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What with the change in comment and registration policies, I figured it was time to knuckle down and finish my ramble attempting to summarize the guidelines for participating here. So here you go: Getting the Lay of the Land. Comments are disabled there, but are welcome on this post. A link to it will go in the sidebar for easy reference, of course.

This long-overdue page is intended to more clearly identify the guidelines of acceptable conduct at this site. Oriented mostly toward prospective and new participants, it may nonetheless be helpful for regulars as well, as it represents some changes in thought from previous incarnations of this page (which may not be here any longer). As circumstances and changes in my ideas and attitudes may warrant, the page will be modified.

The primary purpose of this group blog is to provide a place to explore ideas and issues relating to freedom and individualism. Both being broad categories, there are many perspectives and paths possible, and I like seeing them. I like helping others to recognize the diversity inherent in both as well; and I deeply appreciate learning from others whose approaches are different from mine. Thus, this place is a fairly open forum for conversation; but that does not mean it is open to all conversation.

First and foremost, as this is a private site—that is to say, not sponsored or run by any state employee or official—thus, the First Amendment does not apply here. We are not under any obligation to provide a venue for every person who wants to post comments here; and we will not do so. Trolling and spamming are two obvious activities that aren’t welcome at all, under any circumstances.

My goal here is to provide a place where individuals can respectfully, civilly consider and exchange ideas and information via conversation with other participants. It is not a commercial site, and no ads will be accepted here. (If you want to target this audience with an ad, please consider Sunni’s Salon the way to accomplish that—with many more readers seeing it, most likely.) Trolling is a bit harder to pin down, as there’s more of a judgment call involved in applying that label. Some actions—trollish and otherwise—that are not welcome here include: framing questions or issues in a non-neutral or incivil way way (e.g., assuming anarchy or voluntaryism is necessarily utopian and therefore unobtainable, that religious individuals are necessarily hypocritical or incapable of rational thought, that tax avoidance is somehow “better” or “worse” than another form of pro-freedom economic activism); disrupting a conversation with a barely-relevant tangent, long quotations, strawman smackdown, or efforts to divert the conversation elsewhere; any sort of holier–than–thou attitude directed at another participant; and flame wars and personal attacks between participants. Conspirators may have differing criteria regarding comments on their posts than I do; in those cases, I will do my best to honor their preferences while keeping true to the spirit of this place.

Somewhat related to the trolling issue, I consider it extremely boorish to make statements claiming or insinuating that one “knows” what’s in another contributor’s mind, or what another’s intent is. Especially among individuals who have never met face to face, that is simply impossible. Observe that I try to use such words and phrases as “appears to”, “perhaps”, “many individuals”, “it may be that”, rather than statements of fact that I cannot know or support—although I am not perfect on this. I find such precision aids my thinking as well as writing. It also helps keep conversations from getting overheated.

Without getting too deeply into the DAM (“Dreaded Anarchist–Minarchist”) debate, I will just say that pro-state perspectives are not welcome here. (I consider voting a pro-state activity, by the way.) I expect that all readers who want to join the conversation would agree that the many layers of government in our lives is entirely too much; and thus the focus is on scaling back coercive systems and identifying the flawed ideology underlying them. That said, there are many ways to accomplish that, and many different end points possible between where we currently are and total voluntaryism. Any contributions that advance liberty along that continuum are welcome—viz., one needn’t worry overmuch about purity issues. To be even more clear, I have few quibbles with minarchism, as long as more coercive rules and/or glorification of the state aren’t advocated.

If you’re in doubt as to your ability to abide by these guidelines, keep in mind that I am not expecting everyone to think in lockstep. I know of voters who participate here, for example, as well as proponents of “intellectual” property—but when those issues arise, they tend not to engage, or do so respectfully rather than antagonistically. I hope that’s because they understand that opposing views do not in and of themselves constitute a personal attack. Read through various comment threads and you should get a good idea of how to contribute here; and you will likely be welcomed by us all.

One may participate here by registering. Doing so confers two benefits to you: your comments are not held in moderation; and your comments are “verified”, i.e., an anonymous user cannot post a comment using your user name. At this time, registration requires admin approval before one can post. This is an anti–troll and –spammer measure. You may wish to facilitate your possible approval by sending me a brief email introducing yourself [my eddress is my first name at this domain; and I do use encryption]. Gibberish user names and/or eddresses from countries that are notorious for spammers will be deleted after 24 hours if I don’t receive an email requesting approval. The few trolls with whom I have personal experience are not welcome to post here; I will similarly bar others on conspirators’ recommendations.

Anonymous users may also post comments, but they are held for possible moderation. An anonymous comment may be approved as is, may be edited (with no intent of altering meaning, but perhaps removing inflammatory content—if edited, I will clearly state why I edited the comment), may be deleted but mentioned in a comment by me, or may be deleted entirely without mention. Because they are anonymous and I have no way of verifying content, there is a much higher bar for approving anonymous comments than registered users’ comments.

As another anti-spam measure, all comments have a limit on the number of URLs they can contain̵at present this number is set to 5. The counter counts both the URL in the html code as well as text, so if you want to include links, the best way is to use text as the hot link, rather than the link itself. Any registered user who posts an offtopic link to a commercial site (e.g., peddling penis pills, bogus financial/mortgage help, antidrug sites, sex vids or sites) will be considered a spammer and the account will be deleted.

Okay, this is way longer than I had intended when I set out to write it. I hope it is helpful rather than intimidating. If you need help figuring out what html codes can be used in a comment, click on the “input format” link to see what’s usable. As already stated, if necessary, this ramble will be edited and/or updated. If anyone has questions, my eddress information is in here already, so figure it out and give me a shout. Thanks for your time.

No earth-shattering consequences to this one, though; well, probably not for anyone but me, that is.

Our amazing tech deity just sent me an email, calling me on my “seven readers” schtick—apparently he got curious, and peeked at the November stats. Holy schmoly—over 24,000 people have dropped by! Many are apparently coming for the food ... so I guess I’d better get the next “cooking the alphabet” feature up. Cookie Monster is going to be sooo disappointed ...

(I, however, am astonished [and yes, a little pleased] that so many individuals come by here.)

Speaking blogistically, that is. Mr. Endervidual has started his own blog, titled Memory, Making, Meaning. Sounds intriguing with or without the commas ...

Well, that was pretty painless—from this side of the move, anyway. All the heavy lifting was done by the all-powerful techdeity; and many thanks to him for a job very well done.

Now, off I go to reconfigure my email client for the new server ... and may I suggest that y’all go off to browse the July/August issue of Sunni’s Salon? I know it was long in coming, but I hope you’ll find it worth the wait!

... We’re in the process of moving this domain to another server, and I’d hate to lose any contributions to the conversation here. Either I or our allmighty Godemperor will post a notice when it’s safe to start chattering again.

Oh, and using my Gmail eddress [sunni.snake] during the switchover is probably a good idea too.

Thanks to everyone who kindly let me know about the site being down yesterday. Dunno what the problem was (other than it being some kind of server glitch), but I hope it’s behind us for good. Anyway, that unpleasant discovery wasn’t the worst part of the day ...

The first I am surprised I didn’t create from the outset, when we began our arduous migration to Drupal [the buffalo got nothing on the difficulties we faced!]: tips and tricks. Any kind of helpful hint, product or software recommendation, etc., that we post should go in this category; and I expect that an accompanying category tag will help further classify them (e.g., pood, Pengy Power), although I am not going to be the tagging police and insist upon it.

The second is a bit of inspiration that came to me yesterday, to help me be more consistent about sharing fun things I discover as I cook. “Cooking the alphabet” is intended to be a semi-regular feature, focusing upon some food or spice—one for each letter of the alphabet. Some will be commonplace, while others will be unusual. I’ll try to include at least one recipe with each letter, but won’t guarantee it. And I will probably break my loose rule of focusing on ingredients rather than final dishes at some point, but I doubt anyone here will care all that much about that. I have the first entry in mind already, but need to get this issue of Sunni’s Salon finished before I can indulge myself.

If any Conspirators want to do their own cook the alphabet series as well, I think that would be marvelous. Or you dear readers can run with the idea yourselves, too. It ain’t as though I’m going to copyright the idea.

Update: How could I have forgotten to mention “Wisdom and Inspiration”? Well, I did; sorry. As the name suggests, that category is intended to mostly be a repository of quotes and other bits of wisdom or insight. Certainly not only from “famous” people, either!

I am allowing the domain “realidrebellion.com” to expire—and it will expire in just a few days. I’ve never searched for the phrase, but nearly every time I see a Real ID-related piece, that phrase is mentioned. Thus, I think that the domain name is worth something, and would like to see it go to someone willing to do something meaningful with it (“meaningful” here meaning anything besides those fake sites that exist just to get ad view revenues).

I’ve never let a domain expire before, so I don’t know if I can facilitate someone else buying it. But if that’s possible, I will certainly try to help. The current registrar is GoDaddy, if that matters. Email me if you’re interested: sunni at this domain dot com.

The Blogger Real ID Rebellion site will continue, powered primarily by Michael. And deep thanks to him for stepping up as I have withdrawn from formal activism.

Well. Now that I’m finally here, I don’t know where to begin. Oh, yeah, that should be easy: HughesNet sucks.

Just about the only thing that I’ve been able to keep up with of late is my work on updating all the old Greymatter blog entries. They were transformed into Drupal format via a nifty script our tech admin wrote, but there were a few glitches, the primary one being that all posts apparently got labeled as being authored by me. So, I’ve been sifting through them, making the following changes as needed: 1] correct authorship; 2] correct URLs referring to previous blog entries; 3] remove the coding that forces clicks to open new windows; and 4] categorizing the entry. It appears from my testing that our search function is heavily dependent upon the category structure.

This might seem like a lot of work, with little benefit to it, but I think it’s important. The site will be internally smooth agan when I’m finished, and will be a more accurate record than it is now of who said what, way back when. My daily goal has been to update ten entries per day, which has been easy to accomplish. At this pace I will be through the entire blog in around three months. (We’re still working on how to handle the nonblog static pages I’d created; and yes, I’m the spanner in the works yet again.)

But of course, when I look at some older entries I see other things I’m tempted to change ... a change of mind about a site I’d featured as a “site of the week” for example, or mentions of sites I know aren’t around any longer. The perfectionist editor in me is never satisfied: and it’s true, sometimes I have removed links or – much more frequently – updated links, especially ones that point to friends’ sites. I’m trying very hard not to change the fundamental nature of any post, but it’s sometimes a challenge ... a bit of awkward phrasing or a misspelling jumps out at me, and my fingers want to “improve” what’s there. But change isn’t necessarily improvement, and I know that under the guise of “cleaning up” lies the murky depths of spin, obfuscation, and the like. I may not like some of the things I’ve written, or how I wrote about them, but I am not interested in reconstructing my past. I do too much of that in my head as is ... it’s inescapable.

Just as William James observed in his comments about dipping into a stream, one never dips into the same blogstream twice. And in dipping into my past – at least as represented here – I realize that there’s no such thing as sufficient hindsight that yields a final, “correct” view.

Well, we might not be ready for everything, but tough: sometime soon this site will be moving over to its new software home. The appearance is pretty much the same, but a few differences will be apparent. Commenting will be enabled again—however, one will need to sign up to be able to comment (sorry ‘bout that). Please bear with us as we upgrade, and if you see some problem with the site or old entries, let me know so it can be fixed. Tusen takk, and see you on the other side!

Hi all! If you’re reading this it means that our tech guru has worked his magic and our new site, running Drupal is live. You should notice some small differences in appearance, but most of the changes are behind the scenes. I imagine there’ll be a few bumps and snags as everything gets moved over, so please bear with us. If you spot one, please let me know so we can get it fixed ASAP.

Meantime, it’s good to be able to get the conversation going again, so please, sign up so that you can contribute your thoughts!

A quick catch-up on doings here in answer to some oft-asked questions, and some important, but not so oft-repeated questions or statements ...

Well, the good news is that I survived this truffle-making round ... over 350 truffles made. But it took longer than I had planned (keeping the chocolate in temper was the primary time-eater), and did leave me in a time crunch. The truffles have been sent on their ways, however; and I hope to get some pictures up later today. I took lots of shots of all the goodies lined up, but haven’t had time to so much as glance at them.

I noticed Sunday evening that my hands were starting to feel quite dry ... not surprising, given how often I needed to wash—or at least rinse— them while working. Using lotion isn't a good idea while working with chocolate; if it’s strongly scented it could contaminate the chocolate, and I’ve been told some of the substances commonly found in lotions can interfere with tempering, too. Best not to take any chances. But by the time Monday was done, my hands were full-on chapped, and painfully sore. Any motion that required moving my fingers was uncomfortable, at the least. Taking yesterday off from typing and washing helped a lot, but my hands aren’t completely healed yet. Not sure how to tackle this unexpected problem in future rounds ...

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed an uncomfortable sensation taking root in my head, but being out shopping, I wasn’t able to do much about it. It felt a lot like a caffeine-withdrawal headache, but that didn’t seem possible to me; I’d had my usual morning dose of coffee. Giving in to the temptation of a Coke, the discomfort eased ... but returned a couple hours after I’d finished the drink. Upon returning home, I ate a bit of chocolate, and again, the headache dissipated some. Now, I hadn’t been licking my fingers, nor liberally sampling my wares, so I was at something of a loss to explain this until some research this morning turned up what I had begun suspecting: caffeine is absorbed through the skin; and with my hands having chocolate all over them for the better part of two days, it seems likely that I was getting a steady low dose—and not working with chocolate yesterday, the withdrawal kicked in. “Kick” is the right word, too: when I woke up this morning, my head was really throbbing. Still working on eliminating that. I guess that means that this product would work as billed, although I wouldn’t count on absorbing a cuppa’s worth from a typical shower.

And last, I really took a hit on private shipping on the truffle orders! I underestimated how much weight the boxes add to orders ... still a lot of room for improvement, packaging-wise. But progress is being made, so I’m not too unhappy.

In other “ouchy” news, commenting remains turned off, as the spambots appear to be hovering nearby still. I hate to say it, but we may not be able to re-enable comments until after the move to the new software platform is complete. Progress on that project is proceeding well, however; my goal is to accomplish it before February 1. And it has become top priority, so off to it I go.