For Stream of Consciousness Saturday and Just Jot it January today, Linda prompts us to grab up whatever piece of writing is closest to hand and to work up a post using “the sixth, seventh, and eighth word from the beginning of the page.” Wacky!
The book closest to me at the moment is Winning Chess Strategy For Kids, and the 6th, 7th, and 8th words on the first page comprise the title of this post.
In the proper spirit of SoCS, I’m going to spit out the first few things which come to mind when I consider “Pawn. Welcome to…”:
- Walking into a pawnshop
- I am a pawn on the social media chessboard
- Eating shrimp, or p(r)awns
I’ll start with the middle one. The reason I am a pawn on the chessboard of social media at this point is that I am just starting out. Well… I’ll let you in on a little secret though:
See, I’ve been messing around online nearly all my life. As a kid, I frequented many a dial-up BBS (Bulletin Board System) with my 600 baud modem. As a teen, I chatted on VAX systems and made an attempt to write an AI-like program in Basic. Fun fail, that.
At university in the early nineties, I was big into email list-serves, playing MUDs, and dabbling with hypertext using HyperCard. Then the World Wide Web came to be. In a computer science class, I tried my hand at coding my own browser in C. As with my Basic AI, this proved to be biting off more than I could chew. After half a semester, all I had mustered was a bare bones text editor with some HTML parsing functionality.
Anyway, pretty soon I was creating my own web of pages at GeoCities, largely concerned with my research on the trickster/jester/fool figure in world literature. I used Tripod too. And when blogging arose, I was on the crest of the wave.
Thing is, though, I never used my own name. For various reasons, I decided it was best to wear an armor of pseudonyms.
So the long and the short of it is that 2018 has proven to be the year of shedding the old armor. For the most part. Which is to say that I have not thrown it away, and am liable to wear it once in a while. Especially to do battle, so to speak. One has one’s causes to support and certain forces to #resist. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
But establishing myself as myself, social-media-wise has meant, obviously, going from having oodles of friends and followers, followed sources and circles in which I was known, to being a nearly utterly unknown, unconnected entity. A pawn in the game.
Without my armor, I’m just Dan, and Dan has some networking to do.
I guess that the area where I’m most eager to make as many productive and mutually beneficial connections as possible, ASAP, is Twitter. Twitter is powerful, and I find it to be great fun. Do you Twitter? If so, please consider linking up with me there. I’m @jokumshi, and @LindaGHill (hostess of this linkup) was my very first follower!
Okay, so I’ve come up with more to say about being a pawn than I thought at first I would. I’ve passed the 500-word mark, which is my blogpost goal these days. So I thank you sincerely for your time and attention and bid you adieu for now. Cheers!
Word Florilegium 