01.06.02 - 12:58 a.m.

one nice thing about being back in lv is i get to hang out with cody. i always end up laughing. tonight we watched cannonball run, starring burt reynolds, sammy davis jr, dean martin, dom deluise, jackie chan, terry bradshaw, farrah fawcett and many others. the movie only took 30 minutes to watch, since we fast forwarded through most of the fat guy/jewish guy/arab guy/big breast jokes. what's amazing to me is that the dvd version has a director's commentary. i can't imagine what the director could possibly say, besides "sorry."

we also watched female trouble. i was not previously acquainted with the work of john waters. images of a grossly obese transvestite prancing saucily on a trampoline will no doubt haunt me to my grave.

has the inclination to watch hilariously bad movies ("so bad they're good") always existed? or is this a peculiar tendency of our modern era? while it's fun to laugh at crap, i agree with david foster wallace that excessive irony is corrosive to the soul. (it might be added that cannonball run is corrosive to the soul.)

angi, sandeep and triet get here tomorrow. it's a good excuse to drink some of the wine julie and i brought back from santiago. most of the bottles we brought are carmen�re-- it's this type of bordeaux red that originated in france but, due to the ravages of phylloxera, is now nearly extinct everywhere except for chile. oo la la!

i said before that i was going to talk about ending the journal of pirate lingo. i think for now i will continue. i've thought about purposes a lot. at some future point it may be worthwhile to come back here & pen a manifesto. in any case, when i was talking to laura she pointed out that even if we kick our diary-writing addictions, we still have to contend with our diary-reading addictions. my voyeuristic tendencies will not go down without a fight.

i've still been thinking about livejournal, but now you have to pay or get a friend to sponsor you to join. not a huge deal, but not something i can do in 5 minutes, so for now i've held off.

livejournal vs. diaryland :

	livejournal	diaryland
PROS	1) other ljers can comment on individual entries you make. this is a super cool feature. it makes any journal entry into a discussion thread. 2) instead of just listing 5 bands/authors/movies in your profile, you can list an unlimited number of 'interests'. an interest can be anything-- 'andrei codrescu', 'smoking pot', 'modernism', 'gothic jewelry', '1920's', 'acceleration'. i think this is a fascinating technique of autobiography and it makes it really easy to find interesting journals. the problem with diaryland from the browsing perspective is that 99% of all journals are crap. this is true of livejournal as well, but in livejournal it's a lot easier to sort through the crap. and just as a project of self-discovery (what a loathsome term; nevertheless) i'm really intrigued by trying to list all my interests. there is some truth to what that guy quips in high fidelity: "it's not who you are, it's what you like". 3) jeff is on livejournal 4) in general (i dont know if this is true or not but it's the impression i get) people are a little bit older/more mature on livejournal. diaryland, though not as bad as opendiary, does seem to skew pretty heavily towards the 16 yr old demographic.	1) very simple, clean design. this is what initially attracted my to diaryland-- the pleasant pastels, the kitty (there is a kitty somewhere right? am i making this up?) and the fact that it's run by just andrew. if you think if it in terms of cathedral vs. bazaar, i'm opting for the degenerate case of cathedral. maybe this means more bugs, but democracy isn't always the answer. at least there's a single focused vision here 2) all my real-life friends who have journals are on diaryland (except for triet, whose journal is moribund anyway). plus i've met a few cool strangers here :) 3) already have a lot of entries here, what happens to them if i switch sites?
CONS	1)it's just too big and messy. lj is run by a big community of developers who like messing around with software and putting in tons of features. like all the different clients-- what are they for? i just feel sort of overwhelmed by it all. there are times when simplicity is a virtue. it's kind of like how microsoft word now has 10,000,000 features, but i don't need any of them. it just clutters things and leads to increased confusion. 2) for a while lj was having server problems ALL THE TIME. it was horrible, you couldn't get to anybody's journal. in the 1.5 years i've used diaryland, i've never noticed significant downtime. 3) i just don't like the way most journals look on lj. almost everybody does short frequent entries-- you see the 20 most recent entries on a single page. people typically just put in links to surveys or quick thoughts/notes. i prefer to write longer entries and just have one at a time displayed. you can probably make your livejournal work like this but it's not the default behavior, and i have no patience/time to sit there twiddling my diary. (as evinced by the crappy non-design of this one.)	1) the aforementioned youth factor 2) the lack of entry commenting/interests

this long discursion on the merits of journal sites indicates that i do think about such things, maybe more than i should. while it's true that keeping a journal is interesting & fun, i think it's unhealthy to put too much time into it. in notes of a nervous man james lileks says:

"Reading my journals is like standing in front of a firehose gushing with oatmeal-- plenty of volume, none of it interesting. They consist mostly of complaints: no girlfriend, then bad, bad girlfriend. In between there are brief patches of yea, girlfriend! but you can pick up a greeting card and get the idea. I stopped writing journals when I met my wife and got on to the business of having a life instead of treating it like background information for one of those panel-discussion shows you see on Sunday morning."

amen.