I've been posting to Dreamwidth and LJ pretty consistently, but LJ's "new" interface is pretty janky these days. For one thing, it just isn't loading some of my icons when I select them, for reasons I can't figure out. Some work just fine, others just load the default icon, which defeats the purpose of having other icons. I am displeased.

I also really dislike the new posting interface, but I can't revert back to the older version. I can't do proper text cuts anymore, and adding in images is an absolute pain in the ass. I miss being able to just plug in some html code and being able to preview the entry. Now it's all supposedly "integrated," but in practice it's a hot mess. I'm grateful that Dreamwidth is still operating with a recognizable form of the open source software that LJ was built on. I assume the change at LJ is deliberate in order to do away with as much of the old open source stuff, because capitalism, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

It's too bad that both LJ and DW are so quiet these days. I miss the old days of being able to catch up on the minutiae of everyone's lives, both good and bad. I've noticed that on social media people tend to have two modes: 1) Everything is amazing in my life, please look at this aesthetic photo I took, and 2) Rage bait. Those are the two kinds of posts that appear to "drive engagement," as they say nowadays, and the lack of authenticity is a real drag. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all the friends I follow are suddenly being shallow and inauthentic, but Facebook and Instagram and so forth really encourage you to curate both your posts and what you consume. Photographic posts are rewarded by the algorithm, while text-only posts get "suppressed." The algorithm also decides for you what you should be seeing, meaning that I often miss important news and announcements from friends, which sucks.

There was also something that felt very intimate about blogging, because the long-form content allowed all of us to dive deeper into topics if we felt inclined. At one point I was the queen of very short posts, but I also wrote some much longer thinky-thought type of posts, and having long conversations across multiple comment sections was a great way to get to know people and to deepen my thinking on a number of topics. It also allowed all my nerdy friends to info-dump about the subjects they loved, and by extension allowed me to learn about them. Short-form social media just doesn't lend itself well to this sort of thing.

During Quaker Meeting yesterday, the focus of worship ended up being The Situation At Hand. *gestures broadly* One young online attender shared their trepidation for themself but also their friends in the US, and all of a sudden there was an outpouring of ministry from the older Members, many of whom are old enough to remember World War II, most of whom had family who were active in various war or resistance efforts. So much of the ministry that those elders offered was filled with messages of love and hope and practicality that I could see a lot of the younger people visibly shift out of their despair, even if it was only for a few moments. It was a reminder that we can get through the dark times. We may not get through them individually, but we can get through them as a whole. It doesn't make it any less terrible or scary or awful, but it reminds us that we can be brave and do hard things even when we are afraid.

The elders also reminded us that Quakers have a long, proud history of letting people decide for themselves what pacifism means. For some, it means conscientious objection no matter what, to the point of imprisonment or execution. For others it meant serving in non-combatant roles like ambulance drivers and army medics. For others still it included accepting conscription when it came for them. 

A famous anecdote about George Fox recounts William Penn (another founding Quaker and for whom Pennsylvania is named) asking him whether he should continue to wear his sword. Penn was accustomed to wearing the sword, and at the time was reluctant to give it up. Fox is said to have replied: "Wear it as long as you can, William, wear it as long as you can." And, supposedly, the next time they met, Penn was no longer wearing it.

There are multiple ways to resist in these dark times. We can choose to openly defy those who choose to oppress us, or we can do it more secretly, and take opportunities to resist where they present themselves. We can challenge them in court, we can sabotage their efforts wherever we can, especially if our jobs allow us to slow down/delay/obstruct. We can drown them in useless paperwork. We can hide people who need to be hidden. We can help other people hide people who need to be hidden. We have a wealth of ways at our disposal, and each person's resistance will look a little different.

It was a really enlightening Meeting, and I am glad we were all there for it. I don't think we would have had as enriching an experience of Ministry had we not had both the in-person worshipers and the online worshipers, so I also feel pretty vindicated in that regard.

Today is my only day shift this week. I've switched shifts with a coworker who needed to be on days from Tuesday to Friday, which suits me just fine. I'm working the early evening shift, too, which is great because it means I get to still get to bed by about midnight or half past. Working the regular evening shift usually gets me to bed at 2am, which I find a little rough, but midnight is still halfway decent.

On that note, it's time to get back to work. Catch you all tomorrow, friends!

 I'm still here. Sorry for the radio silence. I had an AMAZING trip, and while I was there I was mostly too busy running around Paris and Edinburgh to actually write about what I was doing, and then I got back and was immediately super depressed about not being in Europe anymore and thus didn't update either.

I promise to try to do better in the future. I go back to work tomorrow, and my levels of "I don't wanna!" have reached the stratosphere by now. I'm also in the throes of trying to find a moving company and packing before the end of the month, and things are a tad stressful right now. I'm hoping to get everything pulled together with

Please let me know if I missed anything super crucial in your lives, LJ!

Oh, also, I am not leaving LJ, but in case it implodes after this latest bit of shady business, you can find me on Dreamwidth under the same name.

Also, for people who are on Twitter, you can find me there as @ratherastory. I tweet quite a lot, and it tends to be in the form of yelling about social justice issues, fandom stuff, and sometimes live tweeting shows or movies. Follow me at your peril! ;)

:::ETA::: Okay, cross-posting from DW appears to have weirdly hard-coded a different font into my post, and I can't fix it. Sorry!

I have so much to write about that I feel a little overwhelmed. I know, I know, some people would really like to have my problems. I keep wondering if I should write about all of it at once and let future entries worry about themselves, or if I should try spacing things out a little bit. In the end I decided to start typing and let the chips fall where they may. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Migrating my entries to Dreamwidth and then posting from there has reminded me of the difficulties of crossposting from DW, which is why I stopped doing it to begin with. Not difficulties, per se. I guess "inconveniences" is a better term. All of my stuff is on LiveJournal: my tags, my photographs, and of course my icons. I've had a permanent LJ account since 2003, while my DW account is a free one, and I am not *quite* ready to pay for a service I'm not sure I'll be using on a regular basis. On DW I only have six icons or so, which does make it easier to pick one, but limits my selection considerably. I can always go change the icon manually on LJ afterward, of course, but it's an extra step that I hadn't taken into account. Not the end of the world, like I said, but nonetheless somewhat inconvenient. So I fervently hope that this is all a tempest in a teapot and that LJ will carry on as it has for many years, with glitches and outages here and there, but nonetheless steady.

I've tried to work out how to transfer my pictures, and haven't found a way. I suppose I'll have to do it manually at some point. I lost all my original icons during one of my many hard drive adventures (alas), but I can at least download what LJ kept, I suppose. I'll add that to my ever-growing to-do list.

Aside from my non-post yesterday, I've at least been doing okay with my "post once a day" resolution. So far, anyway. I never did come back with my feelings about Rogue One, but let me assure you, there are many. Many, many feelings. All of them sad. SPOILERS AHEAD: ( Spoilers behind the cut )
So there, those are my thoughts on the movie.

Tomorrow I have Meeting for Worship, and the plan is to hand in my letter of intent, requesting to become an official Member of the Meeting. Right now I'm an Attender only, but I had been planning on requesting membership last year. I didn't for a few reasons, and now seems like as good a time as any to pick up where I left off. I wrote an uncharacteristically (for me) short letter, mostly because I didn't know what to write, and I'll be giving it to the Clerk tomorrow, in order for my request to be brought to Meeting For Business, which is next week. If it has to wait for next month, so be it, but at least then it will be out of my hands. I am a little nervous about this, but I am trying to get my act together on a number of fronts, and this is one of them. 

Tomorrow I'm also leading First Day School. Since it's sort-of-kind-of the first Sunday of the month (not really, but we're pretending it is), it's Potluck Sunday, which means the children help prepare a dessert for potluck. Of course, anyone who's ever tried to cook or bake with children knows that this means the adult in charge has about ten times the amount of work to do, but the kids love it, and it means I don't have to come up with a curriculum-based activity for them. I'm still pretty shaky when it comes to being able to talk about religious/Quaker themes with the children, although we once had a really great (but accidental) conversation about Quaker themes in How To Train Your Dragon. Cooking or baking with the kids means the added complication of needing to meet a lot of specific dietary requirements: one child is gluten-free, and since it's a kids' activity I make sure that it's also nut-free, which suddenly reduces our possibilities by quite a wide margin. So far I've done apple "biscuits" (cutting apples into discs and decorating them), fruit skewers, and gluten-free Rice Krispie Squares.

I am honestly starting to run out of ideas, but tomorrow we'll be making "peanut butter" cookies using Wow Butter (it's soy-based and tastes pretty much exactly like peanut butter, which flummoxes me to this day), sugar, and an egg. Three ingredients, no gluten, no nuts. Any of the parents who object to egg or sugar can bite me, which is, admittedly, not a very Christian sentiment. ;) 

I have other thoughts, mostly about writing/not-writing, but perhaps I will indeed save those for the next post. Or never, depending on how chicken I'm feeling about writing about writing.

Just as my resolution to post more kicks in, LiveJournal starts to have problems. I wanted to post something with images, but LJ isn't letting me do 90% of the stuff I like to with posts, so I guess I'll hold off until they fix it.

Sorry, everyone.

It has been brought to my attention that my posts can be distressing due to their content. While I try to tag my posts and put things behind LJ cuts, I also can't possibly anticipate every trigger that might be found in what I write.

Here is what you can do about this, since I am not planning on altering the content of my posts:

1- Go to my LJ profile and click "unfriend." My hand to God, I will not be offended. Do what you need to do in order to be safe and to keep the internet a safe and happy place for yourself.

2- If you feel that I would somehow be offended in spite of my assurances to the contrary, you can remove me from your "Default View" on LJ. The way to do this is to go to the "Edit Friends Groups" page, and remove my username from the list named "Default View." That way you never have to see my posts, but don't risk any unfriending drama.

3- If it's only specific entries that you don't want to see, then you can go to my profile and click on Modify Friend. Then at the bottom of the page you can specify which tags of mine you don't want to see. I do use a lot of tags, but they're pretty self-explanatory.

4- There's also the option of simply scrolling by my entries. Not as efficient, of course, but it's there.

So I have been neglecting this LJ for a bit (hah!), and today I figured I would go and poke at my flist and see what's what.

There are a few new folk who have joined from the SPN fandom (hi guys! Hope you're not too bored yet!).

There are also a handful of people I have never heard of and whose LJs seem like the most random of random things ever. One is clearly a commercial ploy to get me to buy "haute-couture" children's clothes (hah! For one, their definition of "haute-couture" is not my definition, let me tell you, and if you know anything about my mother you'll know that I am right and they are wrong). The rest? I have NO IDEA.

One appears to be some creative writing LJ based on the Tarot. I think. I confess that I didn't read much past the first entry. Another is from a 16-year-old girl with only one post, and I appear to be the ONLY person she lists as a friend. O_O

Basically, WTF?

Anyway, if you're new here, how about giving me a wave? I'd like to know who you are and why you're here. Seems like common courtesy to me. It's not like there's anything in this LJ apart from my semi-neurotic rambling and the occasional letter from my mother.

Suddenly ALL my rss feeds decided to update at the same time. Holy open floodgates, Batman!

It occurs to me that I haven't actually posted any real content here for a while. It's been all work-garden-work-work-whatever DVD I'm watching-work-work-work and three-line entries. It seems to me that back in the day I used to write about more important things, or at least that I used to do a fair bit more thinking. Maybe my brain is atrophying, or channeling all its energy into stuff that isn't LJ.

Anyway, I can't exactly apologize for that, but I do regret not being a more interesting blogger/poster/whatever.

I'm not sure I even have the mental energy to post proper content with critical thought. I think my poor reading public will have to put up with the same sort of blather that I've been putting out here for months.

Dear flist,

I am on a salad kick. It's part of my new healthy-eating thing. My problem, such as it is, is thus: I am not an experienced salad person. My salads are therefore pretty standard: lettuce, raddichio, cucumber, tomatoes, and peppers. Occasionally avocado. Today I went wild and added red cabbage. Sometimes I remember to put in spinach, but I usually forget.

So I want to broaden my horizons. What delicious salads do you make? I am open to suggestions, although I reserve the right to ignore ingredients I don't like (endives, for instance: blick).

Ideally, the salads would be non-creamy in nature (in terms of the dressing), and not too heavy on the protein (nuts, chicken, whatever), but I am not averse to having that sort of salad listed as well, for the occasional change of pace.

Ideas?