discoveredinalj | Jan. 6th, 2026

It is the 6th of January, and the end of our Winter-Solstice-Christmas-Celbrate-the-Light calendar for 2025 - sigh, as ever. It's always sad when I make the closing post like this - and especially because this year I have to say something very important, so please keep reading.

This might be the last Discovered in a Winter-Solstice-Christmas-Celebrate-the-Light calendar...

At first I thought it might be the last because I've been doing this for twenty years now and it's taking up more and more time the fewer of us there are, when I really need to do other Christmas-life things more efficiently (and I must admit I was a bit disappointed no one seemed to notice it was our twentieth Discovered in a Winter-Solstice-Christmas-Celbrate-the-Light calendar except me, even though I did announce it - and put it on the banner!) But then a few people messaged to say how much they look forward to the calendar each year, and being me I was relenting and thinking 21 sounded good too...

...and then the Dire Warnings of the End of Lj began popping up, which most of you have probably seen. There've been Dire Warnings before, but I think the world is possibly at a place where this time they're more likely to have some foundation. There is a rumour that Lj is splitting the (probably now very small) English-speaking side from it's much larger Cyrillic-speaking side prior to implementing other changes. There is a post here in the Russian Lj News comm about what seem to be pretty serious restrictions to users of the Cyrillic language site (Google translate seems to work pretty well on it). I must admit I can't see Lj continuing as a viable blog for them if those changes are actually effected - and some commenters seem to indicate that they have been. Could it all be a mis-translated ruse of some kind? Yup, not impossible - but it's hard to tell either way, and ironically enough Lj had a wee glitch as I came on to post this, which usually means something has been changed on the server. But who knows - it could have been a minor fix-an-issue thing.

That said - I have been/am updating the back-ups for

ci5hq, my own Lj, and various other comms that I mod or co-mod to DreamWidth, and I will be running a final

discoveredinalj back-up to Dreamwidth tomorrow. So all the Pros comms that we use and love will be available over there if Lj does go down, or vanish for us (some Dreamwidth links: CI5hq, Discoveredinalj, The Safehouse, CI5hq_dnoticed, ProsFicIndex, ProsFinder, Pros Records Room (Palelyloitering), and here's me too - bet you'd forgotten most of those existed! *g*) The Russian post linked above seems to suggest that content from before the changes will remain available even if everything else is different, and I'm crossing fingers because our comms (and my own Lj) are image-heavy, all hosted on Lj.

Basically: I don't know if we'll be here on Lj next year, and if we're on DreamWidth I'm not convinced it will be possible to run the calendar in the same format. Where ever we are, though, I hope we can all gather in a single agreed Pros-y place again, at least for next Christmas.

All of which is very heart-heavy, so - I'm going to open the rest of your day, in whatever time zone you are in, to posting any more little cheers-es that people might have from the Wassail Bowl, and as always remind people to archive their stories/images/creations elsewhere, although the calendar will remain as an archive for as long as it can be. (Did you know that if you click on a date on the calendar itself, it will bring up the posts for that day? This is true of all the archived calendars that you can find via the User Info page too! Go read the old stuff! Fill your boots! *g*) And...

...Wassail!