over the shoulder
I think I've said before that I knew that other people were reading this site, including people from my old job, and possibly my family. I guess I was fine with that as long as I could pretend to myself that they weren't really there. I was never confronted with it. But what happened today is that someone who sits right behind me started going through the page, and reading the comments, and digging through the archives, and this bothered me a bit more. I don't think I've ever written anything here that I don't want him to read, and we get along great so it's not about getting shit about things I've written. But that's not really the point.
Everyone is writing for different reasons. I kind of think of this site as a place to just think out loud. Over the years as readers came and went, and I got to know who they were, and so subconciously edited to suit the audience and manage the relationship. Obviously, and I hope this doesn't hurt your feelings too badly, I don't care what you think about me in the same way that I care what a co-worker or bar-friend thinks about me. So those conversations are managed differently than the “conversations” I have with web readers. If you want, you can imply that I trust you more than someone I know in real life. (Honestly, when other people have made these same discoveries and gotten upset like I did, and deleted all their content in the past, this same implication has kind of offended me. But now that I think about it in my own context, it doesn't seem quite as rude. I'm such a hypocrite.)
So anyway, with “real life” people (a phrase that really irritates when I'm the one who suddenly is not “real life” any more, but you know what I mean,) you manage these relationships as best you can, and you put the wall in a different place, because you want to craft your reputation as whatever kind of person you want to be during the day. And now I've lost the power to manage that with this guy, and maybe with other poeple, even if it was only an imagined power in the first place. And so maybe that was a mistake; allowing the writing on the site to get more personal than I would ever want to get with someone on the street.
I don't really have that much to worry about here; I've really been holding back a lot in the last year. Joe asked today if I was going to get a new domain, like some of you have before when this happened, and right now I don't think so. I'm just not motivated enough to start over, and I'm not really in as much need of a place to vent as I used to be. Well, maybe I am, but I'm just not going to do it.
I know many of you have already had this internal dialog with yourself… like I said, just thinking out loud. I was kind of suprised that this situation bothered me at all, and so I had to kind of figure out for myself what the real problem was.
So anyway, if gensyn gets even more boring than it was before, that's part of the reason why. I will probably work on importing most of the old content (should be pretty easy with this system,) and making some simple design changes in the next few days. First thing to do is to get the comments working again so all my new readers in Dulles can contribute. Right after I get through a few hours of Deadwood (cocksucker.)
And look! This new software has a cool button… oooh ahh:
Currently listening to: “Starving In The Belly Of A Whale” by Tom Waits
Other new features this system has (that I probably could have done before if I had put some effort into it: email notifications (let me know if you want me to put you on the list, although you would have probably gotten a half dozen emails today) and RSS enclosures, which would let me dump music and other files in your inbox if you are running a podcast-enabled RSS reader. Comments about that idea are welcome. When I get the commenting working. (enations seems to be broken today…)
But it does have an annoying shareware disclaimer, which I'll get rid of as soon as I decide I'm going to keep using it: