Holy Technology!
Feb. 7th, 2022 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI've now done two posts just on LiveJournal on and after the last day I posted here. They will be among my last there.
I began blogging on that site in April of 2004, when All The Cool Kids were doing it. After making many friends and connections, joining numerous LJ communities and paying them annually for extra icons and userpics, I opened the same-name account here in 2009. Then I moved virtually all of my new content to Dreamwidth after the US owners sold LJ to a Russian conglomerate which then imposed very homophobic terms of service. Even so, I maintained active cross-posting of all entries to my old LJ page, and set up an RSS feed of those (mostly cross-posted) entries that showed up back on my Friends Reading page here.
By all accounts, that cross-posting of the streams is now over and done with. Over the years, there have been occasional blackouts on LJ of cross-postings from this and other sites, mainly caused by outside users forgetting to update passwords passed back and forth in the cross-posting process. As the Dreamwidth explainer about it, well, explained,.... it happens when someone has automatic crossposting set up and has changed their LiveJournal password, but hasn't updated the password on their Dreamwidth crosspost settings. The number of failed logins trip LiveJournal's "attempted account hacking" detection system and our IP addresses are locked out from the site. This stops all Dreamwidth users from crossposting, whether or not their passwords are correct: we are entirely blocked from accessing LiveJournal at all.
For a decade or so, when this happened, we were able to contact them and have them remove us from the lockout list manually and whitelist our IP address range so that it wouldn't happen again. At some point in the last several years, they switched to telling us that the blocking is automatic, they aren't able to whitelist any IPs manually, and that we were mistaken when we were able to resolve the issue for a decade by emailing them and having them whitelist us manually; by this point, they no longer respond to us at all about the issue.
Rather than wait for Boris and Natasha to get back to them, the latest word is that Dreamwidth has now taken the bear by the horns and completely disabled cross-posting to LJ on its own end. So that means the only place you can see new content from me, or any of the thousands of ex-L-Jay-triots over here, is by coming to Dreamwidth.
At last count, including my first-in-forever direct post to LJ explaining all this, I had 6,494 entries over there, accumulated over almost 18 years. Numbers geek that I am, I decided to post six more LJ exclusives there, over the next two months and minor change, so my final LiveJournal post will be Number 6,500 and will hit on April 17, the day that blog becomes old enough to vote.
Now it's down to five more, because I decided to post something there, and link to it here and elsewhere, that I found very cool. At the same time, I found the paywalling of it to be very uncool.
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"Support Quality Journalism," they say. Mostly, I do. For years, we supported the local paper with actual home delivery on Sundays and digital the rest of the week. We then watched as they systematically jacked the price up to over $45 a month when they were offering n00bs a buck a month deal for digital-only. We became n00bs at that point. The big boys- NYT and WaPo- are constantly throwing come-ons at us, but their content is usually available elsewhere or by playing with cookie settings. Pro tip: if you ever get paywalled on one of these, google "Washington Post (or New York Times) library access." Many public libraries offer free online access to their own accounts with the papers; Bezos makes you go through a weekly re-up to continue reading the Post, while the Times seems more interested in how many articles you've read.
We also still pay annually to get access to what's left of the Rochester "Demagogue and Comical"- once the flagship paper of the Gannett empire and now, largely, a Pennysaver-size paper in print with much of its content the same as Elmira, Binghamton and the Hudson Valley where that chain also has outposts. Their sports staff is down to basically one (really talented) guy, they laid off their music critic and most of their columnists, but every now and then they hit with something really moving for one reason or another....
and every one of them is "subscribers only."
No "five articles free this month" for you. They're paywalling what they should be celebrating. So I decided to use that LJ account to provide unfettered access to this story:
Who is Rochester's Batman? And what is he doing here?
Now Batman has come to Rochester.
On a cold and windy Friday afternoon, people drive by the Blue Cross Arena, honking their horns and stopping for pictures.
The source of their attention is a familiar face to many. He's known as the Dark Knight — it's Batman, or at least a tall man entirely donning the caped crusader's costume.
The man isn't looking for attention or encouraging photos like those dressed up as comic book characters in Las Vegas or Times Square. Instead, this man waits with a wheelbarrow, expecting a local organization to drop off food, blankets and other life supplies.
That's just the beginning of it. Click that last link to read the whole story, with photos, of this second-year RIT student who decided to cosplay for a cause.
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We talked and posted quite a bit over the weekend about lower-tech things in our lives: books and music. Eleanor's been focusing on the former, as she catalogs, updates and weeds through the hundreds of books in our rooms and cellar. I added my two cents (which is about what Spotify pays:P) on the related subject of our audio collection. This is my reminder to give the post of it own that it deserves.
One book she hasn't added to the list yet is the one I'm just finishing: the Mel Brooks memoir. Over the weekend, I got to his recollections of High Anxiety (his Hitchcock spoof/tribute comedy which we watched last night and Hitch himself loved), Spaceballs, some of his more serious production efforts including Elephant Man, but also To Be Or Not To Be, a remake of a 40s film that he did to highlight the talents of his longtime wife Anne Bancroft.
The chapter on that film, with other stories about Anne, also brought back a memory of an even older television appearance she did. I was too young to remember it, but I did remember a shorter and famously unfunny riff on it that David Letterman did the one year he hosted the Oscars. Does anyone else remember this? At the beginning of his opening monologue, he pointed to two actresses in the crowd and said,
Uma? Oprah! Oprah? Uma!
It seemed weird at the time, and was the beginning of the end of his Oscar hosting career. But as Anne Bancroft proved many years before, he just didn't tell it right. SHE did a fuller and funnier version of it on television in 1970, a sketch adapted from an even earlier New Yorker comic piece. This is what Dave was trying to do, and as with many women, she did it better, backward lying down and in heels:
Yeah...
Date: 2022-02-23 11:17 am (UTC)Trying to get your posts to exactly 6500 reminded me of Dave, who has this thing about tipping the wait staff to make every bill come out as a palindrome. He's funny. :)