InsaneJournal

The Nature of the Journals

Journals the how, what, wheres, and whys    I. Origin; The journals used by many people in the wizarding world started as an invention by the ministry so that employees could keep in close contact - and because they were testing it out as a replacement for the owls they once used as memos. Unfortunately, they sucked quite a lot as memo replacements, but turned out to be incredibly useful as replacements for meetings; it was also much easier to get in touch with other employees. Eventually, family members of ministry employees began to lust after these ingenious contraptions, and the occasional bootleg popped up - usually created by a nagged husband or wife who wanted their significant others or children to just shut up for a while. Word of these bootlegs soon leaked out through social circles, or at the hair stylists, and terribly bright people began to meet the demand with a supply of bootlegged journals - some just as good as the originals and some... not so good.   II. Magic; Identification: The journals are imbued with magic that will identify the writer of an entry or comment, no matter what sort of disguise he has on (similar to the identification charms used on the marauder's map by four very bright Hogwartseans). There is no way to circumvent this except to ward the comment or post in question private. Wards: Any post or comment can be warded private, or warded to specific people - IF, and only IF the warder knows exactly to whom he is warding. One could ward, for example, to "the Order" if one is IN the order, or knows who the order members are. A death eater cannot ward to "the Order" because he has no way of knowing who all is in the Order. You must have a wand to place a ward but not to read it. However, a person can ward a wandless readers comments if they refresh the ward for every new comment. Because all journals can recognize the reader or writer regardless of which journal one is reading in, wards work for the person not the journal. One cannot look over another person's shoulder and read through the other person's wards. Warded magic cannot be broken via another journal, as the wards are performed on words in the original journal. Unless a person knows a ward is present and has possession of the original journal, there is no way to alter or affect that magic. Other magic: Some magic can be performed that has effect on other journals. One example is the anonymity charms, another is warding - but one can also perform very minor curses, jinxes and hexes. Because the magic is so far removed, the worst one could do through a journal is 'zap' or sting someone; a person could never kill another or even incapacitate them through journals.   III. Mechanics; Layout: Much like the TARDIS, wizarding journals are larger on the inside than on the outside. They appear from the outside to be narrow books - maybe 20 pages in size; once open, they can be many hundreds of pages - however many are needed to contain the journal entries of the person writing in them. In order to preserve sanity, a journal will show the last 20 entries a person has written, and if the person desires to read further back, they must be conjured up - replacing the current pages. A set of pages in the back of the journal are designated 'others' pages, and will show 14 days worth of entries from anyone else with a journal. The 'Ink': Because of the nature of the journal magic, ink is not static and therefore cannot be erased (only scratched or torn out), or captured by muggle devices. A muggle photograph will show only the pages of the book, devoid of all information. A magical photograph will show only the text to which the person viewing the photograph has access (i.e. that is warded to them).   IV. Ministry Employees; As of 30 June 1979, All ministry employees are bound by an internal gag order, and must have their journals tagged. Journal tagging will detect any references to ministry work, regardless of wards (the only exception being personal wards). Any ministry information detected in a ward that is not ministry related (DMLE, DoM, etc) will alert the Committee for the Misuse of Magical Journals, and a reprimand will immediately be issued. If the situation isn't rectified in 10 days, the employee in question will be relieved of duty, pending full inquiry. These tags will NOT detect whom wards are to (aside from "ministry" wards, nor will they detect other information being relayed in the journal. So you could write "hey lets have buttsex tomorrow night" and the tags wouldn't pass that information to anyone. If you wrote "hey, Rodolphus Lestrange just got arrested," the tag would check the wards and, if they were inappropriate, notify the committee that there was a violation - but not to whom or what the violation consisted of.   V. Other nitpicky questions; Ask away