Concept Loss and how to fight it

[pseydtonne]

I used to do this bombastic journal-esque mass email I called Pot Sherd. I haven't sent a missive in a while. It's time to reload.

I started Pot Sherd in 1998 or so. It was always a sporadic mailing, although I tried for once a month. The mailing list grew to about 70 people. I learned how blind carbon copies work.

Then my computer had a megafit in December of 2001. I was still running Windows 95 (since then I'd bought a Windows 98 license) and Internet Explorer loved having conflicts with my trackball. I'd lose mouse capabilities so often that I started using the number pad as a mouse. One day, that conflict when ultra -- I lost one program after another in rapid succession. Eventually, I had to install Windows 98 (which ruined my boot loader for Linux but I fixed that later).

I decided after that event that I would ween myself of Windows products, especially the other culprit of my crash, Outlook Express (its motto: "The Tar Baby of Mail Readers"). So I copied my years of email files and had a severe problem converting my address book.

I then started using Pine a lot. Pine does not like the idea that you want to do more than one thing at once. For example, creating a mailing list is trickier than electing a pope. So I got into the LiveJournal thing instead, hoping it would take care of my desire for a blog. Instead, it's left me feeling inadequate as a write because I never get replies.

I also realize that I'd been seeking an intellectual banter from LJ that will not be arriving. As smart as all of us are, I don't think I'm smart enough to get the responses I want from this forum. I am better at evoking responses through email. Email allows the writer to hijack a little more time from the mind of the reader because it doesn't have strings of other written pieces bunched up against it. That extra touch of time is what I need.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop making journal entries here. It's just that I need to do both the Sherds and the Journal, more the former than the latter, to get the satisfaction I seek in writing. The time has come to discipline myself again: if I truly wish to write, I must write whether I am in the mood or not. I'd become lax -- LiveJournal looked like another outlet, but it has instead deflated my ego. I don't quite understand what makes people want to reply to a journal entry. Perhaps I'll be able to have more fun with LJ when the Sherds are taking care of my more verbose output.

I've begun to use Ximian Evolution, the Linux answer to "I like Outlook but I don't like Bill Gates". It's a touch bloated in its acquisition of RAM, but it gives me spell-checking, mailing lists and overall shine. This means I now have the tools and clientele.

While I still have some data to cull, I am very close to starting the Sherds again. I had this piece I wanted to write about my experience at the Apple Sotre in Cambridge, for example, but the thoughts are far too long for LiveJournal. I have a hard time keeping my ideas down to a couple paragraphs, which seems to be the trick of LJ.

If you're interested in subscribing to Pot Sherd, send a quick email to me (dblando at dreamscape dot com) or post an email address in reply to this.

It's also about time I called Tufts and asked them what I need to do to start taking classes this summer. I'd like to get their "post-bac minor in computer science" before this recession ends.

-phase two a jazz odyssey, Dante

Comments

Send me the Papsmear!

[captain-flannel.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the old school referance to the time I forgot what you called Pot Sherd. But I would love to get your acational rantings and intelectual, philisofical speil. I miss that. My e-mail is j.world@verizon.net

[epanastatis.livejournal.com]

So when is the Sherd coming back? I haven't seen any in my spambox (aka Hotmail) yet.

I think the problem you've been having with LJ is that you haven't been writing it in any way like how you write your sherds. The sherds came across as, "this is Dante talking, but with a bit of secondary revision making it all the more excellent." Your journal entries thus far have mostly been brain farts about whatever is bothering you at the moment--which lately has been stuff related to computers--and tend to be written in an overly formal style compared to either your speech or your sherds. To be blunt, your journal seems like that of a slightly idiosyncratic but often boring geek--and that is not what you are.

Also, sometimes an entry can be really cool, but not give someone anything to grapple onto for a comment. For example, your January 8th entry about The Cheese Monkeys. It had some lines in it that were classic. For example, this paragraph:

This is a new form of deus ex machina that only the Twentieth Century could have given us: create an alternate reality and send everyone to it. Typical Western thinking -- take a great idea from the Nineteenth Century, one that needed a fuckload of brewing and spare time; toss the idea at some experiments and prove the faint theory is very real; then blow it so far out of proportion that you wish you'd never heard of the theory; then mass-produce it and abolish any contradictory thought. Hegel gave us Synthesis; we gave him cholera.

The problem is that the entry didn't give me enough of a sense of what the book was like for me to even figure out whether I might, in some alternate universe where I have gobs of spare time, want to read it. It was much more a narrative of your own subjective experience of the book. But since I haven't read the book, I have no touchstone to compare to your subjectivity, and hence am left incapable of doing more than appreciating it silently.

Another thing about LJ is that it's really about creating your audience. I have over 40 people on my "Friends" list, and over 50 on my "Friends of" list. Of those people, I know exactly three. If I met them all in person, it's quite possible that the only one's I'd like would still be those same three. And yet those three people rarely comment on my journal compared to the strangers, and their own journals are, frankly, far less cool than the actual individuals they purport to represent. So what do I do? I go out and find interesting-looking journals. I leave comments. Sometimes, people find my comments interesting, and they click through to my journal. If they find it interesting, perhaps they leave comments or even add mine to their Friends list. If I find them interesting and they don't piss me off, I add them back.

Oddly enough, I think our online and real-life personalities are exact mirror images of each other. When we hung out it college, gregarious Dante went out and met people, and I hung back and judged them--often harshly. Whereas I'm much more outgoing online, and your Friends list seems composed primarily of people you know in person.

I don't write my entries with the intention of eliciting comment, but more often than not, they seem to. Sometimes the comments are rude or stupid or both. Sometimes they're pointless and I don't respond. Sometimes, it sparks discussion. It's because there exists a rather diverse group of total strangers about whom all I know is that some of them are interested in some of the same things that sometimes interest me. And that's enough.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

I'll mention a few observations of my own. Not all of these apply to you or for that matter me but some of them do.

Posting stuff that is completely centered around yourself, as in "I am the center of the Universe", is a good way to not get responses. (This is not one of your issues - this one I specifically want to mention that. I'll point you to a journal that's like that sometime if you want)

Posting things that are strictly, "This is what happened," don't necessarily get responses.

Mentioning that a bad state of mind/body/whatever happened tends to get responses but if you mention it's all done that will get less.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Shorter posts seem to get more response.

Your smart-ass co-worker can verbally zing you while you're working :P

getting responses on LJ

[cos]

I assume people who were getting Sherds before will get them again? Or are you recreating the list from scratch?

There's no reason why you can't email Sherds out and then cut & paste the same text into LiveJournal.

LJ entries that connect to what people are thinking about, get more responses. The easiest way to do this is to mention people, or events that involved them - those people are very likely to comment. The most direct way is to ask them a question. If your entire post is a question to the readers, some of them will probably respond.
(Look at my journal for a dramatic illustration of this)

You could post about a party you were at, and other people who were also there may follow up, especially if you talk about something that was discussed or happened there. You could also post about, say, a movie, and people who saw it may comment.

More broadly, though, if you post something about a place, a current event, or whatever else people can connect to or have been thinking about, it will get more responses. For some good examples of how to present everyday events and unbidden thoughts in ways that people connect to, skim through dr_memory's journal.

And that brings up another point: If you write something especially... singular, or highly entertaining, every once in a while, people will link to it. They'll refer others to it. People who already have you on their friends list but don't read you all the time will read you more often. Expand your audience and you'll get more responses.

And finally: responses beget responses. If other people are talking, it tempts people to chime in.