technical_difficulties raze for those of you who might not have been around to see it, we were experiencing some unusual glitches for a few days. when things stop working around here, rare as that is, there's usually a bit of the good old-fashioned blather_white_screen to keep us company for a while, and then everything's fixed inside of an hour. that wasn't the case this time. everything went sideways monday night. the recent and who pages kept working, sort of, but all the blathes they held were shown as a list of blue links on a white background. while most of the navigational tools still functioned to at least some degree, attempting to blathe brought up that dreaded white screen. of all days, this happened on nr's birthday and my twenty-third blatherversary. i guess blather has a pretty skewed sense of humour sometimes. i remember being a teenager and experiencing something creeping toward physical withdrawal symptoms when the server crashed because of how busy things used to get. not much has changed in the intervening years. if anything, my need for the unique form of catharsis this place affords has only grown deeper. it's more than just a twisty tangly web of words. it's you, and me, and everyone who's ever left some segment of their soul behind. and the thought of losing that terrified me. i had a dream that night of waking to a repaired version of red. the format was all wrong. instead of "today" and "yesterday", the headings on the recent page were "beep" and "boop". the only active 'skite had a small red anchor for a name. their list of blathes sat on an island at the bottom of the screen. i didn't get to read any of their words. whoever they were. whatever they might have written. that turned out to be a pretty prescient dream, because the next day things were a little less out of whack, but any new words that were blathed refused to show themselves. the html stopped building and rebuilding itself. each problem that was solved seemed to step aside to reveal a new quirk standing behind it. new blathes turned into internal server errors. any existing blathe that was poked responded with a url helpfully pointing out its location. and for a few very strange and surreal moments, all that was red turned blue. thanks to dallas and his wizardry, it looks like things are back to normal now, without any beeps or boops. it's good to be red again. 240306 ... Soma [an error occurred while processing this directive] 240307 what's it to you? who go blather from