where his civilizations, including our own

I'm about to take some LJs off my flist here because the people are crossposting everything to DW, and I never post anything locked on LJ so it doesn't matter whether I've got you friended here or not. (Every time I do this, I think I've eliminated all the duplicates, and I'm always wrong.) If I screw up and take you off when I shouldn't, tell me.

This is something I was going to do anyway, and nothing to do with the recent unpleasantness, though it is certainly becoming more and more evident how ill-suited LJ is for fandom at this point. I mean, it never was "for" fandom -- we were never a majority or probably even a very significant source of their income -- but there was a time when it worked quite well. Or at least we could put slashes in our tags without breaking things, you know...

I've seen it pointed out today that if you have anyone on your flist who would be dumb or insensitive enough to repost something locked and/or connect your fannish identity to your real name when you told them not to, that person shouldn't be on your flist in the first place. Of course that's true, but it's not entirely the point. It's just something that would never even be suggested, let alone implemented, on a service meant for fandom. For us, it's pointless and has obvious potential for abuse. For the people whose business LJ wants, maybe it seems like a good and useful idea, I don't know.

LJ security breach with embedded code

I saw this starting to happen on my flist last night, but didn't think anything of it except "huh, I guess embedding isn't loading correctly right now". I think NoScript kept me safe, not that I ever lock anything on LJ anyway.

In further apocalypse news: Australian dust storm sweeps across eastern coast.

There was a little wank on Twitter the other day, when someone made an inflammatory remark about Chaz Bono @BrentSpiner, who RT'd it to his 500,000 followers, with predictable results. (FWIW, I hardly think Brent was in the wrong -- she tweeted to him first, he often RT's, she should not have been surprised.)

Anyway, the original remark was that she thought Bono's gender transition was a "tragedy [...] for the God that made her" (sic). It is extremely troubling to me when people invoke God in such ways, but it is pretty difficult to successfully debate religious beliefs. However, there was something else she said later that can be refuted: "a closet issue is that many are disappointed by it [transitioning]".

This comment sounds relatively mild on the face of it, albeit extremely weasely (how many is "many", and what does "disappointed" mean, and in what way is the issue in the "closet" -- what a heftily ironic choice of word!). But at the heart of it I see a very alarming and insidious thought process.

( Read more... )

Since no one raised any vociferous objections, I'm going to start making posts about real life over at my DW, which will be locked. Subscribe and I'll add you, unless I don't recognize your name, in which case you should tell me who you are.

To be clear, nothing is going to be crossposted, I'm just going to use the two for different things. And still reading my flist in both places.

I also have two DW invites to give away. Send me a PM with your email address if you want one.

I survived Mother's Day at work. I personally took down hundreds of unsold cards from the wall (this is a normal amount, we don't worry about not selling out because we get credit for what we don't sell), inventoried them by writing numbers down on a piece of paper, and put up hundreds of Father's Day cards in their place. Like, with my hands.

Father's Day is the last actual card holiday before I leave this job. Yay. I like my job, but I hope the next one USES A COMPUTER FOR INVENTORY. Jesus.


Also, I have gotten some people friending me on Dreamwidth and Twitter whose names I don't recognize. If I can't tell who you are, I probably won't add you back, so just tell me or something.

I may have figured out what I'm going to use Dreamwidth for, but more on that later.

I'm pauraque on DW, though I'm not doing anything with it right now. So far no one whose entries I want to read has actually moved there exclusively and claimed they won't crosspost, so I don't have much motivation to move either.

I wish DW all the best, but there is no way they can maintain the current level of touchy-feely hands-on management -- which seems to be what everyone likes about it -- if it becomes very popular.

Actually, my experience of the touchy-feely was not that satisfactory.

( Summary: We wrote and bugged them to get rid of the gender field, they said no. The whole thing made me eye-rolly enough not to want to go there. )

eta: On second thought, here's what I'll do. If DW adds a free text box or gets rid of the gender field, I'll move there. I'll even buy a paid account. Until then, I reserve the right to be annoyed about the whole thing.

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RT @jonathancoulton First of May, first of May, jonathancoulton.com server not responding starts today.

Did you know you can still downgrade to an ad-free account on LJ? I didn't.

My main LJ has been basic since whenever my paid time ran out years ago, but I sometimes use private-locked LJs for other stuff, so this is useful information to me. (Not that I ever saw the ads because I have image loading blocked for the domain that LJ's ads come from, but I saw the word "advertisement".)