15.18, Wednesday 18 Feb 2009

Carl Steadman opened my eyes to the possibility of narrative in new media with two pieces: Two Solitudes (1995), in which you would eavesdrop by email on a conversation between two lovers?, friends? becoming distant, over 30 days, and 99 Secrets which I first encountered in 2000.

You can read Two Solitudes online, though without the slow delivery and intimacy of the inbox, it loses much of its poignancy and involvement.

99 Secrets has similarly decayed. 99secrets.com, where you could click through 99 short snippets of conversation between an anonymous he and she, has been snagged by a domain squatter and is consequently no longer available in the Wayback Machine. (I've attempted to buy the domain to enable access to the cache again, but haven't had a response to my emails.) It's sad.

Recently I found miss bunnyhead darling kept the 99 secrets and posted them back in 2006. I am super, super grateful. As ephemeral as the secrets maybe should be, I think they still deserve an audience.

What I've done is taken that list - which I'm not going to link to directly here - and I'm posting Carl Steadman's 99 Secrets to Twitter instead, randomly, roughly once a day: follow @to_no_one.

Thank you miss bunnyhead darling, for your act of care! Thank you Carl, for showing us what could be done and how we can be touched! I hope I don't offend anyone by re-performing the words.

The name I've used on Twitter is from the final secret:

99. i still love you, he said, to no one.

Follow-up posts: