Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

One of the things that annoys me about LJ (it’s a petty annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless) are those random befrienders that arrive unannounced, stay for a minute, an hour or a day and then clear off again. Sometimes they reappear, sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t have any effect upon the quality of my life, and they can’t read anything I don’t want them to, but nonetheless, they annoy me.

I am referring to what I presume are ‘bots’ that trawl LJ and just add randomly and serially. I make this assumption because I cannot believe that even Russians (for it is largely they) have so much free time and so little inspiration that they feel compelled to trawl the millions of LJ users and add people manually.

I am generally happy to add someone back if they add me to their list, even if I have no idea who you are, or why you added me in the first place (Hello, v0lutes). If I don’t like their journal I’ll either ignore it, filter it out or ditch them if the journal is offensive, but by and large I’m enough of a publicity whore to welcome one and all.

The point is, I have to feel that there’s a real person at the other end, preferably one who updates occasionally. I may never comment on that journal, but I like to think that I have the option, same as they have that option on my journal.

When I am randomly added by someone who specialises in randomly grabbing and ditching far more friends than they can possibly read, it gets my blood up. I don’t know why, but hey, a little irrationality goes a long way.

I have a number of friends who never update, but most of them are people I know personally and who for reasons best known to themselves like to read the drivel I write. Others used to update but rarely do nowadays – I occasionally think about culling those, but then why bother?

Just as a matter of interest, if you are on my friends list, have never met me and you added me before I added you back, can I just ask why? Just curious. I’ve added a few people because of multiple shared interests, or because they are friends of friends and have interesting journals.

What made you pick my journal out of the blue?

I have just tried, and failed, to work out how much it would have cost to mount an expedition for six Europeans into the African interior in 1860. Starting from Zanzibar, and travelling by way of Mombasa, with suitable numbers of bearers and askari, total travel time there and back, six months.

I am not sure whether it is google that has let me down, or my lack of imagination in search parameters.

I'm tired now, and I'm going to bed. If anyone has ideas for suitable resources, I'd be pleased to hear...