aggienaut | Entries tagged with meta

   The lights flicker, the concrete walls shudder, there's an emormous "ZORCH!!" noise. You wait several anxious moments and then the battleship gray metal door with a yellow radioactive symbol on it slides open and a bit of smoke comes out. emo_snal emerges wearing what appears to be ... scuba gear.
   "I've done it! I've opened a portal to the Dreamwidth dimension! I've established a research mission over there, AND, combined emosnail, emo_snal and emo_snl! I introduce you to: Operation Aggienaut!"

   Now, I'm not leaving you. I'll never leave you! ...or at least not without coming back here and laying it all out how we've discovered life really is well and truly completely better over there and urging everyone else to come too. I will not slink off into the night and leave you all behind!

   It's kind of novel, I used the style from emosnail, which had been a lot more customized than this one ever was, so it's kind of fun to see my posts using that style again. Anyway, those of you who are primarily using DW now, please add Aggienaut there?
   Also so a lot of people crosspost from DW tp here, can I do it in the other order, from here to there?

Cato uses his paws to demonstrate the width of the dreams he is having

Meanwhile in Real Life
   Suddenly, I am probably going to Congo, the Democratic Republic Thereof, on Wednesday. Yes, it's Sunday now, yes I don't have flights yet, yes I don't have a visa yet ... I don't know, I think The Organization is crazy to pull this stuff but they do.

   Immediately after that, I'm going to Nicaragua on August 24th. The current hare-brained plan I'm very not pleased with has me deadheading back to Melbourne from Kinshasa only to turn around and head to Managua. For... reasons.

   Following Nicaragua I'll be in the San Francisco area for about 96 hours for my other brother's wedding. Then on Sept 11th I shall return to my dear little village on the southern edge of Australia ... until the end of September when I head to Istanbul for the world beekeeping conference.

   Sooo I'll be fairly busy in the next month or two! So today like the nerd / obsessive blogger that I am I'm going to try to finish blogging about that LAST trip!!

   Now I just need to find someone to pet-sit Theodora, my pet basil plant.

Current Location: Birregurra, VIC

   Well that's depressing. So. After having admittedly rather neglected LJ for the last year or so, sometimes only posting once a month and not looking at my friends list much at all, I've been getting back in it (in my defense I was busy adjusting to life in a new country and all). And I've been aggressively trying to find currently active LJers to friend and follow and ... it's been depressing. I've found the overwhelming majority of accounts haven't been updated in years.

   It recently occured to me to look at the friends feed from my original LJ, emosnail, which I used during Ye Livejournal Golden Days until about 2008 or so, and sure enough, the ONLY one of the 200+ once active friends of that account is... myself.

   Today it occured to me (for the first time in 15 years of LJing!) that there might be an LJ community dedicated to travel writing I should investigate and maybe meet some like-minded people there. ...of the two general communities I found, both had almost exclusively Russian language posts (even though the second one explicitly stated in its profile that it was English only and non-English posts would be deleted!), and by the tenth post down one was in 2015 or so.
   I found one travelogger whose writing I really really liked and I was very exciting ... and then I realized he left LJ in 2012 for wordpress, and that's when I started to feel like I really am among the last ones on an abandoned planet or something.

   Are there really better places for blogging with community interaction out there? Obviously anyone here is by definition also among the LJ die-hards. I see a lot of people posting to dreamwidth and crossposting to here, what's dreamwidth like?
   It has occurred to me the empirical way to investigate this would be to think of like 10 bloggers I quite liked from Ye Glory Days and figure out Where Are They Now, and thus I wouldn't be talking to fellow stubborn holdouts like myself. ::Sigh:: I don't know, I really like LJ, but maybe there IS something else out there and that's why people leave and never come back?

The House
   So I've been thinking that my adorable little house needs a name. That's a thing. The house across the street has a placard on the gate declaring it "Birchwood Place," or something, and many other houses have cute little names around here.
   At first I was kinda flailing about for ideas, but then after listing my extra bedroom on AirBNB (a great decision, the two couples who have stayed so far were both delightful to talk to and basically the way I see it I'm getting $100 to clean my own place) I was thinking how I'd have to explain to people that my house is heavily America-influenced and for example they better be prepared to drink real actual brewed coffee instead of Australia standard instant and deal with me having a christmas tree up in June because it's gosh darn winter ... and then I was like oh I should have a name that reflects this melding. Ameristralia? Ausfornia? Birremerica? (I'm in the town of Birregurra recall) Califgurra? Wait wait Caligurra actually isn't half bad! Also my home town is Mission Viejo, so on a humorous note I was thinking Nuevo Mission Viejo (New Old Mission) would be pretty funny, but not really a name I'm feeling. The full battery of humor in a name would be South Austral Nuevo Mission Viejo del Sud!

   So welcome to Austral Caligurra! Now I just need a cute little name plate to hang on the front gate.

The Blog
   So increasingly I'm feeling inclined to share my travelogues in semi professional places (for example I thought it might be nice to put a link in my personal profile on AirBNB), but "emo-snal" is kind of a weird name. And I get a lot of "you still use livejournal?!" from friends.
   Now here's one thing I'll tell you: I'm not about to leave livejournal! But I might try t figure out how to automagically cross-post to blogspot or something? Because it does appear to "look more professional" to have a blog on blogspot or wordpress. But every blog, EVERY blog, I've seen on either of those sites inevitably has maybe, MAYBE, one comment it one entry somewhere (usually by the writer's mother). And comments aren't everything of course but I don't have to tell you I'm sure that it's nice to get feedback and not fun to feel like you're talking into a vacuum ... and if they have a view counter it usually hovers at a few dozen, maybe a few hundred if they're popular. Once upon a time I put view counters in a few LJ entries and (admittedly this was back in the LJ heyday of the mid 2000s) it clicked up hundreds of views a day (which admittedly was probably not hundreds of people looking at it so much as you maniacs reloading your friends lists but the point is people to actually see the entries). So in conclusion I don't think blogs on blogspot or wordpress get many views unless they're one of the 1% who somehow goes viral. So viva la livejournal!

   Emo-snal Name Origin Story: When I first created my livejournal freshman year of college back in 2002 not more than a few minutes of thought went into the name, just "haha livejournal is so emo, so... emosnail!" (my yahoo email address was winged_snail). And then emo-snal split off as a prank turned experiment turned more successful than emosnail (namely I used emo-snal the first time I entered LJ Idol and by the time I was through with that season of LJI I had so much more going on on emo-snal than emosnail).

   So thinking of changing the name to something completely different finally (even though that'll break SO many internal links ): ). As long as I'm going through with this I feel it ought to be something really great. Nothing has struck me as really great yet. I use the name Arrghonaut in a few places, its a nice blend of piraty arrgh with travel / classically mythological / also sailing related argonaut. Then it occurred to me that you know, I work in "ag," which is to say agriculture. I bounced "ag-onaut" off my friend thinking it was a throw-away but maybe that's not the worst, and she shot back with Aggienaut (Someone who works in Ag is an Aggie, and it happens to have been my college's mascot!). Could be a thing. I suppose if I'm going to create a blogspot that automatically repeats from here I could just use the new name there and not bother renaming this one and breaking all my precious links.

   Humorous throw away name that's an obscure literary reference: if the house is Caligurra, it could be Caligurra's Horse!! (see also, Caligula's Horse)

   Other obscure literary reference tagline -- Don Quixote is always on about the romantic ideals of wandering "Knights Errant," so I'm thinking "Tales of a Beekeeper Errant" would be a fun tagline / subtitle. Possibly also title of one of my future autobiographical books ;) (though "I don't know about the rest of you," a favorite way to start FB status updates of mine, is still my favored autobiography title)
   Also you should read Don Quixote it's fantastic.
   Also zero of the half dozen or so Australians I polled had even HEARD of Don Quixote, which I must admit I was kind of alarmed about. I had proposed the trivia team name of "Don Quiz-xote & the Flailing Windmills" and everyone was like "is that a reference to something?" ... then no one could answer what two cities A Tale of Two Cities was about or what book Herman Melville wrote and I had to conclude apparently literature is not part of the education system here. :-|

   Anyway neither of these names is set in stone and suggestions are more than welcome!

Current Location: Caligurra
Current Music: New Amsterdams - A New Name For Everything

   One of my favourite things about livejournal is the feedback one gets about one's writing (/photos / drawings). This feedback comes not just in the form of actual "I liked this" or "this was crap!!" comments, but more commonly in the number and variety of comments themselves. I write to be read and constantly aim to improve, so I'm constantly taking note of all forms of feedback that I can. In fact as you may or may not recall this very livejournal started out as an experiment in gauging people's reactions to varying different variables in entries.

   One generally assumes that comments are indicative of people enjoying an entry and/or finding it interesting. When you get no comments and just hear the crickets chirping, it's time to be worried.*

   After posting the link to the completed drawings about my day yesterday I got exactly two more comments all day. This is way below par. To better serve you we here at Emo-snal are interested to know why that was.

* or your audience might have died, as happened with the oriented-towards-people-from-real-life emosnail before my embracing the anonymous masses here. The friends-list of Emosnail, once veritably spinning with entry turn-around, is now a slow trickle, and entries I post over there more often than not get no comments at all. That low of a turn out is extremely unusual, so I'm curious if you all hate my drawings and I should never do it again or something.

[Poll #1520866]

Bee from one of the cartoons, coloured, and, just for Stacey, bee butt!

See also, my new icon!

Current Music: Slaid Cleaves - Quick As Dreams

   Okay it's Friday evening, and who are we kidding, no one is going to be on livejournal until AFTER all the scandalous entries of Friday night happenings have occurred. Either that or you're going to be playing nethack all night until you're delirious (lord knows that's what I'D be doing if I wasn't so keen on showing off my beer :D )

   The weekend is always the doldrums of livejournal. No one updates (which is weird because the lazy morning hours of Sat and Sun what else are you going to do? Why aren't the rest of you telling your scandalous entries of Friday/Saturday night happenings??), and if you update, no one will comment. (well there's actually a window around noon on Sat morning). So it's best not to waste an entry on a weekend. But.... then 30 in 30 comes along and hey I don't make the rules...

   And so I'm left with a particularly difficult dilemma. I want to make an entry that's interesting enough to qualify as worth reading (I think I may have accomplished that once...), but I don't want to waste an idea I regard as really good to the hopeless morass that is the blogosphere on weekends. So I find myself trying to dial in to a very very specific window of good enough to post but only barely.

   Two solutions I've though of other than writing purposefully crummy entries:
   (a) guest entries! that was fun no? nice change of pace for the weekend. I have the legendary shid (from 30 in 30 II or some such ancient times) lined up for one at some point. Any other volunteers welcome.
   (b) rehabilitate entries from more than ancient times that were already posted in this LJ. Being as some 300 or so of you are new to this lj this year (: I have plenty of entries that would be new to you if reposted... I mean, don't you want to know which US President had a dog named Sweet Lips? Or read my entry about experimenting with controlling substances? ;D

   Anyway, for now I'm whipping out a simple little story of a prank I pulled yesterday, with photographic evidence:

Behind those beehives is actually a door. The only door to a room in which my coworker Jeremy was at the time bottling honey.

...bastard denied me satisfaction by acting completely nonchalant when he opened the door to find a wall. ):!

Earthquake!!!
In other news, while I was writing this I experienced an earthquake!!! Typical.

   Hope. LJ Idol is full of hope this week. Hope is in the air. Hope that one’s entry will be well received, hope that it will do well in the polls. Hope that the next topic will be a good one, one that provides opportunities for good entries. A lot hinges upon the week’s topic. Will it be something that provides wild opportunities for creativity and interesting hints of flavour, or will it result in a selection of entries the upcoming week that’s as exciting as a bar that only serves lager?

   Sometime over the weekend after I’ve read my fill of the previous week’s entries, and cast my votes (always at the very least read the last place votes in every bracket, after all, it’s the only position that matters that week), my thoughts turn to hoping the next topic is a good one. That and displeasure that the weekend is almost over.

   Its usually sometime after noon on Monday that I’m taking a break from getting stung in the face repeatedly to check that week’s topic. First order of business, I always analyze the prompt. Any prompt, be it even just a word, can by analyzed.

   If I don’t know it already I’ll look up the actual etymology of the word (Hope: believed established in its current form around 900 A.D.* from Middle English “hopen” from Old English “hopian”). I don’t know how this could possibly help me, but I think its good to have as thorough an understanding of what you’re working with as possible.

   Secondly, I ask the question of “how can I twist this prompt to something its completely not expected to be?” “Saying Goodbye?” how about “Saying Goodbye When Your Loved Ones Have Been Turned to Zombies!!!” “Moment of Bliss?” How about the blissfulness of a moment of peace in an otherwise fubar situation? “Hope?”…
   Not just LJ Idol but pretty much any time I’m given a prompt my first reaction is to twist it. I took a creative writing class for fun in college and every paper I got back with “not quite the prompt, but good!” written on top I considered a success.

    Step 3: Text boxsofrain “’Hope?!’” “Yeah I don’t know…” … This is actually an important stage because in all my history of writing I’ve found many of my best ideas come from talking topics over with friends.

   Then I usually let the prompt sit in my head for a day. That first day I don’t stress about coming up with an idea. Just let it boil away in my head by itself.

   By Tuesday if a brilliant idea hasn’t struck me yet. I’ll maybe turn up the heat on talking about potential topics with my friends (hereticxxii has been a very help as well). Or perhaps in between bottling beer (honey ale!) at work and writing a legal brief I’ll sneak off to add the proverbial malt to the proverbial hops of ideas in my head, and post a brainstorm post. The brainstorm post will be a long ramble of barely coherent false starts and hanging storylines, but at least I’ll friends-filter it and put it behind an LJ cut.

   By Wednesday an idea will surely be fermenting away in my head. I’ll be hashing out the details throughout the day. By that evening I’ll be all ready to write it … but if the past is any guide I’ll procrastinate away the evening until its too late to write it.
   Because before starting an entry one must get into the right mindset of silly and satire by watching the latest episode of Colbert Report (online – I don’t have a TV), and then one must get a feel for the mood of the audience by reading up on the LJ Idol entries posted thus far ( / make sure no one has already taken your idea!!)

   By Thursday evening I will once again procrastinate writing my entry, using the same excuses. I will additionally be aware of the alarmingly nerdy fact that if someone wants me to hang out or something that evening I’ll be faced with the crisis of going out and potentially not having an entry by Friday morning, or saying no to real world activities for the sake of blogging! O= Fortunately this dilemma has thus far been avoided by my utter of lack of a real world social life ;D
   Next thing you know its 00:44 in the morning and I’ve bottled what once seemed like a decent idea into the most craptastic TL;DR ramble ever.
   But this is what we have to work with since we’ve mortgaged off our hope until the very last minute (turns out it was subprime?). Since this is still a first draft at this point I’ll probably let it sit overnight in the hollow hope that after spending a few hours in a fetal position in the dark I will rise up late for work and have time to somehow forstall the entry from tasting like brettanomyces.

   And then its time to release the entry for general distribution. Hope it does well and prepare to begin the process all anew.

Oh and a Fairly Random Picture of the Day