Tips for the Great AOL-J Migration

Accidentally cross-posted on the Blogger edition of Musings from Mâvarin because I wasn't paying attention. See the Musings version of the entry for larger versions of each image.

Foolishly, I've made no attempt to back up my old AOL Journal Musings from Mâvarin since the announcement was made in late September that AOL Journals will cease to exist at the end of October. There were three reasons for this:

1. I've been too busy obsessing about the election, the dogs, etc.
2. Past attempts to manually transfer or save my old blog entries have been extremely time-consuming and tedious. I hesitated to renew such efforts, especially because
3. AOL promised that there would be a way to automatically migrate the entire blog to another service. Rumor had it that the other service in question would be Blogger, which would be both sensible and convenient.
   

Well, for once, I win! After a week and a half of anxious waiting for further info on how to transfer Musings onto Blogger / BlogSpot, I got the official AOL mail today, containing the all-important link to use to get started. A mere 10 minutes or so later, all 686 entries (or whatever the exact number is) of Musings were posted and published at http://musingsfrommavarin.blogspot.com/. I've done some tweaking since then, but the basic process was remarkably painless. See Magic Smoke for an introduction to it.

Since many people are probably still unfamiliar with Blogger and understandably nervous about transferring their beloved journals, I hereby offer some handy tips:

1. What you need. You must have a Google account. If you already use Blogger, iGoogle or gmail, you already have a Google account. If not, signing up is quick and painless, and can be done by following directions from the migration pages or almost any Google-related or Blogger-related screen. Your account name is whatever (real) email address you give them.


2. Don't be afraid to just do it. Copying your journal into BlogSpot using the automated setup AOL and Blogger put together does not affect your AOL Journal itself, which will still be there until October 31, 2008 (but not after). Nor does it affect any other blog you already have on BlogSpot or elsewhere. It creates a new blog, based on almost all the data in your old one. (I'll cover the exceptions further down this list.) Just click on the link and follow the simple directions. (Note: Paul reports that this can get glitchy if you try to use the browser that part of the AOL software. Use an external browser such as Firefox instead.)

If your blog's name was unique, for example Flippy Floppy Flump (http://journals.aol.com/yourscreenname/FlippyFloppyFlump), Blogger will offer to keep that title (http://flippyfloppyflump.blogspot.com). If your title is already in use as a BlogSpot URL, you'll need to tweak the web address, but this is easy to do.

3. Almost any template will do for starters. During the migration process, you will be asked to choose a template from a short list, and will have an opportunity to preview each of the options. A template is a standard set of codes that tell Blogger the basic layout of your blog. If you see something you like, go for it. If not, just pick one you don't actively hate. Chances are excellent that you're going to change it in the next five minutes anyway.

4. Follow the directions, and Publish when offered the chance to do so. If there is a problem, check here for further info. Chances are excellent, however, that it will also go through smoothly in just a few minutes. (If you've been posting more than once a day, or long daily posts for several years, it will probably take a smidge longer.) If you're on dial-up, of course, it could take a lot longer. You may want to get the ball rolling and go do something else for a while. Once you Publish, you will see your blog in all its rescued glory. Ta-dah!


5. Ready for a new template? Your new blog will not look just like the old one, but you have many more options for making it look the way you want it. If you like the way it looks using the template you chose during migration, then great! Congratulations! If not, go to the Blogger dashboard (click on the orange B or the word Customize at the top of your blog) . From the Layout tab, choose "Pick New Template." Again you'll see a graphic list of templates to preview, but this time the selection is much greater. If you are used to posting large photos, or largish photos with text wrapped around them, I recommend Simple II at the very bottom of the list. The advantage of it is that it doesn't have a sidebar, which gives you a much wider area for your blog entries. The disadvantage is that everything you would otherwise put on a sidebar will have to go across the top or bottom of the page, or be dropped altogether.


6. Describe the blog and set your settings. You know the introductory text that you had at the top of your old journal? That didn't transfer over, but it's easy to fix. Open your old AOL Journal in another tab or window, and copy the blog description. Back in the other window, go to the Settings tab of the dashboard. On the Basic subtab is a place to paste in your blog description. Or, if you prefer, you can write a new one, or leave it out entirely.

While you're at it, go through the other settings and make any changes you want. If you don't know what a particular option means, you can always leave it on the default setting for now. One of the tabs has an About Me section, which will display on all your blogs unless you choose otherwise. This can also be copied over from AOL if you so desire. Permissions on who can read your journal (or post to it if it's a group blog), who can comment and whether they need to type in capcha letters to do it can all be managed from the Settings tab.

7. Look at the colors! Even with whatever template you selected, you're not stuck with the default colors for page background, test, borders and links. From the Layout tab, selected Fonts and Colors and make any changes you like.

Layout with sidebar.

Simple II layout with no sidebar.

8. Now, what's missing? If you had a list of links or other stuff on the sidebar, it probably didn't transfer over. This is easily fixed, but may be the most tedious and time-consuming part of the process. From the Layout tab select Page Elements. from here you can "Add a Gadget" to include linking lists, quotes, pictures, weather and other cool widgets on your sidebar, or at the top or bottom of your blog. The bad news is that if you want a list of links, you'll have to type or paste them into the gadget one by one. On the other hand, chances are your old sidebar was full of AOL-J addresses that need to be updated anyway. For Musings, I didn't add the links, on the theory that they're too stale and people can get more current ones from the Outpost. Once you've added your gadgets, use your mouse to drag and drop them in an order that makes sense to you.

9. Explore and troubleshoot. Refresh the page on your blog and look it over. Is it the way you want it? Is anything still missing that matters to you? Do the entries display adequately? Are the photos all there? Chances are that if you uploaded photos directly in AOL Journals, they will now be in Picasa, the Google photo hosting service that stores (among other things) any photos uploaded in Blogger. If something's missing, you may need to upload it again from your computer if it matters to you.

10. Decide what to do about dead links. You've probably linked to friends' AOL Journals quite a few times over the years. Now they all link to something that will no longer exist. You have four options:

1. Leave them alone as an archive of what used to be. It's unlikely that anyone is going to click through from that 2005 entry about that quiz you found on Sandy's* blog.
2. Include a sidebar on your blog with the current addresses of your friend's transferred blogs, and trust readers to male the connection.
3. Post a gadget or other note explaining that AOL links will no longer work, with a hint on what the updated URL probably looks like (see Tip #1 at the top of this entry).
4. Go through and update any links that really matter to you, such as the ones in that really popular entry from 2006 you still get comments on.
   

*Name chosen at random.

That's it! That wasn't nearly as bad as you thought it would be, was it? From here there are lots of things you can do to tweak and customize things further, but the tips above should get you up and running, and protect your journal's contents from total oblivion.

Let me know how it goes.

Karen

Thud! Goes the Other Shoe

Goodbye to my first web address ever

AOL Hometown/FTP is closing October 31, 2008
From:	AOLMemberInfo
To:	that word again @aol.com
Date:	Tue, 30 Sep 2008 8:33 pm

Dear AOL Hometown/FTP user,

We’re sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Hometown and FTP will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Though you will be able to modify your Hometown site and access FTP until this date, we urge you to save your AOL Hometown/FTP content immediately, and consider other options for hosting your site. Read more about how to download and save your Hometown/FTP files here.

In the meantime, please bookmark the People Connection Blog, where you can find out more about AOL Hometown/FTP. You can also subscribe to the People Connection Blog RSS feed to stay informed about any changes. We’ll be updating the People Connection Blog often, so please check it regularly.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,

The AOL Hometown Team

A caveat to those who need to download files before it's too late. Do NOT follow the directions referenced above. The old FTP client wants to convert all your gifs (maybe jpgs, too; I'm not sure) to bmps. Also the system is overloaded, and the little window doesn't list all files at once. Instead, go in through http://hometown.aol.com/_fm/mt.ssp?a=b from inside the AOL software, or use an external FTP client if you have one handy.

As for myself, I moved most of my pages to mavarin.com some time ago, but I'm taking no chances. I downloaded every file from every screen name tonight. While I was at it, I deleted two screen names, and subscribed to a mailing list from Yahoo/mavarin.com instead of my old UWoT screen name. I plan to shut down the latter at the end of October, the same time the other stuff goes offline.

This was the club's official home page - a hundred years ago.

My very first web page was on AOL, way back in 1995 or 1996. For a decade my Madeleine L'Engle bibliography was there, along with some neglected Quantum Leap stuff. But it's been a long time since that was a good place to host a web page. The URL was long, and each page was loaded with AOL advertising and tracking code. So tonight I cleaned up all that code from the QL pages, made some other updates and improvements, and uploaded them to mavarin.com. And I put stripped down versions of a few pages back onto AOL with the new URL at the top. May as well let people know where those pages went - until AOL deletes even that.

AOL has been largely irrelevant for quite some time now. But it's still very sad.


Karen

A Final Indignity for AOL-J Land

From my email of a few minutes ago:

Subject: AOL Journals is closing October 31, 2008
From: AOLMemberInfo
To: that word @aol.com
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 4:54 pm

Dear AOL Journals user,

We’re sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Journals will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

It’s very important that you save your Journals content before the shutdown. We're working on a way to easily move your Journal to another blogging service -- you can expect an email within the next week with more details about how to do it. We want the transition to go as smoothly as possible for you, so you’ll have two choices. You can either save your information manually and find another place to blog on your own, or choose to automatically transfer your Journal to a different blogging service we’ve selected.

In the meantime, please bookmark the People Connection Blog, where you can find out more about AOL Journals. You can also subscribe to the People Connection Blog RSS feed to stay informed about any changes. We’ll be updating the People Connection Blog often, so please check it regularly.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition.

Sincerely,

The AOL Journals Team

Wow.

Mostly I think this is another sign that AOL is on its last legs after years of bad decisions and major changes in Internet technology and culture. It's very sad, for both the people who left and the people who stayed, and a final betrayal for those who stayed. They didn't leave AOL-J, so AOL-J left them.

I just hope they make it easily portable into Blogger. That is, after all, where most people went in the Exodus. And many of them, myself included, still have entries they never ported over, one painful copy-paste at a time.

K.

Celebrate Him Home

As we know, AOL will soon be parting company with John Scalzi, creator of the AOL Journal By the Way, the Weekend Assignments, Monday Photo Shoots, and a handful of nifty Ficlets. This is one of those "by mutual agreement" situations; AOL is contemplating a change in direction, and Scalzi is contemplating how much easier it will be to meet his deadlines for writing books if he's not busy amusing us with news of phosphorescent cats and fun games and pictures out hotel windows.

I already did my main Scalzi tribute entry, so I'm not going to go on and on about him tonight.

That's where you come in.

Are you one of John Scalzi's many fans? Was it because of him that you first learned how to upload a photo or a video, or had at least one thing to write about each weekend? Has By the Way or the Ficlets blog always been a "must read" for you? As time ticks away to the end of the year, when Scalzi's AOL contract runs out, would you like to show your appreciation for his four years of fun and inspiration and community building, and share your favorite Scalzi memes or moments with other readers?

If so, we've got just the journal for you!

It's called

ScalziCelebration

and it just went live tonight. Carly (whose idea this was), Steven and I have put it together on AOL as a centralized place in which we can all thank John Scalzi for all his good work, and leave links to our own tributes, favorite Monday Photo Shoots, Weekend Assignments, Ficlets or other Scalzi-related fun. We've got three entries to get things started, and we'll be adding more over the next three weeks, featuring YOUR links and tributes, plus several surprises. So click on over and see what you think. Let's gather our scattered journaling community one more time, and give our Blogfather a big send-off!

Karen

By the Wayside

Wave bye-bye to daily doses of By the Way

The other shoe has dropped: John Scalzi has announced that his contract with AOL runs out at the end of this year and is not being renewed. No more Scalzi on the Ficlets blog, no more By the Way, except for possibly the occasional unpaid posting "as a civilian." No more Weekend Assignments or Monday Photo Shoots, unless someone else manages to take up the slack. As of January 1, 2008, the blogosphere is going to have a big hole near its heart - a Blogfather-shaped hole. Scalzi will still be online, but no longer as our friendly AOL-based guide to the Internet.

For once, this is not AOL shooting itself and others in the foot; not entirely, anyway. Scalzi reports that it was a mutual decision, and frankly it's not an unexpected one. For some time now it's been clear that the AOL gig was starting to get in the way of his burgeoning book career, and vice versa. As obsessive as I've always been about posting my Weekend Assignment entry every single Thursday night/Friday morning, and my Monday Photo Shoot entry every Monday night, even I've had to back off in the last month or two, because Scalzi himself could no longer keep to that schedule every single week. And who can blame him? In a choice between meeting a contractual deadline for turning in a book manuscript, or asking readers to post a picture of a tree, I doubt that many of us would give the meme our highest priority.

So here we go, heading into the end of an era, yet again. A lot has changed since I posted my response to Weekend Assignment #7, way back on May 30, 2004. I was just looking over some of Scalzi's own entries from 2004, and was struck by how very different they are from his later ones. For starters, they tend to be short, vanilla text with no pictures, and relatively lacking in that trademark Scalzi humor. Some of that was the limitations of the blogging platform: you couldn't do long entries, I don't think you could choose your text size, and photos weren't that easy to post. But it hardly mattered. AOL J-Land was just under a year old, and most people had barely heard of blogs, let alone memes. John showed us how to blog, right there on AOL. And for most of us in those days, AOL was the only game in town. Everyone read By the Way, and so many people did the early Weekend Assignments that it took Scalzi three entries a week just to link to the responses. That first one I did, about vacations you haven't been on, had 76 comments to his original entry. Imagine! Even allowing for the responses that were in the comment thread rather than their own blog entries, that's a huge number of comments. Offhand I only know of one contemporary AOL Journal that gets numbers like that, and it's not By the Way.

And I suppose it's inevitable that the response to the Weekend Assignments and Monday Photo Shoots has dwindled over the past couple of years. The AOL-J diaspora in the wake of the banner ads soured many people on anything to do with AOL, and John undeservedly caught a lot of the flack over that. Tempers eventually cooled, but it was never quite the same community again. Lots of us ventured out into the wider blogosphere, and discovered a world beyond AOL, with lots and lots of memes we could use to fill up our blogs. We learned HTML and CSS (well, some did, anyway), and blogging platforms competed to have the best features and the most ease of use. We no longer needed John Scalzi to explain patiently how to post a picture or create a hyperlink, or to give us something to write about on a Thursday night. And somewhere in there, AOL stopped promoting By the Way, so that its readership thereafter consisted mostly of the longtime faithful.

During this same period, the writing career Scalzi had successfully nurtured for years stopped being mostly about corporate work as his fiction writing took off, supplemented by the occasional non-fiction book. He's now had a dozen books published, if you count The Sagan Diary. I'm lucky enough to have his award-winning debut novel, Old Man's War, in hardcover, and personally autographed. (I held off reading it for a long time, assuming it was too military to appeal to me. I was wrong.) It's one of four Scalzi books I own to date, and even at that I'm a slacker. His non-fiction book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is on my Amazon wish list, along with The Sagan Diary. He's got at least three books scheduled to come out in 2008. His books have been published in multiple languages, and he's been an honored guest speaker from Google HQ to France.

And meanwhile, some of the recent Weekend Assignments and Monday Photo Shoots have had as few as four or five responses. Is it any wonder that he's decided that now would be a good time to make a change, and concentrate on the books instead of corporate blogging?

But it's sad for us, the longtime readers of By the Way, as we lose our last rallying point, and perhaps our last connection to the halcyon days of early J-Land. We can always check in with Scalzi over on Whatever (I stubbornly never add the definite article to that blog's title), but it's a safe bet he's not going to be suggesting blog topics for us, and linking to our responses. I have to say, I've seriously considered trying to take over Scalzi's two BTW memes, if he and AOL don't mind. But even if I did, it wouldn't be the same. There is only one John Scalzi, one Blogfather.

Still, let's set aside our regrets. Instead, let's look back with gratitude at all he's done for us on By the Way (and secondarily the Ficlets blog), and forward to all the books he'll have more time to write now. Surely that's worth missing out on the continuation of two weekly memes that were already getting lost in the Internet clutter.

Thanks, John, and all the best!

Karen

Grrr. Arrgh. Whimper. Wail. Sigh. Moan.

Good grief, what a yucky day!

First, I was stressed out because I thought it was my predecessor's last day, and I wasn't anywhere near ready to take over the job on my own. I'm still not. It turns out she's there tomorrow, but I have no great hopes that we're going to get any serious training in; history suggests otherwise (Say no more - I can say no more). I'll manage, though. Whatever I can't puzzle out on my own, I'll get explanations for from someone else.

Tuffy shows off her good side.

Then, of course, there was the phone call this morning from Tuffy's surgeon. I know you folks are waiting for details, but there's only so much I can tell you at this point. Dr. K. said that they got all of the cancer but a little bit at the back of the tongue, but that's enough to grow back if left untreated. Dr. K. has to examine the tongue before she'll be able to recommend what to do next. I'm very much afraid that Tuffy is headed for a third operation. As expensive as it is, an operation would be both cheaper for us and easier on the dog than the alternatives. To say that John and I are seriously bummed is both obvious and true.

Meanwhile, Dr. K. had no words of wisdom to offer on the lack of eating, unless something went wrong with the stitches. But she's not bleeding, and there's no evidence of pain or lethargy. She just doesn't want anything but meat loaf or sausage or possibly hamburger. Even high-end canned dog food doesn't interest her - and this is a dog who would reluctantly eat dry food if we added a little canned stuff to it.

I really wasn't expecting the long-awaited pathology report on Tuffy to be bad news. Now I don't know what to think, but it can't be good. There's only bad or worse. And we've a week to get through before she gets in to see Dr. K. and the oncologist.

And if all that wasn't enough crappiness for the day, there was also this. AOL, in their infinite cluelessness, has laid off Joe Loong, better known as Journals Editor Joe.

Y'know, I really thought I was through being angry with AOL. Annoyed at times, yes, bemused by their short-sightedness, definitely; but not angry. But I was angry today. Here is a guy that the AOL J-Land community - that extended family of past and present AOL bloggers - saw as their friend and advocate. If there was a glitch or an upgrade, or a glitch in an upgrade, Joe would tell us what was happening and why, and when it would most likely be resolved. If there was a new feature, he'd explain how to use it. If an individual had a problem with a blog, Joe would try to solve it. And on top of all this, he kept us informed and amused with tales of online foolishness, thoughts on the business, ethics and philosophy of blogging, the weather in DC, and the current page on his Hello Kitty calendar. Much as I appreciate John Scalzi's work as our Blogfather, Editor Joe was the real go-to guy for journalers, the guy who was always there for us, the human presence that made interactions with AOL almost infinitely better than they would be otherwise. Even when the banner ads tore us apart and split us asunder, Joe was patient and helpful as always, never judging someone harshly on the basis of where they blogged or their level of expertise with HTML and such.

For AOL to lay off such an individual is not merely unfair or foolish. It's highly destructive to what's left of the AOL-J community, and equally destructive to whatever tattered shreds of goodwill remain between the company and the journalers. Already people are asking who will help them when problems arise, now that the one person who was always there for them has been shown the door. I'm sure some of the other corporate bloggers at AOL are fine folks, and maybe a few of them even survived today's layoff. But we knew Joe. We knew he cared, and would help if he possibly could. It's hard not to see this as another slap in the face from AOL. No, that's not quite it. For someone to slap your face means that they care about you - negatively, perhaps, but at least they're paying attention. Whoever put Joe on the list of layoffs clearly has no idea what an asset Joe was to the company, because he or she has no idea that Joe's constituency has any value. Journals.aol.com is just another generator of pages on which ads can appear, profitable insofar as they're fed by consumer-generated content, but perhaps more trouble than they're worth based on what happened two years ago. A "suit" who thinks of AOL Journals in such terms is certain to undervalue Joe's huge contribution to keeping J-Land alive. With his endless helpfulness and enthusiasm, Joe made it possible for people to overcome their dismay about the ads, and stay with AOL while people like me jumped ship.

He and John Scalzi even made it possible for those of us who left to retain some ties with J-Land, and even a smidge of loyalty toward a company that wrote us off. Do you know when I finally converted my paid AOL account to a free one? Tonight. It's taken me two years to get on the cable modem and a wireless LAN, work out how to save my email, and change my billing plan to the one marked $0.00. I'd be lying if I said my making the change today was in direct response to Joe's departure, but it's true that were it not for Joe and John, I would have found a way to drop my paid account a long time ago, whether I had the high speed connection or not.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about the dwindling of the old AOL-J community, as people get bored with blogging or fed up with AOL or both, and wander off elsewhere. There are more blogs out there now than any of us could read in a lifetime, but we've lost our personal connection with most of them. The ones branded AOL represent a small, often disregarded backwater of the blogosphere, with few new screen names and a distinct tendency for old ones to migrate to other platforms. We've gained a lot since AOL Journals were first launched - more choices, more versatility, slideshows and video and other widgets, gizmos and gimcracks. But we've lost a lot, too. We're lost the joy and enthusiasm that came with the novelty of this fun new means of expression. We've lost online friends, who dropped out, moved on, even died in some cases. And now we've lost Joe - not as a person and fellow blogger, but as our cheerleader, ombudsman, tutor and advocate. That's probably not the greatest loss we've had as a group. But aside from the people who have actually died, it's got to be right up there.

I've read a number of comments today that asked where Joe can be found, outside the confines of AOL. Not to worry - I've already added his personal blog to my sidebar. Here's the link:

Dumb Things I Have Done Lately

All the best, Joe!

Karen

Formerly Invisible Photos for the Invisible Photo Shoot

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Picture someone or something in the act of lounging about or slacking off. Naps, loitering, general loafing -- it all works. Show yourself, show friends, show pets. All this shoot needs is to have them not doing much at all.

You know what's coming, right? For all the usual reasons, here's Tuffy:


She's not so much lounging as posing for me, while "maintaining a state of catlike readiness" in case gobs of meatloaf suddenly appear between my fingers. That's currently all she wants to eat - no dog food, no cheese, no dog biscuits. As I've mentioned before, she's always been a fussy eater, so we're trying not to worry. Nevertheless, we worry.


This shot is from February, the same session as the photo on my sidebar.


Here's a surprise: I actually have a few shots for this shoot that have human beings in them, and no Tuffy! Here are my friends Kevin and Eva, this past Sunday afternoon:



And here's 102-year-old Eva with her daughter's dog, Shady:


And here's why I may just post this Monday Photo Shoot without any photos in it:


Good grief! First Carly gives me a heads up that all of Scalzi's Monday entries have disappeared from By the Way, including the Monday Photo shoot entry. For one awful moment I thought AOL was punishing Scalzi for breaking the Unwritten Rule or something. But no: everyone's Monday AOL-J entries are gone from their blogs. Any smugness I may have felt about this as a Blogger user (very little, actually) evaporated when I tried to upload the photos. I need to go to bed anyway, so I'm gonna try one more time, and then post without pictures if it doesn't work - and try again in the morning.

Hey, it worked this time! Good enough. Good night!

Waiting for Scalzi, or, What do You Meme?

Okay, it's late Thursday night, and I'm in withdrawal. John Scalzi hasn't posted his Weekend Assignment yet.

This is not an unprecedented circumstance, but it's very nearly so. The first time it happened, Scalzi had just won a major award, so his mind was naturally not on posting his Thursday night meme. Not having missed a single Weekend Assignment since I started doing them (with Scalzi's fourth one ever, I think), I was determined to do one anyway, so I made up my own. The second time it happened, I did an old Weekend Assignment, one of the very few I had not done already.

Tonight I'm not going to do either of those things, although I actually do have a Weekend Assignment idea waiting in the wings. But I do want to say a few things about the Weekend Assignments before moving on to the topics of Tuffy and Pumpkin Anything.

Last week's Weekend Assignment had three participants. Three. Out of the whole Internet, AOL-J, the diaspora of bloggers and journalers: three. Pathetic. The Monday Photo Shoot had four participants - better, but not by much. Why is that? And why should Scalzi stay on top of posting his memes and response links on a particular day, when we haven't bothered with our end of the deal?

I have a few theories. One can claim this is a busy time of year, or a slow time, or a hot time, or a cold time, but I don't think that's the issue. I think there are two...no, three, factors involved.

One, and I think it's the biggest reason, is that AOL doesn't promote By the Way or the Weekend Assignments any more. I've searched and searched the People Connection screen and the screens that feed off it, including the one about blogs. There is no link, no mention of our Blogfather. This seems manifestly unfair to me, and it means that nobody is going to find By the Way except through other blogs. If nobody's doing the Weekend Assignment, how is anyone going to find their way to By the Way? I don't think even Whatever promotes it any more. That's too bad, because it's still amusing and informative and occasionally even helpful.

Two, the old AOL-J Land is pretty much dead. The whole kerfluffle over the ads sent half of us out into other blogging venues, and other people just plain dropped out. I've read lots of sad little nostalgic comments lately from folks, lamenting the loss of the old days, when large groups of J-Landers read each other's blogs, and the illusion was that everyone knew everyone else. It wasn't true; there were actually a bunch of overlapping mini-communities, humor fans and mommy bloggers and people with health issues, photographers and political bloggers and so on. But close enough. By The Way was central to all that for quite a while. Everyone read Scalzi. But over the past year or two, people have drifted away. They've been absorbed into the larger blogosphere, and not necessarily forming personal connections with each other, or even maintaining them.

Three, and related to this, there was a time when the Weekend Assignment was the only game in town. We had these shiny new blogs and journals, and didn't necessarily know what to put in them. So once a week, Scalzi fed us some cool idea to play with. He still does that, but fewer people are looking for that prompt now. We've got the Round Robin Photo Challenge, Feline Friday, the Saturday Six (does Patrick still do those?), and lots and lots of other free-floating memes, full of random facts, interviews, lies, Q&As, and so on. And many people, being less obsessive than I am about such things, simply don't post unless they have something to show and tell, whether it's their own idea or some meme that turned up in another blog yesterday.

Nevertheless, I like the Weekend Assignment. Like those endlessly forwarded emails that I wish someone would stop sending me, most memes tend to make the rounds over and over. Usually there is a "rule" about tagging others to do the meme, so it doesn't take long for one's entire circle of friends to have seen and responded to it, if they're going to. Someone tags a blogger outside that immediate circle, and it spreads out from there, eventually finding its way back to the original group - who will sometimes post the same meme all over again. But the Weekend Assignment, the Monday Photo Shoot and (incidentally) the Round Robin Photo Challenges aren't like that. They are tied to a particular set of dates, and the specifics change before the next set of dates comes up. I occasionally gripe that one Weekend Assignment is reminiscent of another, but usually it's something new each time. That should be applauded, and encouraged, and responded to. Frankly, I see a "use it or lose it" scenario developing here. Myself, I don't want to lose it. How about you?

***

Tuffy is...


I don't know that I can really tell you how Tuffy is, actually. She was ravenous for a while last week, but for the past several days it's been kind of tough to get food or treats into her, particularly with pills tucked inside. She's out of the one pain pill now, and has several days' worth of the other pain pill and the antibiotic still to finish off. But if she's bored with cheese, uninterested in soft peanut butter treats and turned off by pork tenderloin dog food, it's tough to get pills inside her. I have a hamburger on the stove right now, just to wrap around a pill or two.

I haven't heard back on the pathology, and I'm trying not to worry. Please note, however, that she's not lethargic, not whimpering or anything like that, and she's always been an annoyingly fussy eater. But I'd feel better if she would regain her appetite of last week.

Update: she was happy to eat as much hamburger as I would give her (about a third of a patty). This morning John opened a different can of dog food and she ate a (small) bowl of that, too. Guess I should stop worrying. Maybe.

This Year's Pumpkin Anything

Tonight I bought pumpkin nut loaf from Trader Joe's, and pumpkin soup (at last!), pumpkin ice cream and pumpkin creamer from Safeway. The creamer is for tomorrow at work: everyone takes turns in teams bringing in Friday breakfast, and I was specifically asked to bring in flavored creamer, particularly pumpkin flavor. Not being a coffee drinker, I don't know whether I'll find a way to sample it myself. But I'm happy to discover that several people at work are like me, seasonally seeking out "pumpkin anything" to try.

Karen

Pointing at the Past - and Thoughts on Identity

Right. 2:09 AM. Doctor Who Confidential is cued up on the other computer, the laundry (well, some of it) is in the dryer, and it's time to write my entry for tonight. Good thing I can crib half of it from my old AOL Journal, Musings from Mâvarin!

Because I'm totally insane sometimes in an OCD sort of way, I've spent an hour or two today updating two Musings entries from 5/21/2004:

Las Vegas: The Non-Gamblers' Experience
The Sublime and the Ridiculous: LV as a SF/F Destination

Blame John Scalzi and Joe Loong. John Scalzi wrote about people using moblity scooters to get around the Las Vegas Strip, which reminded me how much fun John (Blocher) and I had walking around the place three years ago taking photos. But when I looked at my two postings about it, I saw something Joe warned us about recently: an old AOL You've Got Pictures album was displayed as a Ken Burns style Woohoo slideshow.

I actually hate the old YPG albums; they used to display things too small inside a huge ugly frame, and and never worked well for me and my dial-up. And I love the Ken Burnsy thing. That's not a problem for me at all. I've even put a Ken Burns Woohoo on my church's main web page. But the tiny, grainy photos in that entry, taken three years ago with a Mavica and edited with whatever I had available at the time, are not improved by scrolling lovingly across an extra-large display of the dark, low-res images. So I've deleted one photo that was especially bad, edited full size versions of eight more shots and added them in. And yes, I left it Ken Burns style. Because I don't quite trust you folks to go take a look at the original entry, here is the revised slideshow:



Hmm. The slide show won't display for me in the AOL version of this entry. Stupid dial-up! I'll be interested to know whether it displays for anyone else. It could be a slow connection issue, or it could simply be the way I copied and pasted it in here. (I did get it to display when I loaded the individual entry, so it's probably a connection speed issue. YGP gets impatient with the wait while the Journals product is still loading the other pictures on the page, not to mention the darn ad.)

But all this is a silly thing to do, isn't it? These are extremely obscure journal entries, virtually unknown to the search engines and remembered only by me. When I posted those musings about our Las Vegas trip in May 2004, I only had about two or three readers. Grainy pictures aside, I wrote what I still think is a really good entry about Las Vegas becoming a viable destination for fans of science fiction and fantasy, but nobody ever saw it or commented. And that entire journal, Musings from Mâvarin, is virtually abandoned now. So why did I bother fixing up a three year old posting in a disused journal? Um, because I could, I think. And three years later, I still hope someone will read it and leave a comment. (And Barbara actually has done so. Bless you, Barbara!)

End of cross-posting, with revisions.

Today was, of course, the first part of the Doctor Who story I've been ranting about for several weeks. It was excellent - upsetting and scary and sad and touching and exciting and effective. I don't quite have a feel for the John Smith character yet, despite David Tennant's wonderful acting, but that may just be because as a viewer I'm constantly looking for signs that the Doctor is still in there somewhere, and because the episode has to do so many other things that we can't linger too long exploring him in the first half of the story. Martha, on the other hand, was completely accessible and believable. I'm not going to go on about the actual plot tonight; I just mention it here because it leads me back to a recurring theme in my own writing, that of identity.

When I was in junior high or high school, or possibly both, I remember being taught about the concept of image. It troubled me at the time. I couldn't quite grasp it, couldn't quite believe or approve of the idea that, aside from acting or outright lying, one person could be different things at different times to different people. I was certain that I was always Karen, no more and no less, whether I was talking to a classmate, a teacher, a family member or a friend. I was real. I was me.

To a certain extent that's still true of me. I do try to curb my eccentricities somewhat at work and at church, and don't blurt out everything I'm thinking at the moment I think it. But that's more a matter of self-control (which I don't have in abundance), not really image control. I still like to think I'm really Karen to everyone: to you and Carly and John and Father Smith and anyone else who encounters me.

But not everyone has the same impression of a person, whether the person is trying to project an image or not. Two people I like at work don't like each other much, apparently because of their interactions with a third person who liked one and not the other. M therefore doesn't have the same impression of A that I have. And that sort of thing can snowball, so that cliques form and people react to an idea of someone rather than the person herself. Back at my previous job, a mean-spirited person briefly worked with us. She sat in front of another employee who, well, didn't work very hard at her job. They gossiped with each other, and with another employee who was there at the time. Within a week, one of the people in the office was saddled with a false rumor about his or her sexuality, and I was being scorned by someone whose opinion of me had previously been neutral. The bad apples were soon gone, but the interactions between the people who stayed were tainted by what had been said. The damage was done.

And even beyond all that, people change over time. Why do we do that, and how? I don't know why this question haunts me so, but it turns up in my writing over and over, in many forms. One reason, we know now, is that brains physically change. A teenager's brain isn't quite formed yet, particularly the part that deals in understanding of consequences and self-control. We learn new skills and make new memories, and they are physically encoded in our synapses. Nasty lesions form as we get older, and brain cells get killed off by strokes and alcohol. Although the brain is remarkably good at rerouting around such obstructions, it's bound to have an effect. So our minds change, literally.

It's more than that, though. I do and say certain things because I lost my glasses that one time when I was eight (and again in 1986), because I really enjoyed that Business Law class when I was 47, because I watched Jim Kirk lose his memory one night in 1968, because Shiori died on Good Friday over a decade ago, because I never heard back from Tor, well, all sorts of reasons, a lifetime of reasons. Our experiences change us, our desires change us, the things we try to accomplish change us, and even the impressions others have about us change us. I tend to explore and exaggerate all that in my fiction, put pressure on a character and watch him or her change in response:

• A researcher into ape behavior gradually becomes an ape himself.
• Teenage twins learn separately that they have completely different names, along with the responsibilities that go with those names.
• A boy becomes a monster, and must learn to integrate his human side with the animal he becomes.
• A half-mad King would rather stay a captive than come home and rule the country again.
  
• A mage loses his memory, and is afraid to reclaim it, preferring instead to become an ordinary person (although he isn't one).
• A teenager in love makes himself forget her to protect her, and loses more of himself than he intended.
• A college physics student goes a little crazy after being expelled from his original version of reality.
• High school students start remembering other lives in a magical land.
• A young woman wins a race on her birthday, and the prize involves being no longer human.
• A child whose godmother is lost in the future teaches herself to become the one person who can save her.
• A bored young aristocrat runs away to sea when things get difficult at home, and reinvents herself as a pirate named Kate.

One of the most potent of these scenarios, for me, is one in which a character must choose between a current identity and one that has somehow been lost. If Fabi becomes Fayubi again, what happens to the personality that was Fabi? If Rani can ditch his tengrem body, why should he return to it? If Kirok becomes Kirk again, what happens to the man who loved Miramanee? And if Martha can convince John Smith that the Doctor is real, has Smith any reason to become that person again?

Imagine what that would be like. If you were told that the life you remember is a lie, and that you're really a pirate or a princess, a mage or a Time Lord, would this be welcome news? To choose to reclaim that forgotten life would be a death, because you won't be you any more, at least not the version of you that you currently recognize as yourself. In one version of this scenario that I wrote, I worried for hundreds of pages about what was going to happen to the character when the time came. He clearly didn't want to be that other guy. In the end, that identity went to someone else, someone who was meant to be that person, who always longed for it but had been prevented from having that life.


What if I were to find out I was Queen Cathma?

Okay, so it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone is going to tell me (except metaphorically or in jest) that I'm really the Queen of Mâvarin, or that I'll suffer from tv-style amnesia and later find out who I am. You're unlikely to learn that your father was a Jedi, or you've really been to the Land of Oz, or that you travel through time and space in a police box. But imagine for a moment that something like that has just happened to you. Suddenly you have a chance to leave behind your normal life and become someone extraordinary. Do you do it? Or do you cling to who you are?

Karen