<insert crazy ramblings here>

Following an earlier post on visualising social networks. Here's the sky at Dave's.



The galaxy on the top left is work. The few underneath that are fandom. To the left of them is the AAW posters. Above that is the RaW hacks. My old room mates to their left.
The large cluster in the centre is people from school days, with Drama at the top, and family friends to the left.
Lurking at the bottom are the Joinees.

Seen at Andrew Drucker's

A little while ago^[1] I ran into the list of Geek Social Fallacies. The things that some geeks think, that taken to extremes, make their social lives harder.
( How do they apply to me )
Now to explain how those affect me I'll have to talk about the circles I move in.



The Friend Wheel application from Facebook puts all your friends as points around the outside, and draws lines between them if they know each other. In this example most of the user's friends know each other. My wheel looks slightly different.



Starting from the top, and going anticlockwise, the Joinees, Alt.Alumni.Warwick users, the ex-Radio Warwick presenters, people from my school days, colleagues from my last job, and smattering of others including: SF fandom, webcomic artists, and friend of a friends.

I'm not so far into GSF #4 that I take liberties with my friends' friends. What happens is that I think everyone is really lovely and would get on with everyone else, so try to encourage my different groups to merge. I've been doing this since school days, when I dragged kids from my neighborhood and school to drama.

One side effect of GSF #4 is that I've been responsible for introducing a few couples to each other. I only ever see this in retrospect. I never mean to play cupid, but it is nice.

[1] GSF seen at the Nice Guy article, via Mango's offensive grocery.

Oh and as an aside, if you got this far;
How do you pronounce clique: click or cleek?

I stopped using Live Journal just before the fanfiction clampdown. I don't just mean I stopped posting, (although obviously I did), I stopped reading anything on Live Journal. It was a combination of a few things, covered below, but basically I'm back now.

I was prompted into posting today by a post at Websnark on the re-deleting of fanfic. I think he has a point that Six Apart are mad to be doing this. Other social networking sites are on the rise, and pissing off your paying userbase when the competition is so strong is not smart.

Which leads onto the first reason for my LJ Gafiation. Facebook. I have rapidly become completely addicted to it. Losing my WAP phone for a week, and work's firewall have slowed me down, but still love it. I should post a bunch of my more surreal status updates sometime soon. The Live Journal feature I'd like to see most on it, is custom friends groups.

While I was spending my internet time on Facebook, I paid less attention to my feed reader. It was only when talking to offensive_mango on Facebook that I noticed that I seen her Live Journal update for a while. Or any Live Journal. Bloglines had been failing on the Live Journal feeds. Their customer service was pretty good for a free site. A fairly typical two days to reply, but it wasn't a form response. I replied with the information they wanted, and they fixed the problem a few hours later.

This lead to what I'll term forum bankruptcy. I like to go back through the archives of webcomics, forums, and blogs, to not leave gaps when I've been away from the net for a while. This problem is it leads to me abandoning things when I can't bring myself to up to date, and then it only gets worse. So I'm declaring forum bankruptcy on Live Journal, and am not going to try and catch up with all the posts I missed. I'll try and keep up now though.

Finally I've spent a lot of time travelling with with work to Eastern Europe recently. I'm not complaining about that. It's been nice to see these places, but it has left me with even less spare time than normal.


Another reason for posting again was that Dave Licence asked why I hadn't posted for a while. Which reminds me I forgot to comment on his amazing photo of a household spider. The way the focus is so tight on the center reminded me of Tilt Shift photography, and I was going to ask Dave how he did it. Until I remembered that the whole point of tilt shift is to fake the look that happens naturally when you're shooting something small. If you're reading this Dave, thanks twice over.