should I return to usenet?

[baratron]

I have had two days of thinking profound thoughts. I have posted in compersion about being comfortable with your partner's other partners, and on The Sims Resource about polyamory in The Sims. I've also noticed in referring the TSR people to the polyamory.org FAQs that there's actually nothing in the alt.poly FAQ about the difference between polyamory and polygamy/polygyny/polyandry, which seems a bit of an oversight... and something that did frequently come up on the group when I was there.

I'm thinking about dropping back into alt.polyamory, because I still consider it "home". For a start, there's alt.polycon, which has a very important place in my heart. apc 8 was... stressful in a way that means I'm still procrastinating on tidying up some of the odds and ends, yet it must have been successful - even if just on a ratio of number of attendees to number of new relationships ;) I really want to get to apc 9, but the only way I can afford it would be if I stayed with someone, and I'm no longer close to the friends I had in Boston. (Unless one of my LJ friends lives there, and I'm being forgetful). Wild horses will not keep me away from apc 10, because I need to see Toronto again, revisit all the wonderful things we saw there, and get to all the things we wanted to but didn't have time. I have to talk to Bearpaw about passing on the consuite decorations & so on - if someone could give me his email address, I'd be most grateful.

On a more practical level, I'm thinking I should talk to people there about adding some stuff to the FAQ, and thinking some of them might like to read my post on how labels work for this geek. But it would be rude to pop in without sticking around for the discussion - and I simply don't have time to keep up with the traffic. Even after installing gnus and putting in some heavy-duty rules/filters, I was unable to keep up with it. I miss it, but since lilairen arrived on LJ, everyone whose stuff I really enjoy reading is here. And here, I can read them unmolested by idiots and trolls.

And I like the LJ interface so much better than usenet. I much much prefer the discussion style of livejournal comments. Because of how they work, you only ever get short conversations in comments - if people want to branch off from it, they do it in their own journals - so I can follow threads a lot more easily. soc.bi and alt.poly were nightmarish for me because if I didn't have time to read the groups properly, I'd keep missing out on stuff, and getting upset.

Blah.

Comments

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

bearpaw@shore.net

[nitoda]

I know what you mean about the format etc. differences between lj and usenet ... but just as a point of information, I've looked back into a.p. recently and the posting rate seems to be well down on what it was. don't know if that might be enough to tempt you to look back? I did intend to try to keep up again, but haven't managed it. Mainly because I struggle to keep up with lj as well as email anyway ... but I know what you mean about it feeling like home, too. I *miss* a.p. when I don't read it ... and going back I do find it easier to pick and choose threads to actually read, so I hope, certainly before the Toronto a.p.c. that I will spend some time there again. I think I'm going to start looking on a.p. as a kind of "all you can eat buffet" - and although it's taken me many years to come to this, I do in general now understand that "all you can eat" doesn't *have* to mean that you struggle to eat everything you might possibly like and end up feeling ill! If I miss some delicacies, then it really isn't the end of the world as long as I enjoy the ones I do find and feel healthier and happier for having been at the buffet.

[kiya]

I've also noticed in referring the TSR people to the polyamory.org FAQs that there's actually nothing in the alt.poly FAQ about the difference between polyamory and polygamy/polygyny/polyandry, which seems a bit of an oversight...

If it's an oversight, I'd love to know what it's overseeing. :P As far as I can tell, the only "difference there is" between polyamory and the other things is that some people say the other things aren't "real" polyamory and get their knickers all knotted up over the subject, some people (like me) think the first group of people are essentially illiterates who have no notion what the words actually mean when they condemn them and get their/our knickers knotted up over the subject, and most people really don't care . . . .

Me, I'm polyandrous and wannabe polygamous. There doesn't look like much of a difference there to me from polyamory; they seem to me to be a natural consequence of being a het chick with two primaries, one she's married to and the other she'd marry if we were to that point in that relationship.

People who don't do multiple primaries or polyfidelity aren't likely to be polygamous; non-monosexuals aren't so likely to be polygynous or polyandrous. It's just a thing, like polyfi, like primary/secondary, like no-rules polyamory, what have you; just a descriptive label. < a name="neh?" >

I wouldn't say there's a distinction to be made between polyamory and non-heirarchical polyamory, say. One's a subtype, is all. Just like multiple-spouse, multiple-chick, multiple-dude.

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

4 of your LJ friends live in Boston. And nexos (aka Nicole) posted something to alt.poly about being willing to host congoers. The con committee may also have a list of local folks who can volunteer crash space.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

baratron: I've also noticed in referring the TSR people to the polyamory.org FAQs that there's actually nothing in the alt.poly FAQ about the difference between polyamory and polygamy/polygyny/polyandry, which seems a bit of an oversight...

lilairen: If it's an oversight, I'd love to know what it's overseeing. :P As far as I can tell, the only "difference there is" between polyamory and the other things is that some people say the other things aren't "real" polyamory and get their knickers all knotted up over the subject, some people (like me) think the first group of people are essentially illiterates who have no notion what the words actually mean when they condemn them and get their/our knickers knotted up over the subject, and most people really don't care . . . .

Me, I'm polyandrous and wannabe polygamous. There doesn't look like much of a difference there to me from polyamory; they seem to me to be a natural consequence of being a het chick with two primaries, one she's married to and the other she'd marry if we were to that point in that relationship.

I think there are a couple of reasons for making the distinction. The first is that, where a lot of polyfolk live, polygamy (in terms of actual multiple marriages) is a crime. I think one of the reasons that people talk about polyamory is to make it crystal clear that they're not involving marriage-the-legal-entity and thus opening themselves up to legal complications.

The other reason that I'm familiar with really doesn't sound like it applies to you, lilairen. It's that, all legalities aside, some people don't model their relationships on marriage, and therefore aren't comfortable using a word with marriage at its root. Their relationships with their partners aren't particularly spouselike, but they still want to identify those relationships as significant in their poly structure. So they say -amorous instead of -gamous.

But yeah, if you're not worried about legalities and your relationships are all in spousal form, there's no reason not to use -gamous or -androus.

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

Oops. Nicole is actually nex0s.

[the-maenad.livejournal.com]

wandra and I are hoping to make apc9. One option might be to get a roomshare at the hotel; the price seems to drop drastically the more people you put in a room. We can't really justify going ourselves unless we save every penny possible, so...

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Hmma. I think LJ's interface is abominable; not only is it very hard to read all comments to all articles in a set of journals, but it's hellishly slow even if you pony up for the faster swervers - you're constantly waiting on a Web browser.

I also don't understand why people waste time on posting clients when that's the one thing that's not overly hard to do through the Web interface.

I would kill for an LJ->news gateway for reading. There's a lot of effort gone into good newsreaders; it's a shame to lose all that and have to do half the work myself. Even a Gnus backend would do nicely.

Still, we can't always agree. :-)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

When I read LJ, I typically use 8 windows in Opera at a time. One for my journal, one for my friends page, and 6 for comments pages. I constantly have comments pages loading in the background while I read the main page, so I only have to wait for stuff to load if LJ's having a very slow day.

Yes, it is me who steals all of LJ's bandwidth, why do you ask? :)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

The problem is that in a lot of people's eyes, polygamy is something practised by men who marry three or four women or girls, where the women have very little choice about who they marry, no choice about how many other wives there are in the family, and where girls of a very young age are brought into the family as wives. I, personally, abhor traditional monogamous marriage where the woman is subservient to the man - let alone multiple marriages where the women are all subservient to the man, who establishes a patriarchy by keeping as many of them pregnant as possible.

Polyamory is associated in my mind with consent - the whole point of it is multiple relationships with all parties giving informed consent to the arrangement. I am sure that your polyamorous or polyandrous relationships are not characterised by your men having extreme dominance over you. If you are ever shackled to the kitchen sink barefoot with a baby in one arm and a toddler running round on the floor, it will be as part of a scene or lifestyle choice that you have consented to. I would argue that it is necessary to have a word that isn't tainted with half-misunderstandings to separate a consentual arrangement from an imposed patriarchy. Polyamory, polyandry and polygyny are all fine for that - but I have a bad taste in my mouth to think of someone I know doing polygamy.

Note all the "I" words in this statement :)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Er... any chance you could tell me who the 4 are?

[jaxom.livejournal.com]

Grin, I do much the same thing with mozilla ;) So it's not just you... I tend to do a friendsfriends one too, so I get a feel for a wide range of posts, and find new friends. (or the way i'd prefer to look at it, people who are worth listening to)

The main advantage of the paid servers for me is that my website, where i slurp my journal into, doesn't take 5 minutes to retrieve the front page ;)

I quite like the interface. Little touches like tie-ins to xmms and mood icons add little features, and comments tend to be focused quite nicely, without the arguments and divergence (and spam and off-topic) you get a lot in newsgroups.

[jaxom.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Interesting thought. Don't know about news readers, but it wouldn't be *that* hard to have a perl script that checks your friends journals every few minutes, and emails you any new main post or comment.
Email client thread handling is pretty good these days, so you could use that. A main post would start a new thread, the comments would come as sub threads.

You'd have to clean out the html code, unless you hooked directly into the backend (and I'm not *that* good a programmer) tho if someone had a paid account, you can use the no-html style i think. you could fake the from address to be their publicised email address, and insert a href link to reply to any given comment.

To populate the friends details and which journals to watch, you could have a separate script to check your friends page and extract the relevent details into your database, or put it in the main script and populate when it spots a thread or comment from someone it doesn't recognise.

I don't know perl well enough to write something like this from scratch, but I wrote a chunk of this already in php. Now, all I'd need is a way to call a php script on my webserver every few minutes... Hmm. a cron job on the local machine should do the trick. Failing that, you could run the script manually, while you're making a cup of tea, and then when you sit down to read, all the comments would be in your inbox ;)

If I get really bored at some point, I might just attempt to do this for the hell of it.

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

Your Boston-area friends that I'm aware of are myself, bitty, lilairen and treacle_well. I've heard very little local discussion of the con, so I'm not sure who's doing the planning.

[kiya]

A while back, there was one of those godawful Defense of Marriage Act things wandering through Massachusetts (it was procedurally killed by the legislature a couple weeks ago, IIRC).

I went to the public hearing before one of the committees.

One of the arguments for the DOMA was that if same-sex partnerships were legitimated, it would be the slippery slope towards ". . . polygamy." This was said in that horrified intonation, as if there needed to be no explanation for why this was a terrible fate.

The conflation of "polygamy" and "patriarchal polygyny" is, therefore, in my experience, not only being used to keep me from being able to marry my partners, but to keep other people, who may be monogamous, from being able to get a legally recognized bond made with theirs. Which is one of the reasons I have my knickers in a twist over it: this particular bit of usage is being used to justify the behaviour of bigots.

(I also tend to go ballistic on people who tell me that the roots of the word clearly limit it to polygynous situations. People who try to pull that I tend to beat bloody with a Greek lexicon.)

Call it word-reclaiming if you want. I'm going to continue pigheadedly insisting that someone with more than one marriage is polygamous, because that's what the damn word means, and I'm not going to let ignorance take it away. Moomph. :}

[kiya]

I tend to figure that people who don't have marriagelike relationships are entirely free to not call 'em marriages. I don't understand why that means that other people should avoid using words making reference to marriage.

Re:

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I tend to figure that people who don't have marriagelike relationships are entirely free to not call 'em marriages. I don't understand why that means that other people should avoid using words making reference to marriage.

I don't either - I was just trying to identify a shade of meaning difference, and apparently not doing so very well. I think of polygamous relationships as a subset of polyamorous relationships in which the bonds between partners are spousal. The set of polyamorous relationships would include polygamous relationships plus relationships in which bonds are not spousal.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, then, what needs to be added to the alt.poly FAQ is a definition of the various word roots in "polyamory", "polygyny", "polyandry" and "polygamy", and a definition of consensual multiple-marriage as contrasted with patriarchal polygyny? Even if it's just "polygamy as practised by polyamorists is not X", where X is the sort of thing I said above?

That would please me, and answer a frequently-asked question.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Perl. Mrph. We need to convince Richard to do it, he's one of the better perl hackers I know, and I don't just say that because he's my partner. Actually, several of my LJ friends have expressed a wish for an LJ -> news converter, so maybe they could pool their coding skills to come up with something?

I don't want to co-ordinate it because it's not something I want to see, but perhaps interested bods could comment here so that you all know who you are, and then you can go away and start doing stuff...

P.S.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Before you even start, no perl vs python advocacy in my journal, please.

[kiya]

That looks like a damn good idea to me, especially since the word-roots thing is not only meaningful to mention occasionally, but the sort of thing that's fairly illuminating about group culture.

I wonder who to bug about it.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I do something like that - struggling under the lack of tabbed browsing, but...

It does mitigate things somewhat, but after all news is well enough done not to need multiple windows.

So you'll have to share that bandwidth with me.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

To be frank, if you wrote something like that, it would be easier to convert the comments into news articles than to email them to people. :-)

[Also, then the articles could be crossposted between dummy newsgroups - one for each journal you read and various collections of journals. Then you could look at things in a suitable grouping without reading anything twice.]

The other gotcha would be the need to provide some sensible context from the parent article.

whom to bug about changes to the alt.poly FAQ

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

elise.