Home sweet home: 0 of 30

I still like it here best.

Dunbar's Number says that our brains evolved to manage a maximum of about 150 social connections.

Apparently Dunbar's number isn't just a maximum, though: it may also be a kind of optimum; we feel a need for 100 to 200 social connections. Since most of us don't live in extended families, tribes or small villages anymore, we fill our Dunbar vacancies with virtual social connections.

At least a couple dozen golden social connections of mine for the last nine years have been right here on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal, and you know what? I'd like to try to keep it that way.

Getting email notifications about comments on LJ and DW is still really sweet. I like the kinds of personal conversations that can happen in comments here, that I've never found anywhere else. It's not all fandom all the time, but it's fandom-adjacent, the conversations of enthusiasts and believers and people who make stuff and care about meaning and love a good shared squee.

So, I'm challenging myself to post, read, and comment daily during June. Maybe even read and comment outside my list/circle. I might crosspost from other services. I might do the kind of abbreviated drive-by that's become the province of Twitter. I might post about knitting, or cats, or my bike, or work. Or Dylan O'Brien, what the hell.

Yeah, thirty posts in thirty days, APAD, PEDFAM--it's nothing new. But I'm just so hungry, you know? I'm tired of the fragmentation. Google+ and Facebook and Twitter do very little for my Dunbar quotient.

I still like it here best.

1/30: Cool on two wheels

This picture of an attractive Dane on a bike was posted on BikePortland the other day.

I have since decided that I will signal no other way than the cool way that Mr Copenhagen there signals. (How else could you signal, you wonder? Well, I'm typically more emphatic and full-armed about it because Portland, though bike-aware, does not have Copenhagen-levels of bike-awareness. But screw that. I'm going to be cool Danish-signaling gal from here on.)

The extraordinary editor of BikePortland, Jonathan Maus, is currently posting dispatches from the two great world bike capitals, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. He has mentioned the amazing bike-riding skills of the citizens, and since we're not talking Tour de France racing, I'm assuming he means stuff like riding steadily in slow and crowded conditions, navigating safely around pedestrians, riding handlebar-to-handlebar with your friends while conducting a conversation, gauging traffic, or riding with two kids, a cigarette, a cellphone and no helmet.

No, I'm not being facetious about that last item. Americans think of cycling as a competitive sport requiring speed, power and endurance. (My daily commute is often made uncomfortable and even dangerous by cyclists of that sort.) We don't seem to place much emphasis on casual ease. And let's face it, casual ease requires skill.

I shall henceforth be all about the casual ease. (I'll probably keep the helmet, though.)

Crossposted to bicycles

Signal boost: Love Meme

jjhunter is propagating the Love meme. People nominated in the comments get a thread of their own. Then you can post in that thread about how awesome the person in and how they make the world a better place. And that makes the world a better place!

You nominate someone by leaving a comment with your nominee's username in the subject line.

I'm playing! Gotta go nominate some more people.

EDITED TWO WEEKS LATER ON JUNE 11, 2013 TO ADD:

My disastrous participation in this meme was one of the triggering events that culminated in the breakdown cascade a couple of days ago.

First, I was chided by the moderator for failing to follow the rules, and asked to fix more than one of my nominations. The pleasure of singing the praises of friends vanished for me at that moment.

Then, as if that weren't enough, two of the people I nominated were offended by my nominations--one publicly, because in my attempt to follow the moderator's rules, I broke a social rule I didn't know about. I tried to delete the offending nominations, but I'm not sure I succeeded and I'm scared to go back and find out. I never want to see that journal or that meme again.

Note to self: no more memes in other people's journals or comms with Byzantine old LJ-style rules or political considerations that I'm not 100% conversant with. No more reaching out to express positive feelings to people I don't know well. It is not safe for me.

As much as part of me would like to be more participatory, more giving, and more expressive, I'm not good at it and I do it badly. The feeling of punishment in this case far outstripped the intended good.

It was an awful experience.