Four Simple Words
Because I want to dance.
(And, also, just in case that you didn’t know: Frank Turner is awesome.)
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Because I want to dance.
(And, also, just in case that you didn’t know: Frank Turner is awesome.)
Ah, what a week it has been.
*sigh*
So. I was negotiating another avoidance maneuver, er…reading one of my kid’s comic books, and I came across this particular piece of brickwork from a dodgy character named Randall:
“Hey, while I was in the trash I had some time to think, and I think that I learnt something! Like — a moral? I think that I was wrong to try to find cheats ALL the time. Maybe the best things are those that take the most work, you know? Maybe how you get somewhere can be at least as important as where you’re going.”
Just call me Randall today.
Some days, I don’t have to look very far into the Internet, before I find a sneaky ton of bricks.
First, there’s these:
By our nature we are drawn to relationships because of the sweetness we actually crave to experience. But that is just what draws us in. Just as fruit draws us in to forward its own procreation, relationships draw us in by their own sweetness, so that we will come to the pit, experience breakdowns, discover ourselves and be forced to evolve, just as nature does.
Breakdowns are designed to happen. They are meant to happen for the purposes of our own evolution.
Garrison Cohen
How strange it is that a few days ago, I was talking with a friend, and I suddenly found myself unpacking emotions attached to an event that occurred in my past that I’d never allowed myself to feel, because the event was a source of anger and shame.
Sufficed to say, that unpacking led me to a realization that I did not like about a situation with which I am presently struggling. I’d like to say that now that I know of it, I’m not going to hide from it, but then again, I’m pretty stubborn.
Childish, even.
I do not want.
I will not go.
I refuse to move.
I did not move.
I don’t want to see.
I don’t want to know.
I am afraid.
I can’t, I said aloud, to Him, later that evening. It feels impossible.
And so, not too much later, I was surfing the web, avoiding my husband, and vacillating between tears and anger…
And I see:
Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration, it’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
Muhammed Ali
~~~~
I don’t feel better.
Evidently, Opendiary, a blogging website that had been around since 1998, is now gone.
This is significant in that I blogged there for over 10 years, and it would seem that any attempts that were made at backing up any of the diaries that were hosted there have malfunctioned.
All diaries have been deleted.
This is upsetting to a lot of folks. A lot of diarists never backed up their diaries, unfortunately.
Mostly because backup attempts – the ever malfunctioning FCK editor/function backup – was easily corrupted. And even if one had followed the prescribed and laborious set of steps that the FCK function required, there wasn’t any guarantee that the backup itself wouldn’t be corrupted. FCK didn’t play very well with a lot of system platforms, or text programs.
One thing that Opendiary was infamous for was that the site was in a continual state of being ‘down.’ This was so often the case that there were several forums whose main function seemed to be to notify users as to whether or not OD (as it was called) was actually up and functioning on any given day.
And that went on for years.
I stopped blogging there in 2011, and came to WordPress.
While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Opendiary was bound to die at some point…it still sucks to think that one of the first blogging sites of its kind could just disappear off the face of the Internet, rather than evolve with the Internet.
Why was Bruce Ableson (Able son, eh? How’s that for irony?) so *unable* to adapt to the changing face of Internet blogging?
According to Wikipedia, in 2008, there were 561,000 active users whose blogs were being hosted on the OpenDiary site.
Over a half million users on a website. That is mind-boggling when you consider that the site was already 10 years old back then, and Mr. Ableson still hadn’t figured out how to keep his users happy.
He never did. He never could.
One wonders why.
Maybe that’s why he gave up on February 7th, 2014, at 12:01 PM, and commenced to delete everything off the servers.
~~~~~
Still, it is disappointing to consider that 10 years’ worth of writing that was being stored there is just …gone… now.
~~~~~~
And it would be even more ironic to think of him coming over to WordPress, or Weebly, or even LiveJournal (oh, there’s another dying blogging site), to brag about how he did The Web Log Thing first, and yet, managed it all so poorly.
The man didn’t know what the hell he was doing, even though he was one of the first to do it.
You know what that is?
It’s a FCKing shame, that’s what it is.
bloodteethandflame 