What's the biggest example of the domino meme in my life? I'm gonna have to go with "I got bored on the sleepy overnight shift at the data center -> Russia invaded Ukraine".
Struggled to think of something that fit... most of the cause/effect stuff in my life has been pretty straightforward.
I think: AOL Chat Room -> owning a champion schipperke.
1. I got bored on the overnight shift and started volunteering for LiveJournal's support team.
2. I kept getting put in charge of more and more shit, because I got shit done
3. I got laid off from said overnight shift, and since it was the tail end of the dotcom burst, decided to try college again.
4. I told everyone I was going to have to pick up a job that would work around classes, probably waiting tables, so I was gonna have to stop volunteering.
5. Like three LJ employees went to Brad and said "I know you have no idea what she does, but if she stops doing it, bad shit will happen."
6. Brad hired me and told me to keep doing it.
7. I spent the next 2 years cheerfully doing like 7 jobs so Brad didn't have to deal with a lot of the things he hated.
8. This freed him up to work on interesting technical problems, including how to best support text in non-Western Latin encodings.
9. This being before widespread UTF-8 adoption by US services, LJ wound up with a substantial population of Russian users living in Russia who wanted a service that wasn't under Russian government control/influence, including journalists, largely turning LJ into the Russian free press.
10. Brad sold LJ to Six Apart, where I continued to do like 7 jobs except the CEO was a lot more terrible at listening to me than Brad was.
11. So terrible, in fact, that he ignored me when I said "if you do this, your site will be dead within 18 to 24 months" and did the thing anyway.
I remember there used to be a site that showed the last 20? 50? Images uploaded to livejournal and it was a fascinating slice of humanity, and I noticed it being suddenly very Russian around that time
Ah! Back then I was on LJ with a bunch of other midwestern sci-fi fans and when the sale to the Russian operation happened we were all like, what the hell just happened? Because you'd only see the people you were following so who knew, right?
I remember you from that time (I was a major lurker). Specifically a long post you made explaining moderation and safe harbour provisions (?) that I credit as sparking my interest in the legal underpinnings of the internet.
But I didn't know much of all this.
I kept my mouth shut at the time because I was still trying to fix it internally, then when I quit I was trying to avoid fucking over my team members who couldn't. Then I had a nervous breakdown for a year or so, and then I was starting up a competing service so it wouldn't have been a good idea.
Even today with Unicode and UTF-8 it's a ridiculous problem. Too many things that are just rules that you cannot reason about because they describe systems that humans grew, not designed.
So this is in no way your fault but! You getting bored on an overnignt shift is also very likely why I can’t ever travel to Russia.
I wrote a paper on the DDoS attacks, and yeah. Wild world.
Hey! High five of "I check which international air space a flight is flying through, just in case, because I have told the FSB to fuck off enough times it's a good idea to never let me or my devices anywhere near Russian control"!
I had a harrowing experience in a Moscow airport on a layover before I connected the dots. Never again.
On my end it’s weird cause I was on LJ for Japanese street fashion and annoyed I couldn’t look at our biggest swap groups during the DDoS. 🙃
I just have enough Russian users that the FSB tries to get me to cough up information on regularly enough that I will never let me or an electronic device I've ever owned fall into their sphere of control
Also, yes, those DDoSes were fascinating. When you had the backend info, you could literally anticipate major events in Russian politics by about an hour. Once we had a ramp-up and were like "Putin is about to have a bad day" and then nothing happened, so we thought our bellwether was broken.
You may not want to delve back into this in any kind of order, & there may be areas you put "then shit happened that is still too dangerous to talk about" but a history of this, & how one woman fighting health weirdness still manages to ride the maelstrom & shape a lot of the web, *will* be read.
And rah--way back, when I went into LJ After the Fall, we had to deal with the ToS even Russian native speakers could not understand. So I signed, downloaded, moved to DW, and have left up "find me other places." All impt stuff there already copyrighted.
Is it time to delete the floating LJ?
Just thinking about going around and tidying up places that are placeholders, because I found out some troll came at me via Amazon to Goodreads.
So, the only protection is creating maybe one page of "This is where I am. All else is imposters" and punting?
Oh Christ, I think mine traces the arc of “started smoking to spite my already busted lungs” to befriending you to LJ T&S to a bunch of heavily redacted job shit to “spent the next half day staring at the wall wishing I could cauterize the neurons that now know that thing”
Before: Super-loud ATVs nearby
Me: You’re terrorizing the neighbors! Dogs are upset & scared!! (direct f2f righteous indignation)
After: 0 loud ATV riding in the hood
(more after: discovered the guy is a softy for animals)
