(no subject)
CLOSED FOR BUSINESS
So this is it: the final entry. 10 years ago today - October 7th, 2001 - I started with a public entry in which I stated that I'd eventually get around to writing something here.
Well, turns out I have. After a decade of writing this will be my 1370th and final entry. I started as a loner 19-year-old college sophomore and I end now a 29-year-old man, married for over 3 years. In 2001 my world revolved around (sometimes horrible) hard rock music, anime and webcomics. Now I find myself using phrases like "best course of action for my career" and "resale value at the present market outlook." Damn if growing up doesn't sneak up on you. Like many young adults I wondered just when it would be I'd have that transformative moment when I started to feel like a grown-up. I think I finally became one when I realized there is no transformative moment.
It's appropriate, then, for me to have this history left, in its entirety, of the course of my life and the evolution of my character from that of a that of a silly, broken-hearted teenager to someone cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
As for the content, you either read it, you didn't, or anywhere in between. I met so many people along the way with whom I connected via LiveJournal at one point or another. Not so many of you are left now, least of which from the first several years. I'll briefly explain what I've done to preserve my journaling here in regard to what remains now: I've gone through everything - all 1370 entries - by hand, and have thrown each of them into one of four bins: public, friends, private, and deleted. The public ones stay public for all to see, the friends ones get (or, more likely, stay) friends-locked to allow for somewhat restricted access, the private ones disappear to everyone but are kept for my own personal record, and the deleted ones, well, weren't worth salvaging at all. I've kept backup copies off of LiveJournal of everything aside from the deleted entries and, eventually, I might repost the public (and probably friends) ones elsewhere when I find a new home for my daily journal entries. For right now, though, this is it.
It would be terribly out-of-character for me to leave you on that note, though, wouldn't it? It would be much more like me to have a litany of charts and figures prepared detailing just what I've discovered about the 1370 entries I wrote here. Oh, LiveJournal, you know I can't say no to you:
Let's first examine how those 1370 entries broke down into the four bins I mentioned above:
As you can see, over half of the entries wound up being friends-locked, with only a sliver being left public. A good chunk were privatized or deleted, too. But friends posts weren't always the most populated group as I was going along from the start in 2001 until now: it took until 2007 for friends posts to surpass deleted and privatized entries in total number. So how do each of those groups break down per year, then?
That's the public posts per year. The purple line in all of these represents the average per year across the ten-year period. As you can see here there's not too much interesting going on with the public posts, mostly because there aren't so many of them. A disproportionate number of them the first year from when I made a number of entries hawking various aborted webcomic projects, but then things tapered off to a steady number of annual forays into expository writing, with a bit of a bump before the 2008 election. Then they taper off to very few at all (this one provides the only notch for the final year) toward the end. How about friends-locked entries?
I struggled early on, it seems, to write things that were somewhat personal but not downright embarrassing. Eventually, though, I got the hang of it, it seems. How about private entries?
Yep, again, it seems like getting involved with Becky really helped me to refine my writing into something I'm proud of. Before then there's worthwhile stuff, for sure, but so much of it is just so unrefined that I didn't want it remaining public. That, or I figured some of the other folks I may have mentioned who might also be trying to be grown-ups now might not enjoy "LOLZ DRUNX0RZ WITH [X]" to be viewable forever. But I did mention a lot of fun times and reading many brought up some good memories, so I kept them, just for myself. Finally, there's the deleted posts:
Early on I wrote a bunch of really abstract stuff being deliberately obtuse and frankly, that shit didn't fly. Then I just posted a lot for the sake of posting and, well, quantity over quality doesn't work well, either. I got all of that figured out, eventually, and for the last four years I had very few - if any - deleted posts. I did mention posting a lot around 2005-2006. How does the total number of posts per year sort out?
So there is a good degree of variation here. My final year I wrote less than half as often as I did the year I wrote the most (though, I'd argue, the quality is much improved now). So maybe looking at raw numbers isn't the best metric. How about the breakdown per year in terms of percentage? Starting with public:
No surprises there. It does seem like the Obama Bump for public posts was real, though:
Moving on to friends entries:
Yep, early on couldn't quite contain myself, but eventually I got the hang of this whole "writing for an audience" thing:
The entries I've saved as private:
Ahh, a pretty noticeably clear trend here. Whereas the number of posts I preserved for posterity trickles off slowly to nothing, there's definitely a lot more of them back when I was younger and OMG SO EMO:
Finally, the deleted entries:
Yep, it took a while before I figured out the whole "not posting for the sake of posting" thing. Times were different back then:
The trend for a progressive move from a rather scattershot variety of material to straight-up, friends-locked journal-style entries can be seen pretty well when I compare all four types by percentage side-by-side:
And that's it, really: over the decade lifetime of this journal it's changed with me and eventually settled down into something stable and sustained, too. How about that. But ten years is an awfully long time on the Internet and now it's time to move on. So I'll catch you somewhere else on this World Wide Web, Eljays. I hope you've enjoyed reading. I sure have enjoyed writing.
So this is it: the final entry. 10 years ago today - October 7th, 2001 - I started with a public entry in which I stated that I'd eventually get around to writing something here.
Well, turns out I have. After a decade of writing this will be my 1370th and final entry. I started as a loner 19-year-old college sophomore and I end now a 29-year-old man, married for over 3 years. In 2001 my world revolved around (sometimes horrible) hard rock music, anime and webcomics. Now I find myself using phrases like "best course of action for my career" and "resale value at the present market outlook." Damn if growing up doesn't sneak up on you. Like many young adults I wondered just when it would be I'd have that transformative moment when I started to feel like a grown-up. I think I finally became one when I realized there is no transformative moment.
It's appropriate, then, for me to have this history left, in its entirety, of the course of my life and the evolution of my character from that of a that of a silly, broken-hearted teenager to someone cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
As for the content, you either read it, you didn't, or anywhere in between. I met so many people along the way with whom I connected via LiveJournal at one point or another. Not so many of you are left now, least of which from the first several years. I'll briefly explain what I've done to preserve my journaling here in regard to what remains now: I've gone through everything - all 1370 entries - by hand, and have thrown each of them into one of four bins: public, friends, private, and deleted. The public ones stay public for all to see, the friends ones get (or, more likely, stay) friends-locked to allow for somewhat restricted access, the private ones disappear to everyone but are kept for my own personal record, and the deleted ones, well, weren't worth salvaging at all. I've kept backup copies off of LiveJournal of everything aside from the deleted entries and, eventually, I might repost the public (and probably friends) ones elsewhere when I find a new home for my daily journal entries. For right now, though, this is it.
It would be terribly out-of-character for me to leave you on that note, though, wouldn't it? It would be much more like me to have a litany of charts and figures prepared detailing just what I've discovered about the 1370 entries I wrote here. Oh, LiveJournal, you know I can't say no to you:
Let's first examine how those 1370 entries broke down into the four bins I mentioned above:
As you can see, over half of the entries wound up being friends-locked, with only a sliver being left public. A good chunk were privatized or deleted, too. But friends posts weren't always the most populated group as I was going along from the start in 2001 until now: it took until 2007 for friends posts to surpass deleted and privatized entries in total number. So how do each of those groups break down per year, then?
That's the public posts per year. The purple line in all of these represents the average per year across the ten-year period. As you can see here there's not too much interesting going on with the public posts, mostly because there aren't so many of them. A disproportionate number of them the first year from when I made a number of entries hawking various aborted webcomic projects, but then things tapered off to a steady number of annual forays into expository writing, with a bit of a bump before the 2008 election. Then they taper off to very few at all (this one provides the only notch for the final year) toward the end. How about friends-locked entries?
I struggled early on, it seems, to write things that were somewhat personal but not downright embarrassing. Eventually, though, I got the hang of it, it seems. How about private entries?
Yep, again, it seems like getting involved with Becky really helped me to refine my writing into something I'm proud of. Before then there's worthwhile stuff, for sure, but so much of it is just so unrefined that I didn't want it remaining public. That, or I figured some of the other folks I may have mentioned who might also be trying to be grown-ups now might not enjoy "LOLZ DRUNX0RZ WITH [X]" to be viewable forever. But I did mention a lot of fun times and reading many brought up some good memories, so I kept them, just for myself. Finally, there's the deleted posts:
Early on I wrote a bunch of really abstract stuff being deliberately obtuse and frankly, that shit didn't fly. Then I just posted a lot for the sake of posting and, well, quantity over quality doesn't work well, either. I got all of that figured out, eventually, and for the last four years I had very few - if any - deleted posts. I did mention posting a lot around 2005-2006. How does the total number of posts per year sort out?
So there is a good degree of variation here. My final year I wrote less than half as often as I did the year I wrote the most (though, I'd argue, the quality is much improved now). So maybe looking at raw numbers isn't the best metric. How about the breakdown per year in terms of percentage? Starting with public:
No surprises there. It does seem like the Obama Bump for public posts was real, though:
Moving on to friends entries:
Yep, early on couldn't quite contain myself, but eventually I got the hang of this whole "writing for an audience" thing:
The entries I've saved as private:
Ahh, a pretty noticeably clear trend here. Whereas the number of posts I preserved for posterity trickles off slowly to nothing, there's definitely a lot more of them back when I was younger and OMG SO EMO:
Finally, the deleted entries:
Yep, it took a while before I figured out the whole "not posting for the sake of posting" thing. Times were different back then:
The trend for a progressive move from a rather scattershot variety of material to straight-up, friends-locked journal-style entries can be seen pretty well when I compare all four types by percentage side-by-side:
And that's it, really: over the decade lifetime of this journal it's changed with me and eventually settled down into something stable and sustained, too. How about that. But ten years is an awfully long time on the Internet and now it's time to move on. So I'll catch you somewhere else on this World Wide Web, Eljays. I hope you've enjoyed reading. I sure have enjoyed writing.