icebluenothing | Entries tagged with livejournal

.... Man, you people are cynical. Nobody completely fell for that one. And I went to all that trouble, researching all those links, copying over my whole journal, making a new post there so it might look like I was really going to be using it -- all for nothing. Tough crowd. :)

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For the record .... while everything I linked to yesterday may be true, I can't honestly bring myself to care; it all seems a bit of a tempest in a teapot to me. And those who are calling any of these actions "censorship" need to crack open a dictionary every once in a while; it can't be censorship because LiveJournal isn't the government.

I may not agree with their actions, but I think they have every right to do anything they've done. As the journalist A. J. Liebling said, "the power of the press belongs to those who own one." These are their servers, and if they don't like something that's on here, of course they can take it down. And your words are your words -- you, of course, have every right to back them up elsewhere and put them up somewhere you have more control over, if you like.

Me, I do back up my journal every once in a while, just in case something does happen to this place, but I'm hardly going to leave in a huff. Not while y'all are here.

(On the other hand, I sure don't intend to give SUP any money ever, at this point, either.)

I just went through and added tags to 97% of my old posts.

Here are all the tags I used:

9/11, accomplishments, advice, ahna, anthology, april fool's, art, birth, blatant self-promotion, caffeine, christmas, comics, conventions, dad, death, depression, diabetes, disneyland, doctor who, drabbles, exercise, fanfic, fey, food, health, horror, life changes, links, livejournal, merchants of deva, music, names, observations, october, olympia, people, pictures, pirate, poems, politics, powells, quotes, radio, rants, relationships, reviews, sacrilege, site updates, social, spookybats, stalk me, star trek, tao, treebyleaf, truck, tunes for tuesday, web design, wendolen, wishlist, word pictures, work, writing, wtf

"We'll see how well I manage to keep this up. Every attempt I've ever made in my life to keep anything like a diary or journal has been a miserable failure, but I really wanted an account here, mainly so I could reply to my friends' posts .... So. Here we are."

And here we are still, exactly one year later. Seeing as how I've written over 50,000 words into this journal, I'd say it hasn't qualified as a miserable failure quite yet.

I've been meaning for quite a while now, with honestly no sense of hyperbole, to write up an entry here on "How LiveJournal Changed My Life," and today seems as appropriate a time to do it as any.

I took some time today to read over my whole journal. In many ways, it's been a hard year. A year of death and funerals, a year of constantly struggling to keep from sinking down into depression. But there have also been many simple little moments of magic and light, and I worry that those would have been lost in time, if I hadn't written them down, like so much of my life has been.

Writing this journal, putting down my life as it happens, has kept me honest. I try to be as forthright about my failings and neuroses as I am about my triumphs.

I was friends in college with Kim Rollins, whose online journal sugar & preserve is still widely known and talked about years later, after her journal and her life collapsed, after she admitted that she'd only been writing the best parts of it all down, that she had serious problems with depression and dissatisfaction and had kept it all a secret.

I promised myself early on that I wasn't going to do that. This is my life, the only one I have, and I'm going to write it down. And so far, amazingly, I don't seem to have frightened any friends away with it.

Writing this journal has also simply kept me writing. Writing is like any other form of exercise -- if you want it to come easily, you just have to keep doing it. If it weren't for this journal, if it weren't for the practice of writing nearly every day, I don't think I would have sat down and written a novel in sixty days.

This journal has provided me with a much-needed sense of focus on things that actually mean something to me. I started it in the days after September 11, 2001, at a time when my work and my writing and my life and everything in it seemed small and unimportant. I dove into this journal-keeping because I thought I needed to be distracted. I didn't. I needed to be reminded, that the things I spend my days doing, the friends I spend my time with, are what truly matter after all.

The biggest change in my life that keeping this journal has made is simply this:

I'll be damned if my journal is going to consist of, "Heated up a frozen pizza today and watched a movie I rented." If I'm going to be writing everything down -- then I'm damn well going to lead a life that's worth writing down.

Current Music: David Bowie - Telling Lies (Feelgood Mix)

Pardon me whilst I rant for a moment. I hate to have be the one to break this to you, but:

You're not a character from Alice in Wonderland.

No matter what some on-line test told you.

You're also not a robot, a corporate mascot, or a famous painting. You're not a James Bond villain, an evil criminal or a horrible affliction. You're not a Beatle, a member of Radiohead, or a Tim Burton movie. You're not a Pokemon (thank God).

You are most definitely not a fictional character from Absolutely Fabulous, The Breakfast Club, Empire Records, Enterprise, FFVII, Invader Zim, Lord of the Rings, Reservoir Dogs, Rocky Horror, Slayers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or any film by David Lynch or Kevin Smith.

You sure as hellfire and damnation are not David Frickin' Bowie.

You may well indeed be spiritually attuned with an Element, or with a totem animal. But frankly, if you don't have enough respect for such traditions to find the idea of taking an on-line test to determine them deeply offensive, I'm actually inclined to doubt that you are. Sorry.

You want to talk about test results? Great, I'm interested. Like when my friend noiseinmyhead got a result of hGC-28000 / progestrone- 35.8 on her pregnancy test. Or when retcon got 81% on his i-Net+ certification exam.

We deal with tests, our own tests and trials, every day. That's what we call life. If I'm reading your on-line journal, it's because I'm interested in your life. Could you talk about that instead? Please?

Don't take this as a diatribe against escapism. I'm all for escapism -- and for all I know, maybe you are a fictional character. I want to hear all about your flights of fancy -- the emphasis there being, I want to hear about your flights of fancy, your own words, not something you got for a few mouseclicks.

Current Music: The Venus in Furs - 2HB

This is always the problem I have trying to keep a journal.

Something will happen, something I feel I need to write about, and I put it off, waiting until I fell up to the task of setting it down. In the meantime, life continues. New things happen that I want to write about, but I feel like I can't, because I haven't written about the earlier things, yet. And so I'm paralyzed. And the longer I put off writing about the earliest events, the more distant and detached I grow from them, and the harder they are to write, so I continue to put it off ....

Enough.

I'm not going to do any justice to any of these events, here, not really, but I am going to write about them so I can move on.

Current Music: U2 - One

When did that happen, exactly? Last I looked at the world, it was summer; but today, I saw gray skies and flame-colored trees. It happened when I wasn't looking.

I'm still so tired. I slept for over ten hours last night, and we're barely into the evening and I feel ready for bed again. I hate this. (Of course, I haven't had any caffeine today, and that might be partly responsible. Hmmmm.)

I'm still tweaking the JLJ software, getting it to do exactly what I want. Fun. I was thinking this morning that I might have this journal on Bloodletters, too -- have JLJ save it to an archive there at the same time as it posts to LiveJournal.

I want one of these. I've always wanted one, but I didn't know anybody made them. I figured there had to be a market for a cheap, portable, lightweight, dedicated word processor. I'm going to have to do a Google search and see if they're any good.

I've distracted myself, I think, for as long as I can with this -- tweaking the look of this page, reading all the LiveJournal help pages, and so on. Distraction is largely what all this has been about, today. Give me a new tech-toy to play with and I can lose myself in it for hours.

Distracting myself has been the only way I've made it through this week.

I've heard a lot of people say that the WTC bombing has "helped put things in perspective," but frankly, I didn't need this much perspective. My life, my interests, my career, my writing, everything I care about, has seemed absolutely petty and useless and worthless, this week.

Anyway. I need to get to work cleaning this place up. Right now, it looks as bad as I feel. wendolen is coming over tonight, and I want the place looking nicer than this.

Current Music: Godspeed You, Black Emperor! - Providence

What a charmingly incestuous little scene this is. I just started poking around, looking for people to add to my friends list, and I figured, "I know -- I'll just see who my friends have listed as friends, and who those people have listed as friends, and so on . . . . "

And sure enough, in no time at all, I found myself staring at the LiveJournal pages of "old friends" who, frankly, I never want to see or think about again as long as I live. Christ.

Current Music: Gary Numan - Me, I Disconnect From You

We'll see how well I manage to keep this up. Every attempt I've ever made in my life to keep anything like a diary or journal has been a miserable failure, but I really wanted an account here, mainly so I could reply to my friends' posts .... So. Here we are.

I keep wanting a pretext to write every day, anyway. Maybe this will be it. I don't know.

I went and downloaded JLJ, a command-line Perl script for posting to LiveJournal, so I could kick it old-skool. Word. I'm damned if I'm going to download any fancy Windows client just to post to a silly web page. GUI, feh. Why, in my day, we used to log on to BBSes with our Z29 dumb terminals, and we [blather blather drone drone ... ]

So anyway. Yeah. We'll see how this works.