♫ A heart so true
our writeups will pull us through
you C!hing me and I'll C!hing you
No-dee-mo-on!
Gotta Node 'em All! ♫
Noder Interaction
MIRANDA: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind
is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!
PROSPERO: 'Tis new to thee.
Even though I've been submitting writeups for a whole year now (yay!) and even though I'm a proud member of the Power Structure of Everything2 (yay me!) I'm still having new and different noding experiences.
I'm usually a self-contained noding machine. My job as a lawyer gives me ideas, and just living here in New Mexico has given me lots of ideas. Sometimes I see something in the news that interests me. Usually, however, I get my ideas for writeups from some source outside E2, and I research them offline and get the content from elsewhere. It isn't usually an interactive or collaborative process. But it can be.
I have, to be sure, interacted with other noders before. I've given people advice on legal topics and corrected more than a few typos. But noders have a lot to offer if you let them.
Here's what happened. I was reading anthropod's writeup on chocolate créme brûlèe and started musing about carmelizing and my days as a restaurant cook, and a broiling device we used to do that, called a salamander. I looked it up and found nothing on E2. I really couldn't find a lot about them on the net, but I wrote up what I could find and remember from work, and set my little paper boat afloat in New Writeups harbor.
Originally posted as salamander broiler in the late afternoon U.S. time, it got a handful of votes and disappeared. As I slept, however, our friends across the water woke up and logged onto E2. (How can people with such a notoriously bad national cuisine take such an interest in matters pertaining to food and cookery? I don't know, but clearly they do.) I woke up to several messages informing me that, in England, people do have salamanders in their home kitchens, and that the name applied to an entirely different, 19th Century device for accomplishing the same culinary tasks. I had corrections and even literary quotes to add to my writeup. (Thanks morven, tdent and wertperch!) Then anthropod, the same noder who had inspired me with her créme brûlèe msg'd me offering to do a title edit. Having pondered the node gel under "salamander" anthropod decided to do a writeup on the little beasties, which was mysteriously lacking in that node.
Then we all sat back and contemplated what we had worked on together, saw it was good, and gave each other C!hings.
Now I know there are those noders who think this place is awfully incestuous and cliqueish, and are now rolling your eyes and making wise cracks about circle jerks, but just hold on here a minute. Self-congratulatory? Sure. But this "clique" consists of noders from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Toronto, Canada and Nottingham, England. Just how "incestuous" can that be?
Noded
Nuked
Ed-Cooled
Other Tasks
- My attempts to firmlink things (IHS to Jesus H. Christ) are once again vetoed.
(Since this one was self-serving, I can hardly complain.)