Schmemetic Output, 1-3

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

People asked about:

The Weather

Weather has fascinated me for many years at this stage. My homeplace is on the side of a hill in Co. Wexford, and is situated in the landscape so that almost every kind of weather comes in from the South-West - which is the best view, the direction in which we could see about twenty miles, out past Mt. Leinster. So from about the age of eight, weather wasn't a thing that just happened, but something I could see coming.

That led into reading about meteorology, and learning how to predict a little further than the few hours ahead. Extreme weather is fascinating for everyone, of course, but I'm interested in the minor features as well - grey days, and why we've had so few this year, for instance, or why there seem to have been more puddles with ice in them in the winters when I was small.

The fact that the weather is a huge system that has rules and patterns and yet is not predictable more than a few days in advance is something that I really like, that keeps me looking at it, since I like to know what's going to happen. I do obsess over it, and am likely to tell almost anyone I'm talking to about forecasts, because, well, how could you not be interested?

HTML
Guh. HTML is no longer the bane of my life, because I'm pretty nearly on top of all the necessary tricks to make it work with the current crop of browsers. This will probably change when IE 7 comes out, of course… but in the meantime, Javascript is the one that gives me trouble.

HTML is sort of a basis for everything I do in work, and while everyone tech-oriented in my current workplace has SOME idea of what it does and how it does it, I'm the one who has to work out the Stupid Browser Tricks that sometimes crop up. I can't help but be interested in it on that basis, even if it's no longer vastly interesting. CSS and XSL as offshoots, though, those are still fascinating.

Virtual Community

Obviously, Virtual Community is a huge topic. I'm coming 'round to the way of thinking, though, that says that like economies, there are no closed communities, online or off. So this is a shorthand, in some ways, for “community activities online”.

Everything in this area has changed hugely over the last five years, with the rise of blogging, sites like livejournal, MMORPGs and other online games, discussion boards of many kinds, and now dedicated networking sites like tribe.net, as well as odd items like flickr and delicio.us. All these allow a level of participation that wasn't available to the average user even three years ago, and they overflow and merge, one with the next. The Red Branch guild and its allies on Argent Dawn are elements of an MMORPG, but there's a message board as well (which has a small blog facility), and some of that spills over into mailing lists and other blogs and private correspondence, and from there into conversations in the real world, and back again to the game, and screenshots appear on flickr… and so it goes.

So trying to track the dynamics of virtual communities has become several orders of magnitude more difficult - you can't just subscribe to a mailing list and lurk anymore, but have to follow things from place to place, and particularly with regard to livejournal, you have to participate to gain access.