| Someone has questions and wants to know my answers. My answers are free.
when you make the choice between personal and very personal in your writing... what stays and what goes? why?
This database has given me excellent unimaginable windows into other people's lives. I want to be one of those, or a hundred, for someone else. There are things I do not tell here, lots of them. Sometimes that is because some people who know me are watching. I try to step on that, though. I try to tell things truly, and to remain myself. Sometimes, it works.
How do you think we can get a wider variety of noders here- minorities? foreign langauge folks? handicapped people who use accesible resources, etc? do we want that here-or should we sit here at the satellite and wait for them to find us?
I crave diversity, but I like the serendipitous idea of letting people find their way here. As we grow, we'll attract more "types" - right now our two main groups are techies and english majors. For the moment I'm just grateful they let us fruityass humanities types in at all.
when you think about how E2 is...compared to how you thought it would end up... what happened?
A year ago, I found E1. I was smitten the first day. I wrote and wrote and wrote. In the early days, there was little to no feedback. No chatterbox, hardly anyone posted their emails to their homenodes, and I didn't even hear of #everything for months. If you wrote something shitty, it was either removed or it vanished into the invisible database. No social repercussions, it was all honor code.
I had no idea there was a culture to it, a community - to me, this was just a place for my words to go and live. I knew that people might read what I posted, theoretically, but I would certainly never hear their opinions.
Note: please keep this in mind when dissing nov 13 1999 nodes. Even when they suck, HARD. Few of us realized how . . . integrated this thing was going to become. The 512-character limit (that's about ONE sumbit-box-screenful. youngsters, imagine how cramped you would feel.), plus the limit of only two writeups per node - it made our work disparate. Sure, you could link two writeups together. Or three or seven. But it was beads on a string, as opposed to branches on a tree, which is what we have now. We grew another dimension, we grew outward.
E2 demanded that we blossom or get out. A lot of people hated the new place, and quit. A lot of us didn't. If we stayed, and noded with any regularity, in time we became the old-timers. Some of us were made editors. Some of us get comments from total strangers about our respective asses. It's a strange society we've built, where by virtue of what we say, or how much of it, we are famous to each other.
The next step is meeting each other. I've had the good fortune to meet more of you than I can count on both hands. Some of you smell really good. I never thought I'd be the type to place so much stock in a group of "online friends," but, as I was telling one of you on the phone tonight, when I imagine my fantasy intellectual funtime compound, and decide who I would people it with, three of four names on the list are noders. What does that tell me, other than we've amassed a group of good and interesting people here? Connections are being made, thanks to this site - storylines growing, "ME TOO" revelations, holes of logic being filled in, noders meeting in real life and running off together all smiles. It happens.
What I always come back to is, I always thought it was a good experiment, and it continues to be an excellent experiment. People build stories here. I've seen narrative voices start out quiet and learn to howl.
The Beat poets were just a bunch of very enthusiastic guys who fed each other's word fires. Isn't that what we're doing? We are making writers of each other. Which is why I'll be sticking around. | 
