Eddis, Attolia, Sounis

Hi folks. I adore our little sounis community, but I wrote about some of my concerns with Live Journal a while back and have been meaning to put together an email list of all you wonderful sounisians, in case something happens to LJ and we need to regroup.

Here's what I'm thinking. ninedaysaqueen and I will keep a spreadsheet with you all's LJ user names and email addresses, and I can promise you we won't ever use these email address except to maintain contact with you if LJ ceases to exist.

If you'd like to be included, you can send me an email at checkers65477 AT yahoo.com (obviously, add the @ in there). Or, if you prefer, message your email address to me here on LJ.

And, remember, we have a Dreamwidth backup of the sounis site. Bookmark it, and if we ever need a new home, we can migrate over there and still have all the old posts.

Just a little background. Although LJ was created in America, it was sold to a Russian media company in 2007 and in 2016-2017 migrated to servers located in Russia. The LJ Terms of Service are in line with Russian law, which caused some previous LJ users to migrate to other social media platforms. It all hit home for me last year when I had to pay for my own persomal paid account in rubles.

For years, our mods and members looked for better sites that still allowed for the depth of posts/comments/discussion offered by LJ. The trend now is in more fast-paced, short posts that can be reblogged, rather than longer posts that can be created by and commented on by ALL members of a community. And convincing everyone to go create a login and move to another side would be impossible. So, we've stayed with LJ.

With the recent invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, I felt the need to tell you all this. Politics have never been allowed on sounis (except for the politics of the little peninsula!) and so I'm not going to comment more, except to state my sympathy for and solidarity with the Ukrainian people.

Over the past few years, LJ has censored the content of some journals and limited free expression. In case LJ might see fit to change or delete American-based blogs, I've been doing an occasional backup of the sounis site to Dreamwidth. I refreshed the backup today, so it's all there on https://queensthief.dreamwidth.org/

Unless someone has a better idea, we'll continue to use sounis as is, and thank you to those who have reached out to me about LJ and being dilligent about backups. Feel free to chime in and comment about any of this!

As the publication date for A Conspiracy of Kings draws nearer and advance copies are beginning to circulate, please remember to use SPOILER WARNINGS and LJ-CUTS when discussing the book, as a courtesy to those who haven't read it and want to remain spoiler-free.

It's best to err on the side of caution, which means no information from the new book should be displayed on the main Sounis page. Those who want to read the info can click on the LJ-cut to get to the details, and others can remain blissfully in the dark until they are able to snag a copy of their own.

Edited to add: Kelly had a great idea--you may want to say if your post is mild, medium or maximum as far as level of spoilers are concerned.

Instructions on how to make an LJ-cut can be found here.

Thanks!