Earl read my diary. How ... flattering. Yah, definitely flattering. Maybe a little embarassing, but he's dealt with me in some of my worst moments (the entire month of January comes to mind) and seems to have survived. After that, I don't expect there'll be anything surprising in here.

(Actually, that's the one sort of disturbing thought. What if he finds my journal _boring_? Tragedy.)

I've given up on reading all the diaries in Open Pages, at least for the moment. There's just too many of them, and my job is demanding more and more of my time, and then there's the technical issue -- a lot of diaries are using Geocities, and any time I try going to a Geocities URL with Netscape it crashes. Messily, with a bus error and a nice core file. I've tried turning of Java & Javascript. I've tried telling it not to auto-load images. Nothing works.

Insert a wail of 'it worked at SGI!' right here. G-d, I miss IRIX.

Anyway, if anyone knows why this behavior is occuring (Netscape 3.0 on a Sparc5 running Solaris 2.5.1) please let me know. I miss the Geocities mapviewer if nothing else.

My internal debate on having my entries critiqued continues. I do, to some extent, consider myself a proto-writer; I read a wide range of things to increase my understanding of plot construction. I still can't plot to save my life, but I'm getting better at understanding how other people do it. Hopefully this is transferrable knowledge.

Anyway. I proposed the question 'Do I want someone whose writing I hate critiquing my writing?' It's not a very hard question. though. Of _course_ I don't. The real question is 'will I get anything out of this, other than annoyance?' I still haven't answered that one.

Also, how can I objectively and helpfully critique someone's work if I think it sucks? If I look at the page and say 'You don't capitalise, you don't spell, your grammar resembles that of an overfed armadillo...' and they, in turn, say 'But that's my style!' my innate response is going to be 'Too bad. It sucks.'

I _do_ believe people should write in whatever style they want, of course. Really. I know my mostly-British spelling (I can't help it, I grew up on Agatha Christie) annoys some people. But they're free not to read my stuff, just like I'm free to blithely ignore people who don't spell -- but if I'm critiquing someone's page I'm not supposed to be ignoring it. I'm supposed to be making helpful comments.

It's a puzzlement.