You're going to those webrings? B-b-b-but there are nasty pictures of naked people and stuff on some of those rings, and some of them are of people of the opposite sex! What could you possibly be thinking about? Please, put this foolishness aside, put on a nice heavy petticoat, come back and we'll have some nice hot cocoa waiting for you.

You're still want to go on? OK, but don't say that you weren't warned.

... OK, silliness mode off ...

We do write a fair number of these warning pages in a slightly mocking tone, in response to the the reality that webspace providers like Bravenet, Freeyellow and Freewebsites are often forced to enact otherwise unreasonable policies, because otherwise they'll be left with the ranting ninny factor online: people who will disrupt their business by calling en masse until a provider's phones ring off the hook, similarly harassing their advertisers (in the case of Bravenet and Freewebsites) until the advertisers agree to pull their advertisements from the provider's servers, organizing boycotts of the advertisers when other forms of harassment don't work, etc. etc. We can easily understand why the provider will set policy in response to these realities: these are businesses, and this poses a direct threat to their livelihoods. Even Freeyellow, no longer an ad-supported free webspace provider, still has to deal with the harassment issue, and having had to deal with that one firsthand ourselves, we know just how severe that can get.(*)

If, as we post a little bit of teasing in some of these warning pages, the reader senses a little disrespect, we would hope that he would appreciate that the disrespect is not directed toward our providers, but toward the hordes of anal retentive and socially maladjusted people who do so much to make so much absurdity necessary. Such profanity as is seen in what we link to, via those warning pages, is almost never more severe than what one could hear in the grocery store, or out of a pack of cub scouts. (Having once been a cub scout myself, I can vouch for that, firsthand). So, for provider to find itself forced to adopt policies that force us to post warnings for such things takes us deeply into the realm of absurdity, and I think that the reasonable reader and rational (if beleaguered) sysop alike can understand why we might choose to laugh about this. As we so often say, better to laugh than to scream.

That much having been said, the situation is a little bit different, this time. What one might find on these rings, and which we're warning you about, is not something that you'll be likely to run across, just walking down Astor Street. One is still left with the silliness of somebody surfing a nudist ring, and complaining that he found pictures of naked people on it. What was he expecting to find, parkas? But still, a slightly different standard applies. We may be relatively free-spirited conservatives around here, but we're still conservatives, and do not agree with the "in your face" ethic so often seen on the Left. We don't want you to suddenly get an eyeful of something that you find distasteful, with no way of knowing in advance what it was, that you were about to see. We feel that this kind of visual ambush, far from being a "revolutionary challenge to bourgoise sensibilities", as some in Wicker Park would put it, is piggish behavior at best, and we want no part of it.

Note the content rating tags in the header for this page. If we seem to be running on and on, overexplaining and overdoing this, please understand why we might choose to do so.

The Lupercalia, if it is to be revived under anything resembling a Reconstructionist sensibility, will involve nudity. This being the case, when we went looking for non-Pagan rings to belong to, in order to reach a wider audience, we joined a number of nudist and naturist rings to belong to. None of these welcome sites containing what would generally be considered to be pornographic material. We've found nothing sexually explicit on them. But there are nude images on the navbars, so if that offends you, you SHOULD NOT go on to the page ahead.

Some of the rings these pages are on, are devoted to Mardis Gras, which being Traditionalists (instead of being among the ever elusive "Hard Recons"), we would tie our Lupercalia reconstruction to. Much of Mardis Gras is simple high-spirited flamboyance, but let's be realistic. People do expose themselves at that festival, and some of them may show up on some of those sites doing so. Even if the present ringmaster on one of those rings doesn't allow that, who knows in advance when a ring will change hands, and its policies will change? Again, if nudity bothers you, one of these rings may not be the place for you to be, and we urge you to not go to the page lying ahead.

At least one of these rings - maybe more if we've found others to join since the time of this writing - is devoted to sacred sexuality, a topic which includes Tantra as a subset. The Lupercalia certainly involves a relationship between sexuality and the Divine, and so is apropo for such a ring. But again, let us be realistic - even if we never get into any sexually explicit material, dealing with material that relates to how we relate to our sexuality instead of material that goes into the actual resulting mechanics, the latter certainly is a part of the topic of sacred sexuality, as many practice it. So, again, we're not going to link to those other pages directly from our site, out of respect for the TOS ("Terms of Service" agreement). If coming across such material bothers you, then you shouldn't travel any of the sacred sexuality rings.

Have we scared you off, yet? ...

So, how do we manage to belong to these rings, without violating the TOS our webspace providers have to insist on? By making use of a webring profile page.

Setting up a whole new account at a different provider, just to host these links, would not be practical. We'd have to be constantly logging in to keep that mini-site from being deleted for inactivity, and also, those free webspace providers that allow nude images often have ads that we wouldn't want to greet our visitors from those rings with, as they arrive. But, presumably, Webring.com is not going to object to the appearance of images on a profile page it hosts, found on navbars that it allows to be used on its own system. The ringmasters for the Mardis Gras, naturist/nudist and Sacred Sexuality webrings will, we would expect, be understanding of out difficulties in this matter, and not be too disturbed to see non-sexual nude images, no more graphic that those often seen on sacred sexuality or Mardis Gras sites; certainly, no more so than usually seen on Naturist sites.

We are very unhappy about somebody's decision to portray an entire family in the nude on some of the navbars, and hope that the ringmaster sees his way clear to using an image in which children do not appear undressed, but realistically speaking, we know that this seems to be common practice on naturist rings and in naturist publications, to say nothing about books of photography by Sally Mann currently on sale at Border's Books. The reason for this would seem to be that the ringmasters and site owners are trying to portray Naturism as a wholesome family activisity; we would maintain that trying to pursue it as a family activity is precisely what will make Naturism extremely unwholesome, very, very quickly. We are out of step with the times on this one, and while we hope that the times - and the ringmaster's point of view - will turn more in our direction on this one - right now all we can do is try not to think about it. And be glad that those unclothed children aren't doing anything more than going for a walk with their parents, though the woods.

Maybe we're just being prudish, but it seems inappropriate to us. What if the chidren, not really free to consent to (or refuse to take part in) much of anything at the time they were photographed, find (later in life) that they are unhappy about having been photographed in this way? Isn't this a serious imposition on them? But we seem to be alone in objecting to this practice. Perhaps, it doesn't fully take us into the realm of kiddie porn - nothing sexual is taking place and the children aren't doing anything that parents in non-naturist settings haven't had frequent trouble keeping their own small children from doing, on their own, as long anybody can remember. But even so, we find this bothersome and are concerned that when they've grown up in a decade or two from now, those children might find it bothersome, too.

As for the nudity and sexually explicit material-free Nova Roma ring, the visitor from there enters our site on a wholly different page, on which an HTML navbar is used, on which no problematic images appear. So, you ask, why are we directing the visitor toward that profile page, in order to return? Well, in part, we're not really doing that. The HTML code fragment for the Nova Roma ring appears on the HTML code fragment page linked to from the main page of the Almond Jar, as well as on the profile page. But, as for why we would put the navbar there, one has to point out one of the basic problems with SSNB navbars, which forces this choice on us.

The reader who does not have a website or a Webring.com membership of his own might not know what an "SSNB" navbar is, as opposed to an "HTML" navbar, so perhaps we need to explain. HTML is the computer language that this site is written in, mostly. One can use a series of simple commands to tell the web browser what to place on the page, what color to make the text, etc. When the navbar - that little graphic you see on the screen that lets you travel the ring - is written in HTML, it's just like any other part of our page. Aside from the usual annoying problems that arise because of differing screen settings, the website owner is in control of what appears on the screen. If the ringmaster wants to change the "look and feel" of the navbar on the member's site, he needs the cooperation of the member. We like that, because if something is going to be appearing on our site, we think that we ought to have a say in that, especially since we're likely to be held responsible for it by our provider if some of it is objectionable.

But some on the Webring system would seem to feel otherwise. A few years ago Webring, at that point a newly acquired subsidiary of Yahoo, introduced something called "SSNB code", written in something called "Javascript". The significance of this is that the far more flexible Javascript allows the browser to pick up a piece of coding at one location (the Webring account of the ringmaster) and paste it on another (our website). The upshot of this is that images and links which appear on our site can be changed without our cooperation, or even our knowledge. The main virtue of this change would seem to be that it once the SSNB code is installed on a given page, just once, adding that page to more rings can be as easy as "point and click". As much as we've enjoyed the convenience of this, we do question the wisdom of the change since it has also added to the ease of website owners who try to abuse the system by joining every wehring that they can find. If everybody did that, every ring would end up a clone of every other, resulting in a huge waste of Webring's resources, and inconvenience for the visitor, who ends up climbing over a list of the same old sites, over and over. This sort of thing has become a real nuisance on the Pagan rings, in particular.

But there are other, deeper problems as well, some of which a number of you mightr already have guessed, the moment that you came across the notion of somebody other than the website owner being able to direct change what is appear on a website. Problems which explain why we are not always fans of the SSNB concept, as much fun as it can be from a ringmaster's point of view.

One of the options which Webring allows its ringmasters to exercise, and which right about now we wish that they wouldn't, is that of placing a link to the member's profile on the navbar - and like we keep saying, one never knows when a ring will be adopted by a new ringmaster. Or, for that matter, when he will change the navbar. Let's say we place the Nova Roma Navbar on a page on this server, and then, later on, much to our unhappy surprise, a link to the member profiles is now introduced onto the navbar for the ring. We would then having a link from a page on our site, to a page (our profile) on which material unacceptable from a TOS point of viewing would be appearing (the nude images on those naturist webring navbars), without any warning page coming between our site and that page. That would not be cool. One begins to see one of the reasons why we like using the profile page to get around this problem: the SSNB (ie. Javascript based) navbars associated with that Webring membership only appear on that profile page, and so the only page that will get linked to the profile page by the addition of a "member profile" link to the navbar, is the profile page itself.

This is a workable solution to the problems posed, and it is the one we adopt because it seems to be the only workable solution. The solution we'd like to use is to use HTML navbars, and just simply leave out any images that might pose a problem (eg. shots of nude families walking through the woods), but we can't do that? Why? Because some ringmasters, for reasons really known to nobody but themselves, have set policies requiring the use of SSNB code. They'll even defend doing so on the basis that Webring requires this, turning a deaf ear to arguments that Webring itself says otherwise, and shows its wishes on the matter merely by making the downloading of HTML code one of the options on its system. But, who cares about facts or logic, there are always a few out there who are just going to be stubborn just for the sake of being stubborn, and as much as we'd like to tell them to take their mismanaged webrings and (ahem!), we can't. There's a high turnover rate among ringmasters on Webring, for a variety of reasons, and even if only a small minority of them are going to be these inconsiderate "pain in the neck" types, it's a small minority that circulates around. If we just ignored them, they'd constantly be tossing us off their webrings as they passed on through, and we'd be constantly distracted by the need to continually seek out and apply to webrings being run on more reasonable terms.

This is just too much trouble, and we suspect, a reason why many sites have given up on taking part in Webring, at all. While some choose to forget this, many of us - I would say, most of us - live our lives off of the Internet, and could not accept a situation in which it became a constant distraction. We come, we post our pages in the hope that some will enjoy them and then, the idea is, we leave, returning only infrequently to add new material. We hope, then, that the reader will understand that, should some of the choices we make in design produce results that seem strange or less than ideal, that we often have to work around policies not of our own making, set by people who don't want to be reasonable and don't want to talk things over. Sometimes, if you'll pardon the cliche, one really is caught between a rock and a hard place, and has to settle for the least displeasing option available, there being no good ones left to choose from. If only the people who spend their lives online sending in complaints or the ringmasters would be willing to be a little more reasonable and considerate, these problems wouldn't exist. But reasonability and consideration are no longer in style, so one does what one must.

Do you want to go to those rings, now that we've bored you to death? If so, we can head on over there, if not we can look at the other rings this site is on.

(*) Besides which, with any nude image, there is the issue of server load - if too many people are dropping by the download an image, this will slow the loading of pages for everybody else. One might be amazed at what some will be aroused by, so there are good reasons to keep those navbar images off of this server.