changing worship modes

This is nothing new, but in recent months I have become more attuned to the variety of so-called "innovations" in worship -- everything from meditation to yoga to poetry (replacing liturgy) to interpretive dance (!) -- and I finally figured out one of the things that bugs me about it. Understand that, at some level, if it works for you then it's no bother to me except to the extent that you then interfere with me. But it doesn't tend to work for me, and I realized recently a big reason why: I have barely begun to plumb the depths of the traditional forms, and not only am I not ready to stray beyond that, but I feel I would be incapable of understanding a change of this sort if I didn't already understand the foundation upon which it's supposed to be built.

(There are other reasons, including that some of this tickles my "weird" meter, but that's a separate discussion. I mean, there's plenty of weirdness in mainstream Judaism too. Like, rejoicing while waving three branches and a piece of fruit around? Really? But I digress.)

A couple things have brought this to mind:

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Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth is an LJ-like site that entered open beta a few days ago. I'm there. I don't know how I'll use the account yet. I have a permanent account here on LJ so I'm not planning to go anywhere, but every time LJ has a kerfuffle I wonder what my fallback plan is, and Dreamwidth seems to be the winner there. It's run by ex-LJ people and seems to be a throwback to the ideals of early LJ, before the sale to Six Apart and then to SUP and the layoff of most of the staff. And they're fixing some of the suboptimal aspects of LJ, like the mingling of subscription and access rights into the ill-named "friend" relation.

I know a lot of my friends are setting up accounts there. Please let me know you're there.

It looks like Dreamwidth supports reading from LJ via OpenID. Does anyone know how to do the reverse? If some of my friends move to DW (as opposed to just mirroring there), what I'd really like to do is read their DW posts on my LJ reading page, using either my DW cookie (since I've got one) or my LJ OpenID. I have the vague impression that this sort of thing almost works. Can someone explain how?

A reminder to people who are moving there: if you give DW your LJ password so they can import your journal, you are compromising not only your own security (your choice) but also that of everyone who posts locked entries to which you have access. Be careful out there, ok?