shadesmaclean

...journal, but I doubt anyone was planning on closing early today, either. Or curfews, or a non-stop public assault on press freedom by our own police, or possibly martial law... who knows, at this point? The real point is that history is happening right outside, and that is more important than my otherwise standing embargo on new deviations, and people have a right to know, as only an informed populace can have an informed opinion about anything. There was an actual riot at the Beverly Center earlier today, and even though things stayed business as usual for the remainder of my shift at our store, we were close enough to the action the Corporate decided it would be wise to close early, so even most of my coworkers left a mere hour or so after my shift ended. Since then, there has been instituted a 9 pm curfew in West Hollywood, and likely the greater Los Angeles area, reports of more violence downtown, and demonstrators still on the march, as well as the National Guard being brought in. If that wasn't enough, most of my sources also report that violence directed at reporters in Minneapolis is now spreading into a mounting police assault against journalists in many other places, as well. I just wanted to give a personal account of what I've seen and heard so far, so that if I go offline in the coming days, someone on the outside will know why.

8 years... 400+ chapters of Tradewinds... nearly 200 other written pieces... and I am NOT wasting a single minute of my life cleaning up the mess that wix made of every goddam one of them. In fact, I'm largely done wasting time here at all. I'm not getting any younger, and an "upgrade" that downgrades everything users actually cared about and also obliterates countless hours of work done over the years, that's their shame, and no one else's, and thus they will live with it, on every single page, for the rest of this website's likely shortened life, because I'm moving on. I'm still exploring options, especially possibilities of Retroshare, Beaker, or possibly something IPFS-based, as, between this and fumblr shooting itself in the foot with a bazooka over a year ago, I'm just reaching my last straw on centralized websites altogether. If there are to be any changes to my future endeavors, they will be by my own hand, not heavy-handed down by corporate fiat, and you can be damn sure I'll actually have a plan for transferring everything across fully intact. No missing functionalities, no missing download stats, no need for visitors to consult a dozen tutorials to figure out how even the most basic things are supposed to work, instead contributing to a decentralized future, where individuals and communities can decide their own standards and priorities, never to be eclipsed again.