a scavenger hunt post.

The Spiders Here Are As Big As Your Head.

My road trip, days 3, 4, 5 and 6. Or thereabouts.

for those inclined toward tedious recounting of other people’s sightseeing journeys.

Here.

It’s not one of my more highly-advertised qualities, and indeed, few people notice my underlying fickleness, but if I sense a wavering of loyalty or dependability, I can be fickle. 

I’ve accepted it. I’ve come to terms with my fickleness, and its situation-specific triggers.

Years ago, maybe 20 years ago or more, I had an argument with a relation-by-marriage. The argument left an indelible impression, as some arguments do, and the relationship was never repaired. To the contrary, the relationship has worsened over the years in all possible directions, and the worsening of the relationship has reinforced my inner sense of rightness, if you know what I mean. I’m not proud of it. I tend to think an inner sense of rightness is an indisputable indication of wrongness. Nevertheless. Some relationships beg for a self-righteous sense of superiority, no matter how much you strive against it.

The relation-by-marriage is coming to visit in one calendar week.

It’s a struggle, this particular development. I’m struggling with it.

I just thought you should know.

Meanwhile, in my wordpress life.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to tell you that. 

I guess in case someone starts posting crazy shit here on my Xanga account.

Or uses my info to learn I have an email account under ordinarybutloud. Yeah. I know. Nerve-wracking. 

We are still traveling.

I don’t know how Xanga is doing in re: getting saved. For several days the imminent crash of Xanga sucked up most of my mental energy, but then we set off across the country and other things took precedence.

Suddenly I’m very tired.

my latest vacation blog. 

@Roadkill_Spatula just posted an interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly about social media in general and FB in particular. While I was reading it, two things popped into my mind:

1) I like to blog. I like to write for other people. I never really thought of Xanga as a place to meet people; that was just a happy incidental. My goal was to do what I’d been doing for decades, writing in spirals I hid under my bed, and do it in front of other people. It was my hope that I’d get more comfortable with the idea of sharing my writing. It only took eight or nine years, but I’m happy to say it worked. And in the meantime, I accidentally met a lot of really cool people. But I’ve always thought of blogging as writing. I’ve never thought of Xanga and FB as being the same thing…it was mystifying to me when so many of my Xanga friends disappeared when FB came along, because I was all, uh, what are they doing over there?! Posting one-liners? Status updates? Really?!?

I see now that I have an out-of-step approach to the idea of writing online. But that’s okay. Lots of other people do too, thank goodness.

2) Today I had the opportunity to have a long conversation with my dad about his investment philosophy. He retired in the early 90s and has been living on the income from his nest egg since then, thanks to his investment prowess. The conversation clarified for me why Facebook was a wrong investment for so many people. For some years, I’ve wished I had enough money to buy individual stocks, because I want to buy GAP. I have a good feeling about GAP. But that’s kind of a side issue on this particular post, so I’m going to leave it at that. But the point I was making is that social media and investing and the idea of “venture capitalism” was front and center for me, today. 

this is me whispering about today’s wordpress post. 

I really don’t know the first thing about blogging. I found this site 9 years ago and then I grudgingly adopted each new feature that came along when I absolutely couldn’t avoid it anymore. For example, I didn’t understand how to “friend” people on here for about three years after Xanga added the “friend” function. And the mini thing completely cracked me up. I gave minis willy nilly, I admit. It took me a long time to upload my first photo. (years). I’ve had…I can’t even tell you how much trouble…with the “themes” and what-have-you. Anyone remember when we got the new homepage and the universal inbox? For maybe…I don’t know…18 months…I just clicked on the link that said, “take me back to my old homepage” because I didn’t know how to use the new one.

So, I’m not a super-picky, features-driven, highly technical, savvy consumer kind of blogger, is what I’m telling you.

When I first read the Relaunch Xanga post it mentioned wordpress. So I went to wordpress.org. I couldn’t understand anything about wordpress.org. (in theory I now realize it’s the engine that underlies the interfaces I see in various places, but at the time I was all blah blah internet hooey blah).

So I went to wordpress.com.

I decided to see if it would be hard to have a blog on wordpress. 

It turned out to be easy. It turned out to be super duper easy, even for someone like me, who still forgets to “friend” people on Xanga.

Things I like: if you already have your own community, it’s basically exactly the same as blogging here, because you already have a community. But I could see where it would be exceedingly hard to build a community on your own, if you just struck out on wordpress alone like a voyager to a new world. I like the weblog editor quite a lot. There are two of them, which is confusing, but the one on my “dashboard” is quite fancy while the one on my “reader” is streamlined enough to be easy for my iPad. I like the Reader page where I can find all the blogs I’m following. I like threaded comments. I like the dialogue box that notifies me about new comments. I like control over comments and how they’re posted or moderated or what-have-you. I love the “freshly pressed” theme-based Xanga-like front page, and have already found some fun and witty new blogs to read.

Things I don’t like: No private messages. The “reader” blogs are displayed in giant boxes which means I have to do quite a lot of scrolling to see what I’ve missed if I’m away for a day. I fear missing comments, because my dialogue box isn’t as big as the number of comments I might get if I’m away for a day. It feels a little more…public….over there. One upside to blogging on a place like Xanga where I’m a lot older than the age of the average user and where no one even thinks to come unless they’ve been on Xanga forever is that the odds of a person in my real life stumbling on my blog were zero. But then again, I really need to get over myself on that.

The key, of course, is to make sure that your Xanga friends are in your circle of friends on wordpress. During my nine years on Xanga I’ve had periods where my list of regular readers was down to like 3 or 4 people. I just kept blogging and sooner or later, more people found me, and I found them. I kinda think it will be same way on wordpress, although I can’t be certain.

Paying $1 a week for Xanga wouldn’t bother me in the least. It’s really a matter of where my friends are and what opportunity I have to meet other like-minded people. I occasionally feel like my opportunities for meeting new people on Xanga are limited, because even though I hear people say there are “1 million blogs,” or hundreds of thousands of blogs, it often feels to me like there are only about 250 regular bloggers on Xanga. There were more people than that in my high school graduating class, by a lot. And of course, of the 250, I probably interest (and am interested in) only ten or twenty percent.

I mean that in the absolutely least snobby way possible, says the person who knows she inadvertently sounds snobby sometimes.

Years ago I signed up on blogger. I blogged to myself without one single reader two or three or four times. Then I thought, eh, no. WordPress so far is turning out to be a good experience for me.

my wordpress blog

One thing I’ve learned this week: the xanga “community” means precisely the same thing and completely unique things to every person on here. I’m not going to list the members of my community because you know who you are ( I hope), you know I love you ( likewise) and I am terrified I might inadvertently leave someone off and that would be awful.

But the point is, if you’re surrounded by the bloggers who make your life interesting and amusing and connected ands awesome, it makes little difference where you are.

i have a lot of platform comparison comments to make, but I’m still typing on glass. So not today.

today’s not-meta blog is at: 

http://ordinarybutloud.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/best-laid-plans-and-plans-that-werent-really-laid-very-well-but-sounded-good-in-theory/

(not yelling, @complicatedlight )

Posts move from “5000 Ways to Save Xanga!” and “My Xanga Story!” to “I Wish These *7%^suckers Would Just Pledge Or Get Over Themselves.”

At least, over the past nine years that’s the way Xangevents usually seemed to go down.

Which is good with me. I mean, I’m cool with it. It does severely curtail my ability to talk about two different topics on my two blogs, as I can really only generate one genuine, real-life topic per day, and was counting on The Demise of Xanga to function as my second topic for some weeks.

Five weeks and some days, if you want to be specific.

I thought the post done by @slmret for today was interesting and helpful, for people who may not have realized that Xanga wouldn’t be located on wordpress, but would merely be powered by wordpress, in the event it raises its money.

Years ago I was on a message board with a group of internet strangers. I met a lot of them in person. Once we all met in person the whole place kinda fell apart. It was an issue-based falling-apart, believe it or not, which is weird. People simply couldn’t wrap their minds around other people’s political/religious/moral views. I got caught in the middle of some bizarre battles over things that seemed (to me) completely irrelevant to the question of friendship (which, in my opinion, is a formidable question all by itself).

Anyway, that’s how I came to Xanga. I floated around in a couple of other forums and @transvestite_rabbit suggested Xanga in a message intended for me and some other people as well. 

GENUINE REAL-LIFE TOPIC FOR TODAY.