tea berry-blue

Notice: I have a lot of regular life stuff I want to post about but this was a surreal week and I just haven't been able to get my thoughts together. Also, my computer cable broke after I uploaded some of the Thanksgiving prep how-tos I meant to post, so they didn't happen. I'm on my netbook and eternally thankful that I am able to do things like afford a netbook to cover me for computing and communication purposes when my usual computer (which I am also eternally thankful for) gets broken.

( But this is a post about elephants. And about rooms. And about writing. )

Notice: I have a lot of regular life stuff I want to post about but this was a surreal week and I just haven't been able to get my thoughts together. Also, my computer cable broke after I uploaded some of the Thanksgiving prep how-tos I meant to post, so they didn't happen. I'm on my netbook and eternally thankful that I am able to do things like afford a netbook to cover me for computing and communication purposes when my usual computer (which I am also eternally thankful for) gets broken.

( But this is a post about elephants. And about rooms. And about writing. )

I have a lot of friends participating in LJ Idol, as I did last year. Since I participated for a long time last year and got to know a lot of returning Idolers, and also have a lot of people on my friendslist who are either new to Idol or who were eliminated early, I thought it would be nice to say a few words about my friends whom you might not have gotten a chance to know well yet. Face it, not everyone gets to read all the entries this early on, and since I'm not using this journal to self-promote, I can use it to say some nice things about some nice people you should all get to know.

I included a number of people who were in Idol last year but who didn't get super far. I had to pick a cut-off so I picked Week 10, since that was the first Gatekeeper round last year. I included any of my pre-Idol friends who didn't make it past Week 10, although a couple of them were more active in the Green Room last year.

applespicy has a very positive outlook on life and some really interesting experiences as a teacher. She's got a good balance of both intellectual smarts and common sense, and a really perspicacious way of taking personal experiences and relating them in colorful and emotive detail.

arielchan is one of the people I've known longest on this list, since I joined hogwarts_elite. She's warm, welcoming, inclusive and fun. She's has a very gregarious and upbeat attitude. She has a spirit of adventure and contagious enthusiasm, but she can also be deeply analytical.

astraevirgo is thoughtful, reflective, and tries to see things from a wide variety of perspectives, respecting other viewpoints even if they are not her own. She is interested in social issues and strives to make the world a better place, is an excellent listener but can also be quite silly.

butterbuns is genuinely kind and encouraging to her friends. She hasn't been as active on LJ as she used to, but she's playful and amiable and fun to talk to. She's a perceptive media consumer who always has interesting things to say about what she reads and watches.

gildedage is another one of the people I've known the longest, and I consider her one of my closest friends. She's always been wise beyond her years, and is great at handling serious situations, but also has an amazing sense of humor and is a riot to be around (and to read).

liret is one of my two best friends (the other being cacophonesque). She is compassionate and thoughtful and really cares about others. She's got a rather quirky, deadpan sense of humor and is one of the most voracious readers I know. She's got about a metric ton of patience, and even more empathy.

nialyind is sweet, sympathetic, and innately self-aware. She tends to be observant and attuned to the world around her-- not just her obvious surroundings, but emotions, too. She is also a very thoughtful reader and writer, who considers words on a lot of different levels.

rougebaiser has a sophisticated and refined way about her, but doesn't keep her from being playful and fun. She loves language and that comes across really well in her writing; she's very precise when it comes to her word choice and often parts of her ordinary posts seem like poetry.

serpentpixie is emotive and effusively creative, with a fantastical imagination and an artistic sensibility. She not only formulates fascinating ideas, but has the wherewithal to follow through and actually create things from them. She is emotive, perceptive, and enthusiastic.

sileri has a keen sense for the absurd-- or maybe it's just that the absurd follows her around. She's got a sharp, dry wit and an eye for detail. She's logical, clever, and is never at a loss for originality. She's also one of the most adventurous and independent people I know.

All of them are people I genuinely enjoy reading in their regular journals, so if you don't already know them, I hope you'll get to know them!

I hope I didn't miss anybody! If I did, I'm sorry, let me know!

This post is inspired by LJ Idol, and might be taken as a bit of Idol Meta, but might also be appropriate to consider in other venues as well.

I've read almost all the LJ Idol posts this week, and I've noticed a few posts that got me thinking about positivity versus negativity in writing.

For those of you who aren't participating in LJ Idol and somehow missed last year when I was, it's a community that is structured around a contest, and at this point, it has about 200 participants.

Most people have one of two goals: to win or to make it to a certain "place" in the competition (say, "top 50") or to make new friends by participating, read new people's writing, and having new people read their own writing.

So, in both cases, whether you want to get people to vote for you, or you want to make new friends, you want people to like you. If you want people to vote for you, you might be able to get them to like your writing but not necessarily like you as a person. However, you will probably go a lot further if they like you as a person, too. If it's a choice between you and someone whose writing they equally admire, many people are going to go for the person they like the best. If you're looking for friends, you can probably get away with a lower quality of writing, as long as people can tell you are a person they would want to get to know. This usually involves being at least reasonably likable.

When choosing a subject for an entry, you can write an entry that is:
--Non-fiction, about something bad
--Non-fiction, about something good
--Non-fiction, without a qualitative judgment attached
--Any of the above, but fiction
--Something experimental

Pretty much all entries will fall into one of those categories. On top of the qualitative judgment of the topic you're writing about ("I fell off my bike!"), there is also the question of how your own personal attitude is reflective in the entry. You could have two stories about people who fall off their bikes, but might be "I fell of my bike; haha, I'm such a klutz!" while another is "I fell off my bike; I'm going to sue my neighbor who is an awful person for not raking his leaves properly!"

I tend to find that when the stories I'm reading, be it fiction or non-fiction, tend to focus on the sins of other people, or insult other people, or try to convince me that another person is bad, I am less likely to be sympathetic to the reader, especially this early in the LJ Idol season. It makes me wonder, "Hm, I am just getting to know you as a person: is this the first thing you want me to know about yourself?"

Remember that most of us do not know you. If you met someone at a party for the first time and you wanted to make friends with them, would you want to dazzle them with your humorous story of your own klutziness, or tell them what an awful person your neighbor is? Is trying to convince us that you are better than another person, or that another person is a bad person, or that you are certain your personal values are morally or ethically superior to someone else's among the first things you want us to know about you?

This is especially true if you use your early entries to make fun of or insult a certain group of people, as opposed to simply complaining about a specific person. What if the person reading your entry is from that group? There are 200 competitors, and many people who are not competing who like to read LJ Idol entries. Even if none of them have that particular background, you might think your joke is hilarious, but remember that it is about another human being, and remember that this is still part of our first impression of you.

If you are just here for the competition, and less interested in making friends, then you might want to ask another question: is writing an entry where you bitch about another person or group of people really your best writing? Is that the quality of writing you want to show people?

I think this is true whether or not you are really interested in the competitive part of LJ Idol, and I think it goes beyond a single competition or community. It's why so many of us on LJ lock more personal things about ourselves: we get that airing dirty laundry or bitching in public isn't really a face of ourselves that we want to share with mere acquaintances. We know that there are certain subjects that are rude to talk about at a dinner party. We are, one would hope, compassionate and considerate in the way we interact with people in our daily lives. Yeah, we're all jerks sometimes. I'm a jerk sometimes. And we all bitch to our friends sometimes. That's cool. But many of us are just getting to know each other. Is the first face you want people to see from you the jerky one?

This post is inspired by LJ Idol, and might be taken as a bit of Idol Meta, but might also be appropriate to consider in other venues as well.

I've read almost all the LJ Idol posts this week, and I've noticed a few posts that got me thinking about positivity versus negativity in writing.

For those of you who aren't participating in LJ Idol and somehow missed last year when I was, it's a community that is structured around a contest, and at this point, it has about 200 participants.

Most people have one of two goals: to win or to make it to a certain "place" in the competition (say, "top 50") or to make new friends by participating, read new people's writing, and having new people read their own writing.

So, in both cases, whether you want to get people to vote for you, or you want to make new friends, you want people to like you. If you want people to vote for you, you might be able to get them to like your writing but not necessarily like you as a person. However, you will probably go a lot further if they like you as a person, too. If it's a choice between you and someone whose writing they equally admire, many people are going to go for the person they like the best. If you're looking for friends, you can probably get away with a lower quality of writing, as long as people can tell you are a person they would want to get to know. This usually involves being at least reasonably likable.

When choosing a subject for an entry, you can write an entry that is:
--Non-fiction, about something bad
--Non-fiction, about something good
--Non-fiction, without a qualitative judgment attached
--Any of the above, but fiction
--Something experimental

Pretty much all entries will fall into one of those categories. On top of the qualitative judgment of the topic you're writing about ("I fell off my bike!"), there is also the question of how your own personal attitude is reflective in the entry. You could have two stories about people who fall off their bikes, but might be "I fell of my bike; haha, I'm such a klutz!" while another is "I fell off my bike; I'm going to sue my neighbor who is an awful person for not raking his leaves properly!"

I tend to find that when the stories I'm reading, be it fiction or non-fiction, tend to focus on the sins of other people, or insult other people, or try to convince me that another person is bad, I am less likely to be sympathetic to the reader, especially this early in the LJ Idol season. It makes me wonder, "Hm, I am just getting to know you as a person: is this the first thing you want me to know about yourself?"

Remember that most of us do not know you. If you met someone at a party for the first time and you wanted to make friends with them, would you want to dazzle them with your humorous story of your own klutziness, or tell them what an awful person your neighbor is? Is trying to convince us that you are better than another person, or that another person is a bad person, or that you are certain your personal values are morally or ethically superior to someone else's among the first things you want us to know about you?

This is especially true if you use your early entries to make fun of or insult a certain group of people, as opposed to simply complaining about a specific person. What if the person reading your entry is from that group? There are 200 competitors, and many people who are not competing who like to read LJ Idol entries. Even if none of them have that particular background, you might think your joke is hilarious, but remember that it is about another human being, and remember that this is still part of our first impression of you.

If you are just here for the competition, and less interested in making friends, then you might want to ask another question: is writing an entry where you bitch about another person or group of people really your best writing? Is that the quality of writing you want to show people?

I think this is true whether or not you are really interested in the competitive part of LJ Idol, and I think it goes beyond a single competition or community. It's why so many of us on LJ lock more personal things about ourselves: we get that airing dirty laundry or bitching in public isn't really a face of ourselves that we want to share with mere acquaintances. We know that there are certain subjects that are rude to talk about at a dinner party. We are, one would hope, compassionate and considerate in the way we interact with people in our daily lives. Yeah, we're all jerks sometimes. I'm a jerk sometimes. And we all bitch to our friends sometimes. That's cool. But many of us are just getting to know each other. Is the first face you want people to see from you the jerky one?

Apologies to people who haven't been following Idol, but I've been writing up my review of the week, and I thought it would be neat to see who people's predictions are for the Final Four Idol contestants.

theafaye was mentioning in her journal that a while ago, we discussed the Top 10 but now that we're down to 13, many if not most of the people mentioned as a Top 10 are gone.

Now that we have a Lucky 13, who do you think will make the Final Four? You can write down your predictions, or your Fantasy Final Four, or both!

If you don't remember who's left, it's

alexpgp
beautyofgrey
fourzoas
intrepia
gratefuladdict
java_fiend
mstrobel
notbatman
rattsu
strryeyedgrrl
talonkarrde88
theafaye
zia_narratora