Media Living: What Twitter Tells Me
Nov. 5th, 2008 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wordwhackerPhew! Been a little while since I updated - I forgot to do it last week, but at least I was keeping up with the Twitter stuff for a while, there. I trailed off with it after about a week, but I think I got enough data for it to be useful. I'll probably pick it up again at least once this month, so I can use it to talk about all of my freaking homework and paper-writing and noveling and such.
It's election night, and I've been peeking at the results on CBC (interesting that we Canadians have our own coverage of the US election, and it's at least as comprehensive (maybe even moreso) than our OWN election coverage. I also love that there are election parties going on around here, like the one at the campus bar. I can't really stand to sit and watch the results roll in, myself, and I have homework to do, so I'm just sticking it out and home and will find out the good news (oh god, I hope it's good news) tomorrow. Normally I hate when our news is overloaded with American stuff, but in this case it's nice to have media people that I'm familiar with and a media outlet in general that I'm familiar with handling things. (I haven't done this week's reading yet about the news, but I'm pretty sure it'll be relevant to this discussion - will probably make another mini-post later in the week to talk about it more in-depth.)
But enough about politics. NaNoWriMo is underway! I've been writing almost exactly my quota of words every day, but I discovered something very sad today: I'm not enjoying what I'm writing. I'm not being compelled to write; I'm not feeling the magic of having new characters spring to life. So it looks like I might need to start over (though I'll keep my existing wordcount - can't really erase it from the stats, anyway. I'm familiar with this game, I think I've done this same thing at least three or four times.) Tomorrow amid frantic paper-writing I am going to start brainstorming new novel ideas and maybe outlining. Silliness is in order, but I'm having a hard time finding my voice for my current idea, so maybe something else will come more naturally.
Ah yes, and then there's last week's fun with Twitter. First things first: I just went through and counted how many times I said I was doing "the rounds" - which means personal and school email, facebook, livejournal, and (now) sometimes NaNo forums. I noted that I was doing them 24 times in 10 entries, which puts me at almost two and a half times a day. Not particularly terrible, but I actually probably check 'em WAY more than that and just didn't notice enough to actually make a Twitter note of it. I also keep the clients open all the time - Facebook, LJ and Gmail are up now, and until very recently Webmail for UNB was up, too. I've gotten several emails in that time, but I'm not actively "doing the rounds". Now that I think about it, I actually conceive of "doing the rounds" as a kind of transient thing - what I do if I only have a couple of minutes to catch up online. Otherwise "the rounds" become "the tabs" that are generally open, and they're less of an activity and more of a state of being. Like how "going for a drive" isn't what a cab driver does every day, but he/she probably DOES occasionally do something called "going for a drive" which involves being in the car, and involves driving. Am I making any sense?
Anyway. I don't use my mp3 player a whole lot, I realized. It's on me a lot but I'm not using it much these days - haven't been taking the bus very much. The bus is extremely boring to me without an mp3 player. I tend to feel the same way about walking, but if I get started walking without music it never really bothers me.
I watch The Simpsons a lot, but I knew that already.
XKCD is a great comic, and I made an update one day talking about how the comic was on DRM for files. I'm pretty sure I linked to that one, but there have been a couple of others that I liked for their commentary on technology. Like ths one about how laptops are weird, which kind of exemplifies the whole idea of "global village" I guess (global sleepware?). And of course, this comic on Twitter, which talks about how technology sometimes begs the re-introduction of old memes. It is pretty cool that people are hanging around and talking about this stuff, and even being insightful about this stuff, in a really casual way. It's just how we do things here, man.
You know, it's interesting to me that I can at once not get people who watch the same shows over and over again, and yet I canwatch the Simpsons a hundred times a day re-watch AVGN and Zero Punctuation many a-time. Maybe it's a case of difference in format: I have a short attention span and love things that are, y'know, short. I love videos that are four to ten minutes long. (Come to think of it, Homestar Runner fits into this pattern for me as well.) (And aren't half-hour TV shows about ten minutes long after the commercials are taken out? ;-) That raises an interesting question, actually - how are video forms going to change / how are they already changing, because they don't have to adhere to half-hour or full-hour timeslots? (And yeah, I know Robot Chicken is only, like, 10 minutes long. Or 15, or something. The exception that proves the rule? It's also on "Adult Swim" and such, which is a different kind of timeslot than prime-time or daytime.)
Rock Band drums are the funnest thing ever. Just sayin'. (These people hit onto something really good. Let's hope they don't muck it up with the sequel, or lose steam in the face of Guitar Hero's blatant rip-off which is apparently slated to have better music.)
You know, I've made an effort to get into the NaNo forums, but I'm really not feelin' it. I used to be into that kind of thing, but they were smaller forums - one was probably 30 people tops, and the other was a couple hundred with no more than 20-odd people online at the same time in peak hours. The NaNo forums are GIANT BEHEMOTH SCARY FORUMS with thousands of people online at once. Lordie, it's like a MMORPG! There's so much being posted, and I really feel that saying anything would be like shouting into a room full of excitably-yapping people. I will have to get ENTIRELY too hoarse in order to be heard. But I am going to stick it out and maybe see if I can focus on one single sub-forum (maybe just a few threads within it). Even if I can't stand it, at least I will have some basis for comparison, since I used to be pretty busy on even the NaNo forums a few years ago.
And even though it has a MASSIVE number of participants these days, the whole adventure is still very grass-roots. Chris Baty still makes regular (daily, lately!) updates on the site and sometimes via email, he has answered my emails personally in the past and probably would do so again if the question was actually for him and not better suited to one of the staff members of the slowly-growing charitable company. They tend to hire within the NaNo community and they like to post jobs on the site mainpage, so that they hire people who are already "into it". (I'm telling you, if I hadn't been in university I would have been tempted to go work for them. Hey, maybe an English / ICS degree will perfectly qualify me to work there at some point! I can dream, can't I?) They're a very fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants seeming org and it's been really interesting to watch them grow over the past six years. (This is my seventh time doing this, if you can believe it!) I'm looking forward to when they have the "Author Search" back (site load is too high right now), because that lets you see how many people have signed up. It was 77775 the last time I checked, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 100K once it's back.)
I think that's enough for now - I'll be back later to talk breifly about the news thing specifically, since it's topical for this week.
It's election night, and I've been peeking at the results on CBC (interesting that we Canadians have our own coverage of the US election, and it's at least as comprehensive (maybe even moreso) than our OWN election coverage. I also love that there are election parties going on around here, like the one at the campus bar. I can't really stand to sit and watch the results roll in, myself, and I have homework to do, so I'm just sticking it out and home and will find out the good news (oh god, I hope it's good news) tomorrow. Normally I hate when our news is overloaded with American stuff, but in this case it's nice to have media people that I'm familiar with and a media outlet in general that I'm familiar with handling things. (I haven't done this week's reading yet about the news, but I'm pretty sure it'll be relevant to this discussion - will probably make another mini-post later in the week to talk about it more in-depth.)
But enough about politics. NaNoWriMo is underway! I've been writing almost exactly my quota of words every day, but I discovered something very sad today: I'm not enjoying what I'm writing. I'm not being compelled to write; I'm not feeling the magic of having new characters spring to life. So it looks like I might need to start over (though I'll keep my existing wordcount - can't really erase it from the stats, anyway. I'm familiar with this game, I think I've done this same thing at least three or four times.) Tomorrow amid frantic paper-writing I am going to start brainstorming new novel ideas and maybe outlining. Silliness is in order, but I'm having a hard time finding my voice for my current idea, so maybe something else will come more naturally.
Ah yes, and then there's last week's fun with Twitter. First things first: I just went through and counted how many times I said I was doing "the rounds" - which means personal and school email, facebook, livejournal, and (now) sometimes NaNo forums. I noted that I was doing them 24 times in 10 entries, which puts me at almost two and a half times a day. Not particularly terrible, but I actually probably check 'em WAY more than that and just didn't notice enough to actually make a Twitter note of it. I also keep the clients open all the time - Facebook, LJ and Gmail are up now, and until very recently Webmail for UNB was up, too. I've gotten several emails in that time, but I'm not actively "doing the rounds". Now that I think about it, I actually conceive of "doing the rounds" as a kind of transient thing - what I do if I only have a couple of minutes to catch up online. Otherwise "the rounds" become "the tabs" that are generally open, and they're less of an activity and more of a state of being. Like how "going for a drive" isn't what a cab driver does every day, but he/she probably DOES occasionally do something called "going for a drive" which involves being in the car, and involves driving. Am I making any sense?
Anyway. I don't use my mp3 player a whole lot, I realized. It's on me a lot but I'm not using it much these days - haven't been taking the bus very much. The bus is extremely boring to me without an mp3 player. I tend to feel the same way about walking, but if I get started walking without music it never really bothers me.
I watch The Simpsons a lot, but I knew that already.
XKCD is a great comic, and I made an update one day talking about how the comic was on DRM for files. I'm pretty sure I linked to that one, but there have been a couple of others that I liked for their commentary on technology. Like ths one about how laptops are weird, which kind of exemplifies the whole idea of "global village" I guess (global sleepware?). And of course, this comic on Twitter, which talks about how technology sometimes begs the re-introduction of old memes. It is pretty cool that people are hanging around and talking about this stuff, and even being insightful about this stuff, in a really casual way. It's just how we do things here, man.
You know, it's interesting to me that I can at once not get people who watch the same shows over and over again, and yet I can
Rock Band drums are the funnest thing ever. Just sayin'. (These people hit onto something really good. Let's hope they don't muck it up with the sequel, or lose steam in the face of Guitar Hero's blatant rip-off which is apparently slated to have better music.)
You know, I've made an effort to get into the NaNo forums, but I'm really not feelin' it. I used to be into that kind of thing, but they were smaller forums - one was probably 30 people tops, and the other was a couple hundred with no more than 20-odd people online at the same time in peak hours. The NaNo forums are GIANT BEHEMOTH SCARY FORUMS with thousands of people online at once. Lordie, it's like a MMORPG! There's so much being posted, and I really feel that saying anything would be like shouting into a room full of excitably-yapping people. I will have to get ENTIRELY too hoarse in order to be heard. But I am going to stick it out and maybe see if I can focus on one single sub-forum (maybe just a few threads within it). Even if I can't stand it, at least I will have some basis for comparison, since I used to be pretty busy on even the NaNo forums a few years ago.
And even though it has a MASSIVE number of participants these days, the whole adventure is still very grass-roots. Chris Baty still makes regular (daily, lately!) updates on the site and sometimes via email, he has answered my emails personally in the past and probably would do so again if the question was actually for him and not better suited to one of the staff members of the slowly-growing charitable company. They tend to hire within the NaNo community and they like to post jobs on the site mainpage, so that they hire people who are already "into it". (I'm telling you, if I hadn't been in university I would have been tempted to go work for them. Hey, maybe an English / ICS degree will perfectly qualify me to work there at some point! I can dream, can't I?) They're a very fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants seeming org and it's been really interesting to watch them grow over the past six years. (This is my seventh time doing this, if you can believe it!) I'm looking forward to when they have the "Author Search" back (site load is too high right now), because that lets you see how many people have signed up. It was 77775 the last time I checked, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 100K once it's back.)
I think that's enough for now - I'll be back later to talk breifly about the news thing specifically, since it's topical for this week.
