shadows of echoes of memories of songs

I am moving my plastic-free July posts to my shopping blog (first posts there in about a year...) because that seems like a more sensible place for them. I won't delete the versions here, but subsequent plastic-free July posts will be over there instead. I've massively cut the first day's post to take out most of the rambling emo; the second is more or less unchanged, and today's is ALL NEW. Sorry to all those who've already commented on the first two here, no obligation to go and comment again!

I've decided to make the last few posts (but not this one obviously) friends-only, because they're largely about Img and nursery and stuff and I suspect I probably should be a bit more circumspect about who reads them (though obviously the NSA is still reading them anyway, and Google is probably projecting them on to the moon as we speak). To be honest I should probably make this whole journal friends-only since I have other public blogs for stuff I actively want to make public (as opposed to stuff I'm not too worried about people seeing). It used to be a point of principle that my LJ was entirely public except for very occasional admin posts about change of address, but I'm not really sure what that principle is any more, and I suspect it doesn't apply when I'm posting about someone who doesn't get a say in it. I also suspect that having points of principle about LJ is like having strong opinions about daguerrotypes or something.

(Is there a way to make only posts after a certain date friends-only? Or only posts with a certain tag? There are a few posts I want to keep public. Maybe I should just put them somewhere else. And then I think oh really who cares, only 12 people read this anyway. 12 people and Google and the NSA.)

It's been fun to watch people unfriending me as I post stuff though (I'm guessing it's not so much the content as "oh I forgot she was on my friends list but now she's started posting again, can't remember who she is anyway"). Ah, the drama llamas of yesteryear. To be honest the friendslist angst all seems pretty trivial now compared with the real feeling that my actual friends (some of whom are also my LJ friends, of course) are slipping further and further away from me in time and place and connectedness and it's not some kind of big drama, it's just that people sort of softly and suddenly vanish away. I am very bad at taking people off 'friends lists' but it's starting to feel like the people-I-sorta-like-but-basically-never-see-or-talk-to are diluting the actual friendships (though this is more of a problem on Facebook where I'm 'friends' with loads of people I haven't seen or significantly thought about for a quarter of a century. Need to do something about that.) Maybe that's silly and maybe it doesn't make any difference and maybe the real problem is that I'm a dreadful correspondent or that the people I want to stay friends with just aren't that into me. Not fishing for compliments here, just musing on the way friendships change and the way everything seems to get stretched thinner as I get older.

So tired.

A post about the Perl course I went on a couple of days ago. May contain a couple of paragraphs of mild interest to non-programmers. Contains traces of badgers.

Annoyingly, I wrote that post much better on the train on the way home, but (as mentioned) the iPhone Wordpress app ate it. On the other hand, that version had a very long digression about how I got into writing Perl, which I suspect interests nobody except (possibly) me.

BTW, I notice with amusement that the course tutor has since spotted that I was tweeting about the course, though I'm not sure he knows it was me, if you see what I mean. Wouldn't be hard for him to find out now, though. :-)

I'm worn out already and it's only just over halfway through November! What I really want is to take a long break from blogging, but I am determined to post something every day this month. I think it's doing me good: I've probably finished more sentences this month than in the entire preceding year. (If you're finding this unnervingly out-of-character, just stop reading here and instead imagine me waving my hands around and descending into rambly self-deprecating mutterings, undermining everything I've said.)

So anyway, today's rather thin offering is partly this post here, and partly a new short-ish buycurious post. I do find those harder to do, in some ways, because they're more about the information than the opinions (I can have opinions on pretty much anything at the drop of a hat without necessarily knowing anything about the thing(s) in question — though it's a tendency I try to keep in check); so why am I doing it...? Basically, because I always seem to have a head full of information about shops and where to buy things, so I wondered if I could make that into something that might be faintly useful for other people. I had plans to do all sorts of things with the blog at one point — price-comparisons for specific objects, profiles of individual shops, overviews of areas of Oxford, an opportunity for people to email in "where can I find..." questions like the Guardian magazine does — but every time I had an idea like that I had the same form of Blogger's Block that I usually get with new blogs: "I have a great idea for a post about [whatever] but I have to sort of establish the blog and get some readers before I use up the really good ideas". This then leaves me struggling to find something boring-but-not-too-boring to say in order to pad it out a bit before I post the stuff I actually want to post, which is a frankly rubbish situation to be in and it's no wonder it puts me off posting. (NB I don't really think my "great ideas" are so great that they're worth being that precious about, and I'm sure a lot of the things I blog about are actually quite boring; this is really just trying to explain the mental block I normally get when it comes to actually posting things.)

There's a bit of a general problem here, though: blogs let you publish things easily, but they also come with some kind of expectation of regular or frequent (or at least not-just-one-off) publishing. It's as if every author got signed up for a 10-book contract automatically (though with no promise of payment for any of them!). Yes, people do set up single-purpose blogs, but what I really want (both to read and to post to) is a blog which works more like a magazine: that is, a combination of good one-off 'feature' articles and regular columns, written by lots of different people. Unlike most magazines, though, I'd like it to be unrestrained by the need to have a unifying style or theme, except, well, being interesting. Okay, so maybe I'd be disqualifying myself from this blogozine with even just that single criterion... but that's fine, I'd still be able to read it. :-)

[Will that do? — Ed.]

Today's post is on another blog which I don't update often enough (though I really should because it's the closest thing I have to a professional blog -- on the other hand we do now have a blogging service at work, which I should probably be starting to use for actually-work-related things... MORE HOURS IN DAY PLS KTHX).

It is with a huge sigh of relief that I realise that today is the last day of NaBloPoMo. The closest I got to a SMART objective for the exercise was when I said, back on Day 1: "That's really all I'm aiming for this time: 30 (or more!) posts and a bit of mental decongestion". This will be the 32nd post this month, so that's the first target met (and since I'm already over the target I don't feel too guilty about today's being basically a meta-post); after all, I only specified quantity, not quality. What about the second?

Well, ( you win some, you lose some )

I haven't noticed anybody else on my flist doing NaBloPoMo (though there are people who probably do post every day), but I've been watching monkeyhands's NoFePhoMo (No Fear Phone Month) with interest. It seems like a more useful exercise because a) it wasn't just a target for the sake of having a target, and b) it actually got some phonecalls made which needed to be made; whereas I doubt if anything was improved by my having written another few thousand words of rubbish. Nobody would have minded if I hadn't made any of those posts. I have some kind of residual feeling that writing is a Good Thing, that creating is better than consuming; but if all I'm doing by "creating" is consuming people's time (and wasting space on the great big hard disks in LiveJournal Central, too, I guess) then what's the point?

And when I find myself asking "what's the point?" it's probably time to go and do something else, like have a cup of tea and go to bed. My NaBloPoMo is officially over. Maybe next month I'll have time to catch up with some of the last 30 days' comments.

ETA: I am out of the loop and/or I fail at friends-lists: oxfordslacker has had a successful NaBloPoMo too. Hopefully not blogging every day (apply brackets appropriately, YKWIM) will give me more time to catch up with other people's LJs...

What a horrible name, despite (or because of) the echo of "pomo" and the crumb of "NaBisCo"; however, I have swallowed my objections and joined NaBloPoMo, the National Blog-Posting Month thing. (Is it a movement? An event? An experiment? A club? All/none of the above?) The idea is to make a blog post a day, every day, for a month. No minimum (or maximum) wordcount, no prescribed (or proscribed) topics; just write something, anything.

I did this last year in November; I don't remember being aware that it was part of a national initiative, and I certainly didn't join in by signing up for any social networking sites. Part of this was because if I failed, I didn't want anybody but me (and, as the month went on, my readers) to know I'd failed. I more or less succeeded (though I do remember a couple of eleventh-hour typing sprints to try to sneak the post in before midnight, rather like this one) and it did have the effect of clearing a mental backlog. That's really all I'm aiming for this time: 30 (or more!) posts and a bit of mental decongestion. (I could do with a bit of physical decongestion while we're about it, having had a stinking cold for the last few days.) I promise it won't all be meta-content, blogging about blogging -- there can't be many more dull things to read, and there are certainly lots more interesting things to write! -- but I don't promise much more than that.

If there's something you want me to write about, please suggest it here; but I'm afraid this is an old-fashioned writerly text (this particular author "aten't dead", PoMo notwithstanding) so that's about as interactive as things are going to get. If you're not interested... remember those links you used to get on people's "home pages" when we had those instead of blogs, the ones saying something to the effect of "If you don't like this page, go somewhere else" with the link taking you to a random page? Imagine there's one of those. You're feeling lucky. Click here.