follow-up on blacklisting tags

 I was just looking through my old access filters on here. I had to delete them all, because none of them contained anyone who still follows me, but one of them was called "no comms" and IIRC, I used it to load my subscription page without any communities in it. I can't think why I would have made such a filter, otherwise. But those filters didn't show up when I went to load my reading page anymore, so it seems reasonable to me that they used to conflate subscription and access filters, back in '09 when I set up here, and that functionality has since been split. 
(When you are loading your reading page, up at the top, in the center of the top bar, it says, "You're viewing your Reading page." Then under that it has a link to Manage Circle, and then there's a drop-down menu. If you haven't made any filters, the menu's empty. I have a filter called "Everybody" from which I haven't excluded anyone, but I went in and picked out a few tags from some frequent posters who talk a lot about shows I don't watch, including a community that's running a fic challenge in a pairing I'm not interested in, and so I selected that and clicked "view" and there it is, my reading page has less stuff I don't care about on it.)

But I was thinking about this as I lay in bed, and I remember from LJ, really the way people used to handle it on here is that you just put things behind a cut. And so it was no big deal, if you had a person you subscribed to who talked a lot about a topic you didn't like much, to leave them a comment and be like "hey, if it's no trouble, can you put your updates about your distressing medical condition behind a cut tag?" And then the person would be like, "Oh, I'll try to remember to do that!" and you'd be like "cool!" and then-- I'm not an expert on triggers but I'm definitely an expert in being mildly distressed by things on the Internet-- a lot of times, you'd see the cut tag and be like, you know what, I can handle this today, for my friend who cares about me, and on good days you'd click the little expand button and read it and on bad days you wouldn't, and that was that. 
Here's an example:
( cut for discussion of cat hair )

And then you can end the cut and come back to the entry and keep talking. The bit behind the cut can be one sentence, two words, a thousand words, whatever. Sometimes a whole entry can be behind the cut. I have sorely, sorely missed that ability. It's just so easy to use it like a parenthetical aside that you know only the motivated will read. as a frequent chatterbox, I wish I could do it out loud sometimes.
Oh I've just discovered how to use the rich text entry field to do this. I am so ridiculously whatever I am that in LJ days I refused their glitchy rich text editor and hand-coded all of it, but it turns out it's pretty great now. The cut tag is the one that has three little black lines with a wavy gray line underneath. I don't know about free users but for me it's the twelfth icon in from the right. 
(Did you ever wonder why Fandom Olds sometimes typed out angle brackets around things? It's because we learned to do it in LJ and in bulletin boards. Many of them didn't support rich text editors, or if they did they came out funny most of the time. Some of my very early fic drafts, I typed <i>i in angle brackets</i> every time I wanted to emphasize a word (and in the midst of this, they came out with the new spec and it was supposed to be <em> and i never updated</em>. And some of my early Tolkienfic, I hard-coded special characters into people's names, so I genuinely got in the habit of typing &Eacuteomer as a character name. So like. Anyway. Honestly it's faster if you're in the flow of it, but. We'll see if I can kick the Rich Text habit now that I'm on it.)

My offer still stands, though, if anyone needs paid time. It's just-- you'll have to ask people to use a tag, and then hope they're consistent with the tag, and Tumblr vets probably will be, but some of us really old LJers might not because listen, they didn't invent tags until some of us had been on there six or seven or more years, and some of us clearly never got the hang of them. But boy were we fluent in please cut for TMI thanks. 

About This Journaler

 It seems trendy to make introduction posts for yourself, so I'm gonna, because I goddamn love talking about myself. I even looked up how to make it sticky. I'm super-fancy y'all. (Seriously the FAQ on here is great.)

Most people call me B and I tend to do that when I talk about myself. 
( About Me Online and IRL and where else I am and what I do )

I will make a good-faith effort to use tags intelligently and conscientiously, and beyond that, will attempt to put anything I think is upsetting or distressing or just boring under a cut, well-described. Do, please, feel free to let me know if there's anything you specifically need cut, tagged, warned for, or whatever (a lot of things I'll definitely cut and warn for by default but probably won't discuss often enough to tag for, the way tags work on this site). I can't promise I'll always remember, but I will do my darnedest. I'm also habitually foul-mouthed for effect, though for some reason I find myself censoring that more here, maybe Tumblr just brought out the crudest in me. 

Tags I will absolutely use that you might want to blacklist (and here's a post on how that works on Dreamwidth): 

• for discussion of farm work involving livestock interactions that may be not for the faint-hearted, I will use the tag animal slaughter
  
• for discussions of drinking, with which I think I have a healthy relationship but many don't and I get it, I will tag alcohol 
• for discussions of my writing, I'll use my writing
• for personal posts about me, I'll use about the author

Generally speaking, I don't post many locked entries at this juncture? But if I do they'll probably be locked for personal whining rather than anything else. At this point I grant access pretty indiscriminately, and subscribe back pretty liberally, but that might change in the future.

I am not particularly a Dreamwidth veteran but I cut my teeth on Livejournal in the early aughts so I'm more fluent with the culture of this kind of site in general than many other Tumblr refugees, so I have both an insider and outsider perspective on the weird culture of this kind of place and most importantly, on the fun shit you can do with the HTML coding and such, so. Hit me up if you have questions, I like people, but if I don't answer back promptly, I do go through not-very-talky sort of depressive phases, and when I'm at the farm my online time is super limited. 

unpretty: i’m just gonna post all the ways

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unpretty:

i’m just gonna post all the ways i’ve found so far to get RSS Links They Don’t Want You To Know About from social media sites, because people keep Leaving Tumblr Forever in favor of sites that i’m not going to use

(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)

( i've put the entry behind a cut because the crossposter kind of broke it )

I shoved all the text behind a cut: your best bet, while Tumblr still works, is to click the link up at the top to take you to the post on Tumblr, because the crossposting process stripped out all the images and links and fixing it is beyond me at this juncture-- but there's some information in the comments on this post!

probablyasocialecologist: Neglected pastures thrive under...

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probablyasocialecologist:

Neglected pastures thrive under solar panels

Solar panels could increase productivity on pastures that are not irrigated and even water-stressed, a new study finds. The new study published in PLOS One by researchers at Oregon State College finds that grasses and plants flourish in the shade underneath solar panels because of a significant change in moisture. The results bolster the argument for agrovoltaics, the concept of using the same area of land for solar arrays and farming. The idea is to grow food and produce clean energy at the same time.
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Oh! I actually heard about this!! At the Sheep & Wool Festival there was a woman shearing a sheep, so we took Farmkid over to watch, and the woman started telling us that this was a new breed of sheep they were trying to get to catch on in the region, and they were pretty decent for wool but the big thing that they were useful for was grazing under solar installations, because they were small but not super into jumping. Some sheep are too large to fit under the panels, and some are too vertically-inclined and like to climb on them, which can damage them, so these particular sheep were in the sweet spot of being smallish but not great jumpers.

Apparently that’s where the money is. Because otherwise you have to mow the grass under the panels, and ride-on lawn mowers don’t fit. (If you don’t keep the foliage down, it can take over the field and shade your solar panels.)

Shepherds can make most of their profit by hiring their flock out to keep a solar installation grazed down, and it’s extra-great because solar installations tend to have good forage under them.

(what does it say about the state of america’s foodways that you otherwise often can’t make money on raising livestock except in horrifying confinement operations, however? the woman was absolutely clear that the sheep didn’t break even on wool or meat, but if you could get solar gigs you were golden. Isn’t that sad?)
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"Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a...

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“Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a forest — thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the underwood. You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated.”

-

Beau Taplin || T e m p l e s (via cosmofilius)

My parents’ front yard had a huge Elm tree in it–stretching up past my bedroom window, above the house, into the sky, a resilient survivor of Dutch Elm disease and everything else nature could throw at it.

But last year it had to come down: it was hollow, unstable, sick, and if it fell in a storm it would crush the house.

My mom says it felt like an earthquake when the huge branches dropped.

My mom’s a gardener. She’d taken the grass out of that yard and put in beautiful things, a Japanese maple, a blue and pink hydrangea in memory of my grandma, trillium she rescued from construction sites and uncountable things I can’t name. 

The garden was crushed by those huge falling limbs. She walked out when the last of the tree had been hauled away, and she mourned for the broken Japanese maple and the hydrangea she couldn’t find trace of and the mud and mess of this place she birthed and nurtured and loved.

But.

But the thing about all of these plants is they come from forests, and in forests, trees fall. 

So in the spring, things changed:

The Japanese maple is gone, but there’s a few tiny seedlings trying to be born.

The hydrangea is sending up new branches from its broken stem.

The trillium bloomed, the ferns uncurled, the dogwood, damaged but unbroken, thrived in the sunlight.

And from the roots of that elm tree sprouted a whole flock of saplings. 

So many that Mom’s had to cut them back. So many that for years she’ll have to play tug-of-war with the living roots of that dead tree to keep the front yard from turning into a forest of spindly elms. 

She laughed, last week, when she told me about it.

“There’s a story there,” she said, shaking her head on my computer screen. “Something about resurrection.”

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