1999-12-25 :: 23:48:05

beaten to the meta-punch

Soundtrack: Poole, "Among Whom We Shine"

Opening thoughts:

brent (11:06:00 PM): seriously though like
brent (11:06:07 PM): when I read this its like
brent (11:06:18 PM): dude if you realized how common your uncommon thoughts are
brent (11:06:23 PM): you'd feel pretty silly

Brent is absolutely right. I think that's precisely it -- why we have this strange fascination with the impersonal personal-ness of the web diary. And about my closing yesterday with linking and judging diaries, well, I suppose I should just give up that day job since it appears to be in full effect by two sites (don't click either of these URLs yet):

- i, anomalous - n� anonymous.diaryland.com.

- person - affiliated with anomalous, but not anomalous.

I spent a bit of time cruising around these people and there's a whole old school scene of diarists on this server; kinda weird but amusing. Just another net community, just like how IRC was for me. Now I haven't used it in months...

So here's why I said you shouldn't click those yet -- I am starting an experiment, if you would.

Hypothesis: ano is a guy named Erik in Seattle.

Proof: Check it. A bit of an extension on that, says the age is 22.

I'm down with what he(?) is doing, I think it's really funny -- and since he obviously checks his HTTP referrers, if you click on the above link, well, he'll be reading this entry. So hello ano. I read your site all night last night. Keep up the good work; perhaps you will consider uppercase letters again someday. I will email-whore myself now and ask you to mail me if you see this and tell me if I am right or wrong. I'm just a little (a lot) curious to see if my experiment pans out. It intrigues me that I will not be the one to set it in motion. It will take quite a bit for this experiment to go off, but since I know of at least one visitor to my diary I have a shot here.

person, on the other hand, has a relatively clean level of anonymity, though s/he (I'm guessing their sig of person(f) means she) wrote "behaviour" in the newest entry, so I'm guessing person is Canadian or from the UK. Huzzah. In getting a domain, ano made it a bit easier to venture a guess. But I told you to start with how easy it is to find shit on the net. That's the other thing about online diaries when they hit critical fame and co-workers start checking it out... it's like, what the hell did you expect? Maybe you shouldn't have talked about sleeping with those two guys/girls/transvestities while snorting crack in a butcher shop after killing those cops.

Just so you don't think I hate all diaries based on yesterday's Tara-bash, I want you to know that I like Harsh's. Funny guy and gets plenty out in few words. He's in love with Esther, who has the intelligent, emotional girl-hiding-a-bit-of-something-in-her-words action going on. He also just dropped a funny diss on drunkgirl. I really liked this quote in his first entry: "oh yeah. i got dumped. haha. i'm the shit." Rock (as he would say).

How small is the net? He's friends with Taber Buhl of Swanky. Most of those Swanky kids have a similar style (I'd say Harsh's is right in it -- say it with me: "RayGun") but it's cool. (Irony here is that none of these people have any idea I know who they are or what they do. Weird.) Oh yeah. I went to summer camp with Colin back in the day [editor's note: apparently that link is busted, but he is still listed in the SwankArmy index, so I'll leave it active]. Swanky.

Outside of the whole Diaryland world, I recently was given a URL to this guy's site, which has a diary spanning 5 months of early 1999. I happen to know him in real life (well, I did, since we went to high school together). He is miserable, but there's a lot of good writing in there. (Suffer for your art.) I can't believe he met a girl, nailed her, and broke up with her within a week. Well, I can, but it's an alien concept. He does a good job of saying interesting things (again, in relatively few words).

And isn't that was this is about? People spewing words out into the digital ether and hoping they carve something right out with their streams of consciousness. Lots of ordinary people finding out their uncommon thoughts are really quite common. Hoping for a bit of resonance.

I wonder, then, why I have not made this diary public outside of linking it from my non-visited homepage.