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1. I finally gave in and registered for BarricadesCon. I had been dithering because the last few online con I registered I ended up only attending a few things, I'm not sure I have the brain for even a semi-academic con (or the general smarts level of current Les Mis fandom for that matter) and I haven't been super deep in Les Mis for... awhile.

But on the other hand: snéance. Snail séance. Even if I only make it to the snéance it will be worth £10 admission.

2. While I had my credit card out I bought the Ukraine charity itch.io bundle. Did I need 900 more indie games? Have I played even a single one of the games from the 2020 bundle? No, and no. Have I in fact played any games since 2020 except Minecraft and silly phone games? ~~no, because MinerVGA totally counts as Minecraft v.-0.1~~ But look if I ever want to play games, now I will have even more! Maybe I will become a Twitch streamer and play a different indie game from the bundles every day, weirder things have happened.

3. I put in an application for a cat at the animal shelter! It was for "some hypothetical cat" because the lady at the desk last fall recommended I apply for "kitten waitlist" if I thought I might want a cat in the next month or two, even if I didn't want a kitten, because the applications get backlogged. So ball's in their court now I guess. None of the cats currently on their website told me they were my perfect cat yet, although poor Stella Sweet Pea is the only one who's been at the shelter since I started looking a year ago, so I will have to at least ask about her.

4. Well, my post about archiving and linking ethics became suddenly very relevant didn't it!

Have a minor update to that post with my opinions on the things people have been doing to back up LJ content in the last couple of days:
---importing a public LJ account you control to DW is always okay, I put it in the same category as Open Doors imports since it's still basically the same sort of site, and people can fairly easily claim their content and remove it if they want.
---importing a mostly-locked LJ account to DW is a little iffier, even if you keep it locked, since the people in the lock on DW won't be the same ones as on LJ? But in an LJ comm you always had the risk that the lock rules would change on you, so it's probably fine.
---importing a comm you control to a public non-dw website is also a little iffier, since people won't necessarily be able to claim/control their content
---posting a public copy of an lj comm or account you don't own is, as usual, bad, don't do it
---saving a private copy for yourself is also fine, as always
---passing private copies around privately is fine
---(if it's an LJ community or project that's fandom-related, had a reasonably large readership, and predates c. 2012, somebody probably already has a private copy somewhere from one of the previous panics over Russia owning LJ, so don't worry too much.)

---saving a private bookmark is always fine
---saving a public bookmark/link list of public content on lj is fine

---deliberately saving a copy to wayback or equivalent is tougher, but if a website is actively endangered, that's a little bit different than just doing it to everything automatically, so I would at least consider it.

---saving bookmarks or link lists where you link to wayback copies instead of the original even though the original is still up: why?? Why do people do this?? Don't do this, this is a bad idea for so many reasons.

5. Being on a grand jury is exhausting even though it doesn't feel like it at the time, and there are not enough hours in the day for sleeping. (on the plus side I just found out I get to have my full day's normal pay in jury leave *and* keep my jury pay, so getting paid twice wooooo?)

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Are you allowed to say in broad non-identifying terms what the case is about

eg embezzlement, murder?

It's a grand jury, which I think is mostly an American thing, and like most uniquely American things, doesn't really make a lot of sense.

We don't try cases, we look at preliminary evidence and decide if the case is good enough to even bother with a trial. I don't think Australia has a direct equivalent but it's a sort of a preliminary hearing. Prosecutors can also subpoena witnesses to testify under oath in front of a grand jury in order to gather evidence to figure out if it's even worth asking the jury to indict, so we're also spending a fair amount of time just listening to witnesses in cases where we may not ever even decide anything.

I can talk about procedural and general stuff like the above but can't even hint at any specific cases; grand juries have even stronger secrecy rules than petit juries, because in some cases the fact that the case is even being investigated is secret until after the indictments, and since often nobody's even in custody yet, breaking secrecy can be really dangerous for everyone involved, too.

Because of that, we don't have just one case, we look at lots of cases. Yesterday we heard, iirc, more that half a dozen witnesses from almost as many different cases. Since it's a Federal grand jury, we only look at federal criminal cases, but I think federal crimes in the US and Australia are pretty similar. It can be anything from minor workplace safety regulatory violations to child sex trafficking rings, and we can hear cases over the whole range in one day. (Which I think is a large part of why it's so exhausting when we do a whole day!)

Edited 2022-03-11 03:08 (UTC)

Wow, yeah, I've never heard of anything like that in Australia!

I've never been on a jury in Australia

[and am now chronically ill enough that I would not be able to manage it, even without COVID - I can only concentrate on listening to speech for about 90 minutes before I start missing words and zoning out, no matter how hard I try to pay attention. Plus I need the ability to lie down and be horizontal regularly]

but from what I've heard,

you turn up,

and if you get picked, you get ONE case

which could be "this person was selling a skincare product without the appropriate Therapeutic Goods Administration safety permit" (a real case that really happened in my state, the person accused claimed the skincare product was a food and not a skincare product, and ate a jar of it in court)

or could be murder

but you never get more than ONE case.

Do you have judge-only trials with no jury? We have them here occasionally - I think it's up to the defendant to opt-in, which they do sometimes because either:

a) the defense lawyer thinks the defendant will alienate a jury;

b) due to COVID there are lengthy wait times for a jury trial, and the defendant wants the trial over and done with because they can't get bail because of the risk of them reoffending or intimidating witnesses

The last judge-only trial I heard about in my city was a man who had been accused of murdering three women for his entertainment (also some sexual assaults etc) - he asked for a judge only trial because his defense lawyer did not think a jury would be sympathetic to him[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont_serial_killings#Trial

Yeah, the US has those kinds of juries too, those are sometimes called Petit Juries here to distinguish from Grand Juries, but Petit Juries are much more common and you're much more likely to end up on one - getting called to a federal grand jury was like a 1 in several thousand chance.

I was a near miss for ending up on a petit jury for a mass shooter trial just before Covid, but thankfully the defendant decided to plead guilty, that would not have been good either. There are a lot of judge-only trials though, they may be more common than jury for some crimes - defendants can request one if they want, they tend to go a lot faster, and I think a lot of times either the defense lawyers convinces the defendants they're better off with a judge, or the prosecutors do deal-making where they agree to drop certain charges in exchange for the defendant doing a quick non-jury trial for the others.

Oh, yay, I'm glad you're coming to Barricades!

I will be at the sneance at least!

I'm still torn on the Ukraine bundle. There was some pointed fuckery by the organizers while it was being assembled so I might just toss a check at MSF or something instead.

In a way, I'm baffled by the fuss with suddenly "saving"/importing LJ comms as if there hasn't been more than a decade in which to do it. But my experience with LJ comms was that they were ultimately ephemeral. A mod would flounce and delete everything, there'd be epic mod battles and I'd fuck off into the sunset when suddenly the rules had entirely changes, sometimes I'd wander in, post a bit, wander off... Even the few comms I modded were just sort of there, which is why I never dragged them over back when it was easier to do so. I'm guessing this really varied by fandom and participants? Mailing lists were basically the same feeling, which is why I kinda shrugged at Y!Groups demise. The fic got archived, nobody needs to save forty-seven "this was nice" comments.

(I also truly hope anyone doing massive community importing staggers their imports to let the people with decades of personal journal entries get their stuff taken care of.)

Fear not, we run multiple import workers, so a big import doesn't stop all the little imports from happening!

(I am also baffled by the people who are just now discovering after how long that LJ is owned by a Russian company, because I thought that was pretty common knowledge? but apparently a bunch of people missed it!)

Edited 2022-03-11 23:10 (UTC)

Oh, that's good to know! Somewhere, I saw people panicking about needing to import a ton of personal stuff and to me, that stuck as being most important.

(Ditto. Like I said to

melannen, I thought anyone still using the site had made an Informed Choice but here we are.)

Yeah, part of the extra resources we've been throwing at things this week has been increasing the number of import workers we have running from I-think-it-was-5 to something like 30. That doesn't necessarily mean "30 people's imports completing at the same time" because each 'import' is actually multiple separate jobs, each of which gets assigned to a different worker when you move on to the next step, but we've definitely at least quintupled the potential jobs running at once. (It also meant we had to give the database servers more memory, because you need extra memory on the machines running the workers and extra memory on the database servers they're writing to, but hey. The emergency fund is specifically for emergencies like "help get people's data safe faster so they all stop panicking"!)

Ooh, share the tea? I didn't hear any of that, but I'm not really plugged in to gaming gossip.

Honestly though as long as they're not lying about where the money is going I'm not too bothered - most of these 'charity' bundles are basically just stuff that's not selling anymore anyway that they can then take a tax writeoff on.

And yeah honestly if you're panicked about LJ being Russian *now* where have you been for the last ten years?? Somehow I had assumed most of the people still on LJ were people who were connected to the Russian side of it and knew what they were doing but... I guess not.

Neither am I, but I have friends who are. Basically, the bundle started out as three different bundles, by three different groups, each with different criteria for inclusion. By the time it became this bundle, the organizers told a lot of folks who were planning to contribute (using previous guidelines, some of which had different pointed fuckery in them including some invasive bullshit, but I digress) that no, their contributions didn't have value and they were chasing bigger name stuff instead. Minor, but a sour taste, I suppose.

But yes as far as I know the money/donations/etc. are all legit, nothing to worry about there.

Yeah, I'd basically assumed that after the server move + new ToS five years ago that sticking around on LJ was very much an Informed Choice but here we are. Or something.

I'm surprised by the number of people who didn't give a damn for years that their private data was in the hands of the Russian government/mob, but if people won't listen when you warn them... *shrugs*. I ported my accounts over as soon as I moved to Dreamwidth, and deleted my main LJ account when LJ's servers were relocate to Russia. I didn't bother deleting the many RP accounts, because who cares if a foreign government sees the LJ posts of sentient alien robots, but I did change all the passwords so the DW versions had different ones from the old LJ ones. Lo and behold, my old LJ emails and passwords all ended up on the darknet! Wow, what a surprise.

I've tried to warn people to get the hell off LJ, because their accounts and passwords there are almost certainly compromised, but you can't make people listen.

People are now frantic to import stuff because Russian internet is very likely going to turn into a Russian INTRAnet Real Soon Now, and there will then be NO access to LJ.

You have no idea how many times I've wanted to shake people by the shoulders and scream LIVEJOURNAL IS LITERALLY OWNED BY THE RUSSIAN STATE BANK, PEOPLE. (SUP passed it to Rambler Media Group, which is owned by Sberbank.)

And yeah. LiveJournal still insists they haven't had any security breach! Even though I've seen the actual file available on the black market and it had every single one of my old "I made this throwaway account for testing something and it is messed up in exactly the way we messed it up using direct database access in order to reproduce this problem we're trying to troubleshoot" accounts in it...

It's not "almost certainly compromised", it's "there is absolutely no chance it was not compromised". Just looking at the dumpfile authenticates it in like, 3.2 seconds.

I left mine up because I decided agreeing to the TOS to delete wasn't worth bringing it down, and there was some small benefit to old links continuing to work. But I too am amazed at how many people (even people who've already been on DW for years!) are suddenly surprised to learn that LJ is controlled by the Russian government. The English portion of LJ has been at imminent risk of coming down as being not worth the danger to the Russian owners basically since SUP bought the place! This isn't news.

---deliberately saving a copy to wayback or equivalent is tougher, but if a website is actively endangered, that's a little bit different than just doing it to everything automatically, so I would at least consider it.

I'm going to be a bit firmer here: it's a war situation. It's ethical to do whatever you can to save knowledge and history from the depredations of war or dictatorships. Ownership and legality didn't matter when the Nazis were coming to loot the treasures of the Louvre; stealing artwork away and hiding it from them was more important. If you can snatch a book from a bonfire, you've done the right thing, even if it wasn't your book.

Edited 2022-03-12 03:34 (UTC)

It isn't actually ethical to steal whatever you want during a war and then do whatever your want with it though? Like I don't think this is a great metaphor anyway, but that's not actually something I approve of either? The evacuation of the Louvre was not actually random passers-by emailing things to the British Museum as anonymous donations. And if the book you stole was full of Resistance codephrases and the place you dropped it off was not as safe as you thought - well actually you should have maybe let it burn.

But if you want to carefully put LJ on physical media and pack it in crates in underground bunkers until things settle down and you have a chance to carefully research who should have possession of it afterward, that I am 100% for.

My issues with wayback are mainly a) it's public, so you're not just tucking it away just in case, you're reposting it for everybody to see in a way the original creators may not have wanted and that makes it harder to give feedback etc; b) it's not actually all that safe! As I mentioned in my first post, Wayback has in the past changed its policies so that huge swathes of stuff just disappeared - for a few years you had to go to the bibalex mirror in Alexandria to find anything because Wayback itself was nearly empty (until the revolution in Egypt and the bibalex site stopped being reliable too! War!) There's no reason to think that won't happen again; and c) most of the people saving stuff to wayback aren't actually checking to see if the owners do have backups somewhere else, possibly safer than wayback. Very often they do, or are working on one! In those cases throwing up wayback links isn't actually doing anything other than confusing people and annoying the creators.

Like I said, if something is seriously endangered, the people who created it can't be contacted, there are no other backups, and it has real value to posterity, I do think wayback is a good option. For a lot of lj content right now, that's probably true. But it shouldn't be a preferred option or a default option. And if you really think it's valuable cultural patrimony that should be saved at all costs, you should be downloading locally and looking into those archival CDs, because the 'cloud' is just storing stuff on hard drives you don't control.

And "it's a war" is definitely not a reason to not think about questions like that. "Saving" things poorly just leads to stuff disappearing even more completely. (Because another reason I want to be cautious with Wayback is that I think it *is* a vital service, and the more people abuse it, the more people are going to deliberately block wayback from having their stuff, so that when the emergency really does happen the option won't be there.)

Edited 2022-03-12 04:41 (UTC)

I finally gave in and registered for BarricadesCon.

Belated comment is belated: Nemo!

https://barricadescon.com/nemo-martin/

They're writing an upcoming fiction podcast series for Rusty Quill and have made some appearances on Enthusigasm, RQ's series where various RQ associates and friends and other interesting people ramble about a thing they enjoy; they seem very smart and have good and correct thoughts about Black Sails.

Thus the Extended Rusty Quill Universe continues to Kevin-Bacon its tentacles across the world.

They have a really interesting bunch of guests and speakers! None of which I have heard of, I'm just there for the sneance. :P

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