My tiredness really is from being too busy with work and more recently my PhD and campaigning. Also I'd love to be able to have one good idea of a decent FP story each day but sometimes nothing inspires me at all. I don't have enough time to trawl around and then write something if I don't happen to come across anything in the course of my work or through press bulletins I get.
It is also disheartening to spend time putting a diary together that barely scrapes 12 comments over the course of a week (I know I am not alone in that!) I'm fairly thick skinned on that - enough to know that lack of comments is due to me writing about stuff that others may not have much expertise on or do not feel they are able to make any useful contribution to but still... I'd like to be able to make my diaries and FP stories as accessible as possible and to draw lessons out that can be compared across Europe, even if my diary has been written from a UK perspective. I guess I wish I had the time to develop the thinking within my diaries further, but I don't. Ad astra per aspera
Also I'd love to be able to have one good idea of a decent FP story each day but sometimes nothing inspires me at all.
theres lots of us feel guilty after that comment Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
I don't mind the quieter times - especially at weekends - and I don't mind the ebb and flow. I don't start to worry if an open thread only gets a handful of comments, because in a day or two another one won't, and that's not a problem.
I also don't think you can please all of the people all of the time, and if someone with a fundamentally different point of view leaves in a huff because they made some unsupported assertions and got called on it, I wouldn't see that as a problem either.
I'm generally more averse to meta diaries, because I think we can end up talking about specific incidents rather than strategy, and it can easily turn into one of those talks you have in a relationship where someone says 'Yes, but ten years ago you said...' - and it's often not helpful.
So I think if we're going to do meta we should maybe distinguish between 'What should ET do next' and 'How can we be friendlier.'
I think kcurie covered what we should do next. We've talked about, we have to do it.
As for being friendlier - WhatAboutBob was always an excellent balance to the more intense discussions, and it might be useful to have a frontpager who's not one of the policy kids.
I think Bob had a rare talent for setting a civil tone, and I think if we could find someone with a similar vibe it could help balance some of the intensity.
This isn't a criticism of any of the frontpagers in any way - just a suggestion that there may be a gap there, and filling it could help smooth out some of the sharp edges.
Other than that, my main beef with ET at the moment is that I have too many diary ideas and too little time to write them. But I'm not going to blame the FPers for that. (At least - not yet. :) )
But I'm not going to blame the FPers for that. (At least - not yet. :) )
If only you could work out how, I bet there's a diary in it. ;-) Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
