Friends

It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.

Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more sifting through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. Please note that this still needs more tweaking, and we are working on the one-minute cut-off issue. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

[More from my ongoing project]

People write to me periodically about the problems in their communities with people wanting initiation into this or that, and there not being enough initiates to go around. I wrote a whole article for Thorn Magazine (no relation!) on this subject regarding the opening of the Mystery in all of its variety and glory. You might want to support his fine publication and order a copy. But that is not the topic of today’s musing which is:

There are many reasons to want an initiation. What I’m thinking of today is one facet that crops up over and over again: a wish for external validation. I’ll take myself as a case in point. Periodically, I get an itch to go to graduate school. I had been preparing for this right before my first book was published and my life turned on its head. Needless to say, I dropped the project because it seemed life was taking a slightly different course. However, there is still something in me that loves to study, loves the intellectual sparring with others, and wants more training. There is also a part of me that wants external validation in some letters tacked onto the end of my name. When I look at the amount of time and effort and money it requires, however, usually I find other places to channel my energy. The external validation is just not strong enough to fuel my desire.

External validation never satisfies for long. In the book “Art and Fear” the authors talk about an artist who’s driving goal is a one-person show at a prestigious gallery. He works toward this day, year after year. Finally, the show opens to great acclaim. Success! You know the punchline to this story, right? He never really paints again. His painter’s soul had turned into a soul that wanted outside recognition and proof of his worth. The soul that loved painting itself gave up somewhere along the way, subsumed to this other goal.

Why do we apply ourselves if not for the love of the work? Even those who have a clear outside goal going in must want to fully engage for the love of engaging, otherwise we end up over and over with half finished projects or haphazard practice and return to something easier. We have to have desire to engage will to it’s fullest for the long haul. What interests us about our workouts? What interests us about our study? What interests us about our partners? What interests us about painting, music, dance, gardening, or physics? What interests us about magic, about meditation, about plumbing the depths of our souls and seeking out our heart’s desires?

Without that abiding desire, bringing us back to the search again and again - re-engaging our lives - a degree means little and an initiation is just a blip of an event. There is no outside confirmation that is lasting. The only thing that lasts is what is accrued on the inside. Success is granted within.

1) Ethical dilemma:  At a party at your house, a preschooler drops a plastic ball down a heating duct. No one at the party can figure out a good way to retrieve it. Two days later, the heater sets off the smoke alarm. When a (skilled and trusted) repair person comes, they tell you that the ball appears to have gone into the heat exchanger, and the only solution is to disconnect and pull out the whole heater and go through a tedious and complex process of cleaning the heat exchanger tubes. No amount of money is discussed, but it's not going to be trivial.

Do you ask your friends whose preschooler dropped the ball to pay for it? (In this particular instance, both households have enough money, so the question I was brought up to call "Whose chicken is it?"* is not in play.)

2) The reported death of LJ/DW:  In the past few weeks, two of my LJ friends have bemoaned the death of LJ, saying that "Everyone is going to Facebook." My friends' lists are not any shorter, nor do I see less posting. The first friend to talk about LJ dying said "Who's still here?" and got a lot of responses. On the other hand, when I responded that I'm on Facebook but hardly ever use it, her response was "We should be friends there!" 

I have since deactivated my Facebook account because of their privacy policy. But what I want to know is: does LJ (including DW for this definition of LJ) appear to you to be dying? I note that both people who said this were from roughly the same social circle, which is only one of several social circles I connect with on LJ.

3) The variable sensory experience of housecleaning: In cleaning for our big party last week (the same one where the ball got dropped down the heating duct), I put a name to a phenomenon I've known for years: "cleaning eyes." I can go for months at a time without seeing dirt, especially if it's not on a surface I think about cleaning (for example, if it's behind the sink, or on a wall). But when I'm in housecleaning mode, it's <I>all</i> I can see, and no matter how much dirt I get rid of, it's <i>still</i> all I can see. Then the cleaning mode ends and the dirt goes invisible again until the next cleaning spree. I'm curious whether this works this way for other people. I do not keep a very clean house, though it's sanitary enough (at least, no one gets sick from eating or staying here), which may be a factor.

*  "Whose chicken is it?" is from my mother's childhood in a Jewish community on the east coast. As the eldest child in a pillar-of-the-community family, my mom got sent to the rabbi with questions of doctrine. One day, she was sent to ask about a chicken which had a needle in the cavity: was it kosher? The rabbi said, "Whose chicken is it?" because if it was a rich woman's chicken, it would be declared not kosher, but for a poor woman who couldn't replace the chicken, it would be kosher enough.
 

Hockey and RPG--about as far on either pole as you can get.

Man, what a hockey game last night. For those who don't follow hockey, the Christmas season also marks the time of the yearly World Junior Championships, a U-19 tournament of the world's teams. ( Read more... )

I have to bring this up as a PSA, because I had no idea about it previously.

Sherlock Holmes invoked in me a strong desire to be involved in a Cthulhu by Gaslight game of some kind, and since the only GM in my social circle right now who is playing in or running games is C--, who is tied up with school and his own Deadlands game, I guess that means me.

Trouble is (or was), I don't actually own the book, which is hella out of print. Sure, I could make shit up, but I'd wanted to at least read it. I checked with centerfire who, like C--, seems to collect game system books like other people collect stamps, and C-- himself, with no luck. eBay was my next stop, but the book is going for $75 (!!!) or the box set for $100 (!!!!).

zdashamber suggested DriveThruRPG.com, which appears to be a place to buy pdfs of gaming source material. And, lo, there it was, for only $15, which includes a module (The Yorkshire Horrors) and train map of England that is included in the box set.

So if you're looking for an out-of-print game book or even magazines, I think, try out that website.

Of course, now I'm in obssessive plotting mode, because I really want/need a dead tree copy of the book. I have a cunning plan and a date with my printer tonight, after stopping by Office Max to pick it up a gift of heavyweight paper.
 

Tags: hockey, psa, rpgs

...without sounding a bit like some new age douche.

Change.  I saw another blogger post about the changes they had in the past year, and believe I've had a fair amount of it myself.   I'm rehearsing my choir for the first time tonight.  I would, usually approach this situation in sheer, abject panic, live my day in fear, and irrational thought and bullshit.  I have no such thoughts or feelings, and am so calm, I feel I SHOULD panic about SOMETHING.  But I can't.  I won't.   I realize that I made a lot of choices that year that made me re-think how I act and feel and go about my day.   I guess I finally realized that panicking about shit, does nothing to prepare you any better, and it raises your blood pressure.   Fuck that noise.

I started Kung Fu.  For me!  Not becuase I wanted to look better (though I do want to improve my general shape), not because I want a date (though I'm working on that too...just not from the physical aspect of things), I did it for...wait for it...ME!  Me, me, me, me.  Something I don't do a lot.  Things for myself.  Well, an occasional massage, but something that is truly life altering.   I want something from Kung Fu that I didn't know I wanted.  I want strength, fitness and vitality.   I've not wished this for myself before.  Yay me!

I have come to the conclusion that though my job is currently necessary, I will make more moves to help me get out of this job than I will make to keep it this year.
 
I stopped whining.  I don't complain so much...or at least I think I don't.  I may complain from time to time about trivial things, but not about my life, or what's wrong with me, or any of that crap.  Because nothing's wrong with my life, or myself.  It's to the point, I don't wanna hear anybody else complain.  Complaining is good time wasted.  Something I don't seem to have much of, is time.  Ergo...

So, yeah.  Change.  Good stuff.