Blog fiction: Falling Star

“Let me hold you, please.”

“We can’t. I’m promised to another.”

“Just for tonight?”

She kissed him, fierce and sorrowful. “I love you. Now go.”

As Rigel climbed out the window, a star fell in the distance, the first of a week-long meteor

shower.

Lyra leaned out after him. “Don’t pine for me. It has to be this way. I am securing an alliance, and Arthur is not a bad man, so I will be doing my best to be happy.”

Rigel paused on the trellis and met her eyes. The kitchen garden was a long way down. “Does that mean you won’t miss me? That you won’t long for me at all? That you’ll forget?”

She closed her eyes briefly and swallowed. When she opened them again, her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “No.”

Suddenly shame-faced in addition to despairing, Rigel looked away. “I hope he treats you as you deserve.”

Lyra closed the windows reluctantly and watched the moon through the leaded glass. By the time the waning gibbous moon had set, she would be married. She set her forehead on the cool, indifferent glass and prayed for it to stand still.

Differences between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org

Wordpress.com hosts blogs: wordpress.org is where you get the wordpress software to upload onto your own server (or that of a friend, family member, or someone you pay to host your stuff). It's important to differentiate, because they're both fantastic, and they're easily confused, because the interface is similar. They have their own breakdown of differences, but this aims to be more descriptive.

Wordpress.com is nice because you don't have to mess around with a server or, necessarily, with getting your own domain.

Wordpress software is nice because you can do anything you want. Cue maniacal cackling off into the distance.

But more concrete comparisons:

Access:
The first thing you did was take out that little Meta toolbar on the side, right? It looks unprofessional and sloppy, though some people dislike it more than others (I hate it).

.com: go to your site/wp-admin or wordpress.com or someone's site where they left up the Meta toolbar. It doesn't matter which, since you can navigate the whole back end of Wordpress after the one login.
Software: go to your site/wp/wp-admin. That's pretty much the only option.

Appearance:
Themes govern most of how your blog appears. Themes are a collection of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that tell things to align left or align right or show up purple.

.com: There are a variety of free themes, and even more paid ones, and you can almost definitely find one you love. Typically from there you can also select background color or image and header image. If you buy an upgrade, you can also edit the CSS. You don't get access to the CSS files themselves, though, so you are overwriting blind. If you are pretty confident, that's fine, whatever. If you are mostly used to editing and not building and have never bothered to look at the source code for various pages, when Wordpress updates and breaks your theme you will spend several hours drinking and frantically trying to correct the website, while text boxes float around seemingly arbitrarily and look completely different on the three screens you eventually end up looking through because you are trying to fix the header and you've changed the alignment and indent and mandatory margin but you don't actually have access to the files and it doesn't occur to you to override the vertical alignment, and you then switch to a different theme that is not actually broken but does truly horrifying things to your submenus. When you eventually wake up, vodka having beaten panic at about three-thirty in the morning, Wordpress will have fixed it and you will spend the rest of the day in nihilistic despair.
Software: There are myriad themes and you can not only customize the background and header but also look at the CSS and pinpoint that this line of code here governs what color links default to and change just that to make everything violently orange. You will accidentally leave an extra space or digit or apostrophe somewhere and crash the server. Things will need to be reinstalled. You can take comfort in your own agency in the failure.

Seriously, though, themes and editing without messing with the CSS can get you a pretty customized website, and Wordpress is great about fixing their mistakes and errors that crash the server can be corrected.

Widgets:
If you're building a Wordpress site, you freaking love widgets. Widgets are awesome. The Text widget (which lets you insert arbitrary text and HTML) is how you get your Twitter feed or follow button up, and your tumblr follow button, and a lot of the other buttons social networking sites let you generate. But widgets let you do a heck of a lot more than that: they're your Facebook like box and your RSS feed and your contact info and your flickr link and your category cloud. Widgets are how you implement neat features without extensive background in coding.

.com: limited number, but they cover a lot, and the text widget with HTML adds additional functionality.
Software: widgets for the software are actually a feature of the plugins you can get. Plugins for the software are great, because you can get ones that tweet automatically every time you get a new post, or generate a new post every time you tweet, or do all manner of strange and unlikely things. The trick is that they are reviewed but not actively policed, so you need to make sure it actually does what it says it does, and isn't broken.

Akismet:
Akismet is a spam filter, and is how you filter all the comments that are lists of links to scams or are soliciting people to buy knock-off Gucci handbags on your bike site. You want a spam filter. Akismet's pretty good.
.com: it's already there.
Software: you need to install the plugin. It is a terrible amount of work. You have to click, like, three things.

Scalability:
What do you do when you suddenly get lots of traffic on your website?
.com: It absorbs the traffic, and doesn't cost you extra money.
Software: Your server might crash, or you might need more servers. This can cost more, and may or may not be able to respond quickly to a sudden surge.

Which you choose will depend on your comfort with code, your ability to acquire and comfort with self-hosting, and how much you like customizability. They're both excellent platforms, versatile enough for almost everyone.

Surveillance

Everyone's heard about the NSA tapping phones, right? That's not news.

Basically, they're following up on permissions they got in the Patriot Act, when we were all still going 'please take my liberty and give me security and screw Ben Franklin.'

This is a great post that talks about what such measures can lead to.

Which leads to my perennial post about anonymity. I have not posted about it nearly as much as I thought I had, given that I am persistently cranky about it. Anonymity is very hard to do, and true anonymity is something that has to be worked on persistently and in the face of people who would really prefer that you didn't. Things like The Onion Router and other things discussed in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother are good starts, and Cryptocat is a valuable tool, and encryption keys are completely fantastic.

But all of these things take effort, and are very different from posting 'down with the government' or whatever on your Facebook page. If you're going to go through the effort of anonymity, if you care about a cause enough to get active in protesting, posting on your Facebook or whatever about it is actually potentially dangerous to you and everyone who liked it out of abiding bitterness over parking tickets.

So if you care about something deeply? Talking casually about it on the internet is probably one of the last things you want to do. In light of the surveillance abilities of even reasonably democratic governments, making sure everything you say online would meet with the approval of a hyper-judemental theoretical grandmother is a safe bet.

Also, for writers, anonymity is almost always the enemy of publicity.

Things I grew up thinking about the media

Sometimes overwhelmingly it strikes me that other people did not grow up with journalists. As usual, there are people angry on Tumblr about a 'media conspiracy,' utterly outraged that something didn't spin the way it would in their ideal world. I usually abjectly fail to comprehend.

My mom, dad, and step-mom all have journalism degrees. All have worked extensively in print journalism, though none do anymore. They've collectively worked variously in PR (both before and after social media), political campaigns, television, online news coverage, editing (ranging from copy-editing daily newspapers to helping writers organize the content of their history books), and magazines. They imparted three important things:

1. Journalists lie.
2. Factcheck everything.
3. Don't watch Fox News.

Journalists lie.

Every journalist is a person, and people are subject to cognitive biases as well as personal bias. Journalists have a professional code of ethics, but it doesn't cover every circumstance, and journalists are still fallible. Some of them can't find sources who have accurate information, or can't do so by a pressing deadline. Some of them can't or don't find the sources for balanced coverage. Some of them have to work within editorial bounds that include political leaning. Some of them are Joel Stein.

Factcheck everything.
People get things wrong. People misapprehend. People read summaries and then try to summarize them and end up somewhere else completely. No matter how much you adore someone, unless your chief reason for adoring them is rigid and obsessive factchecking, be prepared to check their story before repeating it. Some things, a sanity check is most of what's needed: if a three-headed cow was really born in Nebraska, wouldn't it be more likely to be in an article in Agri-Chemical News than in The National Enquirer? Check as many sources as possible! I ran into an issue last week where I'd only read one news source for a thing, and it wasn't recent enough or comprehensive enough to actually give me the answer I was looking for, but I ended up repeating it anyway, and then retracting my statement and apologizing and feeling very silly.

Usually, I try to check two independent sources before I repeat or reblog (I'm on tumblr a lot these days) any kind of newsy thing. Like the persistent urban legend that Mister Rogers served in the military: no, he didn't. Try to get independent confirmation of things, try to get multiple sources, try to get firsthand accounts, try to get physical proof. The truth is important, and the story you tell with the truth is important.

Don't watch Fox News.
You know that first point about journalists? An important thing to keep in mind is that most of the people who talk on Fox are commentators and analysts and not actually journalists.

Fox lies. Fox fear-mongers. Fox wasn't allowed to broadcast in Canada until 2004, and even now broadcasters are required to monitor it and "abridge or curtail" any hate speech, because it is an active concern. Canada has standards about lying on air, and so Fox isn't allowed out without a leash on.

Fox is sometimes put on the same playing field as news agencies because they present themselves as the more right-leaning news option that is still totes reliable, yo. That's incorrect. There are tons and tons of articles out there enumerating the ways Fox has straight-up lied on air: find them. Check up on me. Factcheck. Just don't do it with The O'Reilly Factor on in the background.


These are the reasons I am dumbfounded when people point out that the story in the Saturday paper is different than the one in the Sunday paper and cry conspiracy or coverup: if it's a normal morning paper and the incident happened late late late Friday night, the journalist who wrote the story probably had an hour or less to find out what happened, get a statement from a witness, write the article, submit it to their copyeditor, and have it sent to Layout to make the deadline. Then they had all of Saturday! That means they got to talk to more people, maybe get a photographer by, and do their own factchecking.

This is mostly a ramble, but if there's anything I'd really like anyone to walk away with, it's that 'The Media' isn't a massive unified faceless machine: it's a few (disturbingly few, but that's a separate issues) corporations and a lot of Editors in Chief and even more journalists, all with slightly different agendas and all with varyingly applicable codes of ethics. The best, and ultimately only, thing you can do to further pursue truth is to think critically about everything.