As most people who read this know, and far more who don't anymore also know, there is no love lost between me and the current owners of the LiveJournal blogging site. A San Francisco company sold it off to some Russians ages ago, and a couple of years ago their Terms of Service became especially homophobic and censorial.
The code for the software itself was open source, and variations developed over the years including DeadJournal, InfiniteJournal, JournalFen, and the one I now use as my primary host- Dreamwidth. Most of the settings and benefits are the same, and both the sites themselves and the primary software used to draft the entries allow "cross-posting" back to LJ. It's from those efforts that I get that magic number of 6,004. Had I been aware more than a day ago of that count, I'd have shut up a little bit so that today hosted my 6,000th entry.
Why? (What? Who wasn't enough for you? I don't know....)
Because it was 15 years ago today that I first stuck a toe in the blogging waters, and took the nom de bloggue of captainsblog that has stuck with me ever since.
LJ was invite-only back then, and I think I snagged one from a much younger friend I'd been doing online writing with. It gradually took the place in my life of trivia games and other AOL-based online interactions. Over those 15 years, my "friends" from that first effort came from everywhere and nowhere. These fellow writers from the online webseries were an initial core; an odd group calling itself![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
buffalo_dorks(long-deceased) brought a variety of locally based cool peeps, many of whom I've eventually met and stayed in touch with despite them almost, to a one, leaving the blogging life. There was an odd "event" called ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ljdq- standing for "daily quiz" but actually propounded weekly, where the goal, much like on QI, was not to get the "right" answer but entertain the audience with your novel or clever one; the mods, one of whom I still connect with, chose the best answers, and I was always proud to make the weekly roundup, and became friends with Ang and others through that. Friends begat friends of friends, who begat fellow communities with new friends, who occasionally did "friendzies" to repopulate the lists....
and then Facebook and Twitter took over the universe, and most headed to them and, if not totally gone from this world, are rare in their posts.
For me for a long time, it was a daily regimen- but for the past several, one or two a week is ordinary, more is rare, none is less rare. Mr. Ray will never speak unless he has something to say. Still, despite seeming to not care about the effort, I managed to hit significant milestones right on the April 17 blogiversary, as I noted the day after the event, that year a non-event, in 2012:
It was one of the last ones in,ecosopher, who reminded me of all this yesterday. She posted a note that I just missed the five-year-older birthday of LJ itself. This is the link to the memory posted of it, which will personalize to you if you're still logged in to the thing.
So here's a raise of a glass to the Final 145- those whose journals still exist in some form, living or dormant, primary or cross-posty, in some secure Soviet bunker in the Ural Mountains. Some will see me link to this on Facebook and might remember a name they once used, a friend they once made, a laugh we once shared. I doubt will be doing this again in 2034, so get those comments in while you can, kids;) I'll even enable them on LJ if you're not logged in; spam's not much of a problem there anymore:P
The code for the software itself was open source, and variations developed over the years including DeadJournal, InfiniteJournal, JournalFen, and the one I now use as my primary host- Dreamwidth. Most of the settings and benefits are the same, and both the sites themselves and the primary software used to draft the entries allow "cross-posting" back to LJ. It's from those efforts that I get that magic number of 6,004. Had I been aware more than a day ago of that count, I'd have shut up a little bit so that today hosted my 6,000th entry.
Why? (What? Who wasn't enough for you? I don't know....)
Because it was 15 years ago today that I first stuck a toe in the blogging waters, and took the nom de bloggue of captainsblog that has stuck with me ever since.
LJ was invite-only back then, and I think I snagged one from a much younger friend I'd been doing online writing with. It gradually took the place in my life of trivia games and other AOL-based online interactions. Over those 15 years, my "friends" from that first effort came from everywhere and nowhere. These fellow writers from the online webseries were an initial core; an odd group calling itself
buffalo_dorks(long-deceased) brought a variety of locally based cool peeps, many of whom I've eventually met and stayed in touch with despite them almost, to a one, leaving the blogging life. There was an odd "event" called ljdq- standing for "daily quiz" but actually propounded weekly, where the goal, much like on QI, was not to get the "right" answer but entertain the audience with your novel or clever one; the mods, one of whom I still connect with, chose the best answers, and I was always proud to make the weekly roundup, and became friends with Ang and others through that. Friends begat friends of friends, who begat fellow communities with new friends, who occasionally did "friendzies" to repopulate the lists....and then Facebook and Twitter took over the universe, and most headed to them and, if not totally gone from this world, are rare in their posts.
For me for a long time, it was a daily regimen- but for the past several, one or two a week is ordinary, more is rare, none is less rare. Mr. Ray will never speak unless he has something to say. Still, despite seeming to not care about the effort, I managed to hit significant milestones right on the April 17 blogiversary, as I noted the day after the event, that year a non-event, in 2012:
For many years, I've been very aware of the anniversary of starting this journal on LJ, which has been a large and largely amazing part of my life. In several of them, it was possible, even easy, to speed up/slow down an entry here and there so that the anniversary entries were also numerically significant. This one from two years ago, for instance, was the 2900th; the '07 anniversary was the 1440th (gross!); and, the year before that, I hit 1000 on the button.
It was one of the last ones in,
ecosopher, who reminded me of all this yesterday. She posted a note that I just missed the five-year-older birthday of LJ itself. This is the link to the memory posted of it, which will personalize to you if you're still logged in to the thing.So here's a raise of a glass to the Final 145- those whose journals still exist in some form, living or dormant, primary or cross-posty, in some secure Soviet bunker in the Ural Mountains. Some will see me link to this on Facebook and might remember a name they once used, a friend they once made, a laugh we once shared. I doubt will be doing this again in 2034, so get those comments in while you can, kids;) I'll even enable them on LJ if you're not logged in; spam's not much of a problem there anymore:P
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