Private Lives
Thursday, June 9th, 2005Wil Wheaton, on planned changes to his blog:
I hate Reality TV, and I feel like my blog is dangerously close to crossing the line from “this interesting thing happened to me” to “come with me while I take a shit in the woods.” I need to tell more stories, and bare less soul.¹ You know what I’ve learned about The Internets? It’s full of freaks, and if a high-profile person bares too much soul, they really come out of the woodwork and latch on. It’s a little creepy…
Wil’s post was kind of gratifying to read, since I have always wondered if my own blog needed to get more personal. Reading Wil’s comments I feel more confident that I’ve made the right choice [for me] regarding the balance between public and private. If you pick through my archives [which I’ve just realized aren’t easily accessible— wups!] you can find out an awful lot about me, but there is still a whole lot I never talk about.
I do occasionally regret not being more personal/candid here, when I dig back through the archives to read about what I was doing a year or two ago and feel frustrated by the lack of information about my private life at the time. Perhaps the number one reason I keep this blog is for personal reference; it is my journal, and until blogging came along I had never kept one before. I have occasionally considered starting a separate private or secret blog,² but several false starts have shown I would never keep it up.
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1. Wil’s original text has it as “bear less soul”, which I could have copied and added a [sic] to, but seriously that has got to be one of the most condescending things you can do when quoting someone; you might as well write [idiot] instead. Spelling is not that big a deal, so I am content to simply change it without further indication [with the obvious exception of this particular footnote].
2. I think I read maybe four or five anonymous blogs [out of 150 or so], and even these give me the shits sometimes. Note that when I say anonymous I mean “takes pains to keep identity secret” rather than “doesn’t bother to mention real name on front page”
June 10th, 2005 at 7:22 am
I think, in the context of “shit in the woods”, Will’s use of “bear” rather than “bare” was probably intentional- unless he’s misspelled it in the past without any context to make it work as it does here- butI don’t read his blog, so I don’t know…
June 10th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Interesting point, I missed that connection. Although if it was intentional I think he would have marked it by reverting to proper spelling in the next instance, which he didn’t.