Moved this over from my barely-used, now-defunct livejournal. Post is backdated.
-Fox1

Well, forget using this as my domain front page, I'm using an email address at my domain on my resumes, and the last thing I need is a curious prospective employer checking my domain and ending up at a goddamn Livejournal.

Plus, having a domain forward here increases the chance of someone eventually reading this, and I don't really know how I feel about that. This was always more intended to be a semi-secret little place that I could type out random crap for the sake of doing same, in my never-ending quest to trick myself into writing. I dunno, maybe I should go whole hog and remove the small number of personal interests or whatever those are linked in my profile. Just on the off chance that someone decides to go through every Journal listed under Spaced or something like that. Alternatively, someone spending that kind of time on a task of such dubious worth has a good chance of being the kind of person I have no problem sharing my moderately private musings with.

(more below the fold)
The internet has very profoundly changed the way I look at writing in general, much to the detriment of my own endeavors in the field. I think, growing up, you obviously gauge your abilities in any particular area by what you have available for comparison; you probably do the same thing with your self-worth, too, no matter how much you recognize that as a Bad Idea, intellectually. Well, at Foxville High (note: not its real name), I was easily within the top tier of students, as far as literary and linguistic skill went. No matter the genre, I was better able to form my thoughts, turn a phrase or even crack a joke (a skill made noteworthy by my crushing inability to do so verbally) than almost anyone else I encountered. I'm not saying I was the best, my defensive inferiority-circling-back-to-arrogance tactic stopped short of that type of hubris, but while I would, from time to time, feel that someone else had surpassed my own efforts, I never felt overwhelmed by my peers' collective work such that they were in some nebulous realm above me that I couldn't force my way into.

I used to play the trumpet, too. May parents and I (note: 95% my parents) spent a pretty decent chunk of cash on my pursuit of that skill. No, not pursuit, that implies chase, and effort, and positive actions driving you forward, I was just good at it. Period. Very little effort was needed for me to improve at a pace that always brought me ahead of those around me, to the mythical pulpit of the snotty band kid: first chair (oooooooh). But, guess what, I'm no prodigy, and I wasn't gifted with any incredible innate skill that would drag me effortlessly of to Juliard or jazz clubs or... or one of those fucking ska bands or... something, and eventually, as the learning curve evened out and the field of musicians grew wider, I started to sink back into the pack. By the time I had those cursed metal implements of beautification welded onto my teeth, I had slipped firmly into mediocrity, and secretly welcomed the brass death knell of a senior year spent on the less mouth-destructive euphonium.

Anyway, the point of the horrible one-time-at-band-camp segue was supposed to be part of some larger statement about laziness or intimidation or something, but I started reading an article on Fark about Robert Downey Jr. complimenting some lady's rack on british TV, and that sort of stalled my interest in that narrative thread. Basically, as much as you can come up with an almost infinite number reasons why you shouldn't, if even the random forum members at somethingawful are funnier that you have any reasonable expectation to be, Tycho over at Penny Arcade has pretty much pegged the needle on the usage of unnecessarily large words, and the other (note: far more famous) Matt and his X-E has cornered the market on writing about.... random crap, you start to feel like there's not much left for you to contribute.