hello, good evening, welcome and goodbye
Hi! Further to the LJ terms of service change thing, I guess I'll take 'try and get back in the habit of posting on LJ' off my to-do list, where it's been for like seven years.
But is anyone still here? Are people going over to Dreamwidth en-semi-masse? Might that wake things up over there a bit? If you're moving over or have already done, come and find me here. I've transferred my whole journal over, which I hadn't realised was possible.
I've never found a place on the internet to replace LJ, and that sucks. Facebook is like those nightmares where you realise you're naked at school and somehow your boss, your mum and your appalling US state trooper cousin are also watching. Sometimes you find some clothes and put them on, but then Mark Zuckerberg sneaks up and takes them off again when you're not paying attention. Twitter is also like that except there's an angry mob on the horizon with guns. Tumblr is like a cosy living-room which looks like it has walls, so people let themselves be messy and vulnerable, but occasionally something you say gets picked out of the conversation and broadcast to thousands over a giant tannoy. Instagram is nice and laid-back but so full of people (very, very not anyone who's likely to read this, mind) saying they're #blessed, or whatever, with rictus grins, that it makes my teeth ache. ('So #grateful to my spirited children who teach me patience every day!' Oh, honey.)
And everywhere people apologise for writing long things. I like writing and reading long things, especially about people's lives, the totality of lives with all their various interests, not the one topic they guess they ought to focus on in order to monetise their blog. Hi, I am an old curmudgeon, and right now I'm kind of revelling in it. Come and join me in my curmudgeon-den. Maybe even come to Dreamwidth.
But for a long time - like, between 2003 and 2009 - LJ was a whole world, and provided the understructure for a whole rich, busy real-world social life. Thanks to LJ my then-partner and I travelled along the US west coast for three weeks in 2005, staying and having awesome times with friendly not-quite-strangers all the way. The LJ poll feature helped me make massive art (I just asked you all what you were thinking, and just like that you all told me, and it became the Collective Consciousness installation). I have so many and different feels about The Ladies' Loos that I can't sum them up, but... that also happened. I got letters from all over the place, via kindly strangers who found them in the street, after posting about my Postwodehouse project in the found-objects community. So much of that decade is bound up with LJ, for better or worse, and most of the time I felt able to speak here more than I've felt that anywhere else. I'm straight-up grateful for that.
OK, I'm out of here. HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
But is anyone still here? Are people going over to Dreamwidth en-semi-masse? Might that wake things up over there a bit? If you're moving over or have already done, come and find me here. I've transferred my whole journal over, which I hadn't realised was possible.
I've never found a place on the internet to replace LJ, and that sucks. Facebook is like those nightmares where you realise you're naked at school and somehow your boss, your mum and your appalling US state trooper cousin are also watching. Sometimes you find some clothes and put them on, but then Mark Zuckerberg sneaks up and takes them off again when you're not paying attention. Twitter is also like that except there's an angry mob on the horizon with guns. Tumblr is like a cosy living-room which looks like it has walls, so people let themselves be messy and vulnerable, but occasionally something you say gets picked out of the conversation and broadcast to thousands over a giant tannoy. Instagram is nice and laid-back but so full of people (very, very not anyone who's likely to read this, mind) saying they're #blessed, or whatever, with rictus grins, that it makes my teeth ache. ('So #grateful to my spirited children who teach me patience every day!' Oh, honey.)
And everywhere people apologise for writing long things. I like writing and reading long things, especially about people's lives, the totality of lives with all their various interests, not the one topic they guess they ought to focus on in order to monetise their blog. Hi, I am an old curmudgeon, and right now I'm kind of revelling in it. Come and join me in my curmudgeon-den. Maybe even come to Dreamwidth.
But for a long time - like, between 2003 and 2009 - LJ was a whole world, and provided the understructure for a whole rich, busy real-world social life. Thanks to LJ my then-partner and I travelled along the US west coast for three weeks in 2005, staying and having awesome times with friendly not-quite-strangers all the way. The LJ poll feature helped me make massive art (I just asked you all what you were thinking, and just like that you all told me, and it became the Collective Consciousness installation). I have so many and different feels about The Ladies' Loos that I can't sum them up, but... that also happened. I got letters from all over the place, via kindly strangers who found them in the street, after posting about my Postwodehouse project in the found-objects community. So much of that decade is bound up with LJ, for better or worse, and most of the time I felt able to speak here more than I've felt that anywhere else. I'm straight-up grateful for that.
OK, I'm out of here. HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME