Ben Newman

I haven't posted here in a long time. I'd like that to change (okay — it just changed, 'cause I just posted — I mean I'd like the trend to change!). A number of my LJ friends have taken on a practice of posting at least something very regularly, but I'm not going to do that because what I really need is to maintain my LJ/website/whatever as a creative outlet, and my creativity usually comes out in bigger chunks than that.

It's been an eventful winter so far, and looks likely to be an eventful year 2.5 years going forwards. To avoid a single long post that I never finish, here's a brief overview looking both back and forward:

Gatherings

• OVFF, a major filk convention in Ohio
• Christmas as fiddledragon's parents' house
• MagFest, a vide game/music con (and my first non-filk niche con)
• Arisia, the Dionysian pole of the Boston general SF con scene (Boskone, the Appolonian pole, is in a few weeks)

Things I've learned

• People appreciate receiving my pipe cleaner critters as gifts.
• People will give me money in exchange for pipe cleaner critters.
• Among my critter designs are a good selection which can be made quickly and reliably.
• I know what I want to do when I grow up need to get a real job.
• If I play the next 2.5 years right, I can come out much better qualified for all of the top 3-5 jobs on my list.
• An "idea for a novel" works better if it has characters and a plot, as well as a setting.

Creative output I'll post soon

• Pictures of a selection of my 3D art
• A synopsis of a novel I might actually write
• A dirt cheap laser beam-spreader
• Three different visual or map-based storytelling games
• A few new songs

Plus the details of the above-hinted-at 2.5-year plan, a possible website overhaul (eventually!), and more...?

In all likelihood I will never look at http://orawnzva.livejournal.com/friends again.

DON'T PANIC, it's not because I don't love you! It's because I've lately discovered that my RSS reader, Vienna, being browser-based, authenticates to livejournal.com using a magic cookie just like any other web-browser, and thus I can pull down all the LJ that's fit for me to read as RSS. This completely obsoletes my previous system for keeping track of which LJ posts I have and have not read.

As part of the migration process, I have made some minor adjustments to the set of journals I read and to my friends list (note that there is now no essential link between these two sets). I make very few locked entries, and the main consideration when adjusting which information pipes I'm subscribed to is my time and sanity, so, as far as I'm concerned, these adjustments are of relatively small social weight. However, if it is for whatever reason important to you whether or not (a) I keep track of what's going on with you or (b) you have access to my occasional more personal musings, I will gladly take that into consideration.

note: I've been using a DefaultView custom friends group to filter my friends page, and I will, at least for the time being, continue to keep it synchronized with the set of livejournals I am actually reading, so you can check whether or not I am reading your journal by looking for your own entries on my friends page.

Apparently, LJ will no longer allow the creation of Basic (free, ad-free) accounts. Existing accounts can (for now) still be switched to and from Basic status. The latest news posting (which might, theoretically, have prominently mentioned this) says nothing about this change.

As has been ranted about at greater length elsewhere, this is a violation of (legally non-binding, but quite explicit) promises LJ has made in the past regarding the character of its service and its relationship with users. Brad, original founder of LJ and now Not In Charge, but on an advisory board which is apparently going to be ignored by the new Powers That Be, agrees that this was a breach of trust and a bad move.

I'm not sure what I'm planning to do about this. My account will remain Basic unless and until there's another change in policy (I wouldn't trust an assertion that this won't happen if I were given one), but I can certainly no longer recommend in good conscience that anyone join LJ in order to keep up with me. On the other hand, I don't post here all that often. People can follow my journal, such as it is, using RSS, and comment anonymously or using an OpenID, and I have few locked posts.

At the same time, I will say this: Why have so many of us put ourselves in this position where the data that make up our personal and social lives is held by a company that we don't control and with whom we don't even have a real contract? For each other. I could drop LJ in a moment — log out and never log back in — if everyone on LJ whom I care about would follow me. They only have a hold on me because they have a hold on you, and so on, circularly. We are hostages. We came because it was a good deal, but we will stay even if it becomes a bad deal, at least for a while.

Where could we go? Another social networking site? There are others that have better reputations (InsaneJournal seems to be an especially popular destination for LJ refugees)... or, we could hope for some software and protocols that would allow us to achieve the same functions we get from LJ while hosting our content on whatever machines we choose.

From now on, this livejournal will have tags. And, yes, all previous entries have been tagged, too.

I, Orawnzva Arjzna, have cleverly concealed my identity behind the most powerful encryption technology known to the Internet. You will never unmask me. Mwa ha ha ha ha!

-- Ora