This is blog-related

I've started an embodiment journal recently, inspired by my friend MirAngel's work. Collaging is a lot of fun, although as this is a very personal book of mine I'm picking and choosing the pages I show.

I'll include some pretty art so that this is somewhat on-topic. I know I said I'd curb the personal life stuff in the New Year - but the last paragraph in this post explains all, m'dears.

So, I've noticed Caleida, the blog site, has finally gone to the huge Update-Journal button in the sky. I'm a bit sad, to be honest, even though last time I used my most recent journal there it was November 2008 (remember my icon journal? Even if you don't, it's gone the way of the dodo now.)


It was kind of like a poor man's LiveJournal. I don't mean that as an insult because we loved it anyway - but it wasn't as good as LJ itself mainly because it wasn't as active. It was one of the clone sites - we could even use LJ tags and codes and they'd work just fine. However, back in my AOL days I had Parental Controls on my account and couldn't access LJ due to it being blocked. I could access the Caleida site, though, and I wasn't the only one in that situation of having that mysterious LiveJournal site blocked 'but here's something similar!'. I was extremely jealous of all of those who had Caleidas, because you could only obtain an account if you got a code from an existing user (before they opened it up to everybody).

My first journal was opened when I was about 13. I even had a super-cool username (it involved an x and an underscore, and my layout was purple and yellow with a Gryffindor icon - THAT'S how hardcore I was) and I kept it up for about a year before just ... dropping out of the habit of using it. I was writing short stories and fiction in Microsoft Word; I guess writing about my life didn't seem as appealing then, heh. I did set up a few new accounts afterwards; one was deleted, the other one completely private (I didn't use it much anyway, but re-visiting it last year was interesting ... I didn't know whether to laugh or cry). The third was my icon journal, which I think I've already mentioned up there.


The thing about Caleida I really did like though (this is going to sound quite sinister, but I honestly don't mean it to) is that it had a 'Recently Updated' list and I loved reading other people's journals. During 2008 and 2009, those last years, there were a few personal journals that still kept going. All the communities were dead - most went kaput in 2004 and 2005 when Caleida decreased in popularity and everyone moved to LJ. A few communities struggled to 2006, but only a handful and even then those posts never got replied to. But those few personal journals (and I was one of them back when I blogged regularly there), when they were public - were good reads. Two or three of them were private accounts - well, Caleida was so quiet, I guess it was added security for those who really wanted to write in private. A lot of the public-journal users were older than me, in their twenties, just blogging about their life. Once, a girl mused about how Caleida was so popular then everyone just disappeared - and she got four replies from the few of us left who shared the sentiments, me being one of them using my most recent account. We laughed a little, one of them even brought up that we should make a new community on there to try and revive the site a bit by reminiscing. A lovely idea, but I think even if we had done we may have been the only four on there.


I'd say it's down to nostalgia that I'm sad to see it just go. All the communities with their old entries, the old journals that their users have probably now forgotten completely ... I knew it wouldn't be around forever because the webmaster stopped using his own journal in about 2004/2005, but still.

I'm not quite sure why I wrote this here - I guess it's in case any old Caleida users try to visit the site, find out it's down, and go off to Google to see if there's any discussion on what happened to it. There isn't really; a question on Yahoo Answers that's now deleted asking what happened to it (thanks, Google Cache!) but that's all I could find. So if you come across my little ol' post here - yup, I was a blogger there once too, albeit a very young one, and it was part of my early internet life.


And here's one with some writing!!111!!