muckefuck | 4,000th post (Reply)

Besides sickness and five days in a house with a 1:8 computer/person ratio, the main reason why I've let so much time elapse between entries is that I knew this big round number was coming up and I wanted to do something to mark the occasion but I couldn't decide on what. I even resorted to deleting some old aborted posts in order to put off the day of reckoning! It seems more than a bit out of touch to be celebrating past posts at a time when LiveJournal has become a quiet eddy in the turbid world of social media. (Indeed, I've just noticed that this is the fewest entries I've had in a single month since July of 2002.) But being somewhat backward-looking is simply part of my nature.

Obviously I wasn't going to comb through all 3,999 posts trying to select my favourite ones so I began looking for automated cheats. Obviously running a page hit count would be the simplest way to determine popularity but I'm not upgrading to paid status just for that. So I started Googling, but that also yielded little in the way of usable data (beyond the interesting bit of trivia that this journal is now the second hit for "muckefuck" for a US-based English-language search, just behind the Wikipedia entry and before the one in Wiktionary).

A bit more bumbling around and I came across the idea of using LJSeek. The first five hits there are various "Talk to Muckefuck Stories™", an occasional series I began in March of 2003 inspired by some of

rollick's longer form posts. They strike me as good representatives of what makes LJ unique among social media channels. Humourous aperçus and brief status updates get tossed into the maelstrom of Facebook (or Twitter or Google+ for some of you, I imagine); many of my linguistic posts end up on specialised fora where they're more likely to attract responses. But when I want to have a go at pretending to be on the staff of a third-rate New Yorker manqué, this is where I keep coming back to.

Obviously, I'm not a writer and the quality of these posts is uneven at best. Although I go back and reread past posts on a regular basis (a dirty little habit I call "smelling my farts"), I never revise them beyond correcting obvious typos. But in the hopes that there is at least some pleasure to be found in strolling through the aisles of my external memory, here's a sampling of links:

Bonus entry: Numbering the days of Kim Jong Il (4 Apr 2004)