The Mandelbear's Musings

Twenty Years Beneath the Masthead

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 16:14:08 GMT

Twenty years ago today I made myself a LiveJournal account and wrote "Testing..."

The Mandelbear taps the microphone a couple of times. "Is this thing on?"
[Imported to DW as "https://mdlbear.dreamwidth.org/613.html.]

A few hours later I made another post that said, in part, "Some day I'm going to have to improve the colors in that picture... The program that generated it was a quick hack over a decade ago...". If you've been reading this blog for a long time, you may have noticed that the colors haven't changed. I have, however, added the words "since 2002" today.

I started my Dreamwidth account on April 27th, 2010, with a post appropriately entitled Signal boost: more LJ crap. At first they were mostly separate; the exact history is difficult to pinpoint because imports aren't tagged as such on either platform. Automatic crossposts are, starting on August 4th, 2011, with Is this thing on? A good day for transitions. The day also marked another transition of sorts: Ame's 21st birthday. There have been more transitions since then, many of them losses.

Today I edited my sticky meta post to add a few new tags and external links, and added the words "since 2002" to the default (blue fractal bear) icon.

The title of this post is of course a literary reference, which led inevitably to a Wikipedia dive that made its way from (American) publishing terminology to the Bristol Channel pilot cutter by way of the obvious second definition of masthead.

Statistics:

Created on 2010-04-27 15:17:34
21,174 comments received, 8,514 comments posted
7,105 Journal Entries (avg. 355/year), 1,350 Tags, 107 Icons Uploaded

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PSA: LJ crossposts failing

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 01:54:45 GMT

Recently, crossposts to Livejournal have been failing -- not every time, but often enough to be a problem. The most recent failures were

If this fails to crosspost I'll paste it in by hand, but I'm not (currently) equipped to do that on a regular basis. I may never bother: it's not particularly complicated, but it's messy. In any case, it will have to wait until I have a command-line client that can PUT as well as POST, because I'm not about to do it by hand.

(Crossposted by hand to https://mdlbear.livejournal.com/1729513.html).

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Welcome, tumblr refugees

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 19:11:22 GMT

I don't really expect that many Tumblr refugees will see this post, even with the tag, but I know there's at least one person already on my reading list who cross-posts from there, so there may be a few. There may be some G+ refugees, too. In reality, all I'm doing is taking advantage of the occasion to post a few links. Hopefully more than just a handful of my readers will find them interesting.

Let's start with the useful stuff. (People who have been on DW long enough to remember the Livejournal exodus will probably want to skip ahead to the fascinating stuff.)

We can start with the DW community post_tumblr_fandom and ilyena_sylph's About tumblr and DW, mostly news post answers. Good overviews. Another great summary is staranise | Basic Dreamwidth for Tumblr users. (Which comes by way of umadoshi | More using/getting-to-know-Dreamwidth, fandom-migration, and WTF-Tumblr links.)

That's probably enough to get most people started. On my personal reading list, the posts I've seen lately are:

denise's announcement on dw_news | Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks! -- this, or rather the notification in my email, was how I first learned about this debacle. With the new update to Tumblr's community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we'd like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs.
From siderea | [dw] Welcome, G+ and Tumblr Refugees!, which links to Welcome Back to Social Journaling (basically how to get the most out of DW) and The Recipe, Or What you don't know about LJ/DW (on how to build and hold an audience).
From kyburg, a crosspost from Tumblr, ironically, of Arkady Cosplay — From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal,... deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit... (Good advice about how to leave gracefully.)
From madfilkentist, a post comparing Dreamwidth vs. Facebook and Tumblr.
... and my own post from the (most recent) LJ exodus, PSA: LJBF: Goodbye's too good a word.... (I note that I still haven't carried out the full plan there -- I'm still cross-posting. I'll probably continue to, since there are still some people who only have accounts there. I'm sure the same thing will happen with Tumblr.)

Okay, now the fascinating stuff. Watch out for rabbit holes.

Let's start with jesse_the_k's post, Remember when Fandom Spec'ed Pinboard?. Well, no, I don't -- I wasn't using Delicious at the time. But apparently a lot of fans were, so when the site's owners (Yahoo) made some "improvements" like disallowing several punctuation characters in tags (in particular, "/" -- just try tagging fanfic without slash), there was a mass exodus to Pinboard.

Jesse links to Fan Is A Tool-Using Animal, which tells the whole story very entertainingly. It's a transcript of a talk given at dConstruct 2013 by Maciej Cegłowski. The talk included a reading from this hilarious bit of fanfic and, more relevant to our current topic, this amazing collaborative Google doc which is a list of features (with votes and use cases) that fans wanted for Pinboard.

So, finally getting back to Tumblr, (remember Tumblr? this is a post about Tumblr) here's the Tumblr-inspired version of the Pinboard spec: Fandom platform of the future - specs and features, on Google Docs.

How much of that gets into Pinboard, Dreamwidth, AO3, or anything else is anybody's guess. But fen are amazing, and anything can happen when you dive down a rabbit hole.

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Done this month (20170402Su - 0408Sa)

Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:35:30 GMT

It's been a week. Not only are we moving house, a large number of people are moving from LJ to Dreamwidth. I'd already mostly moved, and since I have a permanent account I'm not likely to leave completely, but I've been reducing my exposure -- the entire journal is marked "adults only" and I've taken off all of my interests and most of my personal details. I also gathered together and posted a few notes on the process, under the tag ljexit. Feel free to crosslink, and to use the tag yourself.

Monday was a bit rough, both emotionally and physically exhausting, from spending all day at Rainbow's End organizing and sorting. I did some finishing-up Tuesday night, taking advantage of a dentist appointment and the resulting personal day, when our mover failed to show up. (We found out later that he'd been in an auto accident on the way up.)

Tuesday night was miserable and mostly sleepless, and I woke up on Wednesday with a queasy stomach and muscle aches. It was a close enough match for flu that I called in sick. As it turned out, though, it's more likely to have been physical overwork, lack of sleep, dehydration, and low blood sugar from having been thinking about things other than self-care for much the previous two days.

Thursday at 1pm our listing went live: 4126 37th Ave SW, Seattle, Washington 98126 | The Warmack Group. If you're reading this and interested, the open house is this weekend, and you only have a couple more days to get an offer in.

Friday I got in to work late, having gone with N. to look at another house. I very much wanted to get in to work for the last meeting of the day, with $BOSS and $HR_PERSON. Um... yeah. I've been offered an "early" retirement package. (Scare quotes because it would be only a couple of months before my target date.) I may very well take it. The emotional roller-coaster ride one might expect from having to look reality in the face from up close, but at this point I think I'm ready.

Saturday -- yesterday -- Naomi and I went to look at The Dome House in Monroe. It was magical. Almost perfect for us -- EXCEPT: it's isolated as heck, at the end of a mile of twisty, narrow, gravel road. Haul the garbage to the dump yourself. Lots of unpermitted, unfinished construction in the barn. It would have been perfect for who we were 20 years ago. *sigh* I wouldn't have missed seeing it, but it makes me sad to have to pass it up. N called it the other end of the rainbow. Had a great talk with the owner, who is moving to someplace dryer for health reasons.

So that's the week. I'm glad it's over.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Claim your LJ OpenID on Dreamwidth!

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 01:54:18 GMT

Before you abandon LJ altogether, or even if you don't intend to leave at all, go over to your Dreamwidth account and claim your LiveJournal OpenID (see instructions here)

Doing that ensures that all the comments you made over on LiveJournal will link to your Dreamwidth account when people import them. And if you haven't imported your LJ yet, do it soon before LJ notices that it's going on and blocks it.

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PSA: LJBF: Goodbye's too good a word...

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 17:02:00 GMT

If you use Livejournal, you will already have seen the pop-up demanding that you agree to their new terms of service. med_cat has an excellent partial translation and analysis. A full copy of the agreement can be found in archangelbeth | And the translation of the New User Agreement for Livejournal

I will add more as they come in. The salient points are:

[The user must] Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0 −18) as “adult material” by using Service functions.
Who the heck knows what this includes? Play it safe.
The user may not:
- without the Administration’s special permit, use automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to collect information from the Service and/or to interact with the Service;
  Which arguably covers backing up to DW or your local hard drive.
- post advertising and/or political solicitation materials unless otherwise directly specified in a separate agreement between User and the Administration;
  This presumably covers promoting one's CDs or other ventures.

Many of my friends are leaving altogether. I don't blame them.

What I have done:

I post no original content on LJ -- it's all cross-posted from here on Dreamwidth.
Copied all LJ content -- posts and comments -- over to Dreamwidth.
Comments on cross-posts are disabled; the footer has a link to the corresponding DW post.
I use LJ only to read comments and posts that are not on Dreamwidth. I read DW first so that I can skip cross-posts that don't have comments.
I have started to take people who no longer allow comments on LJ off my friends list.
Effective immediately, I am marking my journal as "adult content", and disabled my participation in "user rankings".
I have reduced the amount of information shown in my profile. In particular, I have removed my list of interests.
I have taken my website link off the journal headers and out of my profile. If you want more information, look at my DW profile.

Future action:

Sometime in mid-April, I will disable comments altogether on LJ, at which point all existing comments will be hidden. They've already been copied over to Dreamwidth, so nothing will be lost. This is for your protection, in case you've posted a comment that could be construed as violating Russian law.
At some point, I will stop cross-posting, both because of the legal risk and as a protest.
At some further point, I may delete all or most of my posts, or possibly replace them with links to the corresponding posts on DW.

Sorry, LJ. We had a great time together, but I think it's best for both of us if we go back to being just friends. OK?

And I'm not saying you treated me unkind / You could have done better, but I don't mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time. / Don't think twice, it's all right.

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Has LJ gone all Facebook on us?

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 03:37:08 GMT

I opened up LJ this evening to find that the posts it's showing are out of sequence -- the top post on my friends' feed is from yesterday sometime, and there's a later one further down the page. It isn't most recent comment, either: both of those are from an account that turns comments off on crossposts.

My conclusion is that either they're using some kind of ranking system which they're not telling us about (and which I didn't see any setting for that that might fix it), or possibly that crossposts are arriving weirdly out of sequence. So...

PSA #1: If you're posting on LJ and not DW, or posting different content on LJ, I might not see your posts.

PSA #2: If you're crossposting and redirect all your comments to DW, I'm going to stop reading you on LJ to cut down on clutter. (If you allow comments on LJ I'll still go over there and read them, if I can find your post. That is, obviously, no longer guaranteed.)

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Done this year (20170101Su - 07Sa)

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 03:10:20 GMT

So 2017 started with an inch of snow on the ground, and the entire week has been unseasonably cold. Welcome to global warming? I spent most of last week trying, with limited success, to catch up on the things I'd fallen behind on over my week of vacaton. I may survive the month.

Now that LJ has moved its servers to Russia (dropping HTTPS and at least a hundred pro-Ukraine blogs in the process), it seemed like a good time to disable comments on my crossposts and direct all comments to Dreamwidth. If you're reading this on LJ you can comment there with OpenID as [yourname]@livejournal.com. But I think you'd be better off making yourself a Dreamwidth account, importing your LJ, and crossposting. Just ask if you need help -- I've been giving out lots of advice.

The other news is that we (N and I) bought a new (to us) car -- it's a 2004 Honda Odyssey which (who?) seems to be going by the name Rosie.

We have also done quite a bit of cleaning-up and downsizing; first order of business is to get the downstairs cleared out so it can have a new floor and kitchen cabinets installed. Needs doing.

... and yesterday I transplanted my storage server into a small case. It's back on the mini-ITX board I'd had it on for the last couple of years; the smaller case makes a lot more room on the shelf. Downsizing.

Looks like it's going to be an interesting year. Lots of adventures. Nasty, uncomfortable things.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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PSA and test: disabling comments on LJ crossposts

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 19:42:42 GMT

I'm not going to go as far as some people, but I'm going to turn off comments on my crossposts, for several reasons:

to save me the trouble of having to import them into Dreamwidth,
to reduce my presence on Livejournal, now that it's wholly owned by Putin and Trump,
to encourage people to move to Dreamwidth.

Apropos of that, if you have a DW account that I'm not reading yet, just comment on this post and I'll add you.

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Recently noticed

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 01:52:51 GMT

Just in case you were wondering just how private your LJ is now that the server's in Moscow, we have:

  : wget https://mdlbear.livejournal.com
    --2016-12-30 16:59:04--  https://mdlbear.livejournal.com/
    Resolving mdlbear.livejournal.com (mdlbear.livejournal.com)... 81.19.74.1
    Connecting to mdlbear.livejournal.com (mdlbear.livejournal.com) [...]
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
    Location: http://mdlbear.livejournal.com/ [following]
    --2016-12-30 16:59:11--  http://mdlbear.livejournal.com/

... which means they are deliberately downgrading the connection from https to http. Wouldn't surprise me if blocking Dreamwidth is next.

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LJ server move confirmed

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 15:06:11 GMT

Thanks to a heads-up from madfilkentist, I can now confirm that LJ's servers were, in fact, moved to Moscow. The lag was presumably due to DNS propagation delay, which sometimes takes up to a week.

Geolocation data from IP2Location (Product: DB6, updated on 2016-12-5)
    Domain Name	     	  	Country		     	Region	City
    mdlbear.livejournal.com	Russian Federation 	Moskva	Moscow
    ISP					Organization	Latitude	Longitude
    Rambler Internet Holding LLC	Not Available	55.752220153809	37.615558624268
    (End of the road for LiveJournal [The Mad Filkentist])

See also my previous post on the topic, mdlbear | Dirty deeds afoot on LJ

One thing I forgot to mention: after you've set up an account on Dreamwidth, you should claim your Livejournal OpenId. That links your DW and LJ identities, so that anyone importing data from LJ will see comments as coming from your DW account even if you wrote them on LJ.

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Dirty deeds afoot on LJ

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 03:53:35 GMT

Several security-minded people on my reading list have been moving from Livejournal to Dreamwidth; some have even deleted their LJ accounts. Meanwhile, huge numbers of Russians have been moving their blogs to Dreamwidth. Apparently LJ has quietly moved all of their servers from the US to Russia. That LJ availability glitch a couple of days ago? Yeah, that. A large spike in the number of new Dreamwidth accounts being created by Russians.

As for me, I'm not changing much: I don't lock posts (I think I have maybe two or three, and those are merely somewhat embarrassing), I post only to DW, and I and have it set up to crosspost to LJ. I have permanent accounts in both places, so dropping LJ wouldn't be denying them any money at this point.

There are some things you can do:

Get an account at Dreamwidth.org if you don't already have one.
Set it up to crosspost to your LJ account. Unlike LJ, Dreamwidth is a US-based organization that, unlike LJ, is entirely supported by its users.
Every so often, back up your LJ journal to DW.
Subscribe to the DW journals of all your old LJ friends. Note that DW separates your access-control list from your reading list -- none of this abuse of the term "friend" that LJ does.
Don't post any secrets! Especially not to livejournal. Go back and delete anything you wouldn't want to be read by any three-letter agency on either side of the pond.

( Notes from today's investigations: )

Let's put it this way: regardless of whether LJ has actually transferred your journal to a server in Russia, you should consider the privacy of your livejournal to have been breached.

Sorry to be the bear of bad news.

ETA: LiveJournal servers moved to Russia: darkoshi

As some people have pointed out, this doesn't change very much. Sure, it adds support for the notion that LJ's Russian owners are slime, but we already knew that. Move to DW, set up crossposting, delete all non-public posts, don't give LJ any more money, and carry on.

ETA 12-30 Looks like DNS updates have finally propagated:

  : Geolocation data from IP2Location (Product: DB6, updated on 2016-12-5)
    Domain Name	     	  	Country		     	Region	City
    mdlbear.livejournal.com	Russian Federation 	Moskva	Moscow
    ISP					Organization	Latitude	Longitude
    Rambler Internet Holding LLC	Not Available	55.752220153809	37.615558624268

(thanks to: The Mad Filkentist)

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Fixing LJ's homepage

Sat, 17 May 2014 02:43:56 GMT

I've been seeing a number of complaints on my friends page about the new LJ homepage. Here's how you fix it:

Go to your friends page. It's [your-user-name].livejournal.com/friends .
Bookmark it.
Never go to the LJ home page again.

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PSA: meta: anonymous comments disabled on LJ

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:01:17 GMT

Because of the recent major increase in anonymous spam comments on LJ, I have disabled them there. Either register, or come on over to Dreamwidth where anonymous comments are still enabled. Besides, I can always use more comments on the DW side.

Also, I've pretty much stopped posting "hippo birdie" posts, in part because the LJ portal is going away, and in part because I've taken the LJ portal and home page off my "AM" list. They were pretty useless to begin with and have become more so. With the demise of birthday posts, I now have no unique content on LJ -- it's all cross-posted from DW.

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PSA: Fixing Livejournal

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:08:01 GMT

Here, in two easy pieces, is how to fix Livejournal's recent problems.

Fixing the comment page.

First, if you're still using an S1 (ancient) style, switch to S2.
Go to your profile.
Go to Journal > Journal Style, and in the box headed <yourID>'s Current Theme click on "Customize your theme" (or just follow the link)
Under "Basic Options", find the line labeled "Disable customized comment pages for your journal". Select "No". (As in "no, don't fsck up my comments".)
Go to Profile > Settings > Display(tab) (or just follow this link.)
Under "Comment Pages", check the box for "View comment pages from my Friends page in my own style"

Fixing DDOS attacks, Rich Text Editor failures, and a host of other problems.

Go to dreamwidth.org and create an account. For the rest of this year you can create a free account without an invite code, but a paid account is well worth the price.
From your profile, go to Organize > Manage Account > Other Sites (tab), or follow this link.
Add your LJ account under "Crossposting", and check the boxes under "Crosspost by Default" and "Display Crosspost Link". Now anything you post on your shiny new DW account will be crossposted to LJ.
Go to Organize > Import Content (or follow the link to Import Journal). Import your old LJ contents. Do this every month or so to import the accumulated comments.

Now, sit back and watch the ongoing decline of LJ with a certain air of amused detachment.

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Dear Livejournal.com

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:45:54 GMT

Dear LJ:

Despite what status.livejournal.com says, your site is almost completely FUBAR. I can get to my friends page and parts of my profile, but that's it. And you have started sending me email in HTML instead of text.

No love,

==mdlbear

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Growf

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:47:02 GMT

My previous post didn't cross-post to LJ; this makes me grumpy. We'll see if this one works -- I'm guessing it won't, either.

ETA: and indeed it didn't.

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Transitioned

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 18:19:28 GMT

I've made my decision: Most of my posts will start out posted on mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, and be automatically crossposted from there to mdlbear.livejournal.com. If LJ is flaky, I'll get them transfered as soon as I can.

The exceptions will be fluff like birthday posts, LJ's "writer's block" (which I do occasionally), and other memes, which will originate on LJ and get pulled back to DW somewhere between weekly and every couple of months. Weekly if I can figure out how to automate the import process.

I may stop doing the birthday posts altogether except on rare occasions; I seem to resent the time even though it's not very much. Possibly because it registers in my tiny bear-like brain as a break in my morning routine, coming well before the caffeine has hit. Let me know what you think about that.

I still want to have a "blog" on my main website, but that's still in the future. I have "blog" in quotes because it will just be for my longer articles and series like The River and Adventures in Family Computing.

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