Marzipan for Connie!

t still looking for the button that controls the "squash Marzie" foot.

Should I be disturbed on how quickly you found that, Empress?

Marzipan to eat! Not the dried out, either, the marzipan dough that can be mushed and molded and played with before you eat it and get that lovely almond sting on the tongue.

that is how I use LJ exclusively. I read LJ through my friendslist.

I'm not saying you should see it my way

This:

I guess I'm saying that to me, they're the same thing; people who've friended me are people who read me.

Makes it look like you're not describing your own behaviour, you're describing the behaviour of others. I'm not challenging how you use LJ. I'm challenging the assumption you seem to have made about how other people do.

Should I be disturbed on how quickly you found that, Empress?

Hee! I love Marzy.

I think of friending someone on LJ as the equivalent of bookmarking a regular blog. So I haven't necessarily told people I'm friending them, any more than I tell Slacktivist or the Smart Bitches that I've bookmarked their blogs.

I'm challenging the assumption you seem to have made about how other people do.

Which is why I backed off farther down and said "Gee, the way I thought everybody used LJ is actually just one paradigm for using LJ."

Seriously. I'm not (now) saying "This is how you should"; I'm saying "This is how I do, and I hadn't realized how many people do it differently".

In unrelated news, I am earwormed with "Last night I got loaded", and I didn't, and it isn't fair.

I thought we were talking about how we read LJ.

You mentioned Blogger, so I thought we were talking about that too. Never mind.

You say you friendslock to avoid Google. Do you distrust them following the HTML directives? Or is Google shorthand for "any search engine, some of whom don't play nice?"

I'm a big old whore for feedback and kind of act like I'm a columnist on lj...I can think of maybe five posts this year I even locked(I did stop short of calling it Crip and The City.) That said, I have a comparatively tiny friendslist and if you're on it, you're a Buffista or in H:LOTS or L&O fandom...I've never really thought about the other readers.

How do you follow blogs?

I am not a Betsy, but I use LJ more and more extensively as an aggregator -- maybe half my friends list is RSS feeds of non-LJ stuff. If I have to keep going back to separate URLs, I'm pretty much guaranteed to never go back. This is partly an ADD thing and partly an "if I cared enough..." thing.

I look at individual LJs exactly once. If I want to read them, they go on the friends list. The only way I ever see people's painstakingly customized designs is if they use a style that also styles their comments pages.

Yes, I do equate readership with friending -- not because I imagine it's the only way to use the software, but because that's exactly the way I use it. Therefore, I'm surprised when people feel strongly otherwise. But it's a "huh" surprised, not a "burn her!" surprised.

No, I mean specifically that I friendslock to avoid the information being generally available. Friendslock is a (perhaps not very reliable) way for me to keep my diary out of general hands. I was under the impression that search engines couldn't (not didn't choose to, but couldn't) get to friendslocked posts.

who are the people I actually know.

And because LJ names are frequently vastly different from RL names or usernames in other communities, if someone friends me because we know each other, it would be nice of them to let me know, so I have sufficient information to choose to reciprocate or not. I've unintentionally blocked at least 2 RL friends from reading my personal posts because they never bothered to tell me their LJ names.

I don't read anything without an RSS feed because I'm lazy that way -- all of my blog-reading is done on LJ or Bloglines.