Tumblr gifsets have me believing a movie is seventeen kinds of gay at once then I watch it and it’s just a two second shot where one character barely glances at another.
This is something of a follow-up to my first Dreamwidth primer, because I completely forgot to talk about it. The features discussed in this post will be old hat to people familiar with LJ/DW style comments – this is mostly for Tumblr users.
So, one of the big advantages Dreamwidth has is that you control your posts. If you’ve ever had a post take off, you’ve probably had to deal with a bunch of people you don’t know having a fight about shit you don’t care about in your notes. And sure, you can block them, but there’s only so much you can do when a post really takes off.
On Dreamwidth, it’s way easier to deal with that. You may still run into it from time to time, but it is so much easier to manage. Enter comment screening and freezing.
the basics
If you’ve made a DW post, you’ve probably noticed these three icons in the comments of your entry:
From left to right, those are the icons for delete, screen, and freeze. There’s also a checkbox next to each comment, and at the bottom of your entry you’ll find a dropdown:
And while there’s no way to select all comments at once, you can also just disable them all by editing your post. On the old editor, the option is here:
And on the new editor (which you can enable by going here), you can turn on comment options from the settings.
Note: If you disable comments, no one – not even you – can see them. They’re still there, they’re just hidden until you enable them again. (Alternatively you could just make the post private, but that’s not usually an option in communities.)
This got long again so the rest is behind the cut.
Hey so @staff it’s really really shitty to flag as explicit a post about my gay uncle who died due to AIDS.
@staff this is unacceptable
Thank you. I didn’t even see a notification – I just came across it while I was scrolling through my blog to see if anything was flagged.
I’m honestly pretty upset about this. It’s also wild considering the history of the AIDS epidemic and how the US government censored PSAs about the epidemic to not mention gay men because it might be seen as endorsing “deviant” behavior. I’m not saying that’s why this was flagged, I’m just saying there’s relevant history here.
Wow. I’m so sorry this happened to your post.
When people ask what we’re so worried about with the new policy this is the answer.
some context for yahoo’s excellent product management that not a lot of people know about:
remember yahoo instant messenger? i’m guessing basically everyone stopped using that after like the early 2000s. but until about two years ago, almostall of the world’s oil trading was conducted through yahoo instant messenger. every day hundreds of millions of barrels, billions of dollars in equity, was traded by a bunch of dudes through yahoo instant messenger. traders and brokers loved that they could be speaking with tons of people at once, and their compliance officers loved that there was a transcript of conversations and deals left behind for auditing and regulatory purposes.
but yahoo decided, perhaps reasonably on the surface, that they did not want to support this service anymore. they wanted to migrate the messaging platform onto something a bit more integrated and 21st century. except their new service was not compatible with any kind of conversation-recording capability, so traders would not be allowed to use it anymore for compliance purposes.
chaos. billion dollar companies all around the world were scrambling. how would they conduct their business? i know this sounds silly, but traders talk to hundreds of people a day, brokers are showing them markets all day long. phones are inefficient and not all are set to record. they explained to yahoo what the compliance issue was. they offered to pay – these companies can afford any kind of subscription necessary. they assured yahoo that a massive pillar of the world’s economy, as fucking insane as it sounds, is actually conducted through their service. just let us use it. (here’s a reuters article about it, and here’s a financial times article on it)
yahoo didn’t change its plans.
now everyone uses something else to trade the world’s oil.
By the by, just so we’re clear, this was a post-acquisition thing. Verizon bought Yahoo two months before they annoucned YIM’s cancellation.
One I ran across on Twitter, and clicked through out of curiosity since that just didn’t sound right.
How did they get that number in the headline?
Thirty eight volunteers targeted hotspots around the borough such as the town centre, railway stations and the local hospital on Thursday night (December 29) and encountered just two rough sleepers…
“However, this was just one night and the council know of at least 12 people sleeping rough.“
I can well imagine that not everyone in that situation would want to deal with the council, or these volunteers going around getting nosy. I doubt I would gladly talk to them. Twelve still sounds very low for the whole borough, and I have personally repeatedly seen more than two street homeless people hanging around just Romford Station most nights. Doesn’t sound like they were even looking that hard.
Also from the same person quoted there, Councillor Joshua Chapman, cabinet member for housing:
“It’s also important to note that not everyone chooses to accept the help or accommodation offered by the council.
“We have actively sought out rough sleepers to make them aware that help is available but unfortunately in some instances they have turned down offers of support.”
I was trying to find an old post discussing exactly that in more detail. But, if people would rather sleep on the street (in this climate, no less) than make use of whatever help/support you’re offering? Maybe you should listen to what will actually serve their needs, instead of getting snotty about it.
They’ve supposedly had to stop doing that to EU-connected immigrants, but would I trust the local council or charity groups given the political climate these days? Hmm.
Anyway, I wasn’t that surprised at the overall slant of the piece, because politics.
What did surprise me some, though?
Investigation work carried out by the Recorder revealed that at least three homeless people have died in the borough in the last year, however no records of their deaths have been kept, and data released by charity Shelter shows that an additional 490 people are now homeless in Havering since the November 2017 figure of 1,956.
Of the 2,446 currently homeless, research shows 22 are rough sleepers and the remaining 2,424 are living in temporary accommodation.
This means one in 105 people are now homeless in Havering, up from one in 129 last year.
(So, now we’re up to 22 official rough sleepers instead of 12? 🤔)
Again, I would be surprised if that weren’t a low estimate. Those figures do include people living in temporary accommodations, couch surfing, etc. But still, somewhere around 1% of people living in this borough are now homeless.
(And this still isn’t as high as some others. One neighboring borough was in the top 10 as of last year, and I really doubt this has improved any more than it has here.)
I knew the situation had been getting worse for any number of reasons, but I didn’t realize just how high the rates had gotten. Or how sharply they’d increased within just a year. And this is before whatever else happens with the ongoing Brexit shitshow.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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