(no subject)

I've been on livejournal ten years, apparently. It's a meaningless event, considering I was writing online since before lj was around, and the people I'd followed onto lj had been writing online longer than that. We all had websites, they were full of content, the word "blog" hadn't been invented, the grass was greener and the sun was higher in the sky... But, lj did make it easier. And though you could see lj as the precursor to myspace and facebook, and therefore one of the bringers of the end of the age of the website, it does have its own merits. Less complicated than a website, more complicated than a blog, no emphasis on brevity or consistency, no worries about audience because web audience hadn't been invented. You'd never worry that your great aunt would end up reading something you posted. Graphics were optional, too flashy to be taken seriously.

And though I have twitter and facebook and all that jazz, I am very, very disappointed when twitter updates a billion times a second but I only get to read two or three choice lj posts a day. Many have abandoned, or scattered, or grew up... I myself don't write as much as I used to, mostly because this journal, the name, the persona, has history. I know what its voice sounds like, though it's mellowed with age (considerably).

But lj is the only place I've found that has real, worthwhile communities within it. Though everyone's doing different things in different ways there are these eddies where ideas are spread and swirled around, where everyone can be actively changed by one another. It doesn't usually last for very long but at least it's there, an emergent property of all these words, differently voiced.

So this is just to say, even to those who are no longer reading this, thank you for changing me.