Uncategorized

  • The War in Iraq

    What’s your sense: how is the war in Iraq going?

  • MORE ON THE XANGA TATTOO!

    Hey guys!  Many of you have suggested that we give free Lifetime to porcupinesol for getting her Xanga tat.  I was actually reluctant to do so, because I didn’t want people to think that we bought her out for 100 bucks.

    But… everyone here at the Xanga offices was SO excited by porky’s tat that the murmuring started.  “Give porky free lifetime!”  And then she started to get tons of comments like this: “You totally deserve a free Life membership…” and “so you get automatic xanga for life, right? :) ”

    How could we deny her?  Porcupinesol is now a Xanga Lifetime member, with our compliments

    I think it’s just such a cool story.  Somebody posted it to digg, and I’d love to see it get dugg onto their frontpage.  Could you guys click over, and digg the link for us?  Help spread the word about the famous Xanga tattoo!

     

  • “My Xanga Tattoo”

    How awesome is this?!

    This is definitely going on the frontpage… in the meantime, I was so excited I want to share with you guys!

  • thx4ever luv u 2

    APolizzi just commented with some sad news – lolsecretz is no more!

    Friday, January 25, 2008

    ….has been pretty gret, aktually

    O hai readerz…

    We all knew this day would come eventually,
    but even still, it’s bittersweet to write this post today. After a lot
    of thinking and talking and intense brainstorming over enchiladas and
    hemming and hawing… we’ve decided to draw this chapter of
    lolsecretz.com’s life to a close. Part of us would love to continue
    making and receiving secretz forEVAR, to see what new hilarity we can
    fashion out of inscrutable kittycat memes, and to see how you, our
    wonderful readerz, can exceed the boundaries of our own imaginations
    and make us laugh over and over again.

    But mostly we want to preserve the spirit out of which lolsecretz was
    originally born – one of doubled-over laughter and playful manipulation
    of themes generated on these crazy Intrenetz; a feeling that we were
    creating something fresh, unique, and extraordinarily (and
    inexplicably) funny; a witty jab at things that we love but feel
    deserved to be parodied. Fact is, we’ve become just as repetitive as
    PostSecret at this point, and that means it’s time to go. We honestly
    never, ever expected lolsecretz to become the hit that it did; at the
    peak of the site’s popularity, it was seeing thousands upon thousands
    of hits per day; we got attention from numerous media websites that we read (!); and there’s even been talk of a book deal…

    Quitting at the top of your game… kinda like Seinfeld did (and Will & Grace didn’t).  Props to you..  kthxbai!!!!1

  • Hobbies

    I thought this was a great post by Jigg about hobbies – it asked how people define the words hobbies, and also if there were gender differences between men and women re: having hobbies.  Here it is, if you didn’t catch it earlier:

    Anyway the topic has stuck in my head.  Not the gender part of it, but the hobby part.  To be perfectly honest (and self-absorbed), it got me thinking: Do I have any hobbies?

    I don’t know.  I like to Xanga… but that’s my job too.  I spend a lot of time talking to the Xanga community, but that’s my job too.  I also spend a lot of time on the Internet, but that’s kinda something everyone does.  I spend time with my wife, but does that count as a hobby?

    I guess my biggest hobby is reading.  I read a lot of books about government, chaos theory/complexity, the history of science, business, and memoirs.  I am really interested in emergent organizations, and how order can emerge by just establishing a few basic rules… like how birds flock without someone coordinating the whole thing.  A lot of Xanga features draw on this sort of thinking: like how the Ratings system doesn’t use top-down centralized control.  Anyway I guess it is a big hobby of mine, but it’s also kinda work related.

    One of the challenges of being passionate about your work is that you don’t have as many pure hobbies any more.  I’m not sure what I can do about that tho – I mean, I’m not going to feel guilty about weaving so many of my passions into my work.  But at the same time, it’d be nice to have some pure hobbies.

    Maybe I can steal some of your ideas.  What are your hobbies?

  • A need for speed?

    Please do the following experiment for me.

    Click on this link to go to your editor… and as you do, time how many seconds your editor takes to come up:

    Then type it in below as a comment… and also, give your sense for how fast or slow the editor seems to you.

    Thanks!
    John

    ps hey guys, just to clarify: I don’t mean, is the editor faster or slower today; we haven’t changed anything about the editor in a long time.  I mean in general, does it seem fast or slow to you overall…

  • Would you donate your remains to science?

    Yes, I want all my organs to go to help sick people. What do you mean by science tho – like, would I want first year med students to dissect me?  Probably not…

    If I had a religion or guiding philosophy in life though, it would be science.  So I should probably figure out a way to better honor science when I kick the bucket.  Will have to get back to you all on this one…

    I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

  • Reply

    This Reply feature is officially my favorite feature of the year.  Granted it’s only January… but still, it’s pretty awesome.  It’s definitely changed how I use Xanga.

  • Chris Choi’s Post about Xanga

    I got like, two of these.  Maybe you can do better:

  • The salt mines…

    Someone asked me recently where the saying “back to the salt mines” came from. 

    I looked it up, and it’s kind of interesting: “While salt is now plentiful, before the Industrial Revolution salt was
    difficult to come by, and salt mining was often done by slave or prison
    labor.  Roman prisoners were given the task of salt mining, and life expectancy among those so sentenced was not great. Roman soldiers were also paid in salt, which is where the term “salary” comes from.”

    Speaking of which, back to the salt mines…

    ps for those of you who are asking what it means: “back to the salt mines” is a saying. Here’s the definition from Answers.com: Back to the salt mines means to resume work, usually with some reluctance, as in With my slavedriver of a boss, even on Saturdays it’s back to the salt mines.
    This term alludes to the Russian practice of punishing prisoners by
    sending them to work in the salt mines of Siberia. Today the term is
    only used ironically.