It's Always More Complicated

I have had text and email from the Physio Services people about my upcoming appointment (next week), and logged in to see that apparently they do not require me to complete Yet Another Bloody Questionnaire (I think I've already done 2 online as well phone interview). Nor I am given the chance to review and change it.

And bopping about the site I saw there was a section of Exercises, which had the ones I have got and been doing for neck and shoulders -

- But also some Ankle and Knee ones WOT which apparently came to an end in June, year unspecified, and if these are not Somebody Else Entirely's, maybe they are exercises I was prescribed at the time of the sudden OW on the trip to see the Bosch exhibition in '16, but I was never told about being online and downloadable???

So I was trying to see if I could reconstruct when I saw the physio on that occasion - for lo, I think back in those halcyon days one did not have anything like such a wait - by going back over my old DW entries, but don't see that I posted anything about it within the putative period.

But anyway, skimming through my entries from that era, nearly a decade ago, what did I notice as issues coming up as being Panicked On In The Meedja?

Woezing about teh MENZ - as a certain fellow-historian in the field has been groaning lately, 'Masculinity, always in crisis'.

Weirdness about READING.

I will concede to a certain observer bias here, perhaps.

But honestly.

See also, rediscovery of some 'forgotten' woman: no, duckie, your not having heard of her before doesn't mean you have Now Rescued Her From Obscurity.

Having problems with cross-posting to LiveJournal - it's been very slow over the past couple of days and today doesn't seem to be x-posting at all, but I'm not getting 'failure to cross-post messages', so I'm not sure what's amiss.

Also I had a message the other day that somebody who I don't think was ever subscribed to this journal had unsubscribed, but it did look like a long-unused journal that was possibly being used for the recent spam attacks, so that might have been what it was in connection with.

And in other internetty matters, somebody on FB posted a PANIC warning from somebody else about what was described as a 'sophisticated scam' involving messages purporting to come from people's banks, saying payments had not gone through, and to click on a link, which would then hoover up your money.

I don't know who these people are, but don't they read the warnings that banks are constantly putting out about NOT CLICKING ON LINKS IN MESSAGES because they are almost certainly well dodgy? and that your bank will never ask you to do that?

(This all sounded kind of spurious to me anyway...)

Speaking as someone who is by now in a demographic which is supposed to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing, and who is actually massively paranoid to the point of referring to the IT Dept in question an email via former workplace account with a large clicky button in it, which turned out to be an entirely legit survey former workplace were having undertaken by an external survey organisation.

And instead of ringing them out and in, I will face the music and dance, even if I am pretty sure that 'there may be trouble ahead' is something that one can pretty well always say and be correct:

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The usual statistics, roundup, etc:

Up to 7,901 Journal Entries; 57,253 comments received, 7,247 posted.

Numbers of comments seemed down this year: the top posts for comments were:
7/5 In the Huxley/Wordsworth cage-fight smackdown, I am rooting for Aldous*
3/3 Has God's supply of tolerable husbands/ Fallen, in fact, so low?
6/3 What people actually eat when
1/7 Counterintuitive culinary challenge
10/1 Is today Anachronistic Historical Notions Day, or what?
14/9 Is this entirely wise?
15/9 'Serious issues around young people entering the modern workplace'
9/6 1066 and All That: failure to read and take note of
6/9 Don't think the trope really reverses...
27/8 Why didja havta be a rule-breaker
But, as ever, stats of views suggest this isn't the whole picture.

First lines (excluding birthdays or filtered posts):
Jan: Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Feb: I was inspired by reading in Winifred Holtby as I Knew Her that WH, in her book about V Woolf pointed out that several characters from previous books by Woolf were at Mrs Dalloway's party
Mar: London in literature is a huge subject, and I'm not going anywhere near Dickens.
Apr: You know, at my age I should probably stop expecting there to be a world out there in which the people who write in literary periodicals are sophisticated and knowledgeable and tolerant and so on and so forth.
May: Currently on the go Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Dragon Ship (2012), on the e-reader.
Jun: Happy 100th birthday, Barbara Pym!
Jul: When discussing the problem of travelling when vegetarian in the comments to an earlier post, I suggested that one does not go to X place in order to eat in the restaurants of other cultures that may be there (I really do not go to Prague for Thai food) but that sometimes these are the only places that do not centre their menu on great hunks of animal flesh (&/or cheese).
Aug: Article in today's Guardian G2 section on the absence of women from time travel movies.
Sep: Dept of, channelling Barbara Pym: last night's conference dinner.
Oct: 'In my experience, high-profile male columnists jump on a subject like Syria regardless of what they might have to contribute, simply because it's a hot topic and they have to be seen to be addressing it.'
Nov: Was wondering, following [livejournal.com profile] slemslempike's lead, about outfit blogging.
Dec: Okay, I realise that I already missed Stir-Up Sunday, which was last week, but it's more than high time to switch over to my bah humbug seasonal icon, right?

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I'm not doing that huge list of questions, except to say that there were no deaths in my immediate circle and I acquired a new great-nephew.

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I read 205 books logged in my GR account but that doesn't include the volumes ingested for Sekkrit Projekt.

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Furrin parts visited: USA, Germany, Czech Republic, the Netherlands. UK travel (overnight stays only): Glasgow, Exeter, Manchester, Sheffield, the family residence.

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Publications that actually appeared: 1 article, 1 book chapter.

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Were it not for this cold dragging me down, I would say I am probably in better health than this time last year, when I was recovering from Dental Abscess Hell (this took longer than I thought it would).

Should anyone care for a Dreamwidth invite code, I still have a few to disburse to deserving cases.

One of the things about the current LJ vs DW thing that has me making like a goldfish is that, you know, these (we, indeed) people at Dreamwidth are the same people we used to be (and in many cases still are) on LJ.

I don't think I've suddenly started not being the It's-All-More-Complicated Hedgehog you know (and love??? - makes pathetic little smoochy noises at flist and rlist) because I'm now posting on DW, mirroring to LJ (and IJ too actually) and consolidating comments in one place. Am not handing out little tracts and asking people if they've been saved. Still commenting on LJ posts, as and when.

I suspect (I R HISTORIAN and phenomena don't just suddenly happen) that things had been happening on LJ such that it was not the same place of fine careless rapture that it was when we first started posting there. Which might be just the development of habit and routine out of something that was once exciting and new.

Quite apart from the numerous LJ scandals, we're older if not wiser (or so much older then we're younger than that now), our lives have changed, our interests are different, our flists have undergone various ecological changes due to loss and gain.

How much of this perception is down to one's own particular circles, deponent knoweth not. When yr hedjog first started posting on LJ, there was a a widespread perception (in spite of all the contradictory evidence) that it was homebase for fourteen-year-old girls with eye-searing sparkly pink journal layouts and their squeeing fan interests. This subsection of users may still exist (it's not really one that I'm terribly likely to intersect with) or these days sparkly pink young women may be hanging out somewhere more Now and Much Cooler, while the former sparklies are now in graduate school/married/parents and either completely dropped out or posting in very different ways.

Do we see fewer memes of no particular interest bopping around (what kind of flower fairy are you, lists of intrusive questions that are fairly irrelevant to anyone over 20, etc)? or is that, again, function of circles I move in - in which the posting of a list of books inspires yet another round of the how many of these have I read and which of those do I wish I hadn't or some variation thereof.

There had already been erosion. Some people set up blogs on other sites. Facebook and Twitter perhaps in particular led people away from LJ. Some people simply dropped away.

And why not. We all have things that work for us but don't necessarily do so for others. Some people still mourn Usenet (which I never really got into: I did a certain amount of lurking but didn't engage). There are still purposes for which a listserv is still probably the most functional thing going. Some people are natural tweeters and some find FB a place of meaningful social interaction.

And those of us for whom the LJ-style model works are still here, unless life got in the way.

I don't see Dreamwidth as some sudden rupture. Well before then, in the wake of various LJ imbroglios, there had been something between a flight to other similar sites (like GreatestJournal and InsaneJournal) and people setting up mirrors on them, but - at least among my circles - this never attained anything like the critical mass of interest which would have sustained the complete leap.

And then Dreamwidth came along.

Again, this may be about my particular milieu, but significant numbers of people from my flist moved there, and there were also New People!! perhaps encouraged by the whole subscribe/access distinction and the feeling that issues around actual friendship were not being invoked prematurely (i.e. before the getting to know you process could take place).

But, you know, and on the whole, my DW rlist is not massively different from my LJ flist.

Which, okay, may well be down to like attracting like and given the general nature of the people I read and interact with just a snowball effect based on those connections.

I don't want to lose contact with my LJ flist people, but there has been, over the past several years, enough upheavals and feelings of instability that I did want to have in place, at the very least, a back-up venue where there was a significant chance of the same people being too,

I'm here, predominantly, for the people. The milieu is not irrelevant to that, but the relevance is that it's agreeable to QOSD. And facilitates our kind of interactions.

There is no conclusion, I will leave this with the equivalent of me walking along by the seashore gazing with an enigmatic expression at the sad sea waves.

*Courtesy of the Linkbait Generator