Yesterday I realized it's hard to node about my noding, what I'm learning while doing so, etc., without mentioning specific nodes (mine), which might get the nodes in question bashed for nodevertisement. So that's right out. Maybe that's the noding for numbers mentality raising its ugly head, but the fact is Everything is just a great big game to me.
Note: that last isn't meant to be trivializing in any way, though I understand it could be interpreted as such (having had to explain myself once on the subject in the chatterbox). I think there are many very serious and important games, and that E2 is one of these. To me it's a another wonderful habit-forming game, or at least that's how I find myself responding to it: I want to get good, I want to play lots, and every time I start to play I find I can't stop without ending things on a good note, some kind of personal best.
I don't like very many games, because I'm generally not very good at them, especially the competitive sort once I start losing at them and get all psyched out. I love solitaire games, though, and the semi-demi-quasi-pseudo-anonymous nature of E2 is perfect for pretending I'm just talking to myself here, and even as I get to know my fellow noders through their work and /msg's, there's always safety in numbers to convince me no one's paying attention to my mutterings (of course, I defeat this purpose entirely by posting on the daylogs, which are terrifyingly high-traffic judging by the rep I've accrued on my various autobiographical musings, but I never promised not to contradict myself here). But that's all the thoughts I've got on that for the time being.
Side note added March 18, 2001: Just found How To Play E2. Excellent.
The other thought I had was about how nodes spawn other nodes. For example, when I began noding my homework a few days ago, I realized that several of what I consider(ed) my primest node fodder essays probably wouldn't stand on their E2 own very well without quite a bit of infrastructure (extensive footnoting or maybe entire nodes about currently undefined terms, metanode-type definitions and the like). So I've got my work cut out for me. So I find myself hardlinking to nonexistent nodes and creating nodeshells when I realize the writeup I'm working on makes no sense stripped of the context I wrote them in (for class). I'm trying hard not to make too many assumptions about what my audience (real or imagined) knows or doesn't, and it's hard. Which ties this entry back to my complaint about the difficulties of noding about noding, and sort of concludes this in a neat, recurring theme kind of way. I dig it, so I'll be shutting up now.