December Days 2022 #16: Serendipitous
Dec. 17th, 2022 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
The remarkably short definition here expects you to be familiar with the concept of serendipity itself, which involves things coming together beneficially by accident, or an unsought learning opportunity, experience, or discovery that is beneficial. With that additional information in mind, it's a lot clearer why serendipitous is one of the two main adjectives I would use to describe the way I set up the link posts. The other is Discordian, for not all of my instances of encountering the primal chaos have not been beneficial or good enough to be serendipitous. There's a district strain of it arriving at the point in time for maximum hilarity for others and maximum potential embarrassment for me. Having caught on that this is a pattern, it's usually less embarrassing for me, or I can see the humor involved in it and have a genuinely good laugh at myself along with everyone else. (And if I need to, sulk later.) Things that are next to each other in a post are things that I believe should be next to each other, even if the link isn't obvious. If it isn't obvious, then I try to explain why they might go together. The serendipitous part is sometimes whether or not the reader has received all of the pieces or has thought about whether the pieces go together in that way before. Sometimes it's a resource that a reader didn't know about, or an aspect of a resource that a reader didn't know about. (Seriously. I fielded a question recently from someone who had microfiche cards and was looking for a reader for their microformat. We didn't have ours available (and I think all of ours were microfilm readers anyway), but I made a quick call over to the next library over, since they have a local history room and collection, and confirmed with them they had one for public use. Five minutes for me when the person asking had spent significant time trying to find such things.)
Sometimes I have to remember that the things I think of as silly ideas, one-offs, or pretty far-out esoterica borne of familiarity and study on certain subjects might be novel ideas for other people to experience or to think further on. Or might bring a new perspective to someone that's been a regular problem. The thought that other people might be interested in the things that I post and talk about, or submit to conferences, is novel to me. Sometimes I have to summon the courage of the mediocre white man and just submit, but when I hear back that there's interest, it's very much an "oh, okay. There is interest, now I have to do it." There's less pressure on entries like this, because nobody's paying me to do this or expecting me to come up with profound insights and revelations on the (monetizable) regular. If the reader gets something out of it, it's serendipitous instead of intentional, and that can sometimes be more fun to watch unfold.
Serendipity for me comes from all the people that I follow, here on Dreamwidth, over on other social media sites, and through work questions and curiosities. Since all of you are different in your interests, experiences, and identities, I get exposure to a lot of things I wouldn't normally come across. Music, especially K-pop, has been a big one of those this year, and so has a lot of fandom stuff. I'm not conversant at all about C-dramas, but I know who might be if connections need to be made. I learned about more than a few games this year by watching people break them in creative ways, or talk about their own progress toward completion. And I learned a lot from the links and the retweets and the boosts of your networks, which often show me how people who don't share my experiences see a thing and the tireless efforts from people of color to educate and explain and tell white people about how their assumptions are wrong, their tools are inadequate, and their supposed solutions to problems end up perpetuating them, worsening them, or make it easier for people to either harass or ignore the people who are raising them. (This phenomenon is not new, but the ways it manifests seems endlessly novel as new technologies come into existence, or, more likely, become significantly more popular than they were before.) Even if I don't end up further boosting or interacting with most of the things that come across my feeds, they are still valuable to me, because of all the perspective that I get from such a wide variety of perspective.
And sometimes I come across someone who seems very compatible, and a connection is forged, the network grown, and more possible points of serendipity come into being. So I'm glad to keep showing new pathways or juxtaposing things that might not have been put next to each other or thinking through things out loud that other people might find useful. I both want to know when they happen, because they help me feel like I'm doing cool things, and I don't want to know, because they'll make me feel pressure over continuing to be insightful regularly. I haven't fully mastered the way of the shitpost yet and the accompanying attitude of just letting things go out into the aether.
"All opinions expressed on Whad'Ya Know are well-reasoned and insightful. Needless to say, they are not the opinions of the International House of Radio, its member stations, or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight."
- serendipitous (comparative more serendipitous, superlative most serendipitous)
- by serendipity; by unexpected good fortune
- good, beneficial, favorable
The remarkably short definition here expects you to be familiar with the concept of serendipity itself, which involves things coming together beneficially by accident, or an unsought learning opportunity, experience, or discovery that is beneficial. With that additional information in mind, it's a lot clearer why serendipitous is one of the two main adjectives I would use to describe the way I set up the link posts. The other is Discordian, for not all of my instances of encountering the primal chaos have not been beneficial or good enough to be serendipitous. There's a district strain of it arriving at the point in time for maximum hilarity for others and maximum potential embarrassment for me. Having caught on that this is a pattern, it's usually less embarrassing for me, or I can see the humor involved in it and have a genuinely good laugh at myself along with everyone else. (And if I need to, sulk later.) Things that are next to each other in a post are things that I believe should be next to each other, even if the link isn't obvious. If it isn't obvious, then I try to explain why they might go together. The serendipitous part is sometimes whether or not the reader has received all of the pieces or has thought about whether the pieces go together in that way before. Sometimes it's a resource that a reader didn't know about, or an aspect of a resource that a reader didn't know about. (Seriously. I fielded a question recently from someone who had microfiche cards and was looking for a reader for their microformat. We didn't have ours available (and I think all of ours were microfilm readers anyway), but I made a quick call over to the next library over, since they have a local history room and collection, and confirmed with them they had one for public use. Five minutes for me when the person asking had spent significant time trying to find such things.)
Sometimes I have to remember that the things I think of as silly ideas, one-offs, or pretty far-out esoterica borne of familiarity and study on certain subjects might be novel ideas for other people to experience or to think further on. Or might bring a new perspective to someone that's been a regular problem. The thought that other people might be interested in the things that I post and talk about, or submit to conferences, is novel to me. Sometimes I have to summon the courage of the mediocre white man and just submit, but when I hear back that there's interest, it's very much an "oh, okay. There is interest, now I have to do it." There's less pressure on entries like this, because nobody's paying me to do this or expecting me to come up with profound insights and revelations on the (monetizable) regular. If the reader gets something out of it, it's serendipitous instead of intentional, and that can sometimes be more fun to watch unfold.
Serendipity for me comes from all the people that I follow, here on Dreamwidth, over on other social media sites, and through work questions and curiosities. Since all of you are different in your interests, experiences, and identities, I get exposure to a lot of things I wouldn't normally come across. Music, especially K-pop, has been a big one of those this year, and so has a lot of fandom stuff. I'm not conversant at all about C-dramas, but I know who might be if connections need to be made. I learned about more than a few games this year by watching people break them in creative ways, or talk about their own progress toward completion. And I learned a lot from the links and the retweets and the boosts of your networks, which often show me how people who don't share my experiences see a thing and the tireless efforts from people of color to educate and explain and tell white people about how their assumptions are wrong, their tools are inadequate, and their supposed solutions to problems end up perpetuating them, worsening them, or make it easier for people to either harass or ignore the people who are raising them. (This phenomenon is not new, but the ways it manifests seems endlessly novel as new technologies come into existence, or, more likely, become significantly more popular than they were before.) Even if I don't end up further boosting or interacting with most of the things that come across my feeds, they are still valuable to me, because of all the perspective that I get from such a wide variety of perspective.
And sometimes I come across someone who seems very compatible, and a connection is forged, the network grown, and more possible points of serendipity come into being. So I'm glad to keep showing new pathways or juxtaposing things that might not have been put next to each other or thinking through things out loud that other people might find useful. I both want to know when they happen, because they help me feel like I'm doing cool things, and I don't want to know, because they'll make me feel pressure over continuing to be insightful regularly. I haven't fully mastered the way of the shitpost yet and the accompanying attitude of just letting things go out into the aether.
"All opinions expressed on Whad'Ya Know are well-reasoned and insightful. Needless to say, they are not the opinions of the International House of Radio, its member stations, or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight."
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