Journal Red Flayer's Journal: Who are these people ony my fans list? 3
I was reading a journal by Shadow Wrought re: hitting the max number of friends, and having to delete old friends to make room for new ones.
In some respects, I do this in real life too. But that's beside the point and is best left for a different journal entry.
So anyway, I decided to take a look at my friends, fans, foes, and freaks lists and see if I could identify any of the people listed, if I could recall _anything_ about them. I think I hit around 80% on my friends and foes and freaks lists, and maybe 20% on my fans list. I'm not sure if that says something about me, or even if it says anything at all.
But every once in a while when I look at my fans list, I'm haunted by a single fan -- ^Z. There in my fans list -- the very last fan -- I see that his or her last journal was in the very early morning on Sept 11, 2001.
I worked in downtown Manhattan at the time, and lived across the river in Hoboken. I lost several acquaintances on that day, and one close friend. Was ^Z one of them*? Was ^Z some other person who lost their life that day? Or perhaps someone who gained some perspective, and realized slashdot is insignificant to them in the grand scheme of things?
Every time I look at my fans list, I'm reminded of that day and the people whose lives were lost. And I wonder how that day changed America, made us a nation of line-toers and protofascists, instead of making us celebrate and honor our freedoms even more. Was it a failure of our leadership? A failure of our modern culture?
And then, today, for the first time, I actually clicked on ^Z's profile, and I see that he or she kept on posting until sometime in 2009, and I realize I'm a sentimental, navel-gazing, analytical fool who lets himself get swept up in revery based on a false premise.
*Probably not, since he journaled in a different alphabet than the one I use.
In some respects, I do this in real life too. But that's beside the point and is best left for a different journal entry.
So anyway, I decided to take a look at my friends, fans, foes, and freaks lists and see if I could identify any of the people listed, if I could recall _anything_ about them. I think I hit around 80% on my friends and foes and freaks lists, and maybe 20% on my fans list. I'm not sure if that says something about me, or even if it says anything at all.
But every once in a while when I look at my fans list, I'm haunted by a single fan -- ^Z. There in my fans list -- the very last fan -- I see that his or her last journal was in the very early morning on Sept 11, 2001.
I worked in downtown Manhattan at the time, and lived across the river in Hoboken. I lost several acquaintances on that day, and one close friend. Was ^Z one of them*? Was ^Z some other person who lost their life that day? Or perhaps someone who gained some perspective, and realized slashdot is insignificant to them in the grand scheme of things?
Every time I look at my fans list, I'm reminded of that day and the people whose lives were lost. And I wonder how that day changed America, made us a nation of line-toers and protofascists, instead of making us celebrate and honor our freedoms even more. Was it a failure of our leadership? A failure of our modern culture?
And then, today, for the first time, I actually clicked on ^Z's profile, and I see that he or she kept on posting until sometime in 2009, and I realize I'm a sentimental, navel-gazing, analytical fool who lets himself get swept up in revery based on a false premise.
*Probably not, since he journaled in a different alphabet than the one I use.
That is interesting... (Score:2)
His journal entries remind me of a user who was previously posting JEs every day, using the date as the subject and the entire body would usually be "...". I don't know if that user is still posting, I don't recall seeing those entries for a while now.
Re: (Score:2)
What was interesting is that before that person was posting "..." he (she?) was posting "still alive". I commented on one of the ... posts after the change asking if that meant he was dead. IIRC he's replied to people and posted other things as well, but very rarely.
It's easy to pick his posts out of the list, he posts only the date in the subject (unlike HomelessInLaJolla). Here's 110122 http://slashdot.org/journal/260174/110122 [slashdot.org]
must happen to every active /. user (Score:1)
For the friends and foes categories, in hindsight, one could have journaled about each one at the time such action was taken, and recorded the thoughts and/or references for why.
But that wouldn't help with the fans and freaks categories. Slashdot really should associate and save *some* context with each relationship change action. Prolly just a single URL, since the system can't really demand that someone put into words a rationale for doing something. And say limited to URL's on the Slashdot domain, so tha