is this what it feels like to do online dating?
LJ has had this thing for a while where if you go to the front page it shows you the top posts of the last few hours. Almost always that's just ONTD and ONTD and ONTD forever and ever and then some stuff about k-pop or something that's completely impenetrable to anyone not in the fandom. Oh and once a year that sweet Yuletide thingy where people write fanfics for each other bubbles up. But yesterday something popped up to the top that was like an epic friendinating fest and so I decided to post there, because 2017 n stuff.
I don't think I have ever posted on one of those "add me" communities, because it feels a bit attention-seek-y. But I do really miss the old days of LJ where completely random people would add one another because they saw a comment in a mutual friend's journal, or they clicked on an interest and liked your most recent posts. I ended up with a really diverse bunch of "friends", many of whom I had very little in common with besides enjoying writing about my life. That was neat.
Outside of work - where everyone is censoring themselves to a certain degree - it's hard to meet people with totally different backgrounds and ideas. I like to pretend that I am doing that when I travel, but the truth is when I travel I am only really meeting people who enjoy sitting around in bars talking to the strangers who drop into their local. So it's a self-limiting group. No teetotalers, for example. Either that, or I am talking to people who are serving me in some way, which can make the relationship a bit artificial.
Anywho, the old LJ was a beautiful thing. So, since finding this re-friendinating community this morning, I started to stalk a few journals. Tons of them are friends-locked, which is unfortunate, because it takes away the "casualness" of getting to know people if you have to ask to permission to read stuff that you might end up finding insufferable. But I was pleasantly surprised at how many people haven't friends-locked everything. People like me who just kinda ... kept posting publicly about their objectively uninteresting lives, for no apparent reason. And - lo - turns out it is a bit interesting to me, because their lifestyles are so different to mine.
Well, different except almost universally middle class, college-educated bla bla bla. Heh, maybe it is just self-limiting in a different way here. Ah well.
Let's see what 2017 has in store. Perhaps inspiration will come from the most unlikely of places.
I don't think I have ever posted on one of those "add me" communities, because it feels a bit attention-seek-y. But I do really miss the old days of LJ where completely random people would add one another because they saw a comment in a mutual friend's journal, or they clicked on an interest and liked your most recent posts. I ended up with a really diverse bunch of "friends", many of whom I had very little in common with besides enjoying writing about my life. That was neat.
Outside of work - where everyone is censoring themselves to a certain degree - it's hard to meet people with totally different backgrounds and ideas. I like to pretend that I am doing that when I travel, but the truth is when I travel I am only really meeting people who enjoy sitting around in bars talking to the strangers who drop into their local. So it's a self-limiting group. No teetotalers, for example. Either that, or I am talking to people who are serving me in some way, which can make the relationship a bit artificial.
Anywho, the old LJ was a beautiful thing. So, since finding this re-friendinating community this morning, I started to stalk a few journals. Tons of them are friends-locked, which is unfortunate, because it takes away the "casualness" of getting to know people if you have to ask to permission to read stuff that you might end up finding insufferable. But I was pleasantly surprised at how many people haven't friends-locked everything. People like me who just kinda ... kept posting publicly about their objectively uninteresting lives, for no apparent reason. And - lo - turns out it is a bit interesting to me, because their lifestyles are so different to mine.
Well, different except almost universally middle class, college-educated bla bla bla. Heh, maybe it is just self-limiting in a different way here. Ah well.
Let's see what 2017 has in store. Perhaps inspiration will come from the most unlikely of places.