Friends List Cleaning Policy

So, I've done a little (very light) housekeeping:

- Set standard friends-page colors, so new people are no longer appearing in black and white.
- Deleted some people from my friends list. Mostly people who no longer keep that journal and have migrated to another.
- Added a few people.

If you've not been added in this most recent round, or have been deleted, it doesn't mean that I don't read your journal, and it doesn't mean that I don't care about you as a person. It means:

1. I might not know you even though I like what you write. Or you're a person I've only met three times for a span of two hours each, or you're someone who I know is neat but I we just haven't gotten to know each other better yet because of small things like, oh, say, an ocean or a continent or a ten-hour time difference. If you think you fall into this category, please take this as a cue to introduce yourself. Or, if I know you a bit, drop me an email (I'm becoming pretty scarce on IM these days, and if you are overseas we most likely won't be on at the same time anyway) and strike up a conversation: "Know me better, man!"
2. I might like you a lot, but your lack of grammar and punctuation and the cornucopia of internet acronyms that attempt to pass as an entry make what would otherwise be an interesting journal into something unendurable, impossible to read.
3. I might like you a lot, but I can get the kind of information you share on your journal through other channels--ongoing email conversations, mailing lists, etcetera, such that your journal doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know.
4. I might like you a lot, but it's a matter of Surgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." The other 10% of what you write on your journal is almost always brilliant; but I only have about five free hours per day and I am trying to spend only about 1 doing internet-related things. I want to spend my hour reading about people I care about and what they think is interesting and important. And if your journal is usually "here's another link about how the president is destroying our nation's free speech laws," or "I waxed my car today," or "This quiz says I'm a friendly and flirty bowl of cottage cheese!" I'm not going to stretch that hour into two sorting through the crap for the really good stuff--even if I agree with you about the laws, think that car maintainence is important, or am amazed at how a particular foodstuff perfectly conveys every aspect of your personality.
5. It's a character journal. I don't really read character journals unless I am actually participating in the writing of said game/world at the time. I've little enough time for actual people's journals.

Regarding the Friending of Communities:
I check all of my communities on a weekly basis so that I can follow conversations as threads rather than discrete chunks of threads taken slightly out-of-context and plopped on my friends page individually--chunks which I might then miss. I don't have all of them on my friends list, but the only one I don't read is paidmembers.

Please note that I do occasionally read the journal of everyone who has listed me as a friend. If you've improved your writing so that I can read your posts, or have managed to make your car-waxing, toast-eating life into something utterly beautiful or hilarious, or have got rid of most of the curds and whey and are actually posting about you, I will most likely add you.

Memories: what the categories mean

I thought, while I was cleaning my friends list, that I should shuffle around and clean out my memorable posts. I rearranged some things--put posts in multiple categories or the correct category if they'd been misfiled, titled things so they would make more sense, changed permissions on some things so more people could read them. Standardized the date format.

Now, of course, this means that the "by date added" sort function is all off, but it's a small price to pay to feel that the attic of my journal is tidied up a bit.

Someday I plan on putting in the poem posts back to 2001...

I thought I would explain to people what the categories I have for my memorable posts are, since it's a little haphazard.

How I Live
Contains entries pertaining to thought and soul in their interaction with matter in terms of my daily life. Many of the posts here are mine; many of them are friends-locked; a few are just private musings I want to remember. Anything from the two non-writing-group friends filters I've set up has also been archived here. Questions this category might answer: How has Eredien developed as a dragon-souled creature? What is the gift-giving policy of her friends and their household? What did she think about books and God after her grandfather died?

Manga & Anime
Contains my thoughts on manga and anime series I've seen and the first three pages of a manga I started to translate from Russian. Notes on anime cons will eventually go here.
Questions this category might answer: What are some things she reads and watches?

My LJ Policies
Contains notes for how I run this lj.
Questions this category might answer: Why did I get put on or taken off of Eredien's friends list? How do I get onto that writing-critique filter? What on earth are "Uncategorized" memories, anyway?

On Stephen King's "Dark Tower" Stories
Notes and thoughts on the books. Pretty self-explanatory. More to come some decade.
Questions this category might answer: What impact did these books have on her idea of what a storyteller was and could do?

Poem
Contains poems, essays, songs, stories. Anything prose that's not a straight journal entry.
Questions this category might answer: What is the possible relationship between Otherkin and LGBT culture? How do the poems of T.S. Eliot make her feel? Has she ever written haiku?

Russian Translations
Contains my translations of anything from Russian, and notes on Russian language and culture.
Questions this category might answer: What do homeless people in Moscow think? Why did she translate that word as "muskrat" when my dictionary says "beaver?" Translations from the slow-yet-ongoing Slavic Mythology Book translation project are posted here.

Trip to England 04-05
Contains notes about my trip to England in the winter of 2004 and New Year's of 05.
Questions this category might answer: Where are the pictures she took in London? Why does the Parthenon room make her cry?

Writing - Critique Group
Contains things I have posted for critique to the writing-critique friends filter.
Questions this category might answer: I'm on the filter...now where'd her story go? How do I get onto that writing-critique filter?

Writing-Reference Notes
Contains things I have written that I want to refer to again, or things that other people have posted to their journals that I might need or want for writing projects at some point. Worth taking a peek at if you write stuff; you might find something useful.
Questions this category might answer: What are the writing projects she's currently working on or thinking about? What are some things I want to read specifically to shamelessly glean information from?

Uncategorized
Contains things other people have written that I want to read again and share with as many people I can, because they are beautiful and meaningful and useful. Most things are public entries; the few friends-locked entries are locked only because the other person's original post was also friends-locked. I wanted to make it display to other people as *, instead of "Uncategorized," but didn't only because I thought that would confuse people. The point: these are other people's words, bright and sharp as stars: small things giving small light to all in dark.