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".