It's a magical world

As a follow-up to the publicization of the LJ hack of 2014/17 (most likely 2014), I have with regret removed access for journals that last updated 99+ weeks ago. If you are one of those accounts and you are still here reading along silently, let me know and I will restore your access. Comments to this entry are screened.

On a related note, anyone who uses Slack may benefit from this guide to deleting your free Slack backlogs. 

Finally, there are no words for the moment. Black lives matter. Protesting is a fundamental right. May we meet again in a country where everyone is truly free.

My posting here has dwindled to vid announcements (I would announce fic if I had finished any since Yuletide 2016, but). Since people are using DW again (I read it every day! I just…don't post), it seems like the time for a mini-revival.

So, in an effort to get back into the swing of things, give me a topic you would like me to talk about and I will do my best to talk about it by the end of January.

Just a quick note to request even more so than usual that if you know my wallet name or other account names to please not associate them with this account or my other wallet name social media accounts. My wallet name has come to the attention of a hate campaign and I'd really prefer that they not know about the existence of this account. Thanks!

( More info )

So there's a site called FriendBlab that is using people's RSS feeds and FOAF files to scrape and replicate their journals on their site - this isn't illegal, but it's certainly unethical, and quite a few people on my DW list have been affected.

I heard about this from ladyjax on Twitter, and she has a post with more info, Beware FriendBlab. She has the contact info for the FriendBlab "copyright agent," one Randy Charles Morin - I suspect your best bet for getting your journal taken down off the site is going to be contacting its upstream ISP, but starting with him will create a good documentation trail. I've heard anecdotally on Twitter that the ISP is already responding to people's emails - this thread on ladyjax' post has the ISP (GoDaddy, ironically) contact info and a sample email.

raanve has a post with more information, including the links to the Dreamwidth account settings page where you can change your RSS feed settings to make this kind of scraping a little less productive. I've changed my RSS settings to "brief summary," since I don't actually want to punish people who are using the RSS feeds for legitimate purposes (unlike the U.S. Sixth Circuit, but that's another story). For a disturbing but familiar look into what FriendBlab is doing, she also unearthed this page, complete with egotistical ranting about how the "intellectual arrogance" of the people who invented FOAF in 2000 (i.e. Brad FitzPatrick) is holding back people like Morin from profit evolving the internet.

It might not also be a bad idea to license your journal under a Creative Commons NC (non-commercial, which means that anyone scraping your content is in violation of your license terms if they serve ads alongside or otherwise attempt to profit from it) or other kind of license, for an extra layer of demonstration that this kind of scraping is being done without your permission or consent. Then go to this page at BoingBoing and read about Big Content's latest attempts to kill the public domain, fair use, and Creative Commons along with them.

I honestly don't really care about LiveJournal's latest outrages anymore, because my emotional home has long since become Dreamwidth. That said, I know some people still care about LiveJournal, and I'm happy to keep crossposting my content for them. But I can't even leave a comment on the new version of LiveJournal while running my primary browser (Firefox, latest), and my comment volume has dropped to almost nil anyway, so I'm going to be disabling comments on the LJ crossposts of my journal entries, effective immediately as soon as I find the box to ticky.

Anyone who likes will be able to leave comments on the DW entries using OpenID; I also invite you to consider creating a Dreamwidth account--you don't need a code to do so until the end of 2011 (two whole days, I know). after which you'll need an invite code, which are easily had via dw_codesharing's codes available tag.

rydra_wong has a great post on transitioning from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth.

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In the meantime, since some people may be transitioning form LJ to some other platform entirely, here's where I can be found on the internet:

starlady
starlady38
starlady

I also have a locked Twitter account under my legal name; if I've granted you access, PM me and I'll be happy to give you the info.

See you around the galaxy. ♥

What I've been thinking of as my vacation from my feels-like-a-vacation, quacks-like-a-summer-program summer in Japan is drawing to a close. Tomorrow (later today technically) I'll take a bus over the Akashi-Kaikyo and Ônaruto bridges back to Kansai, and then on Wednesday afternoon I leave KIX for OAK via SEA. (I have the name of a beer lounge at SEA with Mac & Jack's African Amber on tap, though, so I'm all set for my layover at least.) It's been relaxing, and quite enjoyable; so relaxing in fact that I managed to miss two straight OTW meetings. *facepalm* The Awa Odori is pretty awesome, though!

There will be many posts forthcoming in future, I hope; suffice it to say that thanks to swan_tower and K and loanwords and D I've had an awesome week and a half. The new semester, which starts in a week and a half, is already looming in front of me; it's going to be intense, but hopefully a lot of fun. And I swear I'm going to read more this fall.

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On the Dreamwidth front, yvi is looking for feedback on the idea for a non-native English celebration fest.

As copracat reminded me, Dreamwidth's diversity policy is explicit, and worth a reread. The Dreamwidth that's my second home welcomes all users regardless of language or writing system, among countless other variables.

Q&A Days 1-8

Q&A Days 9-14

15. What 5 things are you obsessed with currently?
Narnia, definitely. As for the rest…'obsession' is probably too strong a word, but I'm very excited to watch a lot of anime and Doctor Who over the summer. And to read a lot of manga. And as always, to try (and fail) to catch up on my piles of 'to-read' books.

16. What are you glad you did but haven't really had a chance to post about?
Um…I post about 90% of my life, I'd say; almost everything I consider worth mentioning makes it way here eventually. I'm behind on several music reviews, including a Javanese shadow puppet performance and a gamelan concert that I saw. They were both awesome.

17. How many people on your reading list have you met IRL?
Hmm. *eyeballs reading list* Probably somewhere between one-third to one-half. One of the things I did when I joined DW was to subscribe widely, which has netted me a lot of awesome people in various places on my reading list, and I've had a corresponding number of chances to meet them offline too, particularly since I moved to California/started attending more cons. And I've met more awesome DW people through those awesome DW people, even better.

18. What don't you talk about here, either because it's too personal or because you don't have the energy?
I don't tend to talk about my family very often; my sister is on DW/LJ too, and a lot of that is her story to tell, not mine. I also, bizarrely, haven't talked about my parrot much. I might try to put together a picspam of him when I'm back in Jersey this week, he likes having his picture taken. I also try not to talk about the minutiae of my grad school life so as not to bore all of us, myself included.

19. What are you most interested in reading?
*laughs* You know, that's actually a good question. I read almost exclusively sff, YA, and non-fiction these days, and even there, my tastes are decidedly out of the mainstream. I'm looking for interesting takes on old stories, believable characters, well-chosen words and thrilling turns of phrase, stories that I haven't heard before, stories that represent real reflections of the broad range of human experience and not just the same rehashing of things the kyriarchy believes. Not coincidentally, the books I read tend to be by authors who aren't white men.

20. Any questions from the audience?
Speak now or forever hold your peace (until next time)!

21. What's your favourite thing about Dreamwidth?
The people, first and foremost. ♥

1. Why did you sign up for Dreamwidth?
I won the 'beta invite for random OpenID users' lottery fairly soon after signing up for an OpenID account at the tail end of closed beta, about a week and a half before the beginning of open beta. I'd been dissatisfied with LJ for a while, and DW made it easy to make the switch. Actually I have to give lian a lot of the credit for bringing DW to my attention and thus bringing me over here; thanks! <3

2. Why did you choose your journal name? What does it mean?
The name is my LJ name (starlady38), without the digits, which I added to my desired LJ name because plain starlady over there has been inactive since 2001. One of the nice things about getting in on the ground floor at DW was being able to ditch such workarounds.

The name actually refers to Star Wars fandom, which I started out in way back in the time known as the day; Timothy Zahn refers to "starladies" in his dedication to Specter of the Past (still one of the best SW novels), which I'd been reading around the time I started my LJ. Also I wanted to be an astronomer for most of my life, so the name is doubly appropriate.

3. Do you use other blogging sites? Why or why not?
I still have my LJ, obviously, and I have an InsaneJournal account that's completely empty. I also have a Twitter account linked to my legal name, but other than that, no. I'm used to the LJ/DW way of doing things, and I find that it's shaped what I want out of a blogging site. In particular, the way the comments structure is set up seems to encourage actual discussion.

I do still crosspost to LJ, though not everything--Follow Friday DW posts, obviously, aren't very relevant to LJ, and I don't post any creative works other than translations to LJ, since I don't want that on SUP's servers, ever. In that spirit, I also have deleted most of my older LJ entries, and I do go back and delete entries with no comments when the mood takes me. My DW is my journal of record.

4. What do you do online when you're not on DW?
I use Wikipedia a lot, as well as various online dictionaries such as alc.co.jp and Perseus. Other than that…in a lot of ways DW is actually the center of my online experience right now; most of the things I wind up reading I find by way of DW. I do read short fiction online; I used to read The New York Times, but their paywall has killed that. I still sometimes read The New Yorker. Oh, and obviously, I read fanfic. And a significant portion of my online time is also taken up by doing OTW work in Campfire, on Basecamp, etc.

5. How about when you're not on the computer?
I read, I write (either by hand or directly into Word or Scrivener), I run, I cook, I bike, I hang out in coffeeshops and wander around to bookstores and restaurants. I watch TV and anime on my computer and make vids occasionally too. And, oh yeah, I'm in grad school. It works well.

6. What do you wish people who read your journal knew about you?
Hmm. I feel like my personality and views come through fairly well in my posts. I don't always comment, but I do read 95% of what's on my reading list, which I don't filter.

7. What is your favourite community on Dreamwidth?
Another good question! There are some that shall remain anonymous per community rules, but I particularly appreciate runners, which is very supportive of runners at all levels of skill and experience. white_lotus, an Avatar: The Last Airbender community, is pretty cool, as is forkedtongues, a community about languages, multilingual-ness, and translations. fandomcalendar is also dead useful, as is animanga_news. And of course clampnews is great too.

8. What is your philosophy on journal layouts?
Hmm, not sure what exactly this means, but! I shall answer anyway. I have the CSS skills that god gave a squirrel, so my options are always limited to customizing the canned layouts that other people create. I actually still prefer my LJ layout to my DW layout--I find the grey-on-black text much easier on the eyes--but I like my DW layout pretty well. I think a layout should be fairly uncluttered and sensibly designed; I like having icons on the right because they pop out more.

( Future questions )

Scheduled posting cannot come soon enough as far as I'm concerned, IJS.

In the meantime, skud has an interesting post, Ebook discussions flying under the radar, which graphically dissects the discussion, mostly on LJ and DW, of which my post Some links on illegal file-sharing and IPR was a small part:

...my gut feeling was correct: there was a really fascinating, complicated, crunchy conversation going on, mostly among women, mostly on LJ/DW, that the tech blogs and other parts of the web don’t seem to have noticed. Make of that what you will.

Personally, while there may be an extent to which the insular grammar of LJ/DW contributes to our insularity vis-a-vis the rest of the web, I'm sure that's only part of it. Food for thought, most definitely.

First, on the pingbacks front, helens78 has established that pingbacks break friends-lock when you edit entries. Lovely!

eumelia has code by 51stcenturyfox which will allow you to disable the crossposting buttons on your journal, not just on your comment boxes.

LJ and FB have signed some sort of integration deal to offer LJ services to FB users, so this probably isn't going away. According to cleolinda, if you enable FB crossposting, your FB (legal, presumably) name will appear on your LJ profile page.

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This afternoon I enabled search engine inclusion on this DW, and minimized it on this LJ. I don't think most people will notice a difference--comments will still be enabled on all translation posts, I will still post translations simultaneously to both journals--but the LJ has been a secondary journal for a while now. At some point in the next week or so I'll finish putting all my translation links in my DW journal sidebar, as well as pruning a lot of private and f-locked content off the LJ, and that will be that.