unfindable, so it's mostly one-way finding. I can usually find the people I'm interested in, and avoid the rest of them.

So she really did travel via duck?

Heh. Via octopus, actually. (The google cache of the image still works but the site itself seems down.)

[uilos.livejournal.com]

You left out the octopi paintings on the the black hatchback - that was what caught my eye before the bumperstickers (mostly because my view was of the side of the car and not the back).

[jazzfish]

!!! Right. Corrected. And, can talk tonight about parentstuff.

[uilos.livejournal.com]

Also, remind me to pass a theory re: your parents by you sometime tonight: New subject, same fight as back at the beginning of college.

[zaph.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know I haven't posted nearly as much lately as I used to, not for any specific reason, but I do generally find it harder to update at work now (though commenting is less tricky) and when I get home, I don't often think to update.

When I do write here (or on DW if I ever get back to finishing the layout I was working on) it does now tend to be longer, because the short and often inane stuff goes on twitter or facebook, and I refuse to use LoudTwitter on general principle.

I think another direction a lot of people seem to be going is real life blogs where they use real names instead of aliases and such.

Here, I am still anonymous, and I don't actually have a real life blog (yet).

[jazzfish]

I'm finding that it takes actual concerted effort to post now. I hate that.

I appreciate you not using LoudTwitter. I think I've not dropped maybe three Loudtwits.

Hmpf. Most of the real-life blogs I read. . . hm. I guess pseudonyms are down to maybe a quarter of them. They've just got nifty names.

[plumbob78.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

<3 Jennie Breeden.

Sometimes I think of coming back here. Nobody comments where I am now.

[jazzfish]

Yeah. OpenID seems like it ought to be so easy to use and not cause any problems, but there's always some hassle. S'one of the reasons I've not migrated to Dreamwidth yet.

[plumbob78.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

It takes at least two steps to comment where I can easily see it. Three for me to know who you are. So, yeah, I don't blame anyone.

Re: Twitter - I think I'm getting addicted. Following Jennie Breeden now. She's coming to Otakon! I'm thrilled.

[rbandrews]

I'm probably not anywhere near the list of people you most enjoy reading, but I have been posting less. Mostly it's because the majority of the things in my life that are new, suck. And I don't like posting about sucky things.

Hopefully soon this will change and I can make happy awesome posts.

I've all but stopped using Twitter too, though. And I never used Facebook for much.

[jazzfish]

You /are/ one of the people I miss when you don't post anything.

I keep using Facebook because it's easily accessible from the Device. Also to keep up with the handful of people who've gone over to the dark side.

Hope things improve shortly; it sounds like they are, anyway.

[rbandrews]

Well, I appreciate that. Knowing that, I'll try to post more often.

I guess I just never really saw the point of Facebook. Most of my friends from high school, I didn't keep in touch with for a reason.

And yeah, that comment sounded whinier than I really meant it to. I just wanted to say, even though I do now have a Twitter account, I use it only for job networking and such (and reading Brent Spiner). I'm probably never going to stop using LiveJournal.

[uilos.livejournal.com]

Ditto on missing you when you don't post, but I totally get not wanting to post the sucky parts.

[rbandrews]

Another part of it is, since I don't have any privacy at work, the only time I can write things is on the weekends (in the evenings usually the last thing I want to do is look at a MacBook). Hopefully if Ryan does give me a job, that'll change, since I'll be working from home.

[uilos.livejournal.com]

Oh right! I'd forgotten that at one point you'd mentioned the lack of cubicle walls at your workplace.

Working from home sounds awesome. Got my fingers crossed for you.

[ivy-lee.livejournal.com]

I've felt very negative about Twitter... But yesterday on the news, there were rally protests in Iran, and Twitter actually proved useful to people who were looking for news. Somehow, people were able to get messages out through Twitter when they couldn't any other way. And I guess in a situation like that, where the state of evens really is changing by the minute, I can see where quick, bite-sized chunks of news would be useful.

But that's the only use I've seen for it that I like. =P

[absolutliz.livejournal.com]

I still like LJ, because it's not as hyperactive as FB. Oh well. I'm on there now too.

I'll be tuning in next time. =)