Cody’s blog

Turns out the smoke we’ve been seeing and smelling for the past few days is from the Zaca fire in Santa Barbara county. I suspected that’s what it was—it was too diffuse and widespread to be a local fire—and when I asked my coworkers yesterday, they all agreed that was where it was coming from. When my we first noticed it on Sunday, my Mom was visiting me and wondering what was making the sky look funny (it’s kind of like a sunset in the middle of the afternoon—it would be pretty if you didn’t know what was causing it), and later we could smell the smoke, so I climbed up the hill behind the house, where I can get a view of the whole valley, to see what I could see. There was no obvious source of smoke, but the haze filled the valley and the clouds were pink beyond the hills, so it was obviously coming from far away.

I seem to have recuperated from Sunday’s run with no problem, and was feeling so full of energy yesterday at work, I forgot to stop for lunch, then was also five minutes late leaving for the day, because I was just working along without looking at the clock.

I should do my two-mile run this morning, but I may wait until tonight. It’s already quarter to nine, and if I’m not outside running by nine, I won’t have time to shower and get ready for work in time. I’m feeling kind of tired today—I was up late last night, reading all the latest news from LJ, and making myself completely furious. Then I downloaded a tool made by antennapedia called ljmigrate, which will download your journal and comments, and repost all the entries to another journal of your choice. I used it to copy my LiveJournal to my JournalFen “codyne” account. It worked very well—only one post failed to copy over, but I didn’t take the time to figure out which one it was yet, because the main migration took until 11:30 pm (about an hour and a half altogether, for 588 posts). So I still need to find that one post and repost it by hand, upload all my icons, and decide what to do about the images that are linked to LJ’s scrapbook.

So I went to bed late, and still angry, and probably didn’t get to sleep for another hour or so.

I think what makes me the angriest about LJ’s latest stance is that, even though they admit that there’s a difference between drawings of children and photographs of actual children, they refuse to treat them differently. They’ve decided to lump it all together and treat it as “child porn,” regardless of the actual legalities. Which leads to them saying things like they can’t warn first and allow the users to delete the offending images instead of preemptively banning them for life because they can’t knowingly host illegal images for even the time it takes to say “take this down within x hours.” Even though the images probably aren’t illegal. But they must act as if they are! They can’t make up their minds.

They also stated that they were reporting any “child porn” they discovered to the police. Does that mean that they turned over ponderosa121 and elaboration’s artwork to the police? Or did they not do that because, you know, they realize that the artwork isn’t actually illegal? I’d like to ask them that, or see if someone else has, but reading the comments to the lj-biz post turn my stomach, I’m not going there any more.

I have no problem with LJ deciding it doesn’t want certain types of art on their site. If they’d told ponderosa121 and elaboration to take down the drawings, I’d have been perfectly okay with that. But to label their artwork child pornography, ban them for life, suggest that they’re criminals for drawing it, to me is outrageous, reprehensible, and immoral.

And now for something completely different: Giant Lego man found in Dutch sea (complete with photo).

I tried to take a photo of the windmills on the hill along the road into town, but they were too far away. You can just barely see them standing along the top of the hill.