Day: January 6, 2009

not a good day on the internet

Valleywag: LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees.
CNET: LiveJournal clarified that it was “about a dozen” cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

The beginning of the end. Again.

Given the current situation, I’m going to start running my LJ Archive back-up daily, instead of monthly, and cross my fingers that someone out there finds a way to make LJbook run again. I don’t believe the entire site will evaporate overnight or anything, but I’ve been writing on Livejournal since 2003. To lose it would be a death in the family, as the site contains not only a clear and concise map of my life and a full history of my writing, it also holds all of you, my friends and family who daily sustain me. How many of us even have each others real names, let alone e-mail, address or phone number? This is the medium of the majority, if Livejournal vanished, so would our ability to keep in touch.

In the interests in making sure we don’t lose what we’ve built if it all falls down goes boom, I’ve whipped together a quick little poll. Don’t feel you have to fill it all out, but if you don’t give me, say, your phone number, who else will call you up on your birthday to sing you e.e.cummings?

If you don’t feel comfortable posting your personal information to a livejournal poll, e-mail whatever contact info you like to my hotmail address: bloodkrystal@. Also, here I am on: facebook – myspace – flickr – you.tube – del.icio.us – twitter.

criminal: pass it on

Via Jake Applebaum: BART Police (in Oakland) murdered a man on NYE.

It appears that police in Oakland shot and killed a man on New Years Eve. He was apparently involved in a fight on BART but this is unclear as things quickly spiraled out of control. The police pulled him and several other people off of the train.

(If you know more information about the officers involved, please consider leaking their photographs, names and badge numbers to wikileaks.)

There was an SF Gate story on the incident. The story (for those who aren’t reading the link) details what the witnesses saw. In short, a man was shot and it was said he was shot in the back, while on the ground. The comments on the story are horrible, most of them directly side with the police and suggest that all of the witnesses were lying. Some of the comments are simply racist and many suggest this is what you get for having a fight in public. While I certainly found it doubtful that the police would murder someone or even shoot them in the back (especially in such a crowd) it’s pretty clear that this is what happened.

At least two people took videos of the shooting and one of them had a direct line of sight. You can clearly see that the victim is talking to the police. He raises his hands as any reasonable person would, especially when dealing with the police. This is I would expect someone to comply, to show that they don’t have a weapon and that they mean no harm. The police put him on his stomach. This was with multiple police officers handling him.

He was reported to have begged to not be tasered. Supposedly he said that he had a four year old daughter right before he was put on the ground. The police officer in the video is clearly not at risk of any serious violence. Another police officer was holding the victim down. He had time to think and his response was to pull his gun, stand up, wait, aim and then he fired a shot directly into his back.

Here’s a link to the video.

Someone in the comments of his post also noted that “Vargas (the filmer w/ the video camera) claims that she resisted police attempts to confiscate her camera.“

complete as the air.

I made a deal with a dear long distance friend of mine this New Year’s Eve that I would toast him at midnight if he would toast me. As the venue I was at was ten minutes late with the midnight, and I didn’t have anything to toast with anyway, I instead made a post to him in reparation right before bed.

This was my reply:

“That’s really sweet, if slightly creepy. You were toasted at the Radegast Beer Hall in Brooklyn by about twenty people in a rolling, gregarious mood. The majority were men. Tequila had occurred prior. It went, word for word, like this:

VS: And to Jane with an H!
Tim: Who the heck is Jane with an H?
VS: She’s a good friend of mine.
Tom: Why should we toast her?
VS: Because she’s my friend.
Danny: But why should we TOAST her?
VS: Sigh. She has breasts.
All: To Jhayne!

What can I say, I know how to work a crowd.”

It’s nice to feel so appreciated.