elements

It was time for a fresh start. I'd been living too many separate Livejournal lives, and this little journal was just sitting, waiting, unused, with its too-wonderful-to-waste name.

Now I am here, and if you've known me as a different Livejournal user name in a previous incarnation, I'd appreciate it if you leave those incarnations behind. This is where I mean to live now, bringing together the different parts of me, introducing friends from different social groups, acknowledging that the many aspects of my online and offline self have merged enough not to be meaningfully separable anymore.

In brief: I am a social systems geek. I am an alternative economies geek. I am a collaborative creativity geek. I am a traditional folk culture, music, and dance geek. I am a social justice geek. I'm not a techie, but I'm a student of the communities and collaborations and new social systems technical innovation can create.

This is my personal blog. If you know me professionally, I am _not_ speaking on behalf of my work-world self here, not ever. Any discussion of things related to work, to work events I might publicize here, or to themes that also relate to my professional life, is incidental and something I would be doing regardless of my professional circumstances: I am both an employee and a layman/volunteer, as it were, and in this journal, I am the layman.

While many of the journals friended here are of folks I met through media fandom, this is not, per se, a "fandom" blog, except to the degree that I personally care about fandom, about fannishness, and about the academic, social, cultural, political, and legal causes and effects of fannish activity. So yes, expect fan geekery. It's part of who I am. But I'm not posting under the assumption that every reader is a fan, or aware of fannish terminology. And while I have written some fanfiction in the pretty distant past, I don't expect to be posting any here.

I intend my friends list here to be a true reading list: journals I find interesting - because I like the people writing them and consider them friends I want to keep up with, or because I find what they have to say worth reading regardless of how I feel about them personally. I am hoping not to be friends-locking entries here, so please do not be offended if I don't friend you back. It has nothing to do with how much I like you, and everything to do with how much time I have for reading LJ. I fully expect that my friended list will be larger than my friends-of, anyway. :)

While I am not explicitly hiding certain "real life"/offline world details about myself, I'd appreciate discretion from those who do know these details: they're for me to choose if and when to share. I haven't blogged publicly in a long time, and I'd like to be in charge of how much of myself I am open about.

One last disclaimer: This journal hasn't always been named Elements. For some time, it was IceClayFireSky, because Elements was in use and then deleted by another user. If you're looking for the person who used the name Elements prior to the summer of 2005, when I snagged this name with a change-token in the grand deleted-usernames freebie, I'm not them, and I know nothing about them.