going nowhere on the mantlepiece

[freckles_and_doubt]

Phooey, had a whole post written and LJ inexplicably ate it. I now have a mental image of my poor little paragraphs wandering, lost and aimless, through the wastes of cyberspace, slowly disintegrating. On mature reflection this is not unlike the basic human urge, which I do not share, to believe in some kind of survival of consciousness after death, except that there's probably more actual reason to believe in an after-image of data than there is to believe in an after-image of consciousness.

This random and unprompted cosmic musing brought to you courtesy of a week packed with disintegrating students, some of whom present no really compelling argument for the persistence of consciousness before death, let alone after. On the upside, one of them dropped by my office for absolutely no reason other than to tell me how much she enjoyed my fanfic lectures in the first term. This kind of thing creates an identical effect to that of a chance acquaintance suddenly presenting you with a giant bouquet of flowers on general principles. Also, fanficcers get everywhere, like Hobbit fur.

I don't remember most of the lost post, like the Last Post but less musical. I do remember, however, linking to Gizmodo's rather entertaining analysis of the historical development of incompatible electrical plug formats across different countries. This has produced my current Favourite Sentence Du Jour: "Basically, the best way to guess who's got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature." At last, a use for postcolonial literature. Who knew? (This last statement brought to you courtesy of Academic Bitterness, and not to be taken out of context. Some of my best friends are postcolonial literature).

Now off to fight my current, Fridayish urge to lock my door and pretend I don't exist for the rest of the day. The current degree of student trauma is creating a sad tendency for me to get all empathetically weepy while giving curriculum advice. I think I need a debrief.

Comments

[nimnod.livejournal.com]

If any of these ficcers are slashers, I wish they're find out about LJ and join my sa slashers comm, simply because I'm trying to work out how many South Africans actually write slash fic (that all the comm does - it's a bit like fandom counts that way).

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Interesting project! I wish I'd thought to ask the student which fandom she was writing in, but it was one of those hectic wall-to-wall student days and things were a bit rushed. Some of the RPG and SCA crowd down here write, though, so I'll pass the word along. And I can certainly point next year's two and a half fic-writing students (it seems to be a standard number in a class of 30-40)to the comm.

[nimnod.livejournal.com]

Thanks =)

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

I get so mad when hotmail eats me musings... I tend to write long emails and when they inexplicably disapear...I shout "nooooooooooooooooooooo"

After it happened enough times that my rage began to affect my body (like the hulk)...I started writing in word and cutting and pasting.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I thought it had happened again today, when I posted but no amount of refreshing could bring up the new post. Which is when I realised that I was refreshing this page, not the main LJ one. I'm not too good at Mondays :>.

Yes, with you on the homicidal rage when the cosmic wossnames devour one's deathless prose. I tend to CTRL-A CTRL-C as a nervous twitch when I'm posting.