Recently, I've taken to reading diaries - mainly because I've run out of Science Fiction, but partly also out of interest for this genre -
Dove right in at the deep end, with Pepys and Casanova - quite long, unexpurgated works of relentless detail, which is no doubt fascinating, but it is hard to see the wood for the trees - in Pepys case, there's an online service that will be deliver you a "pepys of the day" quote, presumably apposite to the calendard and selected carefully from amongst the very freshest products - which made my think about how this could be generalised as a useful service - back in the day, we had a unix thing called qotd (quote of the day) which could be used to select from some curated database (also known as a bunch of geeks or crowdsourced) amusing stuff, like Frank Zappa on Human Stupidity or Groucho Marx on Clubs, or Elvis Costello on Music ("dancing about architecture"). Indeed, in less ancient times (but still a while back, thix could just be an RSS feed...
Anyhow, I think we need to revisit this properly with Diary Farms, and Diary Herds and therapy for people who are in diary need of Condensed Diary products, or, indeed, Plant Based Diary, skimmed Diary, Pro-Biotic Diary and all the rest...
I've made a note in my journal to revisit this a year from now to see if we've made any progress.
