Late Spring of My Discontent

[akirlu]

No, that's not fair. I'm quite content with late spring. Scotch broom is flowering everywhere, looking rather like forsythia, only more fragrant. My variegated tulips are finally blooming, as is the dogwood around town, and something that has blossoms that look like small, very pink dogwood blossoms, which may well also be dogwood, but then may be something else utterly. I am no botantist.

The long bank of lavender down by the Sciences smells of lavender even now -- it's not my imagination -- even though there are no flowers yet, only the old, dry seed heads from last fall. But lilac and wisteria are doing their best to fill in the possible shades of blooming purple.

Apropos of purple, I was walking back up the hill from MOHAI, fresh from a presentation on records disaster management, when I noticed how many of the flowers around the Engineering buildings were in purples and yellows. "Funny," says I, "Someone has marykaykare's taste in color schemes." Beat. Beat. Oh. UW. Huskies. School friggin' colors. Oh. I am so not plugged into the Dawgs mentality.

But I am feeling a bit grumpy and discontented about LJ. It has been striking me lately that some of my best little bits of business are going into late-thread comments in the LJs of people most of my friends haven't friended. Where my little gems will be lost to posterity and most everyone who knows me. And that this may well also be true of many or most of the comments of people whose writing I enjoy. I really, really miss the one-room transparency of RASFF in the old days, where most of the folks I wanted to chat with were in one place, and everyone had access to all the same conversations, and with a decent newsreader you could track all the posts and comments of the folks you were most interested in reading. Here and now it's hit and miss, and mostly miss, taking part in the conversations of my friends, unless they happen to originate in a place that I go back to and check regularly. I feel boxed in and compartmentalized and excluded by the structure of this place. Foo.

Comments

[numbat.livejournal.com]

I assume by RASFF one-room transparency you mean a vast mass of incoherent email messages expensively clogging up my in-box? At least that's what I experienced when I made the mistake of trying Memoryhole. The format seems designed to maximise white noise to flood out whatever fraction of potentially worthwhile writing is buried under the 'me too' messages and reposted comments. My most positive reaction to the experience was that it was vile.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

No, I don't mean that RASSF was like being on Memoryhole. Unless maybe when one read the newsgroup using the AOL newsreader, which was crap, beginning, middle, and end. First off, being usenet news, RASSF did not come to my mailbox -- a definite plus. More importantly however, the early versions of Netscape had a really nice newsreader, which laid out comment threads in trees of author-subject-header links that you could then click to read individual messages. With a minimum of practice it was very easy to figure out just by tree-shape alone what was an interesting conversation and what was not. And once I had selected folks who were good filters, or reliably interesting in their own right, it was very easy to skip the white noise and get straight to the worthwhile stuff. In this regard, RASSF was always superior to the e-lists.