Reddit, going dark

It was awesome, watching one subreddit after another go dark last night. I don't imagine that it will affect Reddit's IPO at all, of course; money doesn't care about the wishes of ordinary human beings. But with any luck at least SOME permanent damage will be done.

I set up new accounts on Lemmy, kbin, and BookWyrm - all part of the Fediverse, which I'm hoping is resistant to the cancerous corrosion of venture capital. I did try to suggest DreamWidth as an alternate destination, but nobody seemed that interested. They never are, although I'm not sure why. Apart from being privately owned, DreamWidth seems an outstanding alternative to me. But what do I know?

Lemmy is working well, but doesn't seem to allow me to blog; it only allows me to post to communities, as far as I can tell. Reddit allowed me to post to my own profile, which was effectively blogging. Although I have no reason to believe that anyone ever read those posts. On the other hand, who cares? That said, Lemmy is the best community site I've found so far. People are friendly, nice, and responsive. I even got to post some book recommendations there.

kbin is impossibly laggy so far. It supposedly allows microblogging, but I have no way to test it until it's actually usable. That might take days, given what I presume is the Reddit exodus.

BookWyrm (which is focused on book reviews) does apparently allow me to post "direct messages", which appear to be exactly the sort of blogging function I was looking for - except they seem to be private only, i.e. it's possible that only I can see them. Even if that's not the case, I don't know if they're visible to the Fediverse outside of Bookwyrm. I guess we'll see.

Here's the first direct message I posted there:

I'm hoping that this "Direct Message" will work as a sort of general status update about my experience here on BookWyrm so far. Will anyone see it? Is it visible to anyone elsewhere on the Fediverse? I have absolutely no idea. But I can hope.

I imported my CSV from GoodReads, but it carried a lot of garbage formatting along with it - bad links to GoodReads resources, for one thing, some HTML that doesn't work here, etc. etc. Since I have hundreds (?) of reviews, manually cleaning up each one is NOT an appealing prospect.

I could copy the CSV file and do a lot of search/replacing. Then re-import. But I suspect that would result in duplicate entries, which would also suck. Has anyone else dealt with this?

This Enlightened Modern Age

I do a LOT of book recommending over on Reddit.

It took me a while to realize that being an older reader, a voracious one with an excellent memory, gave me something valuable I could share with younger readers. In part, I think, because Amazon in particular has effectively suppressed most older books. They're not as profitable, apparently. And bookstores tend to focus on new books, too.

But I love those old books. I don't want them to be forgotten. My feelings about them are pretty much encapsulated by Lord Dunsany's very short piece "The Raft-Builders".

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.

When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.

They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.

See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.

See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.

For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.

After seeing the umpteenth post which amounted to "I've read TLOTR, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Game of Thrones so I guess there's no good fantasy left", well, I started recommending old books. Not just science fiction and fantasy, mind you; older books from lots of different genres. Almost nobody else was doing it.

I soon noticed that I was basically rewriting the same recommendations pretty often. So I started saving them in a document online for re-use. That allowed me to polish and improve them. The document got longer and longer. Eventually someone asked me to publish it, so I did. One thing I started doing over the years was include links to free ebooks in the public domain. I want to make the document as valuable to readers as possible.

I tried to read some newer books as well, but so far most of them have been pretty disappointing. Publishing standards have gone WAY down, as has writing quality. It's a sad situation.

But recently I was told that I'm out of date. Books from the 1980s and earlier don't live up to the standards of modern, enlightened readers. The characters don't have cell phones. They don't use pronouns. Most of them aren't trans, or gay, or gender-neutral. They just don't reflect the world we live in today.

Fuck that.

Nothing against pronouns, or LGBTQ++ people, or anything else - but I don't accept that great books from prior decades aren't great any more because they don't include the latest and most fashionable views of western society. If anything, I'm quite sure that the "enlightened" books of the past twenty years will age MORE poorly than the works of great authors like Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Cordwainer Smith, Lord Dunsany, or many others.

But even if I'm wrong about that, I won't be shamed into giving up the books I love - or intimidated into not recommending them to new readers.

This *Censored* Era

 It's amazing how much you can't say on what was once the "free" internet. Unfortunately, that includes jokes.

But nobody reads this blog. So I can post here without worrying about being censored or attacked, as long as I avoid anything that might trigger automoderation.

I've been hearing a lot about Pride Month lately. Which makes me wonder "When do we get months for the other six Deadly Sins?"

But seriously, it seems that I'm now part of the LGBTQ+ category myself - since I'm apparently demisexual. I'm not sure what to think about that. Sometimes it seems to me that pretty much everybody is going to be subsumed by that definition, until there's just one old straight white cis allosexual guy somewhere in rural America left for everyone else to hate!

You know, I kind of like being able to write without having to worry about downvotes or autobanning or hate mail. I think I might do this again!