Something about this resonates in me as I wind my way up the side
of Mount Tamalpais above Mill Valley, north of San Francisco.
The sun beats into a blue sky with lavish sensuality, and the trees
hold up their arms so effortlessly. It is a perfect Northern
California day and I realize how long it's been since I've done
anything like commune with nature or anything else uncivilized.
I'm far from a techie, but I do spend more and more time staring
into a screen thinking in tiny bites of abstract data. An e-mail, a
to-do item, a Web site URL, a bit of HTML code -- they tap-tap
together into the bulk of my life. At the end of the day, if I am
lucky, I jog or dance until it hurts, but maybe an equally exerting
sexual ritual would work even better.
In other Salon News, from the same article, an event that soulds like a
ton of fun -- with or without a date, I suppose:
Perhaps the best evidence of this is the flourishing of San
Francisco's 15th annual Folsom Street Fair, scheduled in
coordination with National Leather Week. Ten years ago, the
nation's largest leather and fetish party across the nation was a
backdoor affair catering to gay men into leather. Last year the fair
attracted over 300,000 people of all sexes and colors (many of
them admittedly non-pervs practicing nothing kinkier than a little
garden-variety voyeurism), making it the third largest street event
in California, second only to the Rose Bowl and the Gay Pride Day
Parade.
Finally, there's a fun article on the plague on online-diaries and the
foibles of diarists.
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/07/cov_03feature.html
Yet here is Massie, who's also the creator of the respected
personal-narrative Web 'zine AfterDinner, bidding the genre
farewell. "It's grown dull. Tedious," she writes. And not only
will she no longer be regularly baring her soul to the world, but
it seems she's writing an obituary for the whole diary
phenomenon. Web diarists are now "slowing down, drifting
away, and not publishing at all, abandoning unfinished projects,
flailing in redirection and redesign, coming to no real
conclusions and no more happiness."
"The true writing talent," Massie concludes, "is hiding, drifting
away to other mediums, or not publishing at all."
They point to a very highly-read article, "Why Web Journals Suck"
http://www.spies.com/~diane/Diary/websuck.html
Watch especially for her survey and categorization:
The Good Ones
The Guilty Pleasures
The Depressives
The High Schoolers and College Freshmen
The Perky Ones (Christians)
The Nerds
The Annoying and Obscure
What's VOID?
Hint: one category is described as "Guys who can't get laid and describe
their days in the most boring way possible--you can hear the monotone."
-- Rohit Khare UC Irvine 4K Associates +1-(626) 806-7574 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit http://xent.ics.uci.edu/~FoRK