The Vineyards

Last night, around 2am, instead of doing something useful like going to bed or watching Ashita no Nadja on Cartoon Network, I decided to check some blogs to see if anyone had posted anything during the day, expecting to see the same posts I had been seeing for nearly a week. No such luck: there were many updates everywhere and when I was done reading everything it was too late to catch Nadja, so I thought I could post something as well since everyone had done it. Between me and my goal, however, there were multiple technology forums with interesting topics that kidnapped my attention, so the writing of this post was postponed to today, when I no longer remember half the themes I was going to mention.

One of such themes, I recall, was Justin moving back to LiveJournal for all the reasons he ran away from it years before: social networking et al. Indeed, his posts now suddenly have lots of comments from people I can only imagine who are and who did not comment before. The communities in LJ have been known to me for a while, but I never imagined the site itself had grown so big that one could hop back in and two days later have comments from so many different friends.

It almost made me want to go back myself, until I considered the differences in situation. If I went back, first I would be abandoning this domain and all that relates to it, and I am far from fond of abandoning things. More important, however, I have nearly no friends in LJ that are not Justin or directly related. I had little contact with the fun and fine people of Dark Ages, so even Swanberg is a stranger to me. Furthermore, my fellow countrymen are all in orkut, not in LJ (or MySpace, hah!); I would just switch from one isolated island to another, and this one is easier to remember.

Not to be said that I flee from all this social networking thing, however. I got into Last.fm last night - not a social networking system, of course, but it is a first step in two different directions. I am sure it will be completely forgotten within the week, as music is far from a desperate need for me - it is often a nuisance, in fact, and I constantly worry I am bothering people around me if I use my speakers, but earphones can get very tiresome and make one's ears hot - and my cable company's download limits are being imposed. I tend to reach it on upload alone, since I am such a nice guy (ever had a torrent shared to 65000%?); I was hoping to keep it lower, not increase it further.

Note, I really wish Mary-Beth Maybell or Sage would comment between songs. It would make it all so much more interesting.

Posted by Etienne at September 14, 2006 12:02 AM