Category: meta

The reason

Daily Story Project, General, meta

I forgot to write a 500 word post yesterday. I guess 10 is the number to beat going forward. Like many of my similarly-brained cohort, I’m a perfectionist and stickler for detail, so missing a day when I was aiming for a long unbroken streak is like a pebble in my shoe, a ringing in my ear, a mote in my eye. Irritating, nagging, infernal. I felt a flood of emotion when I realized a day had passed without me meeting the goal I had set for myself.

The streak is broken. I failed. It’s over. Might as well stop trying. I’m no good. I can’t do this. Why bother?

Why bother? Why am I doing this in the first place? What was my reason, and does missing a day invalidate that reason?

OK, then. The reasons I started this new daily streak. Let’s dig in.

I’ve done this before. There’s a tag on this post that I’ve used before, “Daily Story Project“. It’s been a thing on this blog going back a long way. I keep trying to do this. I read about streaks, I live for streaks. Keeping a streak going is sometimes all the motivation I need to keep doing a thing. There are folks out there like Jonathan Mann who has written a song every day for (as I type this) for 16 years and 103 days; 5,581 days in a row. That’s impressive! On one level it’s a challenge to see if I could create something new using my preferred method of creating (writing) for even a tenth as long, even 1% as long.

The only thing I’ve done daily is… I was going to say “wake up and get out of bed” but then I remember days, bad brain days, where I did not get out of bed. I couldn’t tell you my longest streak, though; that’s not something I keep track of. For the better, of course.

If I weren’t just trying to hit 500 words right now I’d go look up the longest once-a-day streak I’ve ever maintained on this blog. But I don’t really care. A reason I’m doing this is to add to this blog, to see who will come if I build it, to turn the Field of Dreams tagline around a bit. But that’s writing for others. I write for myself. If having an audience was important to my creativity this would be a very different place. Here, I write whatever I want. I write for me.

The primary reason I’m doing this is to build up a habit. Just keep going. Give myself permission to do it without friction. No obstacle, only flow. So failing to hit that daily goal is the only obstacle that matters to me. I hate it. It means I took my mind off the target. It means I got distracted. It means that whatever was happening in my brain that day did not get recorded, and you can’t change or grow unless you pay attention. At least, you can’t notice change or growth without keeping track, monitoring, observing, measuring.

I write in order to measure. That’s why. If I miss a day, I missed a measure. But I can keep going.

Name change notice

meta

Just posting this to make a note of a change in my account:

I’m the one and only user on this blog. If you see posts or comments attributed to admin, that’s me. If you see older posts (like 2006 and older) attributed to lunarobverse, that’s also me; it’s from before this blog was using WordPress.

I’m trying to change both of those accounts to show the name Brian but it might not affect already-published material. Going forward, though, posts attributed to Brian are also also me. This one should be Brian.

Lotta back-end cleanup I still need to do for this place but it’s a low priority. I have a shit-tonne of broken links that Google Analytics keeps yelling at me about, but you just try to keep all the links on a 21 year old site working, I dare you.

In a way I like that little bugs like this expose just how long I’ve been at this. Makes it feel more like a home. Right?

Two Decades Already?

meta, Tech

Insert “is this thing on?” joke here.

Twenty years ago today, I registered this domain. I don’t remember the details all that clearly, but what I can remember is that I wanted to own my own domain without really knowing what I was going to do with it.

Up to that point I kept a blog of sorts that was part of my IO.com account, so it had some dumb long URL like http://io.com/users/~lunarobverse — that’s a dead link, so even if your browser makes it a link, it’s not going anywhere, sorry. I’m not even sure if IO.com is still a thing. It was an early internet service provider that grew from a BBS started by Steve Jackson Games after their offices got raided by the Secret Service. Listen, it was a whole thing back in the 80s and 90s, kids, I’m really going off on a tangent here. IO stood for Illuminati Online, which was named after their card game about secret societies that control the world. It was Boomer cynicism and it seemed fun at the time until the Feds are beating down the door and confiscating all your laser printers.

So I wanted a simpler internet address to share my weird personal oversharing. I wanted Moon.com but the publishers of that same name had had that locked up for a long time already, so the shortest variant of my own name I could buy was bamoon.com. At the time, I had to buy it directly from ICANN and it cost US$35 a year. Since I was newly flush from my first real job in a long time, I also purchased brian-moon.com. I had vague ideas about putting something professional at the hyphenated URL, but that’s never really happened, not in twenty years. All it’s ever really done is redirect to the shorter address.

For good measure, I also purchased my online handle, lunarobverse.com, which these days is my custom Tumblr domain. I’ve recently created an LLC of that name as a way to consolidate my freelance income under one business, I’m conflicted about whether I should keep using that URL for Tumblr or convert it into a business site. Honestly, I have no idea what I should be doing with any of this. I don’t have a head for capitalism or marketing. You’d think, after decades of being online, that I would have even the vaguest sense of what my brand is. I don’t. I really really don’t.

bamoon.com hasn’t been Lunar Obverse since the beginning. I didn’t even set up a blog and post under this domain until November 2003, as you can see by perusing my archives, and even those first posts were re-posts of things I’d written previously. But from that first post on, I’ve only ever added to my archives. WordPress tells me that I have 2,565 published posts (including this one) and another 108 unpublished drafts, unfinished thoughts that will likely never see the light of day. The heyday of my posting was in the mid- to late-00’s, mainly during the second Bush administration, because liberals (I identified as a liberal back then; I’ve moved more and more left over the years) were documenting how bad the GOP was back then. But also there was an explosion of blogging, political and personal, and I wanted to participate.

Lunar Obverse, though, never really hit that growth spurt that gave my writing a huge audience. At the most, I think I was averaging around 200 unique visits a day. That seemed like a nice number, easily manageable. 200 people would fill an auditorium, and it’s a number of people that I could feel comfortable addressing. But I never kept up the pace, and stopped writing so much, and digital cobwebs and virtual dust began to settle around here.

The blog has run on Blogger, and now on WordPress, and briefly on a bespoke system created by a friend I’ve lost track of (hi Caleb, if you’re still out there, I see your Instagram posts and it looks like you’re doing great), but the backend stuff has never been the reason I care about writing. The reason I stopped writing is personal and sad, but I still want to write. I have things I want to say, and here’s a place I can say them without having to go through anyone else. That’s the power of the internet, after all.

There have been years, here and there, where it’s been iffy whether I could scrape together the US$105 I needed to keep the domains. I remember having to borrow money from friends a couple of times. But I’ve managed to hold on to them, even if I haven’t done much with them. I’d like to change that. My plan is to go through all the old posts, and resurface the best ones, and start adding new ones. Best by my own measure, primarily; if I look at the analytics for this domain even the highest-traffic posts get only tens of hits every month. There are posts here I’m still proud of, though, and maybe they might mean something to someone else out there.

I had a coworker a couple of years back remark that my domain, being so short, might be worth a lot of money. The best I can tell is that I could sell it for a couple thousand bucks. That’s not worth it to toss away all these posts and give up the one thing I’ve owned for longer than I’ve ever owned anything. Nah, I’m gonna keep this, spruce it up a little, do some pruning and promotion, and get it back up and running.

So, if you’re reading this, thank you, and welcome. Maybe welcome back? There may be some life left here after all.

Canaries In The Coalmine, Hopefully

meta
A child runs away from the camera at night on a dark suburban street, the only light coming from a single street lamp.
I get that running-in-molasses feeling in my nightmares, but the worst feeling I get in dreams is not being able to read. True story.

Even my dreams are political now. The monsters that I have to run away from through molasses are white supremacists and capitalists. These are the times in which we live, and the social landscape has infused my unconscious mind.

I announced on Facebook that I am leaving Facebook. It is something I’ve contemplated for a while now, but every recent bit of news about how the company is being run is another stone adding to the mental weight of my participation.

This is not a news site, so I won’t give the full rundown, but my misgivings started with the revelations about Cambridge Analytica and Russian meddling in our elections. But there is more recent news. As I read each one, they became another stone in the bucket of my metaphorical soul.

Conservatives cry that there is an anti-conservative bias, which never is visible or documentable, and media outlets will bend to their whines to try to maintain their belief in the media’s “fairness.” The result of this play has been Facebook allowing right-wing institutions “fact-checking” powers that the social media platform never seems to give to left-leaning institutions. 

Parker Molloy has done a lot of work documenting how conservatives and the far-right have run their usual playbook of “working the refs” against social media in general and Facebook in particular. She reported this after we found out that Zuck has been secretly meeting with conservatives. When that was published, Zuck tried to pull the “I listen to both sides” defense. Of course, there is no documentation of Zuck meeting with union workers, trans activists, or Black Lives Matters. Zuck had and has no specific examples of meeting with anyone even center-left. 

More recently, Elizabeth Warren took advantage of the apparent Facebook policy against fact-checking politicians’ or public figures’ speech. She ran an ad on Facebook, stating Zuck endorsed our Cheeto in Chief’s 2020 campaign. Of course, having some dignity and integrity, she immediately debunked their own lie, in the text of the ad itself, making a point about how bizarre Facebook’s policy was.

Facebook immediately pulled the spot despite its public policy.

Zuck’s minions eventually restored the ad after their hypocrisy was exposed, which led to Zuck’s Harvard speech. His thin-skinned reactions to some of the Democratic candidates’ (OK, mainly Elizabeth Warren’s) campaign rhetoric and the threat of regulation, culminated in his stupid “we support free expression, and that means we can’t fact-check political ads” speech at Harvard last week. He gave remarkably fact-free defenses that Facebook could be a social good, using zero examples from within the existence of Facebook, instead focusing on the actions of civil rights activists like—wait for it—Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Hearing his testimony before Congress today, where he stammered incoherent defenses of his phony money scheme were the straw that broke my reluctance-camel’s back. I can’t, in good conscience, continue giving Facebook my eyeballs and attention. I posted today, and I’ll post regularly for the next week, to make sure the algorithm lets every one of my 369 friends and followers know: after Halloween, I will no longer be on Facebook.

I am present and active on several other platforms, not the least of which is this one (hello! thank you for reading this), and I will be sure to list all the ways to follow my antics and interact with me in the cyberspaces. One thing I will be doing is opening up regular comment posts here. Doing that will give all of you, my dear readers, the chance to comment on these posts. Take those opportunities to tell me when and where I’m wrong (which is fantastic; I want to know when I’m wrong, it’s how I learn and grow), and, most importantly, post memes and adorable animal pictures. 

Those posts will go up twice a week (unless they’re incredibly popular.) I’m thinking of one on Wednesday and one on the weekend. I’m working on a comment policy that will let haters, bigots, and authoritarians know they are not welcome here; I’ll post that shortly. What I do hope is that you, yes, you, reading this, will feel safe, respected, and comfortable, especially if you’re in one of the under-represented or oppressed categories of folk, like people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or queer, or anti-capitalist. This blog is open to you in particular. 

In the meantime, I know many of you have many reasons to remain on Facebook, but if you can cut ties at all, without losing touch with people you love and care about, I strongly encourage you to do so. If Facebook starts bleeding users, perhaps they’ll change course. It’s doubtful because the billionaire bubble is very real, but it’s at least one lever we can use to shift it. 

Something like Facebook or Twitter have the potential to be a net social good, for realsies. How they’re run today, however, ain’t it, chief.

Tell Facebook This Site Is Safe

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Facebook, this site is safe to share. I promise. I have done everything I can to demonstrate my site’s safety. Please unblock me.

I can’t easily share links to this blog on Facebook. It’s been an annoyance for years now, and I haven’t been able to find a solution. Honestly, I haven’t even been able to find a reason for why it happens; I can’t even get that far. No reason is given.

Here’s what happens when I try to share a link, any link, to this domain on Facebook: if I try to post, Facebook makes me solve a captcha, telling me that it’s a “Security Check” and that this site “may be unsafe” or violate community guidelines or something. Facebook discourages me from posting it at all. Why? Who knows! The links to “Why am I seeing this?” expands out to say:

Image of a Facebook Security Check: "It looks like this link is unsecure: bamoon.com. To protect your account, we recommend not posting the link. If you want to share it anyway, you'll need to complete this security check. Please enter the code below" and a captcha. "If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards, let us know."

“This is a standard security test that we use to make sure accounts are authentic.”

It’s especially annoying because I have a page set up for the blog on Facebook, to which posts are auto-shared. Those go through fine, but I get the captcha request even when I try to re-share those Facebook posts! What’s going on?

To pour salt in the wound, Facebook keeps suggesting I add a website to my Page, but when I do:

An error from Facebook after it prompts me to add a website to my Page: "An error occured saving page information, please make sure the information is correct and valid."
“An error occured saving page information” – note the fucking misspelling in the error message.

Security! Protection! Authenticity! These are all alarming thoughts. Facebook never gives me anything specific, anything actionable, I can do to clear my site’s good name, however.

This domain has been in use since at least 2004. I have maintained control of it that entire time. It was and is, registered from Gandi.net, a reputable registrar.

Mail through this account is protected by DKIM, although, to be fair, it may be time for me to register new keys and rotate them.

SSL now protects traffic to and from this site.

There are no unsafe plugins or apps hosted on this domain.

The host (as of a weekend ago), SiteGround, is a recommended host from WordPress.

The domain does not appear on any blacklists that are searchable by MXToolbox.com; it is a safe site according to Google Safe Search.

I’ve verified the domain through Facebook’s Business tools, which has not removed the requirement to solve a captcha to post a link here.

One online suggestion I’ve seen for others with this same problem has been to look at the output of the Facebook Debugger. The only error I get there is about whether or not I have a valid Facebook App ID, but adding one to my site does not remove the captcha requirement.

I’m at my wit’s end trying to prove to Facebook this is a Safe Site. I do get a handful of clicks on my site from Facebook, which, to be honest, is the majority of traffic to it (for now), but would I get more if I wasn’t deemed “unsafe?” How much more?

If anyone out there has any suggestions for what I can do to solve this problem with Facebook, beyond abandoning Facebook as a platform… please feel free to let me know.

Moving Day (For the Blog)

meta

I’m switching hosting providers for the blog. If you can read this, things are fine. If you can’t read this, then it may be temporary.

The new hosting provider said it could take up to 5 business days for the migration.

I’ll un-pin this after the transfer is successful. Thanks for your patience!

A stack of three antique suitcases, weathered and stained, with leather straps.

My Favorite Posts From 2016

clippings, meta, Portfolio

I need some personal inspiration. It’s been a long December, a long winter, a long year. I’ve seen other authors out there, posting their 10 favorite things they’ve written in 2016, and my first thought was, “did I even write 10 things this year?”

Yes, I did, but not much more than 10. Here’s my pick for the best of my writting this year.

My brand for 2016: meloncholy, emotional, nostalgia, apparently.

2017 will be better.

Lunar Obverse Virtual Garage Sale

meta

Got some items I’m selling to raise a little cash. It’s like an online garage sale!

Links go to the eBay auctions for the items. Make a bid there, or make me an offer by going to my About page and choosing email, Twitter, or Facebook to contact me.

  • Mid-2014 15-inch MacBook Pro: 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 2.5GHz Intel i7, NVIDIA graphics, AppleCare until 3/2018. Auction ends 4:30 PM PDT Saturday 18 June 2016.
  • Yeti Blue USB Condenser Microphone, Blackout Edition: perfect for gaming, podcasting, or recording videos. Auction ends 2:00 PM PDT Thursday 16 June 2016.
  • Dungeons & Dragons Starter Kit: Two rulebooks, 19 adventure modules, and some extra bits and pieces, all from the early days of the game. Tons of ideas, monsters, traps, and locations to spark your own creativity. Auction ends around 4 PM PDT Wednesday 15 June 2016.
  • Four rare, signed, Tim Powers books:
    • Expiration Date: hardcover, first edition, inscribed by the author. Auction ends 7:35 PM PDT Tuesday 14 June 2016.
    • Earthquake Weather: hardcover, first edition, inscribed by the author. Auction ends 7:35 PM PDT Tuesday 14 June 2016.
    • Declare: hardcover, first edition, inscribed by the author. Auction ends 7:34 PM PDT Tuesday 14 June 2016.
    • Three Days to Never: hardcover, first edition, inscribed by the author. Auction ends 7:33 PM PDT Tuesday 14 June 2016.

 

More items coming! Watch this space!

It’s Hard to Ask for Help

Freelancing, meta

Help!

Although I’ve been working two jobs since late last year, plus writing when I have time or energy, unfortunately, it’s not enough. I’m in that gray area now where I make too much money for public assistance but not enough money to cover the bills. I’ve fallen behind on my rent and am in increasing danger of losing the home I’ve lived in for over 17 years, the longest I’ve spent in one spot in my whole life.

I’m ashamed I’ve been unable to fix this on my own, and my close friends and family have already been more than generous to me, and I am thankful for them. It’s not enough, unfortunately, and I have to turn to you, kind friends, for help.

There are, however, many ways you can help. Nothing is too little. Here’s a list.

  • Buy my writing! As Gloria Steinem once said, writing is the thing that, when I’m doing it, I don’t think I should be doing anything else. I have this blog to show my range, but if you don’t want to browse through 12 years and 2400+ posts, you can find selected clippings here. I charge reasonable rates and quick turnaround, and am particularly good at explaining technical subjects for a general audience with empathy and patience.
  • Help me find a better day job! I have 20+ years of tech support experience, having been on the phone and the front lines of the information economy. Again, I bring humility and compassion, and am fluent in talking straight to someone and helping them find a solution. Email me for a copy of my resume, or find me on LinkedIn, or pass along my info to any Portland-area companies that need a support specialist.
  • I can also fix or improve you computer! If you have trouble with your PC, Mac, smart phone or tablet, or know someone who needs help, let me know, or let them know about me.
  • Donate! If you are feeling generous, I will happily and gratefully accept any donation you can spare. There’s a PayPal button below this post, or email me if you prefer a different donation method.
  • Share this post! In fact, share any post I make. Get the word out! Post it on your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. Tell your friends about the services I offer. Let your co-workers, neighbors, bartenders and baristas know about me.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for any assistance you can spare, even if it’s copying and pasting a link to this page. I often write and post in solitude, but I know you’re all out there.

PayPal Donate Button

A short bio

meta

How does this sound as a short bio for me?

Brian Moon was born in Portland, OR, and has lived most of his life in Sellwood, a neighborhood of working-class bars, coffee shops, antique shops, and city parks, and grew up thinking that his last name destined him for space, which has not happened yet. He’s been reading and writing since his earliest memories, and enjoys telling stories, explaining things simply, and making others’ words shine in their own voice.