hello how are you friend

[sabotabby]

From anarqueso and angiereedgarner:

So maybe LJ is having a resurgence? Dust off those tumbleweeds, pals. Polish up your syntax. Thar's strangers a-comin'.

In lieu of formally introducing myself to new people, I think I'll just try to resuscitate the old questions meme. Ask me three questions in the comments. I'll answer to the best of my ability. Then on your own LJ, invite people to ask you questions. Who's in?

*Was it three questions? Five? Does it matter? Were there rules? Did it work? I don't remember.

Comments

[katebacross.livejournal.com]

Sabs: how has LJ changed since you've been on it? (I've only been blogging since 2014.)

[sabotabby]

Ah, I'm so glad you asked!

It's become a lot more smaller. It fills fewer niches; when I started, it was one of the more popular blogging platforms, attracting a huge variety of people. If I didn't check it multiple times a day, there was no hope of getting caught up.

Communities were huge. That was where you had your intense discussions about whatever interested you. I belonged to a gazillion and moderated a handful. There were flamewars and hostile takeovers and it was very exciting and that's how one typically made new friends (and enemies).

The conversation was more in-depth. A single entry getting hundreds of comments, many of which had footnotes, was not an unusual occurrence. Posts were very long as a general rule (these days, about half my feed is people's Twitter feeds, which I skim).

Most of my friends in the early days were not people I knew IRL. You didn't typically know someone's age or gender or ethnicity or any of that; you'd meet them because you liked something they said and then got to know them through their thoughts. We often went to great lengths to meet each other in meatspace and it was the most exciting thing ever. Culturally, it had more in common with BBS than with today's social media.

I don't mean to make it sound like some utopia of blogging; it feels like that, in retrospect, in many ways, but it could also get as cruel and problematic as FB or Twitter. But it was home in a way that no online space was before or after.

[metalana.livejournal.com]

When Facebook got popular, LJ users stopped posting "I am looking for a thing", fun URLs, and other short utilitarian posts.

[sabotabby]

Right, that too.

[katebacross.livejournal.com]

Can you clarify what you mean by "I am looking for a thing", please?

[metalana.livejournal.com]

The person posting needs a recommendation for a plumber, needs help with moving house on saturday, is freecycling some junk, knows of a job at their company, doesn't know which store carries an obscure item, etc.

These short utilitarian posts require a large audience, so Facebook is better for them.

[mycrazyhair.livejournal.com]

What are you reading? Why is it awesome? (Feel free to substitute another medium.)

What is the most hopeful thing you've seen this month? (Go with year if necessary.)

[sabotabby]

Ooooh I am reading Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning and I am loving it. It's hugely complex and sprawling (the last two books I read, I finished in a day or two; this is much denser), but the basic concept:

• Very rapid travel has made geography irrelevant, so nations are organized by philosophy rather than where you happen to live.
• People live in collectives rather than families.
• Organized religion is banned—a meeting of more than three people to discuss religion is illegal—but the spiritual impulse is still recognized, so travelling counsellors talk to individuals about spiritual matters.
• Gender is kind of an irrelevant thing, but the narrator makes humorous attempts to gender the other characters for the benefit of the reader based on what they're wearing or their personality.

Against this backdrop, there is a child who can perform miracles by breathing life into toys, which kind of fucks with everyone's theology, or would, if his secret got out.

It's so good.

Hmm, the most hopeful thing I've seen this month? I have to say I was pretty relieved today to read that Bana al-Abed was safely evacuated from Aleppo. She may be one child among many, but she's very much the innocent face of war and I'm relieved that she's survived.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

I feel like we ineract on stupid facebook all the time but let's see if I can come up with interesting questions. I am very much down for a resurgence of LJ and was explaining like 24 hours ago to WB why it's so much better than fb.

1) CAT QUESTION did you have cats growing up and what was your first cat like if so?

2) I thought you were vegetarian but have the idea you are maybe these days vegan? Possibly I'm wrong or possibly you've been vegan forever but if not, what made you switch?

3) To what extent does living outside the US insulate you from the constant panic we are all feeling down here? I think a Canadian recently told me the phrase "when the US gets a cold, Canada sneezes" or something but is it some reassurance not being directly governed by a possibly literal fascist lunatic?

[sabotabby]

I'm excited about an LJ resurgence. Maybe more than I should be, I dunno.

1) I'm a suburban kid; I grew up with dogs. I didn't actually interact with cats; a few friends and relatives had them, and I thought they were cute, but for some reason they were not very common. I was allowed to keep small animals as well—fish, lizards, turtles, even an eel—but the family pet was a dog.

After our second dog died prematurely and my father left (the two were not, I'm afraid, unrelated), I was considered old enough, at 11, to have input into the family pet. I surprised my mother, who had also not grown up around cats, by asking if we could get one, and diligently researched what went into caring for them. I think my main rationale was that they would bond with you like a dog but had a longer average lifespan. Also I was a budding little spoopy kid and cats were mysterious and nocturnal. So we went to the pound and I fell in love with a very small, very loud seal point Siamese. She was 100% the Siamese stereotype, which is to say that she followed me and my mom everywhere, slept with us, curled up in our laps, and vocalized her opinions at great volume. She was very smart and intuitive and entirely what I imagined a cat familiar was supposed to be. She died when I was 21—we didn't have a good estimate of how old she was when she was adopted, but she was quite elderly when she died—and I was devastated and didn't get Marinetti for another few years because I couldn't handle the thought of losing another cat.

2) I've been vegan since June, so yeah, it's a new thing. A bunch of factors—I worked with a woman who was vegan, and that meant that I had to learn how to bake vegan cookies, which are superior to non-vegan cookies, and I have a number of friends, largely on Tumblr, who were making very cogent arguments in favour of it. At the same time, the_axel decided to go from throwing pig roasts to going vegan so I figured I'd make the switch along with him.

Reasons are largely that the dairy industry is even crueller than the meat industry, and animal agriculture is the single biggest driver of climate change. Animal rights has never been my primary political cause, but climate change should be everyone's priority, and this is an easy thing to do to make a small difference without having to freeze my ass off with a picket sign.

3) Not very much. We are very much affected here by what the US does but we don't have a say in it. To make things worse, most Canadians seem to consider themselves Americans, and we have to do everything your lot does. We have several Trump clones waiting in the wings, and my opinion of Prince Justin is that he'll sway which ever way the populace leads.

Not to mention that I have a lot of friends in the States, and a lot of friends with ties to other countries that are directly affected by US policy, and if the bombs start flying or the ocean starts rising or both, it's not like an imaginary line is going to protect me. I'm quite frankly scared shitless.