Deep Breaths

First of all, I should come right out and say that this afternoon I cut my Neighborhood down from seven pages (as viewed in the Organize screen) down to three.  As with any pairing down on that scale, I might have cut someone I shouldn't have.  In the last several weeks/months I have noticed that I tend to let my feed reader collect about a week's worth of posts (150+) which I will scan, grab music from, and mark as read.  So, some of this purge was just an admission to you that I haven't been reading your journals.  I hope that for most of those people cut, that's not going to come as much of a blow.

That leaves the people still in my 'hood, and I hope that by pairing down this much, I can start reading VOX journals again.  The fact that VOX has largely become a place for me to sneakily upload songs that I'm going to use on Tumblr was a surefire indication that I wasn't really blogging here the way I once did.  I did, of course, consider giving up this blog, but I think I still want somewhere to write about life, and (if I don't end up getting a stand alone blog launched) occasionally pen a more topical essay.  The main shift in the way I use VOX is that I am no longer really using it to socialize.  Now that I am spending my days haunting Tumblr, the long-form blogging structure provided by VOX doesn't seem as much like a conversation as a letter.  If I don't have a Tumblr window open, I am not going to go back and catch up on the things said there, but I want somewhere to go when I actually want to make sure every word gets read.

Of course, before I was skimming just about everything on VOX, there were still posts I would skim or not even read at all.  But it seems that now that I have the opportunity to split the more ephemeral qualities of socialization off into Tumblr, I should make the most of what I have here. 

I am staying, in part, because I like the idea that I could, if necessary, make protected posts that would not immediately be visible to the whole wide world.  The stumbling block, of course, is that as much as I have formed some good friendships with people on VOX, many of the people I would want to confide in the most aren't users here.  A good number of them never left LiveJournal, and I do wonder if maybe I ought to go back there myself if that is what I want most from a long-form journal.  So, we'll see.  I may retreat from here entirely, apart from occasionally piping in at Calliope No. 8, and uploading songs for Tumblr.

Naturally, what I want most is some kind of universal plug-in that could create neighborhoods and neighborhood-like security between VOX, LiveJournal, WordPress blogs, MovableType blogs, etc.  I don't see the profit angle in that, so I don't expect it's going to get done.  On the other hand, our esteemed masters at 6A have made suites of blogging tools usable by MovableType and WordPress, so maybe there's hope.  For the record, I am totally willing to pitch in and build this, but it is a project a little beyond the scope of one person, and, to be honest, if I am going to try to fit a project like this into my already occasionally insane life, I would ideally like it to result in some money.  But I guess that's neither here nor there, for now.

If I cut you from my 'hood and you actually care, please let me know.  Anyone who's taken that much of an interest in little ol' absentee me deserves to have it reciprocated.