Salon posts

[jenett]

I've had a lot of people make "I really enjoyed those" noises at me, and I want to resume! However, my work schedule has changed for the semester, and I'm still settling into the new one.

So, here! Tell me things you like about how they were going! Tell me if there are days that work better for you!

Things I'm committed to:
1) It's going to be a weekday: my weekends vary too much.

2) The initial post will go up when I wake up and wander to the computer, which on my new work schedule is probably somewhere between 9:30am and 10:30am Eastern US Time.

3) There will be some combo of "here, have some awesome thing" (links, book quotes, whatever) and a general question. I am open to suggestions for future questions, but they need to be things I want to talk about/feel I can encourage conversation about, so feel free to suggest but be aware that I may go "Yeah, not for me" or "Yeah, but not right now."

4) It'll continue to be hosted here (rather than say, making it be a community where other people could help host) because I think part of what's making it work is my feeling stewardship of the space and a bunch of amporphous 'what's the right question for this week'. (Brains are weird.)

5) There may be occasional weeks off, though I will generally know in advance. (In particular, I have travel in mid-February and in mid-March that may complicate things.) There may also be weeks in which I forget, in which case, please do remind me I meant to do a salon post (but I've rearranged some of my to-do list stuff that will make it easier for me to remember it's a specific day.)

Comments

[jjhunter]

I'd prefer Wednesday or Thursday myself, primarily because those days are otherwise bare of weekly public DW events, but having salon posts happen at all is the most important thing — I'll make time to participate as much as I can whenever works best for you to host 'em.

...I am very excited about having these start up again, by and by. Would you find it useful if you had a dedicated post for people to drop by in the comments with suggestions for post topics as they think of them?

[silveradept]

I liked the format of the first run of salon posts, and the way they easily mushroomed into fascinating conversations, because people are awesome.

[kyrielle]

I love the salon posts also and will work with whatever day they appear on. However, perhaps predictably, Friday is the best day for me by a long shot, since I work Monday through Thursday. Thursday is the worst - besides work, we have a weekly gaming night on Thursdays, so I would only be able to do salon posts very minorly and would have to play catchup Friday morning if at all. [I'm responsive today because I have the day off, but this is very much not the norm.]

I would dearly love to suggest topics as they occur to me! I tried to host a few of these in my journal, as you know, and, uh, they just didn't get legs. I gave up after the second. I don't know if that was my topics, or my readership, or my ability to interact with and keep the threads going. Probably "yes".

But in any case, I would love to toss topics out when they occur to me. (And if they don't work for you, no big deal - any that do, that's awesome, and the rest, oh well!) If you want topic suggestions to be an ongoing thing, you might want to make a post for them (maybe even screening comments in case someone is feeling shy?) and link it in each Salon post. If you want to deal with it at that level, and I realize you totally may not.

The two topics I tried, and am still interested in, distilled:

• What we find beautiful, why, and how we try to add beauty to our lives. (Art in all forms, nature, people, whatever.... I started from photography but that seemed much too narrow.) This one drew a lovely response in my original post about 'touch' beauty, things that FEEL lovely when we touch them.
• How we learn, and how we fit learning into our lives. The incremental day-to-day learning, and the big 'study intensively' learning. What do we want to learn, what resources do we use/like/love, what resources do we wish existed but we haven't found? That one got some decent responses, including yours, but not on a par with when you host salons. (On the other hand, I am still gleefully reading some things you recommended. I'm not sure that using askamanager.org to say 'oh God I love my job' is exactly the intended response, but it's probably not a surprising one either. So many situations weirder than I have EVER been faced with....)

FWIW, I am bouncing over here at the idea of more salon posts.

[pretty_panther]

Sounds fabulous

[redbird]

I like the idea.

I don't know what days of the week would be better and worse for me: right now, Wednesday is probably best, but if I find a full-time job it'll probably be a matter of how days of the week interact with time zones, since a lot of the people who participate in this are in the eastern time zone.

[maribou]

ftr, i also think they are awesome. just...no energy even to answer your easy questions above. and will probably mostly lurk on the salons this term. ft work + internship + cataloging class + life things + chronically exhausting dumb ailments + recurring SOOPRIZE spouse long-term work travel = incoherent maribou