
Samara O'Shea

Archive for the ‘Digital Letters’ Category

Snail Mail My E-mail

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Not one but two friends sent me a link to Snail Mail My E-mail. Send these folks an e-mail (addressed to someone you know) and they will hand write and mail it for you. They’ll even seal it with a kiss if you ask! This service is free, and they kindly request that everyone uses it only once because they don’t want to overwork the volunteers. I posted the link to this site on Twitter last Friday and had a fun discussion with some readers.

Rodney (@rodney_o)said: “But is not the beauty of handwritten correspondence also the effort a writer takes to pen a note or letter?”

He’s right. This site does deny the writer the chance to connect with the page.

Reader Stephanie (@syntaxoflife) responded: “That’s part of it, but first we need to get people to understand how nice it is to receive mail! =)”

She is also right! When one becomes a lover of receiving handwritten mail, then the realization that s/he, too, can make someone’s day by writing a letter is not far behind. I am grateful for any gimmick that gets the letter-writing conversation going. If there’s anything I’ve learned from doing what I do, it’s that everyone has a letter story to tell. Whether it’s a letter they’ve written or received, everyone’s face lights up when telling an epistolary story. Sometimes that’s enough to send them home to sit down and hand write someone they love.

Doogie Howser, J.W. (Journal Writer)

Friday, January 28th, 2011

doogie-howser.jpg

I caught the end of a Doogie Howser rerun a few nights back. I had forgotten that he was the orginal computer journaler. At the end of each episode he’d type a few words of wisdom onto his very blue computer screen.

blue-screen.jpg

He wasn’t blogging—just journaling for himself and the audience, of course. This was the early 90’s, a few years before e-mail became a must. I suppose one writer for the show had a vision that some of us would be journaling on our computers someday, and he was right. So hats off to that man and his vision. Hats off also to Neil Patrick Harris—the ultimate comeback kid. It’s been a hilarious pleasure watching his career the past few years.

For anyone interested in Doogie’s journal, I found this: The Personal Journal of Doogie Howser, M.D. I’m not certain they are all real. Some of them seem so, but others don’t. Ah well, it’s a quick mouse scroll down memory lane.

This is my fav:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1992
Ray and I got caught up in comparing ourselves to others. It doesn’t matter weither* you think too much of yourself or too little, either way you lose.

*Whether is spelled incorrectly on The Personal Jouranl site.

Letters to the President

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Just when I thought I couldn’t love our left-handed president anymore, THIS came along:

Letters of Note

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

I’ve known about this website for a while and can’t believe I haven’t plugged it here. At least I don’t think I have. Stop me if you’ve heard this before:

Letters of Note is the greatest digital collection of letters there is. Creater Shaun Usher has amassed (and continues to amass) letters, postcards, and ephermera of the most impressive kind. What amazes me is that he posts a letter each day. Yesterday it was a letter from Bruce Lee. Today it’s a letter from Wil Wheaton (who I had huge crush on way back when). It’s a reminder that there’s no shortage of amusing missives in the world. I highly recommend you add this to your list of blogs to visit on the daily.

P.S. This Steve Martin letter is worth a gander, too.
http://www.letterlover.net/category/digital-letters/
www.letterlover.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
12950
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DVZ7JWRXTX6EZA3VKHGMMBVCNIMTJTEE
<urn:uuid:3f76da15-db8f-42fd-a817-f30eb75e3e83>
2018-06-24T06:59:02Z
65.181.122.146
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:M2ZRFCENRO6OOFRMOEUG2PZAQ32PLK52
<urn:uuid:1ac812e9-8cec-4d35-b0c6-e16f974b15b1>
http://www.letterlover.net/category/digital-letters/
response
<urn:uuid:991ac21c-314a-4491-b22c-d2149ec412a6>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-158-201-18.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf