Frenzied Theatre

Alright, I’ve got a couple weeks of stuff to catch up on and I’ll probably post them out of order. I still need to talk about how my California trip went (really well!) and my thoughts on “Oklahoma!” and the theatre program at Moreau, but first let’s address the elephant goat in the room.

This is my first entry that I’m cross-posting from Dreamwidth to LiveJournal. I’m not really moving to Dreamwidth, but for the moment I’m going to crosspost from DW to LJ for the convenience of my friends and readers who have.

Why aren’t I really moving? A few reasons. First off, I really don’t think the recent changes at LiveJournal have actually changed anything about the way the service was being handled. For years Russian authorities have had the ability to order your journal suspended, deleted, or even just blocked based on the content, no matter who you were or where you were located. The change in the terms of service and the relocation of the servers only changed what laws they used to justify those actions. Secondly, it seems to me that SUP sees non-Russian LJ as a legacy holdover from the old days and the Russian government probably doesn’t care about non-Russian LJ at all.

As for Dreamwidth, while I was excited about it when it first started, I’m not really happy with the direction the site has taken. Development has really followed the “Journaling” fork in the road rather than the “Blogging” fork that LJ followed which I feel is really odd for a site so used by fandom. (So no alternative logins other than OpenID, no sharing or reblogging capabilities, no real discoverability of other active journals.) I’m also not comfortable with the site’s attitude toward the importing of content written by others. Whenever I would back up my journal, I would consciously choose not to import comments; unfortunately the last time I did so there was an error that was only resolved after the Support team stepped in and forced the comments to import.

On the flipside, LJ’s new tactic of putting ads on all journals and communities, regardless of paid status, is pretty shitty. And while I don’t think the situation vis-a-vis the TOS and legal exposure has changed any, I don’t necessarily think it’s good. And DW does have the awesome split between reading and letting read (watch and trust, or subscribe and access) that I’ve long wanted on LJ. And while I don’t agree with much of the direction the site has taken I do admire the pains they’ve taken to be open and free of outside influence.

So what’s the plan? For now I’m going to compose entries on LJ (for the most part I prefer the LJ editor, plus I’ll have better access to Scrapbook), copy the HTML over to DW, then post to DW and crosspost to LJ. For anyone I followed who has stopped posting on LJ I will follow them on DW, but otherwise will continue to use LJ to follow and interact with those who have maintained some kind of presence there.

Ultimately, I think I might set up a WordPress installation on my website and crosspost from there to both DW and LJ. I’ll have better integration of all my various presences, I can start adding some daily content to the website, and I can finally ditch LJ’s lousy Twitter digest feature (for some theoretically better one that I can use on WordPress.)

Okay, here’s a brief test of DW’s image hosting. How does this look?