FJ!!'s Neglected Personal Blog

Is there a topic you can't stop writing about in your journal? Why do you write about it so much?

Proving again that she can write, mcbrennan answers this succinctly and completely with:

"I originally started this journal to write clever, detached, supersmart, superjaded things that would endear me to the public at large, leading to book deals and screenplay deals and tattoos and TV appearances and eventually changing my name to "Diablo". But when I got here I did what every other 15 year old girl does, I started whining about my life to all my friends. And totally ruined everything. And when I'm not comfortable writing about my life, I don't write about anything. And that is so lame. So yes. Self loathing. Jonas Brothers ruuuuulz!!1! Next question."

It's my LJ path in a nutshell. I know this because I have been backtagging since 2002 (I am at March 2006 now) and could see it happen. I seem to no longer write about war and politics and stuff.

And one of the reasons I admire fengi so. If you like reading brain-engaged analyzes of USA politics and are not subscribing to fengi, you are missing something

Y'all are reading dr_memory's Illustrated Travelogue of Japan, right?

I am hooked n every word.

My recipe for making LJ decentralized and under individual control, while retaining the community-aspect and friends pages.

Now I also want a script that migrates a previous journal to a new system, and a server that you can use to update old comments and RSS feeds when a friend tells you they migrated to their new system. It may be time to blow LJ up into the new blogging paradigm for everyone.

I should blog my sushi adventure, and being at a BBQ the next day where I met kids rumored to be the posse of people Lindsay Lohan was partying with the night she recently completely flamed out, but it is too much work to write it all to do it justice, especially the sushi part (Hama, in Venice, where we didn't order anything but told the chef in front of us at the bar what we liked and then had her take us on a trip. I have eaten things there I thought I never would.)

Instead, I keep thinking, as I have today, about how deceptive blogging can be if it is used as a public diary. Here you go, reading one entry after another about this and that, getting some idea about the life the writer leads, a little insight in how s/he thinks, then maybe a few days silence, and then it's "Dear LJ, I am fine but I am in rehab" or "Hey guys, we're splitting up after 13 years." (Yes, I guess I am admitting I am guilty of that too, although in my defense I have to say that, although there were issues, the split was a little on the unexpected side in this quarter. In my offense, jpeace is right when he says my public persona here is very strictly managed. But it is not to make me look good, it is to not bore you that I so carefully select what I write. Because if it bores you, imagine what it is like for me to have to write it, and proof-read it about 3 times.)

So when people discuss the little fights or problems or disagreements or hang-over or crying jags, the writers know they are opening themselves up to comments about being exhibitionists. Maybe it can be argued that some of it is, that the writing leaves an aftertaste of trolling for comments or not wanting comments but convey suffering, that validation will only be valued if it is offered in the form of adoration of some kind. I have been there in all forms, I am a vain man with fragile pieces to his ego. I understand wanting comments and not wanting comments in all forms.

But whatever gets said about people who blog their minutiae honestly -- well, not so much minute to minute but more the small troubles and tribulations -- at least they don't leave you wondering as a reader "Man, did I know you at all?" when the Big Event gets announced, "Here you are telling me about the subway lines for months and it turns out that for the same amount of time you were being stalked by a convicted felon?"

But writers should only care about that surprise coming up in their readers if their explicit intention was to let people to get to know them intimately, because the aforementioned question coming up means the writer is not writing effectively. For anyone who is just here to vent or comment on their own lives or write to remember noteworthy things or explore other characters or any other reason people LJ, surprising your readers by not building up to major breaks in your life shouldn't be an issue at all. Just because you post here doesn't mean any reader has a right to know anything about you, including that you are leading what could be termed a double life.

I keep needing to remind myself of that when some denoument happens, that as a reader I have 0 right to feel super surprised or even slightly betrayed. If I feel involved for just reading entries -- not by getting sucked into some months long commenting dialog that looks like an Internet game, that is a whole other level, but just reading entries -- that is my own creation. At most, when the shit hits the fan, I get to be supportive.

Now that I am on a slightly more even keel -- thank you new bullshit in my life! -- I can look back and of course say that I was plenty social, even if I didn't meet up with all the LJ people I am so curious about, but instead met new people. I mean, seriously, when you're talking to a new person in a group and you end up in a dialog like

"Oh, and my name's FJ!!"
-- "F.J.?"
"Yeah, it is a little unusual."
-- "There's an FJ on livejournal that I follow for his pretty photographs."
"Yeah that's me."
-- "OMAIGAWD! Your pictures are amazing!"

Look, that's a good weekend. Especially if it includes two brunches with old friends, a garden party where I met 20 new people or so who the next day wanted to hang out, and great dinners.

A few weeks ago, a Flickr abuse-team member deleted a photograph from a community member because one of the 450 comments could be construed as inciting harrassment, which is against Flickr editorial policy. The deletion was irrevocable -- for some reason Flickr does not understand the concept of quarantining questionable content for proper deliberation and determination -- and would have passed in the night were it not for the fact that this member is a very notable community member and the issue the comments were about was appropriation of photographs by 3d parties without consent, quite the hot button for accomplished amateurs like Flickr has many of.

The fora exploded, and of course in the end we got a missive from the CEO or whoever the fuck he was about how he was taking time on his holiday to answer his community from his Treo, the abuse team member felt awful about the mistake (but no word if they faced anything else internally for irrevocably deleting a user's content) and blather about policies and procedures being put in place so this would never happen again, without going into any specifics like, say, what, or a time-table, or community involvement. It read like pure PR we were supposed to fall for, and meanwhile, Flickr is still doing careless and stupid moderation.

My Pro membership is coming up June 4th and I am wondering whether I want to stay a Flickr member considering how cavalier they are about user contributions. I didn't join for the community or the cute little cards, I joined because they had e-mail upload that would post on my blog automatically. Now LJ has fixed it so I can do that directly, but there I am with a photostream I'd have to migrate away so as to not leave loose ends and another account to manage, and I am kinda liking that I can keep some photos slightly away from view... Ugh, decisions. But the point is that suddenly I stopped taking Flickr for granted as just being there for me, and realizing I was giving my pics to actual thrid parties with opinions and delete-keys, not just hosting machines.

Now LJ itself is doing it. LJ, in case you didn't know yet, yes, the hosters of this blog and many others, has decided, under pressure from some nobody watch-group, to start deleting journals about pedophilia and rape and incest. Including journals written as fictional character studies by Game Masters running RPG games. Including communities for rape and abuse survivors that have the word 'rape' in their interests. Inluding a Spanish-language community devoted to discussing Nabokov's literary masterpice about teen sexuality, "Lolita". It's insane.

Yesy, yes, of course Six Apart were thinking of the children and their image. I notied something was up last night when two journals that had friended another journal I am involved in -- I will not answer how -- disappeared from view when I checked the marnamel page of defriending. At least one of those journals I read just to see who that new friend of a friend was: it was a journal of fantasy-writing aboutt fucking five year old boys. The most notable thing about it, to me, who has been all over the Internet, was that it was actually written in full grammatical English sentences. That doesn't happen very often on the fringes, let me tell you.

Here is the thing, and please correct me if I am wrong, but, distasteful as writing can be, writing out fantasies about fictional people is not legally actionable, or nifty.org would be in such trouble. LJ is making noises they are doing this to cover their legal ass -- as in their legal counsel said that stating that 'rape' in your interest list means you are interested in raping people and LJ does not want to be seen facilitating that -- but the deletion of support-journals is just stupid, stupid, stupid. I can;t even do a Niemoller about how first they came for the pedophiles, because LJ already has come for slash-writers, fictional characters, support groups...

And again, I am being confronted with my content here not being hosted by machines, but by machines with trigger-happy moderators. No, I do not write about rape and inces, so I should be 'safe', but that's just putting blinders on. In reality, your own content is never safe until you host it on your own servers. Ugh, I'd miss you all, and the friends / filters / locking system. I am just not that much of a public writer to want a 'proper' blog. I mostly want to let you know how I am really doing.

Goddammit, this sucks.

I remind myself it brought me this entry by bearzbub.

I repeat yet again: if you have to ask me whether I want to be on a specific filter, you haven't been paying attention. I want to know when you breathe, if your breath matters enough to you to write about it.

Yeah, it was the shoes that kept me running that clip. Footie socks turned into thigh-high high-heeled boots (or did they qualify more as kitten-heels?). That's just awesome.

Considering the uniformity of the comments, I am thinking about making an LJ group called kelly, and only gay men get to post on it, about awesome women's shoes.

Then again, it would probably be four comments before it descended into outright misogyny.