Low Doorways

In the Himalayas one often finds houses with very low doorways. One must stoop to enter, and this is true even for the remarkably short high-altitude physique of the folks that live there, let alone folk like me. It’s on purpose.

You see, there’s a terrible thing that can happen to the dead: they can come back to life as a kind of zombie. Fortunately, they can’t stoop. They have the stiff back of a Tory parliamentary intern. That means they can’t get through a short doorframe. Presumably, rather like Minecraft zombies that burst into flames when the sun rises, one doesn’t wake up to find a crowd of these things waiting outside the door.

This blog was deliberately, brutally murdered by hackers along with everything else on Tending and its various cousin sites. It’s been dead, wandering in the cold of the backupless hells for months. With the help of my heroic and kindly sysadmin the various internal services that we use for our work came back up quickly, but the face of Tending has been gone for a long time. Now it’s struggling up through the rich loam of the internet, knocking over the plastic pots of rotted lilies that were meant to mark its absence, hands scrabbling at the edges of the stones that were meant to keep it down.

I will be restoring the old blog posts as I get time. When Tending went down, the whole cluster of sites that it lived with got ransom-hacked too and that meant all the backups disappeared. Unfortunately that means that the comments and community that built up around Tending to Blether will be missing. Consider this your chance to catch up on lost opportunities.

As time permits I’ll bring up our research website, the Moodle site, and the other community offerings that once lived here. Be forewarned: shorten your doorframes now. If I can’t bring Tending back up as a flexible, pliant, helpful and friendly monster, then it was never really alive, was it?