Final Post of the Day

I'm running up on the end of my day, and I don't think I'll have enough time to really give this topic the amount of time it deserves, so I'll bottom line it up front, and then go into more depth until I absolutely have to leave the office and head home: I like Twitter.

I won't go into the whole history of how this stupid little service became popular. You can find a hundred other blog posts that talk about the birth, death, and re-birth (in terms of popularity) of this little Web 2.0 app. What I will say is that this simple little script is useful for a number of varied reasons, and has an added benefit of stirring a bit of nostalgia for the ol' Mr. Rizzn here.

Let me explain this.

Twitter is defined as status microblogging, in case your wondering. Essentially, if you're familiar with MySpace... imagine the bulletins system hooked into your Instant Message client or your SMS system for your phone, with RSS capabilities.

Twitter reminds me of my old Diaryland days... people reading and writing short (although in the case of Twitter, they are limited to 140 characters) blog posts about what they're doing and feeling, etc. You're exposed to your closest friends, and instead of being forced to channel your writing into a niche as in traditional blogging (for professional reasons), it's more stream of consciousness, more real.

That was the beauty of Diaryland. The format was unique, the sub-culture was limited in size, up until the end, and you were able to make and keep friends that were both geographically local to you as well as local to whatever mind-space you tended to inhabit. It tended to sate the voyeuristic nature we all possess.

I was talking to my friend Levontaun about it (one of my old D*land friends). He said:

So yeah, I thought about what you said about missing what Diaryland used to be, people writing short posts about what they are doing and feeling.

I feel the same way about BBSes. My online social life got started on Chrysalis BBS here in Dallas back in the mid 90s. Everyone was local, if you met someone on the computer, odds are that they were NOT from Virginia or South Africa. Talking to people from completely different cultures is great, but chances are that you're not going to hook up with them without serious effort. On the BBS, we had GTGs almost weekly. I still have many friends I met from there.

Diaryland was kind of the same, as there was a culture of us Dallas people that all became associated with each other. That's how I met Matt, Louis, Derrick, Amanda, Missy (Lapis) and a host of others. There were people from everywhere else, but not many.

Myspace has changed everything once again. You can browse local, but chances are most people you find are not computer nerdy-type people like us. Most of the people on there are your average computer illiterate assholes or wannabe hood rats.

I miss the old days. Does this make me old?

I definitely miss the BBS days though - never made the connection to Diaryland, but that's probably one of the things I liked about it.

If there were a way to bottle and repackage that culture, well, it probably would still be un-profitable, but I'd enjoy the heck out of it.

Podcasting is the closest thing I've come to recreating that feel, since it's such a narrow niche (or it was when it started) that it had that tight-knit feel to it where everyone's more or less on the same bleeding edge page, to mix some metaphors.

I think it may not make us old, but it definitely dates us. In internet years, we're old farts, though.

Still, and keep in mind I have no stake in Twitter or anything, I think you should check it out. It's like a low committment/involvement community thing that lacks the MySpace clunkiness. If I was able to populate my Twitter circle with the old crew, I think it might feel a bit like home. :)

Hilarious and Often Painful Memories

I'm done posting up the first half of my Diaryland posts. Basically, what I've got up there takes you through the CompUSA experience of my life, the breakup of me and my ex Traci, my jail experience, and my period of being unemployed and attempting to start my first company NinjaCo (which I don't even list on my CV anymore, I don't think. Check my Wikipedia entry to be sure).

I seem to have lost the entertaining writing style I had back in those days. I was more conversational and irreverent. I think it came from a combination of living with a bunch of geeks, having way too much time to waste while I was at work, and copious amounts of hallucinogenics. These days, I'm way to engaged in my work to slack off like I used to, I'm way too involved in responsibility for hallucinogenics, and all my geek friends have moved off or I've moved away from them.

I think going over my old writings may inspire me to write a bit more humorously though. Those were some good times.

Going through these entries is a bit of a trip down memory lane - I can easily read between the lines of my entries to what was actually going on behind the scenes. My selective storytelling doesn't fool my brain into remembering only the parts I chronicled. In fact, I think some of the most interesting bits were indeed left out of the diary itself.

The thing that has me the most apprehensive about bringing this whole thing over is the reason why it was discontinued in the first place. My parents back in the day discovered my diary and read all about my juvenile drug use and freaked out. The whole time I'm skimming over these entries and posting them in here, in the back of my mind, I'm reliving the whole experience in my head.

This is probably the main reason behind me procrastinating on this project for the years I've been putting it off for. That and the fact of how mindlessly BORING it is to hit [ctrl+a], [ctrl+c], [ctrl+tab], [ctrl+v], type in the title, type in the date, publish.

Another thing that strikes me is exactly how prolific I was back then. I was posting upwards of three times a day, especially back in early 2000. That's the sort of time-porn one has, though, when you have a slack off job like CompUSA was. Now-a-days, my mind is filled with things that are of immense interest to myself, but of little consequence to anyone else. Very few people want to hear about the clever solution I've worked out for this or that programming job I'm working on, whereas back in the day, everyone wanted to hear about the story of the unending, ruthlessly stupid calls I'd get back in tech-support hell.

I think I'll start filling in the gaps a bit once the import job is done. It's infinitely more interesting to read about than what's going on in my personal life right now (at least for the moment, and likely the near future - as someone who's a new father, the stories that amuse me are likely the most boring stories in the world for the rest of the world!).

Who knows - maybe after this project is done, the gaps are sufficiently filled in, it can all be rolled into a book of my life, and the true Rizzn story can be out there for the world to consume and enjoy.

At least we know my ego is still in healthy condition.

/mark

Quote of the Entry: "Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four."
- Katharine Hepburn