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Not cross-posting this to my LiveJournal, obviously.
For those of you wondering if I've been hiding out in a cave these last few days, that answer is No, I've been digging down in the salt mines.
I migrated my old LiveJournal content to Dreamwidth in 2017 (Another Way To Call A Cat A Kitten), while keeping my lj too, and cross-posting from Dreamwidth to lj. I checked after the migration and it looked like the videos embedded in my old lj weren't embedding in the Dreamwidth version. Oh well, got to take care of this sometime (if anyone'll even be reading in the Dreamwidth archives). Then in 2019 I was looking to update a bunch of Dottie West videos that had gone missing on the old lj posts, and in doing this I noticed something really weird: On my Dreamwidth, where the Dottie West videos should have been were other videos, the wrong videos; videos I had indeed uploaded, but recently, elsewhere on Dreamwidth. And I looked around the old Dreamwidth posts and discovered this a lot: wrong videos where correct ones should have been. Anyway, after jumping into fixing these for a few days (putting the correct vids back up on the material Dreamwidth had imported), I decided I had a life to live instead, and I would get to Dreamwidth repair in due time: it didn't look so bad, only a big mess around 2010 to 2012 and I knew I'd been embedding fewer vids earlier. So, I'd come back to it later.
Well, now it's later, for reasons of Russia invading the Ukraine and clamping down on independent media. LiveJournal was bought by Russians in the '00s, and so lj is subject to Russian law, a reason so many of us migrated our LiveJournals in the first place. My fear is that the Russian gov't will simply shut down LiveJournal, and there have been rumors reported on Dreamwidth that, if not killing lj, the Russian gov't would essentially shut the Internet to foreigners, so my journal would still be killed. And the lj is where you can find huge hulks of my thinking and writing esp. 2008-2015 or so. And of course it is therefore preserved on Dreamwidth too but in very weird form, since so much is my commenting on music, embedding what I was commenting on, and so forth.
And the mess is way bigger than I'd supposed: the Dreamwidth software is grinding away still, and putting new stuff in place of old, as well as new old stuff (i.e., stuff I'd just fixed in the archives will show up a day later elsewhere in the archives too), etc. Basically, every embed prior to Feb. 2017 is either a message saying "Invalid Embed" (about a third of them, and this isn't so bad, at least it's not the wrong video), or the text is about a Filipino talent show contestant neighing like a horse, but the video is Javiera Mena, or I'm writing about CL of 2NE1 but here's MC Teteu, or where Cassie had been is now NCT 127's "Fire Truck". Now I suppose, confronted with a post in which Alessandro Leipold, formerly of the IMF, is saying that Europe has become incapacitated in the face of the bond crisis [this was 8 days before Draghi rode to the rescue], and where his talking head is supposed to be we see Badkiz vanquishing lollipop thugs instead, a generous observer might decide that I'm a mad genius. But they're more likely to think I'm an idiot. And anyway Badkiz might be replaced in turn by DJ Guuga celebrating the moment he embraced her. ("Fucking smoke and you for me on all fours.")
So basically I'm going through Dreamwidth and looking for all the wrong videos and replacing them with the right ones – once I've put my own embed into Dreamwidth that should take care of it, and it won't be subject to be replaced. At least, I hope this is true and if it's not then I'm really out of luck.*
And THEN, WHEN I'M DONE WITH THAT, I'll need to go through Dreamwidth 2006 --> 2017 looking to insert the correct code where Dreamwidth says "Invalid Embed," replacing deleted videos and deleted photos from ImageShack and photos that Photobucket keeps threatening to delete when they delete my account, etc.; that's obviously less urgent but still will be much harder to do if/when Russia kills LiveJournal. You see, the way I find what the correct video is supposed to be is by going into the LiveJournal, clicking edit, finding the original embed codes, and figuring out from those codes what the correct video is. (Many of the old videos are no longer functioning on my LiveJournal either, because they used the dreaded Shockwave Flash which no one accepts anymore. So I can't simply go back and look at my lj and see what videos are there. So I have to go into the code.) And yes, I have downloaded my old lj posts, but the downloads are not in the chronological order they were originally posted, and it's much harder to discern the embed code I need by going into the actual thickets of a download's source code than by just hitting edit on a functioning LiveJournal.
This, I concede, is better than being bombarded by artillery, or living in a refugee camp. It's even better than doing my taxes, which is what I should've been doing this week. Which I'll have to do next week.
Badkiz subdue the lollipop thugs
Watch me whip, watch me neigh neigh
*[UPDATE: Denise of Dreamwidth very kindly explained this to me. Basically, for security reasons their importer can't use the embed codes that I'd plugged into LiveJournal, so in essence Dreamwidth's software is matching the number on the LJ-embed tag with the embed tag number on a different, Dreamwidth video and inserting that video. And there's no overall fix that can be applied, so the only solution is to do what I'm doing, which is to replace every single video manually.]
For those of you wondering if I've been hiding out in a cave these last few days, that answer is No, I've been digging down in the salt mines.
I migrated my old LiveJournal content to Dreamwidth in 2017 (Another Way To Call A Cat A Kitten), while keeping my lj too, and cross-posting from Dreamwidth to lj. I checked after the migration and it looked like the videos embedded in my old lj weren't embedding in the Dreamwidth version. Oh well, got to take care of this sometime (if anyone'll even be reading in the Dreamwidth archives). Then in 2019 I was looking to update a bunch of Dottie West videos that had gone missing on the old lj posts, and in doing this I noticed something really weird: On my Dreamwidth, where the Dottie West videos should have been were other videos, the wrong videos; videos I had indeed uploaded, but recently, elsewhere on Dreamwidth. And I looked around the old Dreamwidth posts and discovered this a lot: wrong videos where correct ones should have been. Anyway, after jumping into fixing these for a few days (putting the correct vids back up on the material Dreamwidth had imported), I decided I had a life to live instead, and I would get to Dreamwidth repair in due time: it didn't look so bad, only a big mess around 2010 to 2012 and I knew I'd been embedding fewer vids earlier. So, I'd come back to it later.
Well, now it's later, for reasons of Russia invading the Ukraine and clamping down on independent media. LiveJournal was bought by Russians in the '00s, and so lj is subject to Russian law, a reason so many of us migrated our LiveJournals in the first place. My fear is that the Russian gov't will simply shut down LiveJournal, and there have been rumors reported on Dreamwidth that, if not killing lj, the Russian gov't would essentially shut the Internet to foreigners, so my journal would still be killed. And the lj is where you can find huge hulks of my thinking and writing esp. 2008-2015 or so. And of course it is therefore preserved on Dreamwidth too but in very weird form, since so much is my commenting on music, embedding what I was commenting on, and so forth.
And the mess is way bigger than I'd supposed: the Dreamwidth software is grinding away still, and putting new stuff in place of old, as well as new old stuff (i.e., stuff I'd just fixed in the archives will show up a day later elsewhere in the archives too), etc. Basically, every embed prior to Feb. 2017 is either a message saying "Invalid Embed" (about a third of them, and this isn't so bad, at least it's not the wrong video), or the text is about a Filipino talent show contestant neighing like a horse, but the video is Javiera Mena, or I'm writing about CL of 2NE1 but here's MC Teteu, or where Cassie had been is now NCT 127's "Fire Truck". Now I suppose, confronted with a post in which Alessandro Leipold, formerly of the IMF, is saying that Europe has become incapacitated in the face of the bond crisis [this was 8 days before Draghi rode to the rescue], and where his talking head is supposed to be we see Badkiz vanquishing lollipop thugs instead, a generous observer might decide that I'm a mad genius. But they're more likely to think I'm an idiot. And anyway Badkiz might be replaced in turn by DJ Guuga celebrating the moment he embraced her. ("Fucking smoke and you for me on all fours.")
So basically I'm going through Dreamwidth and looking for all the wrong videos and replacing them with the right ones – once I've put my own embed into Dreamwidth that should take care of it, and it won't be subject to be replaced. At least, I hope this is true and if it's not then I'm really out of luck.*
And THEN, WHEN I'M DONE WITH THAT, I'll need to go through Dreamwidth 2006 --> 2017 looking to insert the correct code where Dreamwidth says "Invalid Embed," replacing deleted videos and deleted photos from ImageShack and photos that Photobucket keeps threatening to delete when they delete my account, etc.; that's obviously less urgent but still will be much harder to do if/when Russia kills LiveJournal. You see, the way I find what the correct video is supposed to be is by going into the LiveJournal, clicking edit, finding the original embed codes, and figuring out from those codes what the correct video is. (Many of the old videos are no longer functioning on my LiveJournal either, because they used the dreaded Shockwave Flash which no one accepts anymore. So I can't simply go back and look at my lj and see what videos are there. So I have to go into the code.) And yes, I have downloaded my old lj posts, but the downloads are not in the chronological order they were originally posted, and it's much harder to discern the embed code I need by going into the actual thickets of a download's source code than by just hitting edit on a functioning LiveJournal.
This, I concede, is better than being bombarded by artillery, or living in a refugee camp. It's even better than doing my taxes, which is what I should've been doing this week. Which I'll have to do next week.
Badkiz subdue the lollipop thugs
Watch me whip, watch me neigh neigh
*[UPDATE: Denise of Dreamwidth very kindly explained this to me. Basically, for security reasons their importer can't use the embed codes that I'd plugged into LiveJournal, so in essence Dreamwidth's software is matching the number on the LJ-embed tag with the embed tag number on a different, Dreamwidth video and inserting that video. And there's no overall fix that can be applied, so the only solution is to do what I'm doing, which is to replace every single video manually.]
