Staying with Livejournal

So, as my Twitter followers know, I came very close to abandoning Livejournal just a couple of weeks ago. This was not because of a sudden love of Facebook. I still hate Facebook. Or because of a sudden love for Twitter, although I do love Twitter, and not in a sudden way. Rather, it was because I was getting tired of constantly getting logged out -- and because I had just discovered, to my annoyance, that people attempting to comment anonymously - i.e., those without an LJ account -- would have to watch an ad. I had specifically chosen a paid account not so much to keep me from watching ads as to keep my own blog ad free, and I felt that I was not getting what I was paying for. My interactions with Livejournal's service department were not going very well either. And this was after several years of declining customer service. And let's not even get into Livejournal's business decision to ignore what its customer base wants -- a blogging service where users can be anonymous, pseudo-anonymous or not-anonymous at all, and share or not share their thoughts with the world, with select friends, or privately, changing with every post, to, well, a blogging service that also offers games. Livejournal, we love you because you aren't Facebook. You attempt to turn yourself into Facebook, and we don't love you at all.

Then Livejournal started going wonky -- very wonky -- and I couldn't access it at all.

Time to abandon Lj, right?

Not quite.

Not just because I've been on Lj since, wow, 2002, which is longer than I've stuck with apartments, jobs, and relationships; there's been such a huge shift in the people who were reading this blog in 2003 and even 2005 and now, and a huge shift in the comments as a result, that it hardly feels like the same place. In 2002 to about, hmm, 2006, and maybe a bit later - say, 2008? -- Lj was a place where I mostly chatted with my personal, mostly real life friends, and posted the occasional poem (scroll down for poems that I posted on LJ) even though I had originally planned to use it as a writing/promotional blog, not realizing that starting in 2002 my job/grad school would keep me too busy to do much writing/promotional sort of things. Then Facebook arrived, and real life friends drifted off to Facebook; meanwhile, I started doing more speculative fiction writing, and found more fellow writers, and LJ turned into a way of interacting more with them.

I digress. I meant to talk about why I'm staying on Lj.

Because as it turns out, these glitches and LJ going down are not random events, or results of LJ's competence or lack thereof. Rather, according to multiple sources, reporting over the last several days, they are specific attacks on Russian bloggers and attempts to silence Russian freedom of speech, coincidentally helping to silence the voices of non-Russians as well.

And that I won't tolerate.

A paid account on Livejournal costs me $19.95 per year, money that presumably goes towards paying for servers and staff to fight against this sort of thing. It's not much. But it's something. I renewed my account, and I'll be trying to blog a bit harder.

(Which is not to say that I won't be creating a Wordpress account shortly, or closing the backup Dreamwidth account.)

Hmm

Thanks to the small fact that the email alerting to this ended up in my spam filter, rather than my regular email, a filter I rarely bother to check often, I failed to inform you all that for the low, low price of several thousand dollars Sotheby's was auctioning off various original watercolor and other paintings from classic children's illustrators, including Arthur Ransom, Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, and (the reason I was emailed about this) Oz illustrators W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill, incidentally proving that I will never have enough money to own an original Neill, ever.

Anyway, some of the illustrations in the e-catalogue are lovely, so I thought I'd pass along the link for everyone to meander through even if it's too late for any of us to bid.

And while searching, I found something of potential interest to my mother and fbhjr: illustrations by a certain George Henry Boughton. (The collection has several more images.)