2000-05-23

History of a Diary

In the spirit of recent entries by two of my more recent fave-raves, CatieCake and Katfish, I'm going to take issue with dead diaries.

I have some perspective on this, having managed to keep my diary in semi-regular circulation since October. In the months that have followed, I've seen Diaryland's Fearless Leader build up a happy little community of virtual journallers. I witnessed the banishment and insurrection of Anonymous-turned-Anomalous-turned-Erik with interest, watching "Diaryland's Trashcan" grow more and more appendages and off-ramps until Erik realized that which he hath wrought, and slowly, methodically, hilariously killed off the entire project. I took part in a well-intentioned effort to create a David-Lynchian Diaryland novella, which was getting kinda interesting until it, too, fizzled out sometime back in March.

Sound complicated? It was, for me anyway, and I wasn't even what you'd call a particularly active participant in the goings-on. Matter of fact, I rather admired the handful of diarists who seemed blissfully unaware of it all...the "review pages," the webrings, the in-jokes. A few of these, I'm glad to see, are still around.

But then there are the scads of "dead diaries."

Certainly everybody has their reasons for discontinuing the endeavor of keeping an online journal. It's a pain in the ass, frankly, to drum up something semi-interesting to talk about, if you're like me and made the Executive Decision� from the get-go not to delve too deeply into Personal Issues�, reason being that my issues are far too pedestrian and predictable to garner any sort of interest day-in and day-out. I certainly wouldn't take 2 minutes out of my day to read the kind of dreck that would get thrown up here were I to focus entirely on my many and varied neuroses. It's enough for you all to know that I'm mildly manic, have a tendency to procrastinate, probably drink a little more than I ought to on School Nights� and spend way too much time surfing the Web in search of bizarre websites just so the Marquis and I have something to gawk at during the workday (see "procrastination" above).

Getting back to the point, it always bugs me to stumble on an abandoned diary or webpage. The Internet is clogged enough without having to dodge the flotsam and jetsam of sites that haven't been updated in months, or in some cases, years. To their creators I want to say: if it's that much of a hassle for you, or if it's not what you expected it to be, take it down.

Whew! That was a dry entry, huh? We now return you to your regularly scheduled dose of Typical Lisa Dreck: I have a copy of Mike Lookinland's mug shot taped to my office wall. Cracks me the fuck up every time I see it.

lisamcc at 15:28:45

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