Filling in the Journal

What can happen in 600 days?

I have been, over the years, an indifferent diarist. Although I started my journal more than forty-two years ago, there are huge chunks of time without a single entry. But okay, I mean, what really can happen over a mere 728 days?[1]

Yeah, if I could go back in time,[2] I would convince myself that even if I wrote a few words a day, it would be better than writing nothing. It probably wouldn’t do any good, since the intention of writing every day was always there, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible.

It’d be late and and I’d be in the dark.[3] The ride would be too bumpy to reliably mark things down. I’d forget where I put my journal.[4] I’d go a trip certain that I was going to keep a journal, but then leave my journal at home (which is better than leaving it in a hotel, never to be seen again). It is quick and easy to not get a journal entry written.

Hard to search through these

Over the years, I filled (at least) eighteen notebooks to some degree of completion.[5] That’s it, barring some forgotten volume resurfacing. I have finally transcribed the lot of them, in some cases replacing bad handwriting with bad typing, so I will probably revisit the volumes from time to time, when I look at an old entry and say, “just what the hell did I actually write here?” Now comes the next phase. It’s time to fill in the gaps. I have a plan.

Now, because I have been a less-than-diligent diarist, these are the things I must do:

See what I wrote elsewhere. For those times when I didn’t write a journal entry, sometimes I wrote something about it elsewhere. A zine.[6] An email. A social-media post. Time to check my words. I’ve been delighted to find that some of the gaps in my journal have already been written.

Like this one

See what I shot. There have been plenty of occasions where I didn’t jot anything down on a trip[7] but I did take lots of photos. That’ll jog your memory. If nothing else, they provide a simple guide to what I did that day, akin to a one-line journal entry. “Went to the museum” is better than just a blank.

What can I remember? And in the absence of any documentary evidence, there’s always the chance association. Every once in a while, I’ll remember something and—aware that there is no corresponding journal entry—jot down what I remember. Sure, this is nothing like a contemporaneous entry, but it’s better than nothing. (I also mark these as such, since they are memories.) What you remember today might slip from memory.[8]

You can’t bring back the past. There no do-overs,[9] but there is a chance—even after the fact—to improve on spotty journaling practices.

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1. That’s the gap between my last entry in 1983 and my first entry in 1985. I mean, yes, that’s almost the entirety of a relationship I had with a boyfriend and included two changes of address, but really.  ↩

2. There’s this fantasy of avoiding some great personal screw-up, but some of those unpleasant events led me to today, so I’ll settle for the lesser goal of not avoiding them, but at least chronicling them.  ↩

3. You can’t write in bed in the dark with pen and ink. I’ve tried.  ↩

4. One journal entry celebrates finding my journal after it went astray at the end of a trip. Had I left it in another country? If I had lost it, I might have now forgotten it existed.  ↩

5. One early volume is lost, though when I last saw it, I did note that it spanned all of three days before I put it aside, only picking it up again after I had started a new one. I don’t think I’ve seen it since. It could turn up.  ↩

6. Yeah, I used to do that.  ↩

7. See above with journals that didn’t make it along for a trip.  ↩

8. There have been times when I’ve remembered something with great clarity but have not been able to jot it down, only to draw a blank later as those memories had sunk into the background.  ↩

9. As nice as that might be in some cases. Oh, here are some mistakes I would undo. ↩

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The Boskone Queerbashing

What follows is something I wrote up for a zine after an incident at the science fiction convention Boskone XXII (February 15–17, 1985). I am not completely certain whether the events below happened as Friday became Saturday, or as Saturday became Sunday. I’m kinda splitting the difference and since 16 February 1985 was one of the days. Leaning more to the evening of the 16th, morning of the 17th.

Boskone XXII was full of surprises. There was great interest in my all-gay apa,[1] I hosted one of Boskone’s two Gay Fandom parties, and also ran a discussion group about Gay Fandom (yes, it was a rather gay con for me). I saw lots of movies. And I almost got queerbashed.[2]

Almost was more than enough. The intent to do more was there And—although I can’t be certain—I think much of it was premeditated.[3]

Start with the first Gay Fandom party. The crowd was only mostly gay. I have no problem with sympathetic straights being at a gay party. The point was to have fun in a gay-positive atmosphere. Then there were people like Drew, brother to someone I knew.[4] He and his friends were not sympathetic. When they showed up at the party, I was a little apprehensive, but there were more of us (and who can stop an army of lovers?).

Drew, in addition to being non-sympathetic, isn’t even a fan. Yes, folks, he’s one of the over-growing number of Mundane Fandom.[5] When I started going to cons, fans had a good reputation with hotel staffers (this heard from a maid (okay, I could be cynical and say she was staring for a bigger tip, but…)). This year, I heard about how the hotel liaison was trying to calm the hotel about the vandalism (most hall phones were destroyed).[6]

Well, they were quiet (although at one point, Drew called me over (I was in the middle of a conversation and said so)) and soon left. That’s when things began. There were a few annoyance calls and one in which Drew told me that his brother wanted to meet me by the film room (1. I don’t deal through intermediaries—his brother knows that; 2. I rarely come when summoned, which his brother knows too).

Finally, at 3 am., I was preparing to leave the hotel. I wanted to say goodbye to a few friends. This took us (Ron and I) past Drew and his friends. “Queers,” they said, “faggots.” Bluntly speaking, these things are true, but I’d rather not be called them. Ron and I have only reaction to queerbating: we kiss and walk on.

They got louder and cruder. “Faggot,” said Drew, “it makes me sick that my brother used to hang around with a faggot. I wish I had a gun so I could shoot your balls off, faggot.”

“At least he can find them,” shot back Ron. My turn: “I’d rather be queer than an asshole.” This got them mad.

They pursued. Drew pushed me. “Leave him alone,” said Ron. Then a large brick wall, disguised as a blond man appeared and said, “leave them alone!” He pushed the queerbashers away. We left, going for security, since a fight had broken out. We left, going for security, since a fight had broken out, and we wanted to make sure justice was served.

Unfortunately, by the time we got hotel security to come to the fourth floor, everyone had disappeared (everyone! combatants and spectators alike).

I was a little shaken up by this, so I suggested to Ron that we go to the film room and watch the rest of Slaughterhouse 5. So we did and told a few new friends of our experience. We soon became a group of angry young queers.

There are people in this world who think that gay people should put up with such abuse. Fortunately, con operations did not agree when we told them of the incident the next morning. The next morning, Ron and I bumped into a committee member we both know. We told her out story. She told us to meet her in Systems. So, we went there and told our story (just as it is above).

Later, we had to return to Systems. It seems the guy who stopped the queerbashing pushed Drew’s girlfriend, causing her to break her knee.[7] So, we retold our story (to another con staffer), pointing out that we could understand Drew & Co. feeling attacked, but that the attack was borne of chivalry.

[Not in my original account, but we were told by con staff that Drew and his friends had been ejected from the con and told that they were not welcome on the premises. They were also told that knew and believed me and that their tale of how Ron and I initiated things just wasn’t credible.]

Later, I saw Drew’s brother. I told him the story, and promised to do what he could although he doubted he could do anything. (We saw him still later; his parents refused to order Drew to come home, further Drew had sworn to get us).

We were a little nervous about all this. You can’t count on large individuals to come to your rescue. Fortunately, at most time we were with large groups of fen,[8] and usually several gay fen.

We went to Burger Thing,[9] and—as chance would have it—they were two tables way from us. This somewhat ruined our appetite, but nothing happened.

The rest of the weekend went by with only one more incident. While the finally incident wasn’t violent, it was homophobic. Earlier that day, I was about to go to the bank and didn’t want to deal with weirdos to say dumb things to people in top hats, so I had loaned my hat to a friend. I hadn’t seen her after that, so I went to a party where I knew she’d be.

I left several friends in the con suite and went off for the 13th floor. En route, another elevator passenger saw my badge and said, “You’re John Dumas. I’ve heard of you.”[10]

“In conjunction of with that?”

“You were involved in that thing where the girl got assaulted.”

“What girl?” I questioned, then it hit me. “Her—she was injured trying to assault a friend and me.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said the gentleman., “you only suffered verbal abuse, she has a broken knee.”[11]

There’s no talking to some people and this one was going to the same party. So, I collected my hat[12] (much to the disappointment of the friend who was now wearing it (sorry, Adam)), and explained why I couldn’t stay—and I was expected elsewhere.

My friend later told me the topic of the party became how stupid some people could be, excusing the intent of committing violence, just because the intended victims escaped unscathed. There is hope for humanity.

A few words in postscript
Ron and I broke up less than a year after that (for reasons that had nothing to do with the queerbashing at Boskone XXII). He’s a great guy (we’re in touch), but we were a disaster as a couple.

The incident was well remembered a year later at Boskone XXIII, which saw the founding of the Gaylaxians. I’m happy to say that only positive gay experiences happened at Boskone XXIII.

The question of what would happen with out gay fans at the con had been answered. Yeah, there could be problems, but the con would have our back (kudos to the staff of Boskone XXII, who handled things beautifully).

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1. An amateur press association seemed the best choice to me, since I assumed that gay science fiction fans were sufficiently rare that there would be no way to have a local organizations (1986) or a convention (1988), both of which I later had a hand in.
    ↩
2. I wrote “almost” in 1985 when I wrote this up. I was queerbashed. They made physical contact with me. (Queerbashing and queerbaiting were the terms used by the LGBTQ (then LGB) community. Later, non-community newspapers softened these terms to gaybashing and gaybaiting, because when you’re talking about physical or verbal assaults, you need gentle language.)
    ↩
3. I think anything less than an abject apology for existing and a promise to leave the con immediately would have been taken as a pretext for a physical altercation. They were spoiling for a fight. I wasn’t there for that.
    ↩
4. When I originally published this in my zine, I named him. I’ve removed a few identifying other details from this story. If you knew me in 1985 and you’re curious, yeah I’ll tell.
    ↩
5. Boskone had a problem in the mid ’80s. It had grown large enough that it was dubbed the “Winter Worldcon” and had attracted an increasingly large contingent who weren’t even remotely science fiction fans. These people increasingly became a problem for Boskone.
    ↩
6. And it would be two more years before Boskone XXIV, the “Boskone from Hell,” after which no hotel in Boston would host the convention.
    ↩
7. So it was said. That said, a few years later, I injured a knee when I was thrown off my bicycle and made a one-point landing on my kneecap. I didn’t break anything. Within an hour, my knee swelled so much that I couldn’t bend it for a week. That Drew’s girlfriend was ambulatory does cast some doubt on her story.
    ↩
8. Fannish slang of the era, with fen on the model man > men. Men is an i-mutation plural. These were common in Old English, but only a few of them are now left. That’s progress for you.
    ↩
9. Oh, figure it out.  ↩
10. Within a couple years, people would see my name on a badge and want to talk to me, but it was in more positive contexts.  ↩
11. Again, though this was her story, I’m inclined to believe that it was just a story.
     ↩
12. Although I have many hats, I don’t have this one anymore.
     ↩

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“You Needed Better Friends” An Optometric Observation

See, I really do own glasses.
No need to see them on my face.

 This year—2020—marks fifty years of vision correction for me.[1] I recently had my annual vision check.[2] I was chatting with my optometrist and this recalled the days when I wore glasses.[3]
My glasses of that era could best be described as “heavy, thick, inconvenient.” Their thickness (due to my prescription) meant that optometrists would regularly tell me “no.” As in, “can I get wire frames?” No, I needed thicker frames to support those lenses.[4] Later would come the question of whether I could get contacts. “No, they don’t make them in your prescription.”[5] Heavy, thick lenses came with all sorts of problems.

My glasses were always either sliding or being knocked off my face. Grabbing my glasses because their weight was pulling them off a sweaty boy’s face was bad enough, but it seemed that anything that happened to me would result in my glasses going projectile, once into a campfire. The lenses were spared, but the frames were trashed. I had to go some days without my glasses. My father had been given tickets to a Red Sox game, and I went even though I couldn’t see more than about a foot beyond my face.[6]

Contacts, how wonderful!

The friend who bumped into me, sending my glasses flying, at least meant no harm. Thick glasses on which I was utterly dependent also made me a target. From third grade on[7] it seemed there were always bullies who would snatch my glasses from my face and hold them out of my reach.[8] Glasses weren’t only expensive, they were difficult to replace. If anything happened to them, I’d be lost for days. If I remember, replacement glasses took two weeks. Plus I couldn’t see. Taking my glasses away was a great way of making me panic.

When I mentioned this to my optometrist, she said, “children can be so cruel.”

“It wasn’t always children. Friends snatching my glasses from me persisted into my early twenties.”

“You needed better friends.” That was good diagnosis.

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1. Do I get a prize for that? Maybe new eyes, 20/20 without correction, also the ability to focus on close without reading glasses. You know, like normal 25-year-old eyes. I’ll settle for 30, I’m not fussy.
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2. This has grown into a series of visits, as now I see an ophthalmologist before I go to see the optometrist. I have old, very nearsighted eyes.
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3. Not that I don’t wear glasses now. I spend most of my waking hours with contacts, but I have glasses and wear them.
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4. Eventually with changes in lens materials, I was able to get wire frames. My current glasses are frameless, an impossibility for me in the 70s or 80s.
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5. I asked annually nevertheless. My gas-permeable lenses taught me I needed to wait for soft contacts. At one point, a friend asked if I had considered Lasix. It was, of course, not available in my prescription. When I was 40 an optometrist suggested it, although there was no guarantee of 20/20 vision and I would still have to wear reading glasses. Thinner glasses didn’t make it worth it.
    ↩
6. Baseball happens more than a foot away.
    ↩
7. Just do the math.
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8. Just to be clear, I wasn’t just the kid with thick glasses, I was the short kid with thick glasses. The short, chubby kid. The short, chubby, non-athletic, nerdy kid with thick glasses. My shirts might have all been concentric red and white circles. Yeah, I was bullied. (Note to my former bullies: fuck you.)
    ↩

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The Non-Writing Life

I do use one of these
occasionally, though most of my
writing is done electronically
these days.

I recently got a message from someone who pointed out that as long as he had known me (about forty years), I had been writing. What it showed to me was how much we had fallen out of touch. To be clear, he hasn’t known me for forty years; he knew me for about four years, but we had a falling out (partially my fault[1]) about thirty-six years ago. Truth be told, it’s not like he’s some unique individual from this era. I’ve lost contact with just about everyone I knew back then.

I met this friend[2] when we were in our teens. I was an avid science fiction fan, and like many science fiction fans, I wanted to write science fiction too. My journal from that time repeatedly names stories I was working on, with some indications that they’re fantasy or science fiction. All these stories are now long lost and while there are some lost things I really wish I still had, the stories I wrote in my teens are not all that important to me.

We’ve had sporadic contact since then, much to my disappointment.[3] We briefly connected on Facebook, but I’m pretty certain he left that to become inactive on Google+.[4] We also connected on LinkedIn, which I joined about a year alter when I was job hunting. Later, when it became clear that I was not returning to the exciting world of in-house IT support,[5] I changed my profile to say that I am a freelance writer.[6] I’d like us to be friends again. I’d also like to be slightly taller,[7] and have my hair back. They can do things about hair, though I haven’t bothered. But I’m writing about writing here.[8]

Now we can construct a timeline:
We’re good friends and I’m writing. → That whole period he knows nothing about. → We’re barely acquaintances and I’m writing.

I was writing then, I’m writing now, I must have always been writing. Not so. There’s a gap. (In a way, this is somewhat comforting, given my scant publication record[9].)

Let’s talk about that whole period he knows nothing about. Let’s wind back thirty-eight years. There was an end to a lot of writing in 1983. I stopped trying to write stories. There’s about a two-year gap in my journal writing. I did keep writing zines during time for two amateur press associations.[10] But no fiction writing. Then the apas stopped. One grew increasingly hostile to the presence of an out gay man. The other was nothing but gay men, but it eventually died. And then, all I was writing was my journal.

No fiction.[11] Life got busy. I had dropped out of college and entered the work world. The spare moments I had for writing evaporated. No more filling an hour between classes by grabbing a desk in the library and scribbling away. There are people who write while holding down a full-time job,[12] but maybe not while holding down a full-time job, looking for an apartment, and navigating the beginnings of a romantic life. There I was, early 20s, insecure and inexperienced, finally meeting other gay men. Certainly a distraction from writing.[13]

I also became one of the founders of a group for LGBTQ[14] science fiction fans. That took up a lot of time, especially as the group started to grow and we started running our own conventions.[15] I moved and had to start job hunting all over again. Writing looked like it was permanently pushed to the back burner.

How long is the gap? About eighteen years. I didn’t start writing again until 2001. I had some ideas and started writing. I even had a plan establish my chops with some short stories and build from there. I had come to the conclusion that I just didn’t have the turn of mind to write fantasy or science fiction,[16] so my new attempts were erotica. This was just as adult magazines started folding, due to the ready availability of porn on the Internet. My potential market had dried up.

I turned to writing a novel. Why not? I had an idea. It was clearly something that would need to be worked out at the length of a novel to get everything I wanted on it. I proceeded then to hammer away at it over the next fifteen years. After fifteen years, I had an unfinished novel that really wasn’t compelling enough to keep working on.[17] Also, work just kept getting busier and busier. I found that after pulling lots of overtime, when I tried to write all my characters wanted was to pour a glass of wine, put their feet up, and watch some tv.

I really salute the people who hold down full-time day jobs while managing to write after work and on weekends. I have no idea how they manage it. My experience was that I’d look forward to some writing time only to find that I’d be working overtime due to some crisis at the office. On so many weekends, I’d see my chance for getting some writing done recede into the distance. Then my job was eliminated.

My new job was “job seeker,” but it really wasn’t an eight-hour-a-day position. The résumé was fine tuned. I scanned through job postings. Early on I did my online sessions with an employment counselor (one of my severance benefits). I also wasted some time just frustrated and unhappy. Then I got back to writing.

One of the early projects was this blog, in part to rediscover my own voice (after years of writing corporate speak), in part to see if I could write at least a thousand words a day.[18] As the blogging gave me more practice and confidence in my voice, I returned to writing fiction. After a while (and a wholly unsuccessful job hunt), my husband agreed to let me just focus on that. The job hunt was over.

I’ve kept at it. I’ve turned out some stories, one of which I even managed to sell. Sure, there have also been some times when life’s demands have slowed this down or even stopped. But I keep writing. I think I’m going to get there.

p.s.: If you’re reading this, you know who you are. Send me some emails. Please. After all, this post is for you, whether you read it not.

Minor personal update: I was curious and looked through some old emails. I told him in 1999 that I wasn’t writing. Just before I got back to it.

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1. Tough time in my life. It was when I came out. I was a bit of an emotional wreck, which was tough on me and lots of people around me too. It was also a period of transition for me, since I still have contact with people I met not long after. My belated apologies to all those whose patience was pushed past the limit.  ↩
2. “Friend” seems a slightly inaccurate term, since we haven’t spoken in thirty-six years, we swapped a few emails some years ago (he owes me one), but to call him a “former friend” would just make me feel sad.  ↩
3. This post is some of the stuff I’d want to tell him, but since communication is unlikely, I figured I’d get it off my chest this way. Look, if you’re reading this, you know who you are, you know what to do. You have my email address. Answer the email I sent you. It’s wholly unlikely he’ll actually ever see this blog post. Truth be told, I don’t think he’s interested in putting in the effort.  ↩
4. Remember Google+? Sure, you might now. I don’t think we’re far away from people wondering if they had accounts there or no. “Yeah, maybe I was on it, I’m not sure.”  ↩
5. Your browser may not be equipped to properly display sarcasm tags.  ↩
6. It’s a largely unpaid position.  ↩
7. If I woke up at average height, the need to buy a whole new set of pants wouldn’t bother me that much.  ↩
My belated apologies to all those whose patience was pushed past the limit.
8. As opposed to getting maudlin about a lost friendship.  ↩
9. That is, one story, though part of that is for lack of trying. (Maybe that’s fodder for another blog post.) The story is “Shotgun” in the anthology THCock. It makes a fine gift for any gay stoner you might feel comfortable giving erotica to.   ↩
10. If you are unaware of what an amateur press association is, best to think of it as a group blog of the pre-Internet era. They were obscure then, more so now. My blog stats are pretty minimal (thank you, oh kind reader). These were even more limited, read only by the participants. I need to mine them for whatever comments I made about my life during the time when I wasn’t keeping a journal.  ↩
11. Sure, my journal is just my point of view, not an objective account of my life, but it is as truthful a narrative as I can make it.  ↩
12. I salute these intrepid souls.  ↩
13. I think if the options are find a quiet corner and work on a story or have sex, it’s a pretty obvious choice.  ↩
14. I admit the anachronism here. When the group started, the term transgender had not yet been coined. The initialism g/l was prevalent, soon supplanted by lgb. The Gaylaxians were open all, without regard to sexual orientation.  ↩
15. Which persist. The first Gaylaxicon was in 1988, the most recent one in 2019, though I haven’t been to one in years.  ↩
16. I do keep trying. I even brought a fantasy piece to a writing workshop where the professor praised it for some good and inventive writing (yeah!) then completely eviscerated it (no!). As she pointed out, the best part didn’t even belong in the story.  ↩
17. In part, it was probably a victim of my own inexperience. After countless restarts and revisions, I sapped the life out of it. Plus, I really should have outlined the whole thing, instead of trying to just write it organically.  ↩
18. Yes, though a thousand words of blogging (which I’ve already passed in this post) is a lot easier for me than a thousand words of fiction.  ↩

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The Journal of My Journal

The various physical volumes of my journal
(or at least the ones I have tracked down)

If the word journal were to be defined based on my practice, the definition would be “a work of memoir for personal use characterized by suddenly breaking off in the midst of a notebook and then starting a new one.” I’ve used several notebooks for my journals, most of them end in blank pages.

I have used (at least) fifteen notebooks.[1] I started at fifteen and filled out (end-to-end) four composition books. I started a fifth, but I do know that I stopped making entries in it (at the moment, I am reasonably certain that this one is lost). That fifth volume, which had plenty of empty pages, was a harbinger for what was to come.[2]

I eventually started a sixth volume (and in the first entry, wrote about the lost three-and-a-half volumes). It’s a small volume, and I wrote on every page. By that point, I had been (intermittently) keeping a journal for a decade, and I had filled out five of the six volumes.

The next volume covers exactly nine sheets of paper. I didn’t like the paper. Clearly. Finally, I stuck a Post-It Note on the last page to show me where to pick up again. Then I bought a new notebook and used just three sheets. Oh, I must have really hated that one.

The ninth volume starts off with a comment on how much I love the paper. Yeah, that lasted for ninety-pages when I stopped writing in it. At that point, I abandoned paper journaling for a while and created one in HyperCard. Given that HyperCard saw its last update in 1998, you might not have heard of it. Maybe you could look it up on Wikipedia.[3]

I am not sure why I wrote my journal in HyperCard as opposed to a stack of text files in a folder or something. The single HyperCard stack (HyperCard files were called “stacks,” and they consisted of a variety of “pages”) did have the advantage of everything in one place, new entries were easily dated (I created a script that inserted the date when I created a new entry[4]), I was able to password protect the whole thing, and it was faster too. In other words, in 1990, I created a little electronic journal program in HyperCard.[5]

One of the downsides was that I could only work on my journal while sitting in front of my Macintosh SE/30. Not a very portable device. Despite its limitations, I used the HyperCard journal from 1990 to 2008. Not too shabby: eighteen years of sporadic journal writing in a single format, when I had kept a (also occasionally sporadic) journal for fourteen years prior to that. HyperCard went from computer to computer. As the application hadn’t been updated in a decade, it was showing its age.

Plus, even before I abandoned it completely, there were still moments of going back to paper. I have a few entries in one notebook from 1994 and and a few in a notebook from 1998, just a few pages each. I started a third in 2001, and when went to Italy, that supplanted the journal on my Mac. This twelfth volume (not counting a not counting a hard drive as volume[6]) got filled end-to-end.

I continued this with the thirteenth volume. Perhaps it was because both of these blank books were gifts. It wasn’t just my own money I was wasting, it was the generosity of a friend. I was obligated to fill out those pages. If that’s the case, then I made a tragic mistake in buying a beautiful leather-bound book in Italy, but that ends with just a few more than half the pages filled in.

Not bad!

And that’s when I went back to the computer. By this time, HyperCard was now inoperable. That tragic day when you upgrade your operating systems and a cherished piece of antique software no longer functions.

Earlier, I said that my my practice had been that the journal was for me and me alone, but in 2005 lots of people I knew were blogging on LiveJournal and it seemed like the thing to do. Sure, I couldn’t put things in there I didn’t want to share with other people, but it was an interesting experiment while it lasted.

In the end, I wanted to go back to things that were just for me, but I knew that I had done better when I was on something electronic (the HyperCard stack or the LiveJournal pages) than with scribbling in a notebook.

Let me be clear, I love the romance of taking a beautiful blank book, uncapping a fountain pen, and writing in my journal. I still look longingly at blank books when I see particularly nice ones available. I do ink fountain pens and write with them. I have not been all that interested in writing my journal with a stylus on a tablet. As I’ve gone though and transcribed old journal entries (an ongoing project) I’ve occasionally thought, “what did I write here?” Sometimes that has gone unanswered.[7] When it comes down to it, while the thought of lying in bed writing out your thoughts of the day sounds great, it’s actually a bit of a pain to write in bed.

Back to the laptop, so the obvious thing was to find if there was a Mac app for keeping a journal, and there was.

I wanted to like MacJournal, but I don’t. It just never sat with me. Sorry. Well, not really. I used it anyway, and when it came out for the iPad, I convinced myself that it would et me to write a journal on a more regular basis. Well, it’s a lovely sentiment, at least. Between March 2010 and September 2013, I have a total of 85 entries. Admittedly, in the past I’ve written journal entries that are nothing but a note that it’s been a month since my last journal entry.

In 2011, for reasons that totally escape me, I used a few pages of a Molskine notebook which had been resident in my camera bag for years to write out a few journal entries. No idea why.

Which brings us to the most successful iteration of the journal. After that, I downloaded DayOne, getting the iOS version on July 11, 2013 (I think Apple gave it away[8]) and then the desktop version on October 23. I won’t pretend it’s magic: it doesn’t make you write out an entry. It has made it easier. Instead of sporadic entries, I’m writing almost every day.[9]

I’ve been keeping a journal for forty-one years. Mostly sporadically. I’m delighted that I’ve found something that actually works for me. If you keep a journal, best of luck with it!

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1. Just writing these words makes me suspect I’ll stumble upon a forgotten volume. [After writing this, I found my journal for my trip to Italy in 2000, and had to revise the word thirteen to fourteen. After taking the pic and actually counting, I realized I had left one aside. Fifteen.]
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2. I have the vague memory that at one point I thought the fourth one was lost and that I had first three and the fifth. Or something. That said, I have a journal entry from 1992 in which I list it as the missing volume. (I have since begun to suspect that when I said, at the end of the fourth volume, that I'd start the fifth volume in the morning, I never did.)
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3. I did, to remind myself of some of the particulars.
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4. To dig down into it, I attached the script to a button, so I created new entries by hitting a button.
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5. I also created a cataloging system for my books in a different stack. I really should have gone on further from using HyperTalk, the programming language for HyperCard. Too late now.
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6. Even though it is a volume.
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7. Not that my typed journals are free of typos. [Note: in typing this, I hit the D key by mistake and wrote “typods.” Are “typods” typos made on iPads? As I said.]
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8. Thanks, Apple!
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9. Looking at the calendar view, I see October 2015 has only two entries. Thinking about it, that was the month I wanted to see if I could write four short stories. I managed it, but I did little else. Had I written entries they would have been “I worked all day on [name of story].”  ↩

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Moving to iCloud Photos and What I Learned

One of my earliest digital photos, circa 1994

(And What I Wish I Had Known Beforehand)
I recently made the jump to iCloud Photos. It was a very slow jump, in that I am several days into this jump with many more to come until my photographic feet are on solid ground again. Some of the things that I did in preparing for this jump may have prolonged it. Mistakes were made. Nothing serious, just irritating.

Had I known certain things, the whole process would have been smoother. In my reading beforehand, I didn’t find anything that would have let me know these things, so I’m committing them to my blog, because maybe someone will stumble on them.

Okay, that'll take a while (this is from day four)

Going to iCloud Photos meant syncing photos from three places: two iOS devices and on Mac. My photos are in several other places, as the Photos for MacOS is backed up to my TimeMachine drive. As photos are added to Photos, I also store them on another external drive. I started doing this before Apple released iPhoto, and I’ve never found a reason to stop doing it. My oldest digital photo dates back to 1999, a few years before iPhoto. Over the last twenty years, I’ve accumulated a lot of photos (at ever-increasing resolution), scans of photos, and so forth. What I’m saying here is that my Photos database is pretty big.

Nevertheless, because it was (and will continue to be) the repository for all my photos, I decided that it would be the first set of photos that I would send to iCloud. That was a mistake.

It was also an easy mistake. I upped my iCloud storage to the appropriate amount (lots) and then set Photos preferences to use iCloud Photos. That was the easy part. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the place to start.

As I said, it’s got everything. Well over 100,00 items. These range in size from a 750 MB video to those early digital photos at less than 50 kB each. This means, of course, that the per-item countdown I’m getting isn’t completely helpful, since uploading that video or one of those tiny pics would knock an item off the list, but they’re not going to take the same amount of time. Progress seems to be newest to oldest, so I’m anticipating that things will speed up as I get to smaller files.

The two iOS devices held a subset, all of which are also on the Mac, with some seventeen thousand items on my iPhone and six thousand on my iPad. Once I had the Mac uploading the massive number of items to iCloud, I set to work on the iOS devices and tried to switch on iCloud Photos. It warned me that my albums synced from iTunes would be deleted. I agreed and I promptly got the message that iCloud Photos couldn’t be turned on.

What follows is a mistake. I looked this up on the web and I didn’t find much. The best answer I had was to sign out of iCloud and sign back in again. That didn’t work. Nor did restarting the machine. I decided that the problem could be the photos already on the iPad, so I methodically exported backups (even though these photos were backed up) and then deleted them. I tried again. It still didn’t work.

Well, if it wasn’t the photos… I cancelled the deletion of slightly more than 6,000 photos and synced the iPad to my computer checking the setting to stop syncing albums from Photos. One of the things that had lead me to iCloud Photos was the inconsistent behavior of albums synced through iTunes, which would typically vanish from my iPad sometime between when I had verified that they were there and when I wanted to show them to someone.

Once the synced albums were off, I started iCloud Photos again. Success! But also something of a mistake. Then I did the same thing to my iPhone. I compounded the mistake. This is a lesser mistake, since getting rid of the synced albums was a good thing. My sequence was off.

At this point, things were slowly beginning to make sense. I was beginning to see see the error of my ways. The iPad took a couple of days to finish uploading, after which it began downloading (which it’s still at). There are still black bars where I deleted photos which are now being re-dowloaded. Because I sent things to be deleted, I’ve been making a daily round of the Recently Deleted album to make sure that none of my photos end up there.

It also became clear that every device was uploading things in reverse chronological order (either by file date or import date). Time creeps backwards. For the Mac, it was clear that anything new would wait until the end, while the iOS devices and iCloud did share their new content. There’s probably no way around that, but the process might have gone smoother if I hadn’t had three devices uploading at the same time (as I write this, I’m anticipating another two days for the iPhone, after which the Mac is on its own for uploads, apart from now photos).

This Is How I Would Do It
If Apple’s TimeMachine really could turn back time and I could take my current knowledge back to when I began, I would do this (so maybe you, gentle reader, can profit from my adventures):

An important step: The first clean-up step would be to remove the albums synced with iTunes. Since if everything goes right, they vanish anyway, it’s no loss to speed them on their way.

Then I would sync the device with the least number of photos and videos first. (In my case, that would be my iPad.) Move from there to the next item, only as a final step send the remainder of your photo library to iCloud.

Had I done that, at this point, I’d have all the same photos on my iPad (less the albums shared from iTunes, though they’d get there eventually) and it would be adding photos from my iPhone (which is most certainly is doing).

This is all working. I’m going to get there (and I’ll probably make another blog post about it). With just a bit more knowledge, I probably could have got there more quickly and easily. I think I’m going to like iCloud Photos, but there will be a delay getting there and that delay is partly my fault.

Wish me luck.

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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Social Media Incantations

This is what bullshit looks like

You’ve probably seen these posts. The ones that claim that if you copy and paste them, it will change what the Facebook algorithm feeds you (it won’t). The one that claims that everything on Facebook becomes public tomorrow (it won’t). The second one never actually specifies what day “tomorrow” refers to, but that only heightens the urgency, right? Unless you’ve seen it multiple times over an extended period and tomorrow never comes.

Some of them sound legal. There’s one the cites the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) and the Rome Statute, both of which sound really serious. The only problem is, as lawyers are happy to point out,

the UCC is a model code and is not law. Where the UCC has been adopted, it only applies to commercial transactions, not intellectual property.[1]

The stuff you’ve posted on Facebook: pictures, comments, and such are all intellectual property. Some of it might even be yours. That meme you copied? Not your intellectual property. There is a piece of text that floats around the Internet which inaccurately implies that stuff found on the Internet is public domain, while the stuff the person who posted the notice also posted is most definitely not public domain. Posting something on the Internet doesn’t alter its copyright status.

The Rome Statute part is even more interesting.[2] It’s the international statute (to which the United States is not signatory) which sets up the International Criminal Court. I really wanted the ICC to be the court that dealt with dashing jewel thieves who smuggle diamonds from Paris to New York while impeccably dressed. No such luck. The ICC is the court that deals with war crimes, genocide, and things like that. No matter how badly you think of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, you probably don’t think them guilty of genocide.

If your lawyer really told you do to this, find a better lawyer.

So what’s it doing in a much-shared post? It makes it sound legal. Same thing the reference to the UCC does. Or the posts that begin “under the advice of legal counsel” and go on to proclaim that the poster is a “free citizen of the world.” The concept of sovereign citizens has some pretty ugly roots in white supremacy. The people who coined the term felt that the only “free citizens” were free white citizens. Ouch.

Why is these things so attractive to people, given that they have no actual legal standing and that there are some associations that at best seem to be conspiracy theorists? I have a thought on that.

I am not a lawyer (IANAL) but I do have some training in Medieval Studies (IAAM).[3] I have seen legal mumbo-jumbo before. These posts aren’t intended to be legal. They’re incantations.

The Internet has become a scary place, in part due to Facebook.[4] The online world probably would be scary without hoaxes, fake news, reports of Russian manipulation, fake accounts, and so on. Then there are the moral panics, where someone is happy to report that social media will degrade your intellect and made you a worse person (typically without any data to support such a thesis), which fall in nicely with previous moral panics such as novels[5] or reading newspapers.[6]

What can you do about it? How do you deal with the terrors of the Internet.

You can recite an incantation. Because if these don’t have legal force, but they have emotional force (and why else would people share them?) they’re in the category of the superstitions people do to ward off harm (which is exactly what they hope these posts will do). Are they effective at warding off harm? Probably as effective as throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder. Also saying “bless you” after someone sneezes has no clinical efficacy in preventing colds. Or warding off evil. But you do it, don’t you?

These social media posts, with their meaningless language, are our contemporary version of some medieval charm. They sound good, although they have no actual power to ward off malign influences. If you’re bitten by a snake, you need modern medical attention, not the poultice of herbs in the Nine Herbs Charm (which tells you to recite the charm three times over each ingredient, and then in four places on the victim).

Medieval charms were chanted repeatedly, just like a social media post that gets shared again and again. Like a medieval charm, they don’t actually become more powerful by repetition. They never had any power at all.

The next time you see that a friend has posted something that tells you to copy it to your own timeline in order to ward off some dreadful aspect of social media (Facebook billing you, or showing you only twenty-six friends[7], or taking possession of your photos[8]), cross your fingers, knock on wood, close your umbrella before you go inside, but don’t copy that post. Please. Even if someone said that someone else’s lawyer said that you should.[9]

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1. Protecting Your Legal Rights on Facebook, retrieved 5 February 2019. If that’s not enough, here’s a post by a lawyer whose work is on copyright, trademark, publicity right, and media law.
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2. Well, at least to me.
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3. I Am A Medievalist.
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4. Yeah, thanks a lot, Facebook.
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5. The novel was guaranteed to be injurious to the mind, particularly the minds of young women. Clearly your high school English teacher did not have your best interests at heart, but we are talking about someone whose brain had been disturbed by years of reading novels.
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6. The death of conversation.
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7. We don’t know the specifics of the Facebook algorithm, but we know it rates posts as to how sticky you’ll find them. If you interact with a lot of memes and wonder why you never see the posts where friends tell what going on in their lives, it’s because Facebook can tell that you like and share memes and scroll past your friends. It’s watching you, which kinda does make you want to ward off evil.
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8. A violation of copyright, though if Facebook tried to monetize your work (instead of just you), you’d probably have a hard time getting damages.  ↩
9. I mean, free legal advice from a lawyer who didn’t put their name to it?  ↩

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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