The People's Republic of Fub

I saw a post on the Dreamwidth maintenance account, partly in Russian, that imports could be slow because of the massive influx of new accounts that want to import their LJ-based blog to DW. So of course something is going on -- turns out that in order to post, users have to identify themselves. This is because a law in Russia, another way for the authorities to crack down on dissent. And because LJ is owned by a Russian company, it has to comply.
Elsewhere, someone linked to this thread on Bluesky by one of the owners of DW on what that might mean for the non-Russian users of LJ. And maybe it's alarmist, but I agree it doesn't look good. It can't be bad to be prepared.

I have migrated my blog to a Wordpress instance on my own domain, but I still had entries that included images hosted on LJ -- because I have a permanent account there, I had some image hosting space and I used to it upload photos and pictures to use in my posts. When I migrated the posts, the images were left where they were, and the Wordpress entries simply linked to the images on LJ.
So I located all of those, downloaded them from LJ and uploaded them to the Wordpress instance and replaced every image. So even if LJ goes down outside of Russia, I still have those photos in my entries.

There were rumours of a total disconnect of the Russian part of the internet. LiveJournal, which is owned by a Russian company and is hosted in Russia, would therefore also be unreachable. There was some panic and many people moved their journals to Dreamwidth. I was not that worried, as I blog on my own WordPress instance and only cross-post to LJ — though almost all of the interaction I have with others is through LJ.
I have a permanent account, so I do not directly contribute to LJ’s bottom line — and while I don’t believe for a moment that my entries cause people to flock to LJ, adding content does strengthen the network effect of people engaging with LJ and possibly buying paid time etc. So the question I have to ask myself is: do I want to contribute to a Russian platform?

And the answer is that I do not want to do that. I fully support the widest possible range of economic sanctions. In the case of LJ, I don’t want to/can’t leave completely, but I do want to minimize my engagement on LJ. Concretely, this means the following:

/c</p>
• If you have a journal on Dreamwidth, I will read and comment over there. My username on DW is the same as on LJ, so please feel free to add me if you haven’t already done so.
• If you do not have a journal on DW, I will continue to read and comment on LJ.
• I will stop crossposting the entries from my blog to LJ, and instead crosspost them to DW.

It will take some time for me to switch the cross-posting over to DW, as there is some code involved and I need to get that done and tested.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Happy birthday, beauty_forashes!

A few months ago, I was in a chat conversation with a colleague from support. I had helped her with a question, and then she closed off with the message that I should take a break because I worked so hard, and maybe have a snack. I thought that was a sweet thing to say. So we started chatting about snacks, which should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. We both like sweets (her favourite is tiramisu).
When my team started to have a fixed day at the office, I sometimes would bake sweets for them. The first day I brought apple pie from apples we had picked ourselves. I also made macarons, green tea cookies, and most recently chocolate sprits. But her team is scheduled for another day, so we never had any overlap. Which meant that when I brought sweets to the office, I couldn’t give her any.

But we devised a plan: I would do some of it in a container, put her name on it, and put it in the fridge at the reception. Officially, that fridge is for soft drinks to serve as refreshments to waiting visitors, not for stuff employees bring in. But when I asked the receptionist, they always let me put my little box with cookies in the fridge. So that turned into our ‘cookie dead drop’. I’d take pictures of what I had made and send them to her through chat. Then, when she was next in the office (a few days later), she would retrieve the container. All of my baking was well received!

The building with the fridge is now being renovated, so we don’t have our cookie exchange space anymore. But for last Friday we arranged to both be at the office: for her it’s her team day, and I had a meeting in the afternoon that I preferred to do face-to-face anyway.
Prior to this, we didn’t even do as much as a video chat. We communicated exclusively through text chat and anime GIFs (she likes anime as well). So we met for the first time then. I had brought chocolate sprits with me, especially for her and her team. It was a bit weird to meet, but she eagerly accepted the cookies and started distributing them. Her colleagues asked me a bit suspicious what the occasion was.

Rather than tell the whole story, I just said that Support was, of course, my favourite department! I’m not sure they believed me, but they did enjoy the cookies. Which is exactly the point!

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

I don’t have much contact with former colleagues, but I do still play tabletop RPGs with the group we started back in early 2020. I’m currently running the Tales from Wilderland campaign for The One Ring for them, using first edition rules. We have players in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Russia.

Friday, we had another session. Of course, the topic of the war in Ukraine came up. The player in Russia was born in Russia, and has the Russian nationality. But their father is Ukrainian. Their home-town is 40km from the Russian/Ukrainian border. They have extended family on both sides of the border, an absolute nightmare scenario. Understandably, they were in tears about what is happening.
They were in contact with their Ukrainian family, who were taking shelter in subway stations against bombardments. And they said they couldn’t even go out on the streets to protest against this invasion, rightly fearing they’d get arrested.

We talked about sanctions. Someone mentioned the potential of Russia being kicked out of SWIFT (that hadn’t been decided then yet), which would mean that it could get impossible for them to get their salary paid, as they are working for an international company after all. They didn’t care about that. They’d rather have put as much pressure on Putin to make him stop. If that meant not getting paid for some time, then that was a sacrifice they were willing to make.

We expressed our grief and our support, and it felt weird to start the game after that. I feel so powerless. But being able to offer moral support and distraction for a few hours is something I could do, and I think it worked.
I’m still upset about it. I mean, I’m upset about the war in a general sense, but I am upset at much more personal way about this.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

1. What’s your favorite candle scent?
None. I am not a big fan of things that are artificially scented. The smells are often too strong for me.

2. Do you have an artistic or crafty hobby? What is it?
I guess bookbinding counts? Haven’t really picked up a project in a long time, though. But there is still that box that needs to be made for all the Everyway cards that I got as part of the Kickstarter for the second edition.

3. What’s one weird way you save money on food?
We make a meal plan and stick to it. We shop for groceries two times per week, so we don’t go into the supermarket hungry every day. If there is an own-brand or cheaper variant of something basic, we use that. For instance, canned tomatoes are not really that much better if they’re by a well-known brand. There are a few exceptions, if we really don’t like the cheaper alternative, but it mostly works for us.
So yeah, none of these are weird, and probably common sense?

4. Do you collect anything weird or unusual?
I have a bit of a pin collection, but that’s not weird I guess.
I have a few lines of RPGs that I want all physical books of: Tales from the Loop, The One Ring and Everway. I’m sure I’m not the only one, and RPGs are not an unusual hobby anymore either.

5. Do you fear the deep ocean, or does its unknown depths excite you?
I do think I have a mild thalassophobia. I do like clownfish and other fishes fine, like many — but I’m not a big fan of the more grotesque creatures lurking in deeper waters…

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

I’ve seen reports that cross-posting from Dreamwidth to LiveJournal did not work anymore. My blog runs on WordPress on my own site, but I cross-post everything to my LiveJournal. I had not written an entry since I’ve seen those reports, so I did not know whether it would still work — but the entries still go up. So it’s not the API itself that was disabled — perhaps this was specifically targeted towards DW users?
Ultimately, it will hurt LJ in the long run if cross-posting is forbidden or disabled, because there would be even less reason to stick around on LJ. The lack of content on the platform is the problem, not the fact that content gets cross-posted from other sites. And having your users go to those other sites because they want that particular content does not seem like a good strategy to me.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

I borrowed these books from my father, and finished reading them some time ago: Gouden Jaren (“Golden Years”) and Het Goede Leven (“The Good Life”) by Annegreet van Bergen.
Van Bergen is an economist, and in these two books she shows how every-day life in the Netherlands changed between 1950 and 2000. In that period, average wealth increased four-fold (and that’s real wealth, corrected for inflation!) — an unprecedented period of economic growth. And we all know that it hasn’t been replicated since, too…
That economic growth also had an effect on social life and technology, which in turn allowed for more economic growth etcetera. For instance, with transportation becoming cheaper (most notably things like mopeds), people could now take jobs further away from home which paid better. That meant more income, which got spent on more luxury, which made it economically feasible to invest in the production of those things, and so on. It is an interesting look at how the Netherlands developed in living memory, and how things changed.

Though it is not a subject of the book, it is also an interesting look into the lives of the baby-boomers. We know boomers to be self-absorbed and unwilling to share. How did they get this way? Well, these books tell you about their formative years, and how they established themselves socially and economically during this period. It must be completely natural for them that every decade has a much higher standard of living than the decade before — they simply haven’t experienced anything else. By the time the big economic crises hit, they were already largely insulated from the worst.
Gouden Jaren starts with an anecdote that perfectly illustrates this: at a party, the writer meets a man who is retired. He and his wife bought a large caravan and go on holidays: four weeks in summer, four weeks in winter, and they do city trips during the rest of the year. When the topic of pensions comes up, he gets really angry because his pension has not retained its full value — which was the promise of back then, but nobody under 60 has such a pension these days… Then the writer asks him whether his parents could have afforded two months of vacation each year. Turns out that, before the man went into military service, he had never been on vacation — his father rented a car for a day, and that was it. (If you can read Dutch, it’s the start of the first chapter and that’s available to read on the book page linked above.)
The writer herself is a boomer, so she doesn’t really spend a lot of time on what growing up in this period did to her or her mentality, other than to illustrate some change in daily life — but the signs on how the boomer generation became so entitled are certainly there.

I found it easy to read, written in a conversational tone. But the books made me half-envious: envious of seeing your daily life improve so much, but on the other hand I grew up with most of those improvements already in place. My teeth are much better than my parents’, because dental care really took off when I was a little kid. I profited from having all kinds of telecommunications available, etcetera. The only thing to lament is that, because of the social and economic structures in place, not everyone can profit from these things.

If you have an interest in recent Dutch history, then I certainly recommend these two books.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Happy birthday, sillie82!

During our most recent trip to Japan, in 2019, we visited the Kanda shrine — it was on our way to the sake association’s tasting center 😉
Next to the shrine was a building with a ‘cultural space’: a cafe, a shop and an event space, clearly associated with the shrine. It was quite new — apparently the Kanda shrine featured in the anime Love Live!, and being relatively close to Akihabara, I’m guessing it gets its fair amount of ‘pilgrims’ which must have put quite a chunk of cash in the shrine’s coffers. If this is the result, then that’s not bad at all!
We browsed through the shop for a bit, and I bought the book ‘Shinto from an international perspective’ by Satoshi Yamaguchi. It’s a dual-language book: pages to the left are in English, pages to the right are in Japanese. The writer is an ordained Shinto priest and worked in Geneva — so his perspective is indeed more international than many other shinto priests.
It’s an interesting read, but shallow. It does not really spend a lot of time on the foundational shinto myths, but it does do a good job of explaining the history and the various changes it underwent as a result of various social and political changes in Japan. Some things in the history of shrines we visited, puzzled me — and with this increased understanding, I’m more able to get the nuances.

If you’re interested in the subject, then it’s a very good starting point.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.