The other day I remember reading a lot of
naysaying about Day Logs in the
chatterbox. Mainly your normal huffing and hawing about "
XP Whore" this and "
Noding for Numbers" that. But it got me thinking, and so here are my answers to standard complaints about
Everything Day Logs.
1) "But, I don't want to hear about Everythingian X!"
Answer: So don't read about them.
Reading day logs is your own choice. It's very easy to tell when something links to a day log, because it's in your standard "Month Day, Year" format. This is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. There's a lot of stuff here in
Everything, and not all of it's interesting. You don't have to read it. Of course, you could have a problem with it being useless becuase you think...
2) "You're just noding for numbers. That's what the Day Logs and Dream Logs are all about!"
I disagree. Just because you find somebody's life uninteresting, or you find the fact that they noded the cd's they were listening to and the problems they were having isn't a bad thing. For one, from
Everything Day Logs it says that the Day Logs are so that Everything can become in part a unique history database. Secondly, noding interesting things in your day is just
noding what you know. What do you know better than what's on your mind and what's going on in your life on any given day?
3) "Day Logs are just a lot of people whining!"
I'd have to agree with this, but I don't see why it's a problem. People don't whine unless something is bothering them, and often the best way to help that is to talk about it. I see people whining not as an annoying thing, but more as something
healthy.
4) "People who write Day Logs use horrible text formatting and massive fonts."
Well, ummm, *shuffles feet*, yeah. If you wanted somebody to see your writeup in the sea of others, I guess you have to do something a little more drastic than to just have a really good Day Log. However, one might also think that
if you have to scream to be heard, you have nothing profound to say.
5) "Your radical ideas about X have already occurred to others."
So what if your radical ideas have already occurred to others. They're occuring to you now, and by documenting them, you're providing some historical record of your growth as a person and your thoughts at any given time.
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So, despite all issues to the contrary, I like Day Logs. I find them both fun to read and interesting. For my own selfish note, I like to keep some sort of public record of what I'm doing (outside of my private
journal) so that other people can know what I'm doing or how I'm generally feeling if they so choose.
Beyond my own selfish reasons, I also think they're also a nice addition to
Everything Culture. Every noder has their own background and their own style that they bring to writing, and knowing a little bit more about them through Day Logs helps to understand Everything more from a
subjective point of view.
Lastly, even though Day Logs seem so hated by people, I think it keeps a lot of stuff out of the rest of Everything that wouldn't really fit. Nobody wants a metanode about what cd's somebody else has listened to in the past month or a separate node for every noder and every day. Sometimes experiences or dreams are brief random things that might be good to record but don't merit their own node.
And hey, this is
Everything, and what anybody did yesterday, or today, or ever, is definitely a part of that.
Everything Day Logs, to me at least, seem the best way to organize that information.