The point has been made that a number of the
submissions for Lord Brawl's Lost Gems of Yesteryear quest are not
really all that "lost." That's valid and fair. But as someone who
submitted one of E2's most beloved writeups, I feel the need to explain a few
things.
First, "lost" has many definitions. Let us examine, for starters, those provided by our good buddy Webster:
- Parted with unwillingly or unintentionally; not to be found; missing; as, a lost book or sheep.
- Parted with; no longer held or possessed; as, a lost limb; lost honor.
- Not employed or enjoyed; thrown away; employed ineffectually; wasted; squandered; as, a lost day; a lost opportunity or benefit.
- Having wandered from, or unable to find, the way; bewildered; perplexed; as, a child lost in the woods; a stranger lost in London.
- Ruined or destroyed, either physically or morally; past help or hope; as, a ship lost at sea; a woman lost to virtue; a lost soul.
- Hardened beyond sensibility or recovery; alienated; insensible; as, lost to shame; lost to all sense of honor.
- Not perceptible to the senses; no longer visible; as, an island lost in a fog; a person lost in a crowd.
- Occupied with, or under the influence of, something, so as to be insensible of external things; as, to be lost in thought.
The
majority of these are quite descriptive of the way I define "lost" in
the context of this quest; that is, something we were conscious that we
had and then let slip by the wayside.
As I noted elsewhere, Do you remember how small your body was when you were
five? is not overlooked or underrated. It had racked up a total of 28
C!s before I ever suggested it for the quest. But the most recent of
those cools is at least six months old (I have no idea how long ago it
was, but I do know that the user who bestowed C! #28 hasn't been seen
around these parts in six months). I have no idea how many new users we
typically rack up over the course of six months, but I remember that I,
in my young noder days, was
typically drawn to the writeups that appeared as Cool
User Picks. Someone who joined within the last six months (at least)
would have never seen it there.
No matter how many thoroughly
one reads the FAQ and Everything University, how
much time he or she spends lurking around the site before submitting
that fateful first writeup, no one really gets used to the nature of
the nodegel too quickly. I know I wasn't fearlessly exploring the
database through softlinks and hardlinks, pipelinks and random string
searches when I first joined. I was trying to get a feel for the place
by checking out the writeups seasoned users had deemed worthy. That's
how I came across Do you remember how small your body was when you
were five?, which was written not long after I joined E2. But I came
to find and love it through the Cool Archive, not Everything's Newest
Writeups.
If you want to talk "lost" as in "overlooked," you
might argue that I would have done well to suggest jessicapierce's
followup daylog instead. But what good is an update
without the backstory?
You could also make a similar case
regarding the second of the three writeups I chose to submit for your
consideration, kthejoker's Ghosts I have known. Mr. K. has written
countless heartwrenching and astonishingly good
writeups, but this is the one that grabbed me by the heartstrings and
made me cry. Could I have chosen something with more universal appeal? Sure. But this was the one that spoke to me, and I want
other people to read it.
As I mentioned earlier, Girl geek by
KokiriKid is what I might call "overlooked," but being one of my
favourites I was happy to include it in my list.
My favourite
part of this quest has been the fact that it allows us all to have our
own definitions of "lost," and why shouldn't we? Some of us are
approaching this quest from the angle of introducing "lost" works of E2
greatness to new users -- or even guest user. When a new user takes
the first step of asking for help before submitting that all-important
first writeup, he or she is usually told to search around the site to
get a feel for what works and what doesn't. What do people search for?
Stuff that interests them, of course, and
that probably means they get sent straight to a lot of factual writeups, or more abstract writeups with matter-of-fact titles.
Those are all great, you know. But these,
despite all their C!s and their hundreds of upvotes and what might be
viewed as immense popularity, are still not as well read as they should
be.
And we can fix that.
Walter, of course, made a very valid and fair point. Just my take. YMMV, etc.