I changed the quotes in my LJ profile. It's always weird to change my LJ profile. Every time I turn around, I realize the person it describes isn't the person I am anymore. It's very nearly to the point where I'd like to do away with it altogether, but I do like sharing a couple quotes that describe my state of mind at this point in my life. (Apparently, my state of mind post-college has a lot to do with children's books.)

I also took out a bunch of really dated interests, and added new ones. I actually really like that 'interests' feature on LJ. Interest lists make such an interesting collage of a person, you know? They're always the first thing I look at when I look at someone's LJ profile.

Anyway, there's that. LJ is a sort of weird place, these days, isn't it? You have all these big name social networking sites out there, and what with Facebook and MySpace and Twitter getting so huge, LJ has sort of fallen back into the shadows a little bit. I was talking to mizujada about it once, and we concluded it has something to do with the fact that LJ is aimed at relatively long-form posts, not the little snippets employed by Twitter and Facebook. It takes a lot more energy to write up a LJ post than to drop something in Twitter. Also, now that I have a Twitter (middlemuse, if anyone's forgotten), I feel like my LJ posts have to actually have substance, because if I just want to whine about work, or gush about some link I found, isn't that what Twitter's for?

(Oddly enough, back when I first started blogging, when I was a teenager, I used my blog as an outlet for anything I thought might be too tedious to share with my friends on instant messenger. As blogging philosophies go, this one is not a winner. Just sayin'.)

I've brought back my Etsy store! Right now, there aren't any new items up, but I'm working on a couple of nice handknit pieces of clothing which should be up soon.

Also, if you're somebody who relies heavily on images, please take note that I have changed my default userpic! I'd been Lilo for years and years, and it felt like it was just time for a change. I'll have to decide whether I like this one, so it may change again in the near future, but I imagine I'll be settling down soon.

Sorry for the lack of real posts here, guys. I think that what happened was that I wrote SO MUCH in the months and weeks before graduation that I can't find the energy to really do a lot more writing. Hopefully that will be better soon. I kind of miss writing, even though I'm burnt out on it.

On the other hand, I've been doing a little more roleplaying lately, which is a good, low-energy creative outlet. Speaking of which, hey, fishlanterns, now that school's out for the summer, would you have any interest in picking up some more RP? Let me know.

I'm happy to be back in Colorado. It's surprisingly green here right now--apparently it was a rainy spring while I was gone. But the weather is just starting to warm up, and I'm sure things will get dryer soon. I finally have carved out some space of my own in my mom and stepdad's house. The other day, I finally got all my books out onto shelves, which was a wonderful feeling. I haven't had all my books out and available since high school. So, that's good.

I'm stuck on dialup at home, which is another reason for the lack of posts--I don't get online until the end of the day, and by then I'm too tired to do much but slog through my webcomics and blogs in Google Reader. Unfortunately, my mom's house is in this weird little low-income neighborhood, which means that the only broadband available is satellite. The phone lines aren't good enough for DSL, and the cables aren't digital, and while there is wireless broadband available in our area, this neighborhood is tucked away at the base of a mesa that conveniently blocks access to that. (As well as cell phone reception. It's not a great location, although its proximity to the river makes it pleasantly more humid than the surrounding area, and a few degrees cooler.)

Once I get a job, maybe I'll decide it's worth it to shell out the $60 a month for satellite internet, but since this situation is fairly temporary, I'm not convinced it would be worth the startup fees. So, for the time being, I can't watch videos or listen to streaming audio at home, which is frustrating. I'm spending a lot of time in the library, as you can imagine.

A few final pieces of housekeeping: First, now that school is over for good, I'm easing back into the whole instant messaging thing. I've abandoned AIM, but I'm on Google Talk most nights as museofastronomy. (I figure most of you probably at least have Gmail accounts.)

Second, amberdulen, I finally found those printouts I had from RWOnline. I'm happy to send them your way, if you want them--just e-mail me your address. (I should've saved it when you sent me those delicious cookies, but I didn't have the forethought.)

Third, I'm going to turn off the twitter dump to this journal. It's got to be annoying some of you, and it's just plain depressing that the last several weeks of posts are nothing but Twitter. Besides, my Twitter account (middlemuse) has an RSS feed, so even if you're not on Twitter, it shouldn't be that hard to keep up, if you desire.

I'm 'friends' here on LJ with a number of journals that I mainly just watch from a distance--people who don't even know I exist, or whatever. And, I just moved most of them over into Google Reader and took them off of my Default View filter.

If I decide I like having them over there, I may just subscribe to ALL of my friends journals in Google Reader and abandon the friends page altogether.

This is a VERY BIG DEAL. My favorite thing about LJ, the thing that's always kept me here, is how easy the friends page makes it to keep up with all of the journals easily and in a nice format. But now that I've been using Google Reader for a while, I'm actually frustrated with LJ for not having features that Google Reader does.

I particularly miss features related to sorting posts, like the ability to keep track of which posts I've read and which ones I haven't, and to sort unread posts from oldest to newest so that I get to see things in the order they were posted. (I'm sure you're all familiar with that weird experience where you run into the update someone posted on a crisis they're experiencing before you get to the actual post about the crisis.)

The ease of subscription and thus of communication is the primary reason I haven't switched entirely to my own privately hosted blog, and it looks like Google Reader is supplanting LJ in my mind.

I won't be leaving LJ, of course, as long as people are still using it to read MY posts. I really, really like knowing that people are reading the stupid things I write here--I always feel so lonely on my blog. I almost never get comments, and I can't see who's reading, apart from my webstats, which I never believe.

Still, it's weird to think I might be moving on to a better interface.