I picked up a book at the library that I was pretty certain I would need to own a penis to enjoy (note: own a penis; not borrow a penis), so I was pleasantly surprised to find Notes from the Internet Apocalypse thin but readable.  Fine, it was very thin, like a story stretched over one of those pot-holder looms, though it probably would have felt thicker (no pun intended) if I had something between my legs.  If I was the sort of person who spent time on 4Chan or looking at Internet porn.  Like the boy recently in the library who unabashedly continued to look at Internet porn even while I was standing behind him, trying to look through the M section in general fiction.  He would likely love this book.

But — again — it is readable, and even somewhat enjoyable, if you know the sites mentioned.  Which you will: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Of course, you should also have a heads up that there is a recurrent pregnancy loss plot point.  Not exactly what I was expecting amid all the discussion of porn.  But there you go.

The basic set-up for the book is that the Internet has gone down completely.  No one know why the world is offline, but it comes down to no websites, no email, no social media.  The book starts with a description of what happens to all of us when we go through Internet withdrawal, and then sharply veers into an Internet whodunit of trying to figure out what took out the Internet and whether the rumours are true that there is someone in New York who is still online.

That part was less interesting than wondering whether we could go backwards at this point and return to living offline after burying our faces in the warm bosom of the Internet.

Unplugging for a set amount of time — eg. not checking email or Facebook while on vacation — is very different from the Internet being offline.  In one case, you’ve removed yourself from the Internet, and in the other, the Internet has removed itself from you.  Sort of the same thing as being the dumper or the dumpee in a relationship.  Either way, the relationship is over, but one scenario has you in control and the other does not.

I don’t want to get dumped by the Internet.

It would be very difficult to go backwards at this point.  Give up a site, sure?  I could close my Facebook account and be fine.  I could leave Twitter and not miss it.  But blogs?  I start hyperventilating when I think about not reading blogs anymore.  I could still write my blog — it would be like keeping every entry in draft form — but to not be able to read anyone else’s blog?

I’ve been spoiled by the immediacy of the Internet.  I send an email, and I expect a reply in a short amount of time.  I have a question, and I Google for the answer.  I get handed the name of a song or the name of a familiar-looking actor in a television show via apps on my phone.  I take a photo and my sister can have it 15 seconds later.  Could she still have the photo without the Internet?  Sure, if I go to the store, print it out, go to the post office, mail it to her, and have her wait three days.

I couldn’t have books instantly or music instantly or movies instantly.  I couldn’t play games or check up on friends or see someone while I speak to them long-distance.

Obviously, if the Internet dumps us, we will have to continue on without it, fondly remembering our time together.  But it will hurt.  It will hurt a lot.  My heart would be broken.

Could you live without the Internet?

When we got back from the beach, I checked the caller ID instead of playing the answering machine because I am just that lazy.  I was scrolling past the names when I thought I saw my own and backed up.  Wait.  I hadn’t seen things.  There it was: my own name followed by my own number.  A call made from inside the house while we were out of town.

Which instantly called to mind every “I’m calling from inside the house” horror story told around campfires.

Image: Stephen Pierzchala via Flickr

I played the answering machine, but the only message was a hang up.

A hang up preceded by a moment or two of eerie silence.

I sent Josh around the house, certain that he would find someone who looked like Bob from Twin Peaks hiding in our basement, holding an old-fashioned, rotary phone.  (Why was my horror man holding a phone that takes 10x longer to make a phone call?  I don’t know.  Because he has all the time in the world as he leaves his creepy horror messages?)

The basement was empty.

The rest of the house was empty.

That night, I Googled the situation and discovered that phone solicitors have now discovered a way to make your own name and number appear on your caller ID.  They know that we all ignore “private caller” or unlisted numbers, but how can you ignore yourself?  I mean, it could be future-you calling present-you in order to warn you about Twin Peaks-like, rotary-phone operating horror characters.  Or it could be a robo-call.  Either/or.

In any case, the mystery was solved.

But for a few hours, it was pretty damn creepy.

We went to the beach last week for a few days.  I brought along a bunch of books, and I ended up reading two — one which was pretty awful and I won’t name it out of politeness and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which is a comfort read (one of those books I read over and over again just because it makes me happy).  We found a new playground on the island.  We took ice cream to-go each night so we could eat it while watching Doctor Who in our hotel room.  We ran around on the beach during sunset.  We biked through the nature reserve.

And somewhere along the way, I felt my body truly and fully relax.

Waves in the evening

Sunset on the bay beach

Pretty flowers on the nature reserve

Like this photo?  I got eaten alive by mosquitoes taking it.

Flocks of birds which likely have names but I’m not sure what they are

A herd of wild horse during sunset

I felt everything internally unknot.  My body melted onto the sand, oozing like ice cream in the sun.  I stopped hating everyone and everything.  I stopped worrying about next week and the week after and the week after that.  I stopped eating Tums.  Actually, I’m lying.  I still ate Tums.  But I took deep breaths and felt the air reach the dark recesses of my lungs.

At some point, during our last few hours on the beach, I started to feel melancholy about the whole thing.  What was the point in relaxing like this if I couldn’t hold onto it?  I’ve done this enough times to know that the moment we crossed back over the Bay Bridge, all the same feelings would return, climbing inside the car like hitchhikers.

And they did.

In some ways, they feel heavier because my body got used to being unburdened by them for a few days.  In some ways, they feel lighter because I know I can find a space sometimes to set them down.

Perhaps I only posted about this on Facebook (because I can’t find a post on my blog mentioning it even though I know some type of social media discussion took place when I first stated it) but many months ago, I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency.  As in, my body makes pretty much no vitamin D.  At all.  There was the amount your body needs to produce to be considered abnormal, and I was well, well, well under that number.  So I went on prescription vitamin D and brought up my levels, and then months later, was weaned to a normal, daily vitamin D tablet.

All was well.

Then my brand of vitamin D started adding gelatin to the tablet.

And I do not ingest gelatin.

So I went out trying to find a vegan supplement.  This proved to be (1) harder than I thought and (2) grosser than I thought.  Because along the way, I learned where vitamin D comes from.

I let myself shudder vitamin-D-free for several months until my doctor noticed during a blood test that my vitamin D levels were back down to nil.  So I had to suck it up and find a vegan supplement.

I found one at the local organic market.  It cost more than vitamin D should cost. (Like… $20.  Doesn’t that sound high for a few months of vitamin D?)  But I am back to rickets-free living.  I hope.

*******

Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Affected” (Chookooloonks)
• “Why I Hate the ALS Bucket Challenge” (ANDMom)
• “Reaching Out” (ANDMom)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable has a post about the true meaning of finding balance.  I love this post because she points out that balance isn’t necessarily a happy space.  It is more existing in the center of You-ness, not so focused on the Joneses or whatever else is out there.  Balance is about bringing it back inward, not having the external forces rocking you like a Weeble Wobble.  It’s a fantastic reminder in a world that is constantly pushing everyone off-center.

Family Building with a Twist has a post saying goodbye to summer.  I am having a hard time with the end of summer, so this was the perfect read for me this week.  This resonated with me so much: “Most of it is due to my worry that we didn’t maximize our time here; you know, sucking the marrow out of our beach week and all that. We didn’t play in the water as much as we would have liked. We didn’t collect as many shells. We didn’t spend as many evenings chatting into the wee hours while the ocean breezes blew.”  Especially knowing there is never a point where you reach “enough” of a good thing.

Lastly, the Road Less Travelled has a two-part, must-read post set on finding peace with the disappointments (or… larger than disappointments… tragedies.  The advice covers a wide range of situations) in life.  One of my goals for the year is to develop some resilience since I would say that is a life skill missing from my tool bag.  The two posts are chock-full of helpful information.  Bookmark them.  Come back to them a hundred times.  (Or however many times you need to commit the advice to heart.)

The roundup to the Roundup: My D3 is gelatin-free.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 15th and August 22nd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I read every terms of service (TOS) before signing up for a site.  Yes, I am that one person who reads them.  Companies, you wondered who that person was?  It’s me.  Hi!

I read them because I don’t want to have any regrets.  Just because a site has a terrible terms of service doesn’t mean that I won’t create an account.  It’s just that I use that site differently than I would have if the terms were different.

While it would be nice if everyone read every section of every terms of service, I also know that most people don’t have the time to do so.  So this post will teach you how to quickly scan the terms and figure out how YOU want to use their site (if at all).  Bookmark it and come back to it every time you have a new site to use.

“You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license”

There is language a site needs to put in their terms of service to protect themselves. For instance, they need to ask you a royalty-free license or you could claim in the future that they owe you money because you brought traffic to their site with your content. They need the license to be worldwide because they need to make sure they’re covered regardless of where their users live.

BUT… there is a red flag word in there: sub-license.  This means the site can license your content to a third party without contacting you or asking your permission (because you gave them permission with the TOS).  They do not need to be granted this type of license in order to run their site, but they do need to do this to make money in the future because your content is their asset.

Sites that tell you they can sub-license your content: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter all have very broad licenses that state they can sell your content to third parties.  I have accounts on all of those sites, but I do not upload any images, videos, or words that I wouldn’t mind if they ended up on a billboard on I-95.  I am also cognizant that anything I upload could be used to promote a product or idea that I wouldn’t want to promote or endorse.  So… I tread carefully and consume more than I upload.

“You give us a perpetual and irrevocable license”

Before you sign up for a site, make sure you can leave a site.  And make sure you can take your content too.  What if you upload photos of your child, and then your child grows up and begs you to take their image off the Internet?  With certain sites, that won’t be a problem.  With other sites, once you upload any content, they are allowed to perpetually and irrevocably hold onto that content.  (And with the ability to sub-license, perhaps sell that content in the future.)

You can close your account at Twitter or YouTube, and you can delete your tweet or movie, but both sites are allowed to hold on and use your content in the future.  You cannot completely close an Ancestry.com account (wish you hadn’t uploaded your family tree?), Pinterest, or WordPress.com account.  (Along with many other sites.)  Before you sign up for a new account, make sure you know if you can leave and what happens to your account and content if you do.

“Customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets”

Your data is a site’s most valuable asset.  Some sites collect more personal information than others.  Some sites, such as Netflix, disclose non-personal information to third parties.  They may know X number of people watched Y film, but they don’t know the names of all the people in the X category.  Other sites, such as Amazon, admit that if they ever sell their company, they’re selling your personal information too.

It is somewhat impossible to utilize the online world without having your personal information collected.  I look for sites that are open about their practices vs. those who leave it vague.  I trust transparency.  At least I know what I am getting.

“Does not claim ownership of any Content that you post”

Make sure the terms of service state something along the lines of “You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”  In other words, you want to make sure that YOU retain the copyright to YOUR work, and that by uploading the content, you are not transferring your copyright to the site.

It is unusual for a site to ask you to transfer the copyright.  Usually the site will ask you to grant them a license to use your work as they wish, though the creator still retains the copyright.

“We may revise these Terms from time to time”

Be careful with sites that tell you that they can make major changes to their terms of service and the most they will do is post them somewhere on their site.  Unless you are continuously going back and checking the site’s blog or TOS page for changes, chances are, you will not know when changes take place.  Even without seeing and signing off on those changes, by continuing to use the site, you accept the new terms.

What you want is a site that will contact you when they make major changes to their policy.  That is a site that operates with transparency.  Even better is a site that will allow users to weigh in on major changes to their prior policies.

Fine Print

Do a quick scan for the term “third parties.”  You want to know how using a site connects you and your content to third parties.  Are they sharing your information with third parties?  Selling your content to third parties?  You need to know where your information and content may travel.  Will it travel?  Who can say.  But once you give a site that right, they are allowed to use it.

There are other red flags I watch for, such as giving up my right to legal action (“You agree to defend, indemnify and hold us harmless”), or the jurisdiction for any lawsuits (I’m not flying to another state in order to participate in a lawsuit).  But they’re not deal breakers.

In fact, very few terms are deal breakers for me when it comes to using a site.  Will I upload content if I don’t love the terms?  Hell no.  But will I create an account so I can follow other people and read along, yes, and I’ll upload content that I’m okay with being out of my control.  Sort of.

I’m not a lawyer; I’m just an online user who is very interested in the way sites collect information and do business.