River: Report on the riparian environment

[mdlbear]

It's been a while since I posted anything with a significant amount of River content; little things like life, the universe, and everything have been conspiring against me. I'm sorry to disappoint you again, but it seemed as though this was a good time for a sort of re-introduction and status report before we continue our journey.

The River posts started out as a journey of personal exploration, concentrating on mental states, emotions in particular, interpersonal communication, and relationships. Along the way they seem to have acquired a second theme of advice, primarily for geeks like me and people in relationships with geeks. (I'll get into definitions in a little while.) How this geeky old bear found himself in the role of slightly bemused relationship counselor is a longish story that has yet to be told in full, but you'll find bits of it in the archives if you're curious.

There seem to be three main types of River posts. There are, of course, general posts that have a brief mention of a River-related topic -- those usually just get the tag. There are the ones that report on, and usually analyze, a specific incident or event from a riparian point of view -- often these have the phrase "on the River" in their title. And finally there are the more carefully-considered posts, of the sort cflute calls "The Mandelbear waxes philosophical", which usually have titles that start with the "River:" keyword.

At any given time I may have a half-dozen or so posts in various stages of writing, and another dozen in the form of a title and a few notes. They often stay in this state for months, until I either get tired of beating on them, or they get triggered by some event, usually on my friends list, that makes them suddenly relevant.

Definitions:

Although there are plenty of terms I use in a somewhat non-standard sense here on the River, the only two I want to highlight here are geek and human. I believe I first started using the pair of them in a technical sense in a post titled Humans are from Earth, geeks are from Saturn.

Geek

This is intended as a humorously self-deprecating, fairly general term that covers anyone who, like me, has trouble relating to and getting along with "normal" people. It covers a fairly wide range, including aspies, people with adult ADD, loners, and in some aspects people who are simply terribly shy. Geeks often have an easier time relating to computers than to people; some of my earlier posts have mentioned "hackers" in this connection.

Human

This is meant as a less disparaging term for "normal" people than things like "neurotypical", which is common in the Aspie community.

I'll note immediately that I'm well aware that many people -- probably including most of my readers, fall somewhere in between the two categories, or have aspects of one or the other in different situations.

Sub-tags:

Here are the tags commonly used for River subtopics. This set changes over time, and posts will occasionally have tags that are used more widely.

c9n

Calibration -- getting or soliciting feedback or corrections (outside of LJ -- inside LJ I'd use "query"). You may have met the practice of using a number to stand for the number of omitted letters in "i18n", the common abbreviation for "internationalization".

comm

Communication

def

Definitions. Often also have "Defining my terms:" in the title.

human

The whole "being human" thing (usually in the context of my abject failure at it).

meta

A post about posting. This post, for example.

np

N-person relationships (where n>2). The definition of np-complete and np-hard are left as an exercise for the reader.

psa

Public Service Announcement. Something I want people to know about me.

psych

Psychology, including mental states, psychopharmacology, and so on.

query

Questions of the readership, often for calibration purposes.

rel

Relationship

Books?

The River seems to have spawned some related writing projects. The first, thought of a couple of months ago and introduced in a post titled The River: it's not just a tag anymore, was the comparatively straightforward idea of turning the first year's worth of posts and some selected comments into a book, A Year on the River. It will require some serious editing, of course.

The second, and more recent (as in just this week), is the idea of writing a pair of somewhat more organized self-help books, tentatively titled Relating to Humans -- A Manual for Geeks and Relating to Geeks -- A Manual Mostly for Humans. I envision them being printed back-to-back, like one of the old Ace Doubles. Anybody else remember those? It would make sense because, as I've noted above, many people fall somewhere in the middle. And, of course, because geeks have most of the same problems relating to other geeks that humans do.

(The initial phrase, currently "Relating to", is up for grabs; additional possibilities include "Living with" and "The Care and Feeding of".)

Naturally, both of these projects will start out as wiki-like websites, so that I can get some help -- I'll need it.

Comments

[mdlbear]

"Socials" might almost work, but it doesn't resonate for me (not to mention the fact that it doesn't work grammatically, which I find a significant stumbling block). "Human" does resonate: I often feel as though I've come from another planet, trying hard but mostly unsuccessfully to learn what all these humans are doing.