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Symbolic Forest

A homage to loading screens.

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The Audience (part one)

Or, you are reading these words

When I write things here, I don’t think about who might be reading them. Most of the time, I write posts to entertain an itch in my head. I get it down in words, and then I forget about it. The readers, if I do think about them, are the crowd of maybe 20 people who I know personally, who I know read this site fairly regularly.*

It’s a bit of a surprise to realise that other people do read and follow what I write. The other day, for example. I was sitting around in a club, one of those places where there are lots of people whose faces look somewhat familiar, but you don’t actually know them. One of those people – I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before, but it would take me a few minutes to remember where – joined in the conversation. Before long, he said, to me: “I remember you blogged about that.”

All I could do was nod, in a slightly surprised way. But, really, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. These words are out in public, after all. There are a couple of sites on the net that have both a photo of me** and a link to this blog; and nearly all the customers of the club we were in have an account on one of them. Nevertheless, I was rather surprised, because I’d never have dreamed that some random stranger who I’d barely talked to before would have seen my photo online, read the blog, and remembered it well enough to then recognise me in a dark nightclub.

This is all extra-silly, though, because I do the same thing myself. So I shouldn’t be surprised when it happens to me. In fact, that same night, I had a conversation with someone else I barely know, where I was the one saying “oh, I read that on your blog.” That story, though, can wait for another day.

* either because they have linked to me, or because they know me in real life, or because I know they follow the links to this site from other places I’m active online.

** although I am very used to people saying “ooh, you don’t look like your photo at all!” There is even a photo I’m in somewhere on this site, but it’s not captioned.