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January 15, 2008 2:40 PM, Audrey_H said...

Hi! Just curious... and maybe a little slow :) But I didn't understand; in what way are you responsible for "musings"?

January 15, 2008 3:09 PM, Dain said...

Oy, I am not suing anyone! Do I actually have to prove it!?

I'm only joking. I actually feel I should, since I was so bold to make the claim, but it really wasn't intended to be a contentious point in the first place. In the sense of "musings/ramblings on cosmetics in which other ruminations on life may also enter", these go back to a bunch of long posts I would occasionally write on the board, I think before you came to LP, Audrey, long before blogs rose to prominence (though I have been blogging since 2001). In any case, I was able to find one of the originals (also dating back to 2001), which I didn't want to link to, because it's really kind of embarrassing, the prose, I mean. There were several posts in this manner, which I would title as "Ramblings...", or "Musings..." if I was feeling the need for a change.

January 15, 2008 3:58 PM, Jenny B said...

Dain, you're giving every other blogger and poster too little credit. Don't you think they could learn the word "musing" from wherever you first learnt it or anywhere else, and not from you? Or, if that doesn't matter, there may have been any number of posters on other forums that used the word "musings" before you did, except you didn't know of them.

January 15, 2008 4:35 PM, Dain said...

That is very fair, and I am very often high-handed, but I don't really think it is the case here. It was quite a few years before people ran beauty blogs, you see, when there were a handful of beauty boards, that was it, no youtube or google, and blogs were strictly personal journals. By the point that blogs exploded as popular media, it already had a particular use within the cosmetics community, especially makeupalley, where it had spread (if you recall, makeupalley came into existence after LP, I remember when it first started, I was friends with the original owner). I am not suggesting that they learned it directly from me, not at all. I do not think these people know me, and in no way do I think they owe me anything. What simply mean that I coined a slang term. This has quite honestly happened to LP quite a few times. And it is not merely restricted to the past. Only a few weeks after we updated the design of the site, with every feature at hand on every page, as well as the most recent posts constantly updating, design features that Colleen worked very hard on, makeupalley also developed the same format.

I am sorry if my comments offended you. If "musings" seems too generic a word to make my claim very strong about how LP's material has been widely copied, I must point to very particular slang words such as "PPP" (Signy) and "holy grail" (Carole, but I'm not sure about that) that saw their first use on the LP boards and spread into more general use, all at the same time. Makeupalley then became very popular indeed, and people forgot about LP, so these terms are very widely used and no one remembers where they came from. This latter I cannot really prove, however.

I am not trying to imply that other people cannot come up with original ideas. I think that is an unjust insinuation, as all I said was that I was responsible for particular terms, and not that others are incapable of thinking for themselves. And I did in fact do the "cosmetics whore" joke. All I claimed was that I used it as a sort of slang within its original setting, as many others also have done on this site over the years. I have been a part of LP since 1996, so I have a very good sense of how the "beautynet" has developed in the past decade.

Again, I am very sorry if I have offended you, but I cannot retract what I know.

January 15, 2008 4:37 PM, Dain said...

My apologies, I meant to put "This latter I cannot really prove, however" after the exposition on the design changes.

January 15, 2008 5:14 PM, Jenny B said...

No apologies necessary, I'm absolutely a-mused! But you should take into consideration that people have been using these words for a long time before posting them on the internet. The people who use "musings" in their blog name may very well have been musing a long time in their personal writings. Claiming to have been the first to spot a good makeup item, the first to use a certain word and so on just seems a little silly and very, very illogical.

January 15, 2008 5:52 PM, Dain said...

That is certainly your opinion, and I very much respect it.

My statements were only intended in the spirit of "I was there and I am still here, funny how things were and are". They were based on history and specifics, not general arguments such as common use, in which light everyone seems ridiculous. They were, if you will, idle musings. There is no howling invective, I have not put anyone down. If anything, I wanted to point out how I would never make it a matter of contention as Bond No. 9 did, because I honestly believe that ideas are free. Of course, you object to my claim that it's my idea, but it is actually intended to absolve my claim to it, even in spite of the facts.

But then, I very much doubt if this blog will ever be brought to comparison with Aristotle's standards of logic; nevertheless, I hope someday I am someone who is completely irreproachable. I daresay I am not the only one.

Above all, I must stress the fact that my statements were not meant to be taken seriously, or taken up contentiously. Sadly enough, the very opposite was my purpose.

January 15, 2008 6:11 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...

Hmmm...I remember the ramblings and musings on LP. This was before blogs were in general use...so people used to "blog" on the forums.

It's hard to put into context now, because the Net has changed since then. But there were very few beauty sites back then, and, as I say, next to no blogs...no Google. The same people visited all of the beauty forums. So it was fairly obvious at the time, which ideas originated where.

Thinking on it, the main difference between now and then is the medium. Forum posts are impractical to keep. They take up a lot of space in the database. But blogs...which have replaced some of the forum functions...take up relatively little space. It would be akin to storing the posts of a single user, or several users.

In short, imagine ten years from now...because we talking about events which happened ten years ago. Rather than it being arguable, it would be a matter of searching the blog.

January 15, 2008 6:22 PM, Dain said...

Ohhh... ok, I was really puzzled, to be honest, because I thought I was going on about the absurdity of claiming names as property. And it rather caught me off guard to be presented with disbelief (as I feel I take pains to be honest). That was what I meant. But you can definitely read it as, it was mine, *sniff*.

This is if you read it literally. But I am almost always sarcastic, and I styled it on Bond No. 9's PR spam, you know, as a sort of mockery via self-mockery. Err. Now that I think on it, it isn't really that obvious, so I guess it's my fault for playing word games.

January 15, 2008 7:37 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...

I remember musings, ramblings, whores, ho's, mad science, SPAM, PPP's, minimalism, cold turkey, UEU's (and UEO), lemmings, FOTD's, enabling, frankening, Igors, YLBB, five minute faces, lippies...

The blogger lingo is a tad less colorful perhaps. Although I am wondering about your One True Blush. I like that, I think it's valid.

January 15, 2008 8:00 PM, Dain said...

No, actually. That one is yours. ; )

Am testing Montale Black Aoud--every review makes this disclaimer about aouds, but this is... gorgeous. Rose, the glorious real scent of a rose! Saffron? No! Medicine? No! Premature first impressions.

January 15, 2008 8:13 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...

It's really yours. I'm cheap, so One True Anything sounds great to me. Institutionalizing it for blush...is a novel concept.

Yeah, Montale does better roses than any I've tried. There is rose in much of what they do. Even Aoud Blossom, which I ended up buying, has an undercurrent of rose, as does White Aoud. Crystal Flowers is half rose, Aoud Roses Petals is tons o' red rose with saffron... The one non-Montale rose scent I've thought of trying is the Ava Gardner one Creed makes. Purely for the cheesy celebrity factor though.

January 16, 2008 1:14 PM, Dain said...

Nah, if I take that, I'll just draw more sweet poison.

January 16, 2008 2:50 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...

Or you could write a book. :)

It crossed my mind though, that the blogs of today, may be considered the books of tomorrow. Instead of issuing a print book and then digitizing it...hey, it's already digitized.

Seriously...the limitation of forums is storage. That particular chunk of time exists only in the memories of the people who were there; it's ill-documented, if you look at it. A few pages exist in the Internet Archive, that's it.

Whereas, whatever anyone is doing now, stands a far better chance of surviving, say, ten years or more. Largely thanks to Google. Google is now the rich patron. :D What they need to do is develop a better archiving system for the blogs...where you can cut off a chunk of years and put it aside, rather than republishing so much each time.

January 16, 2008 3:07 PM, Dain said...

I think the internet is very much the books of tomorrow. I had an especial interest in 17th and 18th century literature, and it has a totally different quality. The printing press made books cheap and widely distributable, and you could say something similar about Microsoft and computers. The literature then has this "street" quality to it, just everyone with an opinion going at it.

January 16, 2008 3:17 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...

Yeah, I think you did...ultimately, I think print books are...I don't want to say dead, but the kind of power they once had is gone.

How many of your desert-island books are modern? Mine aren't, except for technical manuals. It's rather like your series of paintings. They tend to have been created in a time and place.

Now everyone is jumping on the Net, the way, say, everyone wanted to write the Great American Novel before. What ends up surviving is another matter.

January 16, 2008 3:26 PM, Colleen Shirazi said...

Hmmm...the Gloria Steinem/Marilyn Monroe book on my list is the newest one, published 1986. 1984 of course was from 1948. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter--1940. Erica Jong's first three novels--1973, 1977, 1980 (plus poetry from the 70's).

Technically these should be considered modern, but they're not being replaced by work of comparable influence imo.