State of things
Apr. 7th, 2017 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI constantly tell myself I will post more than just fic and vid announcements, and then I don't, because reasons. But the foofaraw with LJ means I feel like I have to at least say that DW is my primary choice for journaling interaction these days, and if we're not already following each other, my user name over there is gwyn.
My plans are vague: I think I will do what a couple people have said they're doing, and lock all previous posts to friends lists. I think most of the gay porn horses are out the barn, but the fact that I can't actually read the new TOS but the journal is held hostage to it anyway bothers me. I also plan to stop crossposting after this one, but I will probably keep reading because there are a few communities that won't migrate that I don't really want to lose. I'm pretty sure at some point they will be disappeared by the new overlords, but for now having an LJ still, even if I don't use it myself, means I can communicate with them.
I had an interesting experience in the last go-round with the servers--as an experiment, I made a password that was basically an alphabet/numbers version of fucktheR******* and immediately I could no longer crosspost, I couldn't even post directly from LJ, but I could get into it. So I changed it to something benign, and suddenly I was able to crosspost and post directly again. Sure, maybe it's coincidence, but that sat really badly with me, and the fact that you can't securely browse the site left me pretty convinced they are paying attention to what people do. You can't have that much of a mass exodus of users and not pay attention. I deliberately don't support businesses and agencies that have agendas in opposition to my own, so I'm not going to support this one just because I won't be arrested in the Russian federation, or whatever the other mocking things people have said about those uncomfortable doing business with the new overlords. (Just for the record--it wasn't my friends list/people here on DW doing the mocking, it was some really hostile comments in a community I watch.)
And considering what happened with Syria, I just want to hunker down with people on DW and curl into a ball of anxiety and despair. I know everyone talks about how creating art in times like this is so important, but it is harder and harder to do that, you know? I have a lot on my plate: the Cap Reverse Big Bang, a WIP that needs a chapter update soon, a vid for Club Vivid and then figuring out some kind of vid for premieres at VVC, and work. Procrastination seems to be the order of the day for me, followed by a chaser of hopeless misery.
For some reason, I don't know why, I'm having a lot of…I don't even know what to call it. I can't stop thinking about my sister lately, having flashbacks to the last few days of her life and watching her die. I'm just going about my day and it's there suddenly. I was in California on the anniversary of her death, trying to just…enjoy myself and keeping it inside so I didn't bring anyone else down, but usually by now it eases off. It's so weird that Bucky's birthday is the day my sister died, I have emotional whiplash whenever I post a story for his birthday.
Anyways, hopefully I'll still be able to comment on LJ posts for as long as the journal is still there, but I'm signing off on new posts there for now.
gwyn. My plans are vague: I think I will do what a couple people have said they're doing, and lock all previous posts to friends lists. I think most of the gay porn horses are out the barn, but the fact that I can't actually read the new TOS but the journal is held hostage to it anyway bothers me. I also plan to stop crossposting after this one, but I will probably keep reading because there are a few communities that won't migrate that I don't really want to lose. I'm pretty sure at some point they will be disappeared by the new overlords, but for now having an LJ still, even if I don't use it myself, means I can communicate with them.
I had an interesting experience in the last go-round with the servers--as an experiment, I made a password that was basically an alphabet/numbers version of fucktheR******* and immediately I could no longer crosspost, I couldn't even post directly from LJ, but I could get into it. So I changed it to something benign, and suddenly I was able to crosspost and post directly again. Sure, maybe it's coincidence, but that sat really badly with me, and the fact that you can't securely browse the site left me pretty convinced they are paying attention to what people do. You can't have that much of a mass exodus of users and not pay attention. I deliberately don't support businesses and agencies that have agendas in opposition to my own, so I'm not going to support this one just because I won't be arrested in the Russian federation, or whatever the other mocking things people have said about those uncomfortable doing business with the new overlords. (Just for the record--it wasn't my friends list/people here on DW doing the mocking, it was some really hostile comments in a community I watch.)
And considering what happened with Syria, I just want to hunker down with people on DW and curl into a ball of anxiety and despair. I know everyone talks about how creating art in times like this is so important, but it is harder and harder to do that, you know? I have a lot on my plate: the Cap Reverse Big Bang, a WIP that needs a chapter update soon, a vid for Club Vivid and then figuring out some kind of vid for premieres at VVC, and work. Procrastination seems to be the order of the day for me, followed by a chaser of hopeless misery.
For some reason, I don't know why, I'm having a lot of…I don't even know what to call it. I can't stop thinking about my sister lately, having flashbacks to the last few days of her life and watching her die. I'm just going about my day and it's there suddenly. I was in California on the anniversary of her death, trying to just…enjoy myself and keeping it inside so I didn't bring anyone else down, but usually by now it eases off. It's so weird that Bucky's birthday is the day my sister died, I have emotional whiplash whenever I post a story for his birthday.
Anyways, hopefully I'll still be able to comment on LJ posts for as long as the journal is still there, but I'm signing off on new posts there for now.
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Date: 2017-04-07 08:30 pm (UTC)Yeah, for me it's not just a question of not liking the new TOS, I feel like in order to be in line with my own personal ethics I can't support the site any longer.
And, *HUGS*, I'm sorry things are being so hard for you right now.
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Date: 2017-04-08 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-07 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-07 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-07 09:25 pm (UTC)And considering what happened with Syria, I just want to hunker down with people on DW and curl into a ball of anxiety and despair. I know everyone talks about how creating art in times like this is so important, but it is harder and harder to do that, you know? I have a lot on my plate: the Cap Reverse Big Bang, a WIP that needs a chapter update soon, a vid for Club Vivid and then figuring out some kind of vid for premieres at VVC, and work. Procrastination seems to be the order of the day for me, followed by a chaser of hopeless misery.
//clinks the chaser glass Yeah, doing much of anything seems really piddling and unimportant right now, not to mention how AO3 has turned actual recommending into a numbers game, so it's even less probable anyone will see it. Which didn't bug me so much when I was a NNF posting snippets on LJ, but it feels like AO3's sorting methods are always rubbing it in my face.
It's so weird that Bucky's birthday is the day my sister died, I have emotional whiplash whenever I post a story for his birthday.
Oh, God. Overlapping anniversaries are so hard. T's grandfather died on his birthday and it still affects him.
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Date: 2017-04-08 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-09 05:48 pm (UTC)And I was just like really? REALLY? After all the DDOS attacks and fucking up stuff like, oh, comment functionality, and years and years of broken promises, on the LJ side, and nothing like that ever happening with DW, the main thing was "oh but what if DW vanishes into the aether?" I mean, I saw people comparing it with fucking Inksome. If anything DW has remained remarkably sturdy while other services -- Deadjournal, Greatestjournal, Insanejournal -- have gone belly-up. (And people are STILL bitching about how there's no photo hosting here. FOR GOD'S SAKE THERE ARE LIKE SIX DIFFERENT HUGE FREE PHOTO HOSTING SERVICES USE ONE OF THOSE IT TAKES FIVE MINUTES.)
Ehh, I just hope at least some of them get fucking paying accounts for the service they trash-talked for years which is now saving their archives and years of conversations and so on, that would be a nice token of gratitude. But probably they won't.
//cranky because of ear infection
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Date: 2017-04-09 08:42 pm (UTC)I think it's just a difficult situation all around, and a lot of it is more complicated than just clicking import journal for some people--especially people who bought permanent paid accounts, because those weren't necessarily cheap even on sale, so it's hard for them to want to pack up and leave. I'd love to see more options for things here--I wish someone could come up with a hybrid of the image and quick reblogging ability of tumblr with the text based ease of DW, something that could function in a number of ways. I think the lack of image capability and the requirement that you code in links and have to know how to resize photos and all that stuff is, for people like me, keeping them away from using a service like DW. The rich text editor sucks, at least for me, and I have to give LJ credit for the ease with which you could select photo resizing from a drop down menu.
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Date: 2017-04-09 10:52 pm (UTC)I wish someone could come up with a hybrid of the image and quick reblogging ability of tumblr with the text based ease of DW, something that could function in a number of ways.
Yeah, that would be the dream right? I thought Imzy might be closer to that, although I don't remember if they had the reblogging, but there don't seem to be that many multiuse platforms anymore. Facebook is kind of like that but I find Facebook like trying to drink from a firehose (and it's hard to set up multiple or pseud IDs).
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Date: 2017-04-07 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-08 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-08 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-08 02:41 am (UTC)End of an era, really. It makes me wonder what will be next, as fandom largely migrated to Tumblr, but it seems like there's a lot of dissatisfaction there...
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Date: 2017-04-08 10:47 pm (UTC)Tumblr sucks. It really sucks, but it's where everything I'm into is, so I've learned to accept it and work with it as best I can.
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Date: 2017-04-08 11:19 pm (UTC)Tumblr...I mean, I signed up basically because I got sick of trying to follow comments and not being able to when someone went Tumblr-only, but it feels like a lot more pressure to produce content constantly. Which I am not good at.
I keep hoping there will be some kind of hybrid of the two that will arise from the ashes.
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Date: 2017-04-09 05:53 pm (UTC)Yeah, I can't follow comments or conversations on Tumblr either because I am Old I guess, and there really is pressure to keep up the content -- and their TOS even says "use Tumblr once a year. If you don’t, we may mark your account as dormant. Your content won't go anywhere—it'll be archived exactly as you left it—but your URL(s) will be released for someone else to use" and there was some more recent update that said if you leave the account dormant too long, they'll delete it. WTF, that's not even something fucking Facebook does.
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Date: 2017-04-09 10:09 pm (UTC)Yeah, I am a professional lurker, not a poster/producer, so I am really not made for the current trend in social media.
That makes no sense. How can your content be archived if someone else is using the URL? I mean, your content is linked to the URL...I just...what?
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Date: 2017-04-09 11:10 pm (UTC)Oh man, I CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT. I know there's Xkit and other workarounds, and also with Tumblr everyone is interacting with what was meant to be the backend for basically a visual display showcase, but I'm just like....why is this so clunky and horrible to use? Although I remember the old LJ and IJ comments used to go wayyyy off to the side and you'd wind up with something similar but that only happened after dozens and dozens of comments, not, like, ten. And I don't even want to get started on the tiny narrow pastel all-the-same-colour -10 font design most people seem to love, it's like the lost souls of a thousand Geocities websites woke up inside people and went "We must be resurrected!"
That makes no sense. How can your content be archived if someone else is using the URL? I mean, your content is linked to the URL...I just...what?
I have no idea and I resent it on two levels, one that I have to keep logging in and churning content for them not to disappear or mess with my content already there, and two that I had no idea of this until I looked at the service terms. Tumblr got a lot of bad press last year for summarily deleting blogs they said violated DCMA with no warning, and how they're just so open about it https://support.tumblr.com/post/129312400022/heads-up-on-a-little-maintenance-thats-going-on -- "For those of you who are looking to snag a particular URL, this is a good time to check back periodically to see if that username is now open. We still can’t manually release any URLs to you —we’ve got to let the process above work its magic. This’ll give people a chance to either get back to their true calling of spending all day on Tumblr, or set their URLs free for others to enjoy." Because God forbid you not be on Tumblr all day.
It would also destroy archiving as we know it -- people now are worried about LJ memorial accounts, but it sounds like with Tumblr they'd just go pouf.
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Date: 2017-04-10 02:12 am (UTC)Disappearing memorial accounts is Not Right. Yeah, yeah, in the early days nothing on the internet was supposed to be permanent, but it's been pretty clear for a while that the loss of content has been harmful to digital history.
I can only eye the merger of Yahoo and AOL with trepidation for what it might meant to what is currently fandom's main platform.
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Date: 2017-04-10 02:18 am (UTC)Disappearing memorial accounts is Not Right. Yeah, yeah, in the early days nothing on the internet was supposed to be permanent, but it's been pretty clear for a while that the loss of content has been harmful to digital history.
Yeah, I read in an article that the web right now is this weird mix of ephemeral and permanent -- people can be dogged forever by screenshots or search histories, but a lot of stuff also vanishes permanently and without warning, or sites are rejiggered and forum conversations are lost (I saw this happen with Flickr) and the big website just doesn't care, because after all the suckers providing content for free (us) aren't the ones paying them, it's the ad companies. ....anyway. I was struck by seeing how many people saying they're deleting their LJs, how that history is going to be lost to them too -- maybe not if it's downloaded, but I remembered that book that just came out where a man found a woman's lifetime of diaries. It seems like a lot of diary-keeping has moved online and that's so precarious. (Remember Diaryland?)
I can only eye the merger of Yahoo and AOL with trepidation for what it might meant to what is currently fandom's main platform.
the WHAT now (is sick and has been living under a rock)
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Date: 2017-04-10 02:52 am (UTC)I wouldn't be surprised if Tumblr was just an absolute mess of patches, dead code and leftover bugs that don't show up only because no one's using the site in a way that would activate them.
Yep, for all its fragility, paper is still the most enduring format for individually produced content. I mean, other than stone and clay tablets, which have a longevity that's kinda hard to beat.
Yahoo & AOL merger
Supposedly the merger won't change anything, but they always say that and it always does.
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Date: 2017-04-10 03:23 am (UTC)....yeah man, just in my lifetime, I've had PC floppy disks, Mac disks, Zip/Jazz drives, data CDs, flash drives, and now stuff in the cloud like Flickr/Dropbox/Google....I remember when people used to print out their emails and file them! LOL, right? Although when Hotmail pulled that "log in by x amount of time or we'll delete without warning," I lost about four years of email and it was the first web email service I'd been on, so that was a ton of history. Wish I had printed out at least some emails since then, ha ha. And as Stephenson pointed out in Command Line, the Word programs aren't back-compatible with each other -- the new ones can't open older files. -- ANYWAY.
The new name behind a combined Yahoo and AOL is about linking brands and values, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told CNBC on Tuesday.
"We wanted something that would be a name that would connect all the brands — Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Gadget," Armstrong said in an interview on "Squawk Box."
On Monday, the AOL chief said that when Verizon finishes its acquisition of Yahoo and merges it with AOL, the combined companies will be called "Oath."
OMG that sure doesn't sound OMINOUS, no! Who the hell picked that name?
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Date: 2017-04-10 04:43 am (UTC)Yeah, the speed of digital communication and the lack of backwards compatibility of formats is a real issue in electronic archiving. Loads of stuff resides on old media and keeping the hardware and software to read that media running is becoming more and more difficult.
...Apparently you can take me out of data archiving, but you can't make me stop thinking about it...
How do you even get to "Oath" from all of those entities? Like, how does that name have any relevance or connection? It's not just unsettling--it's bad branding!
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Date: 2017-04-09 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-08 03:23 am (UTC)I've found that the worse the rest of the stress level is, the more my PTSD around things gets triggered. Pow! Back in whatever awful moment has decided to play on heavy rotation this week/month/administration. So, you know, the world is a cluster and it's not surprising that your brain is misfiring and bringing up other trauma as you try to cope.
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Date: 2017-04-08 10:49 pm (UTC)Yeah, it might be stress related. I'm always, always stressed, so I guess I don't think of it in terms of differing levels, but that makes sense. Also I'm having really fucking weird dreams and I'm remembering parts of them, which never happens. I don't remember my dreams much at all, so the fact that I am is freaking me out.
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Date: 2017-04-08 04:45 pm (UTC)Yeah. :/ While I'm not planning to delete my account/existing LJ entries, that's the main reason I don't want to post there anymore. My LJ is a permanent account, so it's not a question of giving them money, but I don't want to give them more content, even if that mostly makes me feel better rather than actually hurting them in any way.
*hugs*
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Date: 2017-04-08 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-09 02:12 pm (UTC)And yeah, I won't give LJ any more money either, I deleted my fanworks accounts, and I'm still trying to puzzle out what I'm gonna do with my main.
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Date: 2017-04-09 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-11 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-09 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-15 03:59 am (UTC)https://ironymaiden.dreamwidth.org/1072255.html