Ornoth

It’s finally time for us to move on, LiveJournal.

You and I had a good run together. Twenty years, in fact, since our relationship started back in 2002. 1,350 journal entries, between my general and cycling blogs.

But boy have you changed. In 2007 you were bought out by a Russian company, but I stayed loyal to you when most of my friends left for your alter-ego: Dreamwidth.

Since then you have: fired your American staff, broke a promise by relocating your servers to Russia, adopted partisan Russian censorship policies in your terms of service, prohibited other blogging platforms from crossposting to LJ, and made it difficult for users to export their existing blog entries to other systems.

I don’t know at what point your behavior crossed the line, but it obviously has. At this point, my earlier choice to distinguish between LJ’s policies and those of the Russian state seems naïve.

With that distinction removed, it becomes much harder to pay for a service hosted in an authoritarian country that is engaged in a clandestine hacking war upon the United States, and an unjustifiable invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

Between LiveJournal’s own policies and those of the Russian state, things have finally gone too far. So after 20 years with you, I’ve finally joined Dreamwidth, who will host my general and cycling blogs going forward.

Yup. Twenty years, beginning on February 16 2002 with this post, where I shortsightedly stated, “You shouldn't expect to see very much in the way of public postings.” That was the first of 1,350 entries (so far).

I found it telling that I observed that 20th anniversary by posting a status update on my Facebook, rather than LJ. Previously, I’d written about my feelings on the fifth anniversary and the tenth anniversary of my blog.

Henceforth all new postings will appear on Dreamwidth, where I’ve imported all my old LJ posts and settings. As you might expect, a few things didn’t come across perfectly, but I’ll try and iron those out over time. If you notice anything missing, broken, or ugly, I’d appreciate if you let me know.

As a reader – however infrequently that might be – you can expect my blogs to continue as they always have, save for the obvious change of domain name. Hopefully the only change you’ll notice will be a return to posting more often.

I joined LJ six years ago, on February 16, 2002.

It’s kind of amusing that my fourth and fifth posts, on February 24th 2002, discussed the first steps I took on the long path of philosophical inquiry I’ve been on in the years since. So this journal is all bound up with my review of my previous Existential beliefs, a survey of the overall philosophical landscape, and my adventures in Theravada Buddhism.

Arguably my biggest discovery along the way was the commonalities between Existential and Buddhist thought. Which makes it odd that only now, six years later, I recognized another very basic tenet those two philosophical systems share: sensualism.

A key Buddhist view is to experience the fullness of life in the present moment by maintaining one’s focus on the bodily sensations like touch, sound, and smell, and to rein in discursive thought like fearing and planning about the future, as well as reminiscing about the past. To actually experience your life requires you to live in full sensory perception of each moment of “now”, as it arises and passes away. Anything else is a distraction from what is most vital, in both senses of the word (i.e. both “essential” and “characteristic of living beings”). So Buddhism promotes a certain kind of sensualism.

Existentialism, with its rejection of theism and focus on the individual, also puts a lot of stock in sensualism. The best example that leaps to mind is from albert Camus’ “L’étranger”, which describes the blinding heat of a North African beach and its effect upon the protagonist. Meursault is overcome by the glare of the sun, which drives him to shoot a friend’s rival. He is unmoved by major events in his life, and he is only really present for the more sensory experiences of sex and swimming.

By the way, the irony is not lost on me that this revelation came to me as I sat on a tropical beach this morning.

However, be careful about that word “sensualism”. Americans usually use the word to refer to someone who is a thrill-seeker, searching out ever more extreme sensory input. The sensualism of Buddhism and Existentialism is not so radical. Instead, it’s the simple and easy act of being present to all your sensory input at each moment of “now”, rather than spending those precious moments thinking about the past or the future. We can all recognize and appreciate the silhouette of a tree or the sound of crashing surf or the smell of breakfast in the morning. The essence of life isn’t to be found in manipulating abstract concepts with our minds, but in sensing, noting, and fully experiencing the beauty of the world around us, in every moment of our lives, including even the most mundane.

Okay, I’ve finally gone through and tagged all my old LiveJournal entries.

I haven’t gone back and done a cleanup pass, but at this time I’ve got no less than 1054 tags used 2509 times.

Here’s a list of my top twenty tags, and how often I’ve used them:

Friday Five (68) humor (43) Buddhism (38) cycling (33) DargonZine (31) photographs (30) Boston (25) PMC (25) Inna (24) work (24) language (23) Sapient (19) food (17) friends (16) meme (16) NESAD (16) photography (16) LiveJournal (15) music (15) travel (15)

The “first sentence of each month” meme…

So… I want to tag my journal. Okay, I think I can talk about yesterday now. 4:52am. In recent months I’ve seen at least three college graduates on my friends list type “loose” when they meant “lose”, or vice versa, and it’s just as common an occurrence for the people who write for my magazine. It hasn’t yet been a month since I ranted about “lose” versus “loose” in this entry. Okay, I’m applying some originality here. iniren was reading through the Boston Phoenix during her visit last week and came across some self-promotional filler that read: Be as hip and trendy in real life as you pretend to be on the web. Hey everybody, I have arrived in Bourne, at the base of the Cape Cod Canal, after a 112 day ride in the saddle that featured a little bit of cramping, a lot of just general tiredness and heat on a beautiful weather day and it’s really so far been a pretty positive experience. Oh what the heck… Wow… If you wanna get your LJ noticed, say something disparaging about love! No shit, there I was: scenic Lechmere T station, one cold October afternoon, looking for a bus to take me into the bowels of Meffid. I thought I’d share a favorite bit o’ Thomas Moore with you this evening.

iniren was reading through the Boston Phoenix during her visit last week and came across some self-promotional filler that read:

Be as hip and trendy in real life as you pretend to be on the web.

For some reason, iniren thought that applied directly to me. While I do enjoy putting my life out there for others to “admire”, the more I think about it, the less I think that phrase applies to me.

Consider those adjectives: hip and trendy. In all honesty, neither of those really apply to me. I’m way too old to be hip, and I’ve never really followed changing trends in order to be stylish. Really, I don’t think I depict my life as being either hip or trendy. But do I depict my life as more grandiose than it really is?

Well, how *does* my life come across? “Eventful” is probably pretty accurate. If nothing else, my life has a lot of stuff going on. It’s a pretty full life—sometimes a bit too full—and that does show up in my blog and on OrnothLand.

What else? “Active” is probably good, and my writing about the activities I enjoy assures myself and others that I’m getting out and doing things, rather than spending my adult years sitting in my own gravity well watching CSI or 24 or something equally inane. So that, too, is a reasonable conclusion to derive.

Others? “Cosmopolitan?” “Reflective”? “Ethical”? “Self-absorbed”? I dunno.

So if that ad copy had said, “Have a life as active and eventful as you pretend yours is on the web”, then that would hit a lot closer to the mark. Although in that case, since the adjectives are pretty accurate, the whole “pretend” angle doesn’t really apply. Though the bottom line is that, yes, I suppose I do try to portray my life in fairly superlative terms that sometimes exceed the reality. But it’s for a good cause!

On a tangential note, a couple days ago I was looking at the list of people who read my blog, and was pretty shocked. There’s actually about forty people who have me on their Friends List, and most of them are people I know or have some type of meaningful friendship with. It was kind of odd to see that, since my self-image is that I’m pretty isolated and don’t have many friends at all. The ironic part is that there are no DargonZine people in that list, other than a couple former writers who recently reestablished contact. Very strange. Glad to have you all here, tho!

So… I want to tag my journal. You know, organize posts by topic. The problem is, I can’t decide whether to do it via LJ’s tags facility or its memories feature. Anyone have any opinions?

Tags seem a bit easier to use, but tags will only show the last hundred posts for a given topic, which seems unnecessarily limiting. early on, before LJ implemented the tags facility, I did some tagging using the memories feature, and that seems to work okay, for the most part.

So I can’t decide. Do you use either? Both? Neither? Vote, and put any additional info in comments. Thanks!

Today I created a syndicated feed on LiveJournal for DargonZine, the electronic magazine I put out. People can now add dargonzine_feed to their friends list, and each time an issue comes out they’ll be notified of it by a brief post that will appear on their friends page.

I really need your help in making it easier for people to add the feed to their friends list. How can you do that? Easy! Just add dargonzine_feed to your own friends list. That’s all there is to it!

See, every LJ user is given a small number of “points” that can be used to subscribe to syndicated feeds. The “syndication price” of each feed is based on how many people are subscribed. The more people who subscribe, the less it costs each one.

But that makes it hard to start up a new feed, because no one will join until the “cost” goes down. That’s especially true for free users, who only get .99 points, total. Once you get over the hump of getting your first handful of readers, the syndication cost drops dramatically, and even free users can subscribe.

So please: do me a favor and add dargonzine_feed to your friends list today. You’ll only get one brief notification each month or so, similar to the ones already appearing in dargonzine_feed’s journal, but it’ll make a big difference in how easy it is for other LJ users to receive those notices.

By the way, if you don’t know what DargonZine is… DargonZine is a strictly noncommercial electronic magazine that prints original medieval fantasy stories that are written by aspiring Internet writers and set in a common milieu as a part of the magazine’s collaborative writing project. The longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet, DargonZine was founded in 1985 as a way for aspiring fantasy writers on the Internet to meet and improve their craft through mutual contact and collaboration as well as feedback from a representative readership via the Internet. New readers and prospective writers are enthusiastically welcomed. For more info, visit our Web site at www.dargonzine.org.

Okay, this rant has been coming on for a while now, and now its time has come. This isn't meant to knock anyone in particular. In fact, it appears the whole world could be painted with this particular brush; each of the examples I cite below came from a different user's journal...

So I've been reading a couple people's journals that they keep on LiveJournal, and I must admit that's it's pissing me off. Here's why.

As I see it, there are two types of journals: one chronologically documents significant events in time, and the other is a place for exploring your private beliefs and feelings and reactions, and basically "working through" stuff, or at least recording the stuff that you worked through. That's why, when you look at my Web site, you get a listing of important or significant things that happened to me; and when you look at my LiveJournal, you tend to find fairly detailed opinions and thoughts.

Now, when I read other people's journals, I get neither of those. I get things like "I bought some cheese today", or "I hope I don't have to go to the DMV", or "I took an online test to see what Buffy the Vampire Slayer character I would be". Other people's journals are full of inane crap that is absolutely without any meaning or significance whatsoever. There's no unique viewpoints, there's no depth of character, there's no thought at all! And these entries aren't even valuable as historic documentation of significant events, because they rarely even get personal enough to deal with anything more than the mundane trivia of everyday life.

Let me attack this from another angle. When I share part of my journal, or when I note a special event on my Web page, it's because I want the reader to be able to connect with me and understand or empathize with me at a meaningful level. I want to share the joys of my life with others, as well as the unique insights that I've gained along the way. That's what I offer the reader, even if that reader is just myself ten years in the future. That's also what I, as a reader, expect from others' journals: I want to be able to connect with someone at a level that's beyond the inane surface that usually rules face-to-face interactions. When I have read someone's journal, I want to feel like I know that person better than I did before. Your journal is you being you, perhaps more candidly than you ever would in person; it's a sharing of who you are and what you value.

Or so I would expect, but that's not being borne out in my observations of real life. Sure, LiveJournal is a social phenomenon, and maybe I'm just expecting too much from a glorified public bulletin board. But if I were to judge solely by their LiveJournals, I would think that people in general are even more inane and shallow than I ever thought possible. If "I went to the bank and then bought a new highlighter" and "I forgot the sausage for dinner and had to go back" and "I'm making meatballs now" is the extent of what really matters and is important to people, so much so that they spend time recording it for posterity, I think that goes a long way toward explaining why I prefer isolation to society, and why sometimes I'm at such a loss to find anyone I can interact with on a the meaningful level I value. I really do hate to be so negative, when I've been trying hard to turn that around recently. And thank god there are the infrequent exceptions whose depth of character is a blessing I cherish; otherwise I'd surely either go mad from alienation or be labelled so by the majority for being so "different"!

"Got no life? Try LiveJournal -- no life required!"