Interesting Fact Meme

[brin_bellway]

Tell me an interesting fact about yourself and I will reply with an interesting fact about myself that I think of when I read yours. It may be entirely related, or only related in the weirdest, broadest definitions.

Meme provided by journalmemes.

Comments

[sigmaleph]

interesting fact: earlier on in my relationship with one of my partners, we used to do "weird [name] fact of the day" every day as like a way to get to know things about each other

I was looking through a log of such for an appropriate one when I noticed the fact this log exists is probably appropriately interesting in itself

[brin_bellway]

I used to run a [Livejournal community]/[Chatzy chatroom] where people gathered three times a week to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine together. I started off as just an attendee, but my flexible homeschool schedule meant that I was able to show up very reliably, which made me increasingly important to the community†. As moderators drifted away, I stepped up to do the things they weren't doing, and a few months later one of them drifted back in long enough to grant me official moderator powers over the Livejournal. (I never did get moderator powers over the Chatzy.)

At the end of the first timeslot each week, we would come up with discussion questions for the episode and post them on the LJ.

After about three and a half years, eponymous_rose must have done a subscription audit or something and realised she was still paying $40/quarter for a premium Chatzy she hadn't been to in years, and cancelled the subscription. The main effect of this was that--after the rest of the quarter ran out--we were going to lose access to our chatroom archive, which I for one frequently re-read and I think one or two other people used as well (plus anyone who took comfort in its existence but didn't actually use it much).

I think about those logs a lot while doing other archiving projects, about being able to say "It's okay. Don't worry. I've taken care of it.", about under what circumstances that kind of life-consuming pace is appropriate. In this particular case, I think I made the right decision. I can't really handle a place with ambient SJ levels as high as DS9 Rewatch anymore, but I still read those logs sometimes, and I certainly still take comfort in their existence.

(although it is just now occurring to me that I might have been able to save each Chatzy-archive page as an HTML file and pull/format the data from them at my leisure; 2014!me did not have enough archiving skill/knowhow to try that, though, and also I'm not as good at the slow-and-steady thing as I am at the get-everything-done-in-one-burst thing)

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†It turns out that The Person Who Always Shows Up is an extremely important role: the fourth, 3-AM-in-Toronto rewatch slot (intended primarily for Europeans) withered away to nothing within a year or two, when its viewership dropped low enough to enter a vicious cycle of "if I show up, I'll likely be the only person there, and it's not worth the bother for a risk that high". Other timeslots were prevented from entering this cycle by "well, if nothing else, I can hang out with Brin".

[wingedcatgirl]

I like to meow in IRL. I'm kitty

[brin_bellway]

I can dance the birdie hop.

Context: one time I was at a Girl Scout badge workshop† and they asked us to invent a dance. The other kids were awkward and shy about it, but I embraced my assignment and decided to jump up and down while flapping my arms. I called it the birdie hop.

(The other kids looked at me like I'd grown another head. I did not care.)

For quite a while afterward, whenever the topic of knowing how to dance came up, either I or Mom (who was a Girl Scout leader and had witnessed this) would say "well, [I/she] can do the birdie hop". (She said this in a good-natured way: she was proud of me for not letting the aura of awkward stifle my creativity.)

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†You *can* do the steps to qualify for most badges piece-by-piece and self-paced, but sometimes there will be organised events where they take you through all the steps for a badge in one go.

[wingedcatgirl]

That's pretty great! 😺

[lunartulip]

I do my best to do at least 1000 words of journaling each day, in order to help me process my thoughts about things better than I otherwise tend to.

[brin_bellway]

(It's striking, with them next to each other like that, how similar your and wingedcatgirl's icons look. You're even both winking your right eyes!)

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My diary currently has 283,574 words, going back to January 2003. That's not counting my dream journal (118,022 words, starting December 2009), nor the food log (October 2012; 121,466 words, most of them rather repetitive but including some notes on what I thought of new foods†), nor the parts of chat logs in which I tell other people about what's been going on with me (difficult to count).

The words are unevenly spread through time: I did a lot more journalling in my early teens than before or since. I would like to be [a person who journals a lot]--it feels like The Sort of Thing I Would Do in much the same way jogging does--but my archiving energy is currently being taken up by other things. I still fit in the occasional entry, and I hope to give it a greater focus once I've arranged my Wordpress just so (maybe six months? hard to predict).

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†Also handy when you're not sure what to make: I sometimes "spin the Wheel of Dinner" by opening it to a random page and looking at what I had for dinner *then*.

[redsixwing]

I keep office houseplants, which lots of people seem to think is some sort of magic. (The actual secret: set as minimal a schedule as possible for watering and messing with them, then stick to it.)

I do way more complex and interesting things, but also I like green spaces and growing things, and people get really focused on the houseplants.

[brin_bellway]

When I was little, my mom got two tiny cacti (one for each of us) as a kind of biology project.

It's been about two decades. We still have the cacti, now about half a foot tall, in our kitchen windowsill. One of them is beginning to grow an arm.

(We might someday have to bring them to her sister in Arizona, when they get too big for the windowsill.)

[redsixwing]

..cute. :D

o.0 Windowsill saguaro! That's quite a feat.

[brin_bellway]

I went and took a closer look (it's mostly been Mom's project lately, she was always more into houseplants), and they've actually grown more than that makes it sound. We have *four* cactus plantpots on the kitchen windowsills, each with several sprouts (though only one with anything that could be called an "arm"; the other sprouts are more separate than that).

(I think each tiny cactus plantpot originally had two tiny cacti in it, all of whom survived and ended up growing big enough to need their own pots.)