This page is collection of legal, moral, and ethical disclaimers associated with The Argothald Journal.
Purpose
This blog contains essays on topics that I found interesting at the time. There are reviews of genre stuff, descriptions of Passover seders, pictures of my hobbies, and incessant whining about my #FirstWorldProblems. If you like it, great! If you don’t, there’s a big wide world of the Internet out there for you to explore. Why not visit Whatever? It’s written by people who write better than I do and on more interesting topics.
Comment policy
The first amendment does not apply here. Read the amendment again. It applies to the government. It does not apply to privately-owned web sites such as this blog. If you feel you have no free speech here, you’re right.
With that said, if you choose to comment on any of these posts, I’m likely to allow it, even if it disagrees with my opinion or worldviews. What I won’t tolerate is bigotry (religious, racial, gender, or otherwise). I also take a dim view of comments that are off-topic from the original post. That doesn’t mean I won’t allow topic drift, but that’s at my sole discretion.
As a corollary to the above paragraph: The presence of a comment on this site, meaning that I approved it, does not imply that I agree with that comment. The words of the commenters are their own. It might very well be that I’ll approve a comment, and later be informed that its words were in fact discriminatory or offensive even though I did not recognize it as such. I’ll then “unapprove” the comment so it no longer appears.
On the other hand, if I display signs of discrimination or hurtful ignorance, please feel free to correct me. I will listen. The tone of the correction matters; I may listen and learn from a comment, but I’m still under no obligation to approve it if the tone is abusive. If I make you angry, even with justification, learn to control your anger; I, in turn, will make every effort to control mine.
With all that said, I get very few comments on this blog. The reason is obvious: It’s not popular, and I rarely write anything that worth commenting on. That’s fine by me.
Copyrights and such
When quoting or excerpting brief material from written works, movie stills, and game screenshots, I usually try to include the appropriate legal reference (©, ®, ™, etc.). However, due to ignorance or neglect, I may omit the appropriate symbol. The omission of such a symbol should never be interpreted as a challenge to the rightful holder of these properties.
Amazon Associates links
After two decades of including amazon links in my blog posts over the years, I’m trying to scrub them. You can read why here.
This isn’t easy to do. If you see an Amazon link, please don’t click on it. Feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get around to removing the link eventually.
In case you’re interested: It’s the presence of these links that led me to call this domain “argothald.com” when I set it up in 2017. If I didn’t include them, I would have named it “argothald.net”.
Privacy
If you write a comment, I’m going to learn the IP address of the device from which you sent it. I’ll also see the email address you entered to identify yourself. I have no interest in your personal information and won’t use it for any purpose… provided the contents of your comment aren’t criminal, abusive, or illegal. If you confess that you shot a man in Reno just to watch him die and threaten to do the same to someone else, the appropriate authorities will be informed.