Eccentric Flower:200911/Signal
From Eccentric Flower
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Signal
A few bits and pieces on this, the last day of November (where the hell did November go?), just to keep the line open, as it were.
I've only had a real, incapacitating migraine twice in my life, and one of them was yesterday. I think now that it must have been a perfect storm of bad/nonexistent diet, two nights of restless sleep, and a whole day spent sorting and cataloging images via little bitty thumbnails (which involves staring at a computer screen with even more focus than usual). When I got up on Sunday and started to do it again, first I got what my wife calls "aura" (it doesn't look like aura to me, it looks like the edge of my vision on the right is flickering) and then got the special headache - but the headache wouldn't have been the problem, it was the nausea and clinched stomach and dizziness and shakes and need to eat something but utter unwillingness to do so that completely threw a wrench in the rest of my day. I spent a great deal of the afternoon lying on a bed with my eyes closed and breathing heavily.
I find myself today compulsively watching the edge of my vision. Jumpy. I still didn't get caught up on sleep and my right eye isn't behaving well, but so far no aura.
The nightmare of my existence is that some day I will get a condition that will prevent me from being able to use a computer for any length of time. I am sitting at an electronic device (or lying down with an electronic device, or what-have-you) for seventy-five percent of the time I am awake. I don't ever use a computer when I am eating, in the shower, or reading a book. The rest of the time, no bets. If I can't do that, the fabric of my existence - all my viable career options, nearly all my entertainment, all my social contact with the world - goes out the window. And, shortly afterward, I suspect, so do I.
A couple of days back I wrote about preferring non-threaded comments and several of you thought I was crazy. I said
I should like to note that over the weekend an item showed up on Making Light which is pertinent to this matter. At comment #45, Teresa Nielsen Hayden - who is probably the closest anyone in the world has ever come to "pro moderator" status - says
So that's two of us. Mind you, if you like threaded comments, I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just saying that my wanting them non-threaded is not just a matter of caprice, nor of technical limitations (although in truth threaded comments would have been Very Hard to implement here had I desired them).
Incidentally, re the main topic of that post: over the years I have dealt with both newest-at-top and oldest-at-top arrangements, and have concluded that oldest-at-top is the only way to go for comment threads. However, over the years I have found myself increasingly favoring newest-at-top for emails where older emails are included in the reply. Different requirement set.
As long as we're discussing means and methods of electronic communication, it should be clear to some of you now that I have discovered I really am quite fond of Twitter. (Waiter: Crow for one, please!) I'm still haunted by the nagging feeling that I am contributing to the downfall of humanity by using it, but not so much that I don't appreciate what it does. The counterpoint of this is that some of you who like instant-messaging methods will find this the complete fall of my already-declining IM usage. These days I use IM for two reasons - to talk to a remote co-worker or to deal with my wife - and I don't leave it on any longer than I have to.
The problem is that IM is an invasive medium - not as invasive as the telephone, which I just don't answer, but pretty intrusive nonetheless. For a while I have habitually left up a status message that says, essentially, "don't expect me to reply to this IM in a hurry, I may be busy," but it doesn't really help. With Twitter you can have an IM-like exchange but without necessarily having the real-time expectations.
Category of "things where I have officially stopped caring about the collateral consequences of an utter collapse of the system"*: The American consumer-goods-sales industry can all fall down a deep hole. Economy be damned. I'm now at the point where I feel like, if the only way to prop up the economy is to buy more tchotchkes and things you don't really need, then it's time to find a new paradigm for the economy.
I'm not saying people can't Have Stuff. I buy stuff all the time (but a lot less often than I used to, because my "Am I really going to use this?" test has become much more accurate and stringent over the years). I'm saying that this current model where retailers are hoping to get themselves in the black for the year by artificially spurring consumerism for one month to insane levels, where Christmas decorations appear before Hallowe'en in order to try to alleviate some of the desperation, is a sign that the Model Has Officially Failed. Retailers should be trying to stay modestly in the black all year from modest, consistent, steady levels of consumption. If that is not viable for them, then something is very wrong.
Also: I hate to be Cromwellian, but if it were up to me Christmas would be cancelled. Well, mostly cancelled. You would be allowed to have parties, if you felt up to it - but no decorations except discreetly, behind closed doors. And you would be allowed to give each other gifts only if they were homemade, with particular emphasis on the edible. Yes, I think Christmas should be about social contact and friends and warmth and baked goods. And egg nog. And perhaps a nice ham. And hotdish. And mulled wine.
* Which I have been abbreviating to myself for many years now as "Samson issues" or "going Samson." You figure out why.
I think for me the problem is that I often want to have a conversation with one person, am frequently willing to have a conversation with 2-4 people, and hardly ever want to have a conversation with several hundred or thousand people. Accordingly, I e-mail frequently, discuss things at length in lj comments somewhat less often, and actually participate in a thread like the ones on Making Light vanishingly rarely.
-- 18:02, 30 November 2009 (GMT)
I deliberately never put threads in the Flutterby system. It's not like it'd be hard to do, but I find threads lead to quick quips, whereas to capture the context of four messages ago one has to put enough words around the quips to make the sentiment that much more thoughtful.
And this was actually a matter of quite a bit of back-channel debate when I had the NNTP interface up, the two people who were using it found that the web interface flattened the NNTP threads annoying.
But then the vibe of a web site is controlled by all sorts of unmeasurables and intangibles and a lot of this is like wine tasting or audiophilia.
To Mrissa's point, Elf just wrote about the Dunbar Number[1]. Yeah, I don't need to see a gazillion slashdotters making the same comment over and over again, either it's a good comment, or it's a person whose opinion I value, but there's a point beyond which quantity is a detriment, and that point is fairly close.
[1] Haven't got a feel for the markup here yet: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1171919.html
-- 18:18, 30 November 2009 (GMT)
Dan, re markup, to quote another website familiar to you: "URLs will be mostly recognized and linked" when put in as a bare URL. If you want it to have markup, see examples below:
|
Plaintext ... |
becomes ... |
-- 19:21, 30 November 2009 (GMT)
Mel:
I do miss our IMs, but I can't blame Twitter for their demise.
Also, I agree completely about the threaded comments. You get lost in them.
And while I do care about the fate of the economy, I agree about buying more stuff you don't need. These days I mostly try to confine my "unneeded stuff" purchases to beads. At least they're small. (Oh, there's also the Christmas tree we bought yesterday. But that's different.)
I've already started buying ingredients for wassail. Come over and have some, why don't you?
-- 20:26, 30 November 2009 (GMT)
Andy:
Your explanation of why you don't like threading makes sense to me. I notice on LJ that if I'm interested in a subject enough to read the comments, I generally want to click on the "expand all" button, and read all the comments as though they are unthreaded.
The same idea of preserving the "We're all in one conversation" feeling is why I'm very reluctant to killfile anyone in a mailing list discussion. If you just killfile his posts, and not the replies, you see all his text anyway, since it's included in the replies. If you killfile all the replies as well, there are a lot of posts by worthwhile posters that you are not reading. If everyone is doing that with slightly different collections of posts, you no longer have a common context for discussion, the way you do if pretty much all the frequent posters are also reading pretty much everything.
-- 20:45, 30 November 2009 (GMT)
I'd like Christmas to be a little less "you will all participate in this festival of spending" too, but I want to keep the holiday lights. I love lights on people's houses. But we can ban those huge inflatable decorations if you like.
-- 20:56, 30 November 2009 (GMT)
"With Twitter you can have an IM-like exchange but without necessarily having the real-time expectations."
Cool. You just invented e-mail!
-- 21:40, 30 November 2009 (GMT)
Your Christmas already exists, only it's called "Thanksgiving."
Christmas I can take it or leave it, although I do love them englightened palm trees.
-- 02:31, 1 December 2009 (GMT)
Is it really stuff you don't need, or just stuff you would really love to have, but wouldn't allow yourself any other time of the year? The Christmas holiday gives you an excuse to be indulgent, for yourself or for others, and I frankly don't see what's wrong with that. I don't like for people to feel they MUST buy gifts, but many of us enjoy such activity, and can get away with it much more easily at this time of year.
Also, this year I happen to be making many of my presents, knitting, woodworking, baking, I'm even going to try my hand at nut brittle and candied citrus wedges. That's fun, too. But there's nothing quite like standing inside a lot bedecked with live fir trees. The aroma is magical, both at the tree lot and especially inside your house! This year, I'm constrained by space to putting my tree out on the patio, and I'm pretty sure it won't be the same. Gonna have to arrange some boughs inside somewhere.
Oh, and Jette, ditto on the inflatables. I think they're obnoxious. But I do love the lights.
-- 03:40, 1 December 2009 (GMT)
Bunny, I don't generally enjoy either giving or receiving gifts except in special circumstances ... but that's not the point. Even if I did, I think I'd fail to understand the idea that crams all the gift-giving into one month of the year. I think the same idea applies here as I said for the merchants: What's wrong with modest, appropriate, balanced levels of gift-giving all year round? Why does it all have to be crammed into a short time? Do people really need to feel like they have special license to give gifts or buy something they want? I don't.
(As a matter of fact, I'm one of those people who habitually and proudly - but not deliberately - has been infuriating gift givers for years, because when I see something I actually do want for myself, I buy it. My family has been complaining that I'm impossible to buy any gifts for for twenty years. My response, of course, is, "Well, don't buy me anything then!")
I was much more tolerant of Christmas trees before I became a homeowner. Now they just feel like a house fire waiting to happen. (ETA: Decorating a live, uncut tree out in the yard, now, that's a wonderful thing, if you have the means to do it. And you can use the same tree every year!)
-- 16:15, 1 December 2009 (GMT)
I understand everything you've said here, and I don't dispute it. Ever since I was a little kid I have enjoyed the colors, the pageantry, the crowds of happy shoppers, the smell of fresh trees (which, by the way, are an agricultural product raised precisely for this purpose, just like wheat or corn, and keep tree farmers employed, so there!) and, of course, the lights. I can remember going driving with my mom and brother, searching out decorated houses all over the Akron/Kent area, and making a special trip to downtown Akron to see the animatrons in the store windows at O'Neal's and Polsky's. It was an event, all by itself.
My point is, this is how I process the season. Always have. I revel in the search for just the right gift, the wrapping and the fun of watching faces. Occasionally, I encounter the reaction that I shouldn't have, I didn't get you anything, etc. I cope with it the best I can, and the incidents have been very few.
I would love for the spirit I feel during this season to last all year long. Who wouldn't? I'm not forgetting the reason for the season, as it were, but the goodness of human nature that I see during these weeks should prevail all the rest of the year. It doesn't. For whatever reason. So I go out into the hustle and bustle of the Christmas holidays and drink in all the goodness I can get, so it'll last me all year.
My mom, and to a lesser extent, my brother would rather go to sleep about Dec. 15th and wake up around Jan. 3rd. I sometimes suspect I was adopted.
Oh, hey, I almost forgot. Mythbusters proved that you can't set a live tree on fire with Christmas lights. Just sayin'...
-- 17:58, 1 December 2009 (GMT)
Thanks for the markup help. Unfortunately, when I implemented the Flutterby.net system I made it handle both the Flutterby.com markup and MediaWiki markup, so now I can't remember which is which.
Bunny42, regarding setting a live tree on fire with Christmas lights, I think I can rig up a scenario in which an old set of lights gets some wear-weakened wires... I see a great need for some post-Holiday YouTube-age.
-- 20:59, 1 December 2009 (GMT)
I dunno, Dan, the boys tried awfully hard to set a tree afire, with bazillions of lights and configurations. Just didn't happen. I feel fairly safe with my fresh, fragrant frasier fir, and my lights were new last year, I believe. I'll risk it. Smells wonderful!!! Nobody should be stoopid about putting flaming candles on a dried up tree, or other images of horror. But I'm pretty sure this'll be just fine.
-- 23:38, 1 December 2009 (GMT)
Patrick:
I love the fact that you've turned around on Twitter! I haven't fully embraced the "@" conversation style (though I do it once in awhile), but it's really very much like you said, an IM conversation that you don't have to keep on top of every minute.
I think it's been refreshing to "talk" with you via Twitter, where it can be light and silly, rather than a deep, thoughtful comment discussion here or on my LJ.
-- 17:51, 30 November 2009 (GMT)