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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?)
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?
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?)
no subject
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.)