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Beginning of the End....
Apr. 13th, 2017 09:09 pmJust a heads-up: Soon it will be The End of This Blog As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)....
No, it won't be the end of me, or of me blogging. There's a Why and a Where to be explained. This will explain the first; suggestions on the second are under advisement.
I began this journal on this site almost exactly 13 years ago, when it was still invite-only. Not long after, it was acquired by a US-based service called Six Apart, and it came at a time when blogs were moving into the worlds of venture capital and major Internet Player Branding. But the marriage was not good- Six Apart was focused more on their paid service TypePad, and LJ soon wound up in the hands of a Russian company named SUP. We all made moose-and-squirrel jokes and kept on blogging. Other social media forms and formats came along, and some of us kept on blogging. Then Russia lost its fucking Soviet mind over things like LGBTQ equality, and a lot of us started getting nervous about blogging on servers located behind a Bigoted Curtain.
Now, though, finally it's gotten personal. In order to log in and post here as of last week, you had to agree to new Terms of Service. They were kind enough to post the new terms in English, but with a disclaimer that the Cryllic terms are the controlling ones.
You like to read, maybe? In Soviet Russia, Terms Service YOU!
Much of it is standard TOSsity BSity, except: The User may not...post advertising and/or political solicitation materials...[or] perform any other actions contradictory to the laws of the Russian Federation and/or any other applicable laws, including those applicable in the jurisdiction of User’s residence.
If'n you hadn't heard, the Russian Parliament has been busy in the past few years, and there are now laws on the books which ban any discussion of "sexual deviancy." You know, Adam and Steve- or Uri and Dmitri. So any advocacy of the very things I've always advocated, or anything suggesting that Владимир Путин - оловянный диктатор с марионеткой в нашем Белом доме и крошечный член, well,....
That Would Be Wrong. And could get me banhammer-and-sickled.
So get ready for a change. If you follow this on other media, I'll still post public entries that will be linked. At least temporarily, once you see a "last entry" entry here, they will be cross-posted to a long-dormant blogging site using the same code. Nothing new here, yet, but there may be.
The other leader in the clubhouse is to makesomething bigger out of this bigotry. On May 1st, I will be becoming a real tenant of my primary law office, no longer subletting. With that comes signage, and with signs come the need to put websites on them. I've never had one- although I've owned my own domain for years (mainly to keep other Rays with the same name from grabbing it). Coincidentally, I'm also awaiting word on whether my email address of the past eleven-plus years will be changing, since Time Warner Cable has now morphed into something called Spectrum and probably won't be paying a now-unaffiliated media conglomerate potentially millions a year to name its email service after a coyote-taunting bird. If that changes, I will almost certainly change my email address to ray@mydomain.com, start a website at the same domain for both work and personal things, and this journal would become the center of the personal side.
Lots to plan, lots to back up- so just keep in touch through all the usual media channels while we still have them. My personal email will not be changing, and you can always contact me through that.
No, it won't be the end of me, or of me blogging. There's a Why and a Where to be explained. This will explain the first; suggestions on the second are under advisement.
I began this journal on this site almost exactly 13 years ago, when it was still invite-only. Not long after, it was acquired by a US-based service called Six Apart, and it came at a time when blogs were moving into the worlds of venture capital and major Internet Player Branding. But the marriage was not good- Six Apart was focused more on their paid service TypePad, and LJ soon wound up in the hands of a Russian company named SUP. We all made moose-and-squirrel jokes and kept on blogging. Other social media forms and formats came along, and some of us kept on blogging. Then Russia lost its fucking Soviet mind over things like LGBTQ equality, and a lot of us started getting nervous about blogging on servers located behind a Bigoted Curtain.
Now, though, finally it's gotten personal. In order to log in and post here as of last week, you had to agree to new Terms of Service. They were kind enough to post the new terms in English, but with a disclaimer that the Cryllic terms are the controlling ones.
You like to read, maybe? In Soviet Russia, Terms Service YOU!
Much of it is standard TOSsity BSity, except: The User may not...post advertising and/or political solicitation materials...[or] perform any other actions contradictory to the laws of the Russian Federation and/or any other applicable laws, including those applicable in the jurisdiction of User’s residence.
If'n you hadn't heard, the Russian Parliament has been busy in the past few years, and there are now laws on the books which ban any discussion of "sexual deviancy." You know, Adam and Steve- or Uri and Dmitri. So any advocacy of the very things I've always advocated, or anything suggesting that Владимир Путин - оловянный диктатор с марионеткой в нашем Белом доме и крошечный член, well,....
That Would Be Wrong. And could get me banhammer-and-sickled.
So get ready for a change. If you follow this on other media, I'll still post public entries that will be linked. At least temporarily, once you see a "last entry" entry here, they will be cross-posted to a long-dormant blogging site using the same code. Nothing new here, yet, but there may be.
The other leader in the clubhouse is to makesomething bigger out of this bigotry. On May 1st, I will be becoming a real tenant of my primary law office, no longer subletting. With that comes signage, and with signs come the need to put websites on them. I've never had one- although I've owned my own domain for years (mainly to keep other Rays with the same name from grabbing it). Coincidentally, I'm also awaiting word on whether my email address of the past eleven-plus years will be changing, since Time Warner Cable has now morphed into something called Spectrum and probably won't be paying a now-unaffiliated media conglomerate potentially millions a year to name its email service after a coyote-taunting bird. If that changes, I will almost certainly change my email address to ray@mydomain.com, start a website at the same domain for both work and personal things, and this journal would become the center of the personal side.
Lots to plan, lots to back up- so just keep in touch through all the usual media channels while we still have them. My personal email will not be changing, and you can always contact me through that.