S. Worthen | Weblog

Six years ago, searching for a way to motivate myself to write daily on my dissetation, C. suggested I start a blog for posting daily word goals and counts. I could tell my family about it, and if they checked now and again, I would feel responsible to an audience for achieving my daily word goals. It was a good idea. I picked LJ because it was based on an open source platform and it was free. The only person I knew who used the service, littleowl, was busy recovering from giving birth and it would be weeks before she logged in again. I got my invite code from a player named Blue on TooMush. I set up an account for tracking my daily writing progress.

A few weeks later, browsing through communities, I encountered haggisthesecond. And from there, it all slowly snowballed, until, rather rapidly, LJ became more of a social and networking nexus for me than a tool for dissertation structure. But that's okay. I finished the dissertation, I graduated, I moved continents, I bought a permanent account, LJ no longer requires invite codes, and a whole lot more people use it these days.

Now the people I know here cover all sorts of clusters from my life and world: relatives, medievalists, historians of science, Smithies, friends from the University of York (UK), friends from the University of Toronto, Canadian science fiction fans, British science fiction fans, people from TooMush, people from SouCon, and all sorts of other people, most of whom are located in countries I've lived in, but others in Afghanistan and Australia, to name two. Several of you have proved points of cascading acquaintanceships and friendships, through whom I've met countless others, particularly cliosfolly, easterbunny, fjm, hungry_pixel, and mirrorshard. (LJ makes these connections more explicit than I might otherwise remember.) The majority of my f'list I've met, whether or not I knew them before we encountered each other via LJ. It's been a good six years. Thank you.