I've written more for Waking the Dead over at the Well, doubling the size of the story, though I haven't finished it yet. Comments are very welcome.

(Also, if you're new, these are the stories preceding it, in reverse order: Yellow Skulls and Dragonfly & Cricket. I'll eventually tag these so its apparent they're part of a pseudo-serial.)

I also discovered that the version of WordPress I upgraded to has a very annoying feature that can not be turned off via the control panel: revisions. Every time you make a change to an entry, it saves an additional copy of the entry in the database, wiki-style.

So if you go in and change two words, you end up with two copies in your database, the old one and the new one. If you go in and change another word and remove a sentence, you now have three copies in your database. Which is a ridiculous waste of space and completely USELESS for my needs or, far as I can tell, for those of most single-author bloggers.

And (again) IT CAN'T BE TURNED OFF via control panel (you have to hack code). Jesus. Yeah, I can hack the code, it's easy to do, but whose bright idea was that?

I am not satisfied with my journal.

Mainly it's been a pseudo-journal. Not really a journal per se, and not really a blog, either. Just random things. I've been letting slide things I think are important to post, posting stuff that feels empty to me: releasing and venting and personal things no one cares about.

I want to post more: game design, creative writing, illustrations or photos.

Also, the Aerie sees one post a month. I'm not utilizing it at all though there are plenty of half-formed posts waiting to go up. Originally, I was going to use the Aerie to post about non-personal social/cultural/philosophical things and use Autumn Winds to post personal things.

That isn't how it's worked out.

So, I have these two things, neither of which is doing what I want them to do.

I think the problem is social networking: I'm not meeting all the people or making all the connections I could be to make the most out of keeping a public journal. And I'm not sure how to meet people or get them interested, sticking around, communicating.

I have no clue how my wife has managed to do it, or how many of the folks whose journals I read have managed to do so. I am apparently a very boring and uninteresting person with useless thoughts -- I'm not quite certain how else to parse out the failure (though I'm fairly certain I see the flaw in that logic from a statistical perspective).

Regardless, none of my designs are accomplishing what I'm wanting them to or what they were created to do.

Feel like I'm drawing runes in the sand in the middle of the desert. Praying to ghosts.

LJ's spellchecker does not recognize the word "blog"; more amusingly, it suggests "blag" and "biog" as possibly the word you are intending to use.

I must be one of the only, if not THE only long-time reader and participant at the Forge who only just now got around to reading the Diaspora thread: the announcement about the eventual shut-down of the Forge. Sure, I'd heard about it here and there, even did a quick search for the thread once and never found it, but I'd not read the whole "mission statement", as it were, until now.

Having done so, I don't agree with the reasons given by either Ron or Clinton for closing up and moving on, and I can basically guarantee that I will not be shipping off somewhere else to discuss theory, at least none of the places thus far mentioned as stepping-off points from the Forge. I might start browsing RPG.net more, but even that is doubtful because of RPG.net's (in my experience) sub-par moderation and general free-for-all laissez faire attitude towards (serious) discussion.

Chances are much higher, however, that I will instead be taking a more active role on the Dark Sun boards at wizards.com, because I've recently been offered and accepted a position with the official DS team (at athas.org). I also see a slight possibly of my contributing more to some of the high-activity mailing lists I am or have been a part of.

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