MOOP!

On December 27th, 2003, I wrote the first entry in this strange little "online journaling experience" I have since undertaken. It is not anywhere nearly as awful and cringe-inducing as it could be --indeed, one of my longtime online friends (mek? Tho?) once complimented me by pointing out that I never really had a flailing period as I tried to understand how exactly livejournal worked.

(That being said, I also took something like four months and fifty entries to actually learn how to "thread comments". Oops.)

Ten years later and...I'm still here. Not only am I still here, but in the one hundred and ten months since I started, there have only been two months where I did not publish a single word¹. This wasn't my first home on the internet, but it's the one that has _lasted_, the one that has _mattered_.

And over the last (many) years, I have watched it crumble, with an unbearable sadness in my heart. Things change, and I recognize that not all the people I care about are designed for the long-form storytelling --and livejournal is not designed for the quick and clever single thought. I don't fault a single one of you for going elsewhere, it is truly exciting to watch the history of social media flash past my eyes, and know someday I will be able to say I was there, and I helped shape it. The world is so cool, and the internet is such a beautiful thing, with all its different aspects and shapes.

But it still hurts a little, as posts on my friends page dwindle², and the comment counts in my e-mail fade to almost nothing. Because livejournal is the one that makes sense to my writer's brain. I like doing longform writing for a triple handful of you. I like it a lot more than shouting into the overwhelming cacophony that is my mass of Facebook friends. I like it a lot more than the blinky-not-thinky balance of image and text and sound that comprises Tumblr. I like it a lot more than the snappy one-liners of Twitter, and more than the single minded focus of Fetlife.

And I like, and miss, having all my friends in one place. There are people who post here and there and there, and I catch up with some of it...but not all. Some people I've lost track of just softly as our lives twine out of each others, but some people I realize I've not talked to in years and I wouldn't even know where to look for them anymore. I'd love a service that collates all the friends' lists and feeds for me, one site where I can see livejournal posts and Facebook statuses and Twitter updates and Tumblr reblogs stacked on top of each other and mixed together and just one stop for my friends, not a dozen tiny universes.

I'm not leaving. I have really enjoyed posting lovely inane things this week, and want to keep doing more of that, just tiny snippets of my life for the rest of you to see. But maybe I need to put more work into crossposting entries across websites. We'll see.

I don't really think this entry went where I wanted it to. But that's okay --I have always worked things out through writing. Happy New Year, all. Happy ten years. (Happy ten more.)

~Sorcyress
MOOP!

1: March and April 2005. It was a very tiny spiteful protest in regards to my computer being moved from my bedroom to the living room as punishment for my getting shitty grades in school. AND THAT'S IT! I have checked in at least once a month (and realistically, I don't think I saw any months with fewer than four or five) for 105 straight months.

2: Here is where I started to list my hellos, and there are too many to be a reasonable list of names. But still too damned few --a dozen of you or so still posting, another dozen in the comments.