channonyarrow

None of these are new. However, they evidently bear motherfucking repeating.

If you design a website or middleware site, stop making the font be a different iteration of the same fucking colour as the background. I have seen one too fucking many light-grey-on-dark-grey/lavender-on-violet/light-blue-on-dark-grey sites today. Actual contrast is okay.

Additionally! If you are using a middleware site and you are posting to a comm, quit fucking breaking the font overrides I have set. I have set my overrides to generate a page I can fucking read, and you know what? I don't think it's particularly cute when you break my overrides so that your tiny, tiny text can come through in your comm post. Either you've set your screen resolution far too low or you've got the self-esteem of a bug. Knock it the fuck off.

If you wish to use an idiom that contains a homonym in it, you might want to check the idiom. It is "deep-seated", not "deep seeded". It is "spitting image", not "spit and image". This, in particular, pisses me off. I cannot take someone's deep seeded fear seriously, I really can't.

*****

Today, I am going to wash my car. It's been over a year.

This is why I buy gray cars.

I also need to clean it out so that I can a) find my Fall Out Boy tickets and b) put graeae into it. It's getting to the point where there's not even room for me.

I may even vacuum it.

ETA: Apparently, I will be taking a hammer to the fuse box. I have no power in part of my kitchen, and I know why this is. It still pisses me the fuck off - and I really wonder what was being done in the apartment below me to make the fuses blow, but since I have more fuse switches in the off position than I have verified should, in fact, be in the off position, I have no urge at all to just randomly flip switches.

So apparently I get to chase down Every. Single. Fucking. Circuit. in this place before I call the landlady and tell her what's going on. Yay!

In conversation with graeae, who listens to music more indie than anything I will ever see - she listens to, you know, that guy, the one with the head. Has arms - I had to explain why I was mortally offended that she pretty much thinks that TAI... and Panic(!) at the Disco are the same band.

Me: The lyrics are STUPID. "'Cause it's nine in the afternoon/and your eyes are the size of the moon."
Me: "Dear Ryan Ross, your pretension, let me show you it, no love, me."
Graeae: No, I mean the closing the fucking door song. That's different. I KNOW the nine in the afternoon song is stupid.
Me: Not by MUCH.

Helpfully, I decided to provide an example of this by finding the lyrics.

Me: Wow, this so exemplifies them that I am falling over laughing. I clicked on this one and I thought "Wait, this is a newspaper article about them," and then I read it and realised that the lyrics are just that goddamn dense. Fucking Door Song
Me: Actually, you know what their lyrics remind me of? A spambot.
Graeae: *falls over and dies*
Graeae: Dude, everyone in my house was sleeping. Let's repeat that. WAS.

And then she dared me to post it to LJ. And I did because a) I hate Panic at the Nuclear Waste Dump a lot, and b) their lyrics really do remind me of a spambot.

I just bought a book older than my grandparents.

*snugs book*

Oh 1902 edition of Baedeker's Guide to London and Its Environs, how I love you.

The beauty of being at work at 11:30 pm is that I can actually unplug my headphones and play iTunes, and it fucking rules, because this version is, like, forever later than the version on my home comp (which is actually the very first generation of iTunes, yes, I have not bought a new computer since 2001) and the fade between tracks is awesome.

Of course, everything ELSE about being at work eleven hours after I was supposed to get off sucks. But there's almost an end in sight, and I won't be here till 2:30, at least, thank fuck, that was LAST Friday.

I expect to (gasp) resume normal function...soon. I hope. If I throw my weekend on the fire and burn it ritually, I may be able to walk out the door on time ALL NEXT WEEK HOMG. Well, except for the one book that's running so far behind because everyone loves Drizzt (and I want to stab everyone for that, trust me.)

I really want macaroni and cheese, but if I could find somewhere to get it, I would be too tired to eat it, and I can't get to the only place I know of that serves late-night mac and cheese before they close. I'm thinking about going to 13 Coins for a Philly, but I'll probably just wind up in the drive through at Jack In The Box. But there's something about hot food when you're fucking tired as hell because you've been doing this crazy crazy crazy schedule for weeks now, and I'm certainly not going to be able to provide myself with hot food from scratch. And going home and eating half a loaf of hominy bread is Frowned Upon. By the time I finished five slices of challah last night I was sort of sick of bread.

I've decided that I really like Turkish rap because I can't understand what they're saying. Ceza is awesome, and I love them, because I can just be into the beat, and it doesn't matter if they're talking about, like, Turkish nationalism or about fucking up bitches, I can't understand it. It's pretty cool. Not to say that they're not talented, they are, but most rap is really just me wanting to scream "SHUT THE FUCK UP, COCKFACE."

Not so much a problem with rap in a language I don't speak. I can totally just concentrate on the music.

Also, Rough Guide finally put out an album I don't like. The Rough Guide to Bhangra Dance or whatever the fuck it is, I love Bhangra because I'm like that, but this is like...well, there's a few tracks on there that are like Panjabi MC and Anakhi and Balbir Bittu and that's AWESOME, but there are a few tracks where I'm seriously going "Wait, why am I listening to Missy Elliott? Wait, what? What just happened here?" Or, you know, because I certainly don't, someone who looks a lot less like they'd like to make you eat your own head than Missy Elliott and Lady Sovereign, but who has that singing-hip-hop vibe going on, and they're singing in ENGLISH, and it's like...okay, sure, this is Bhangra, but I promise: when I buy a Bhangra album, I'm buying it rock out to Bhangra, not to listen to hip hop. When I want that, I buy hip hop albums.

But considering that I have like fifteen Rough Guides, I suppose one out of fifteen ain't bad. I've never even had ONE Putumayo that I've liked.

I'm really tired and hallucinating a little. It's awesome. Whee!

ETA: What I find hilarious: people who think they have a sense of humour taking a joke WAY too seriously. Or, you know, Yahoo Answers. SAME THING!

I am an editor, not a burglar. Using the provided gummy label for sealing your manila envelope is fine. Using the brad that no one ever has a use for (since they've previously sealed the envelope using glue) is borderline on my List Of Things That Make Me Hate You To Death, but acceptable, as no one ever knows what to do with it.

However. There is a line. And let me explain where that line is.

That line is right there at "I cannot use a letter opener to open manila enevelopes." See, when I worked as a receptionist and was, therefore, in charge of the office mail every day, I had one of those nifty letter openers that looks about the size of a credit card and has an actual blade in it. I am a master of those. But the letter openers that exist here are the old-fashioned Col. Mustard in the conservatory, stabbing Mr Boddy in the eye kind, and I do not have ranks in those. So I am fumbling about, using my fingers, and, on noteable occasions, my teeth, to open envelopes, and this is where the line is:

Once you have used the provided glue AND the provided brad to seal your envelope, taping-it-fucking-shut makes me want to kill you with my brain.

Unless you are the sort of person who wears asbestos underwear on the offchance that your ass will someday catch fire, sealing an envelope shut three ways is the HEIGHT of ludicrosity, given that it is a PAPER envelope, which catches fire, rips, and generally is easily mauled, particularly by the postal service in this country.

Of course, the real winners are the people (yes, plural) who seal EACH AND EVERY CHAPTER OF A 25-CHAPTER SUBMISSION this way, and then put the WHOLE THING into a BOX. A BIG box.

Bear in mind that we really want three chapters or thirty pages and if we want more we'll let you know. Someone sending us a box of 25 manila envelopes is Not Following Guidelines, and we will NOT read that submission. We might be lax about guidelines, but we are not INSANE.


ETA: You know, it really does only take me about one second to figure out that your land is called Esor because you spelled "rose" backwards. Stop that. THINK about it if you want fancy-ass made-up names.

Also, no one (except the Germans) likes umlauts or diaeresis or whatever the hell you want to call two dots. STOP.

In case anyone has forgotten, I am channonyarrow at GJ as well.

ETA: I'm not likely to leave LJ at the moment. I am mainly mirroring this journal on GJ (no, I have no idea how I'll do that, whether I'll just use one to read and one to post, or what) because of the most recent round of Strikethrough. And yes, I do actually give a shit about that. What my reaction will ultimately be, I can't say, but I don't like that a private company thinks it can dictate what is or is not free speech and what is obscenity by values that range from "someone said they don't like it" to the Miller Test, without consistency, when even the United States Supreme Court cannot define what is and is not obscenity and what is free speech.

It doesn't help that the latest round of "to catch a predator" shows seems to be focusing on LJ. Because god knows, I'm totally a pedo and so are the people I know in fandom.

I am, however, not likely to be looking at anything other than an inconvenience in terms of my own journaling, and a weird one. It is more convenient to keep my journal on LJ. I have many non-fandom friends who are not going to be affected by this, and who are not going to move as a result, and those are connexions I value. I'm not going to be deleted any time soon, since I don't do anything that's going to target these idiots who think that the internet should be sanitised for your protection. However, in light of some of the conversations going on, I felt it was appropriate to reiterate my location on GJ.

As to what it will mean in terms of "supporting" Livejournal - well. The thing I've learned is to wait and see. Do I have a sanguine hope of a happy ending? Not really - they've never responded to all the comments addressed to them when they changed the rules the weekend that Deathly Hallows came out and Sectus was going on. Do I have a fatal hope of an unhappy ending? Not really - they backed down, ultimately, on Strikethrough, and their policies are so flawed that I can't imagine that a lawyer would actually let them stand (and they DO have lawyers). At this point, I'm calling the odds fifty-fifty. Whether I will continue to give them money I don't know. I like having a paid journal, but I don't like supporting people who wish to police what I can and cannot look at as long as no actual child is being harmed.

I am an editor. Words are sacred to me (and yes, I wince every time someone on cranky_editors posts that they work for a POD publisher because I hate POD) so the right of free speech is up there even higher than most other values and liberties I hold dear. I don't like that LJ/6A is choosing to use the worst of two systems, the public and private systems in America, and is not choosing to think about this. They are bodging together their right as a private corporation based in America to dictate the content that is hosted on their servers, because they would be named in a lawsuit about child pornographers, since such images would be illegal under American law, with their wish (I have no better term) to support freedom of speech by not censoring unless it is called to their attention.

The problem with this is in the execution of that. Yes, every single Snarry work is now ToS-able, since we know that, canonically, Harry was not eighteen when Snape died. Child porn in the US.

Except! US law has never judged a work of fiction as child porn! Case in point: The Colour Purple. Well Schooled in Murder, by Elizabeth George. I KNOW I have other books on my shelves that qualify to SOME as being child porn, but the US has never found a work of fiction that I know of to qualify as such. As well, the US has never found an image of fictional people to be child porn as far as I know - I am on shakier ground here, but it makes sense. To be child porn, it has to hurt a child, and there is no child hurt if there is no child involved in its making. What happens to the porn after creation is an entirely different issue; I'm speaking of its creation.

I personally think that they're misreading "child porn", as used by Warriors For Innocence and other groups, to mean "child porn" when WfI means "teh gay". I have no take on the predator crap, other than to wonder whether shows that got a lot of watchers and eyes by finding actual pedophiles on MySpace will get the same watchers and eyes by looking at people on LJ who like looking at pictures of people having sex, regardless of age.

I also think that their execution of this policy is flawed in the extreme. I realise that we live in a happy country (for those of us in the US, which is where LJ's servers are located, so everyone ON LJ lives in the US) that believes that we can dictate what other people do and don't do, but we should NOT encourage that. It is behaviour that is not right, in my opinion. It is even higher than freedom of speech and sacredness of words, in my opinion - I have the right to do anything that does not hurt another person incapable of consent, in my opinion.

You click on a link marked NSFW, you get what you deserve. If you don't like teh gay, stay out of fandom. What LJ is doing with this policy and its execution is encouraging anyone who has a grudge against someone to go rat them out (and I do wonder how long it'll take before daily_deviant is ToS'd). With the "guidelines" that LJ follows, the main one being the Miller Test, which presupposes a community standard so that what is obscene in Podunk, GA is not necessarily obscene in New York, NY, there is nothing to stop this sort of abuse from happening.

Note, please, that LJ is not claiming that the works that have earned ToS's are copyright violations. They are offensive to someone.

So. We have a system ripe for abuse. You have a grudge? Great! ToS me! You can do it, you really can. I write about incest in a fictional relationship where one of the participants is underage. If you do that, however, I will come after YOU.

This seems to be where LJ stopped thinking. "The Miller Test" sounded sufficiently awesome to them and they didn't stop and think about whether someone could or would actually rat someone out on the basis of the fact that Person A and Person B did not get along. That's not upholding freedom of speech, in either of the manners that LJ has the right to do so. I personally believe that they are better served by going with the widest, broadest definition of free speech possible, before they shrink, and that things that are actual depictions of children in sexual situations should be prosecuted to the fullest extent, but that's not how LJ chose to roll. They threw words at a problem that weren't good enough words and that didn't do the job they wanted them to, then got scared when the fanartists didn't just disappear and started ToS-ing. They could have done something really good; they chose not to.

I don't want to support that, but it's a bit like my car. If I give up my car for the good of the environment, I give up a LOT - like being able to see my parents regularly. Like being able to do anything, five days a week, other than work and get to and from work. Like being able to go out with friends. If I give up LJ for my principles of free speech, I lose a LOT of my friends. I am now supporting something I don't agree with for the ease of my life, and I don't like that. But I don't have better options right now.

I have discovered my ultimate sexiest thing ever.

A large vocabulary, employed by someone who will, in fact, when I say "I don't want to use burgeoning there, but what do I mean?" will say "You mean thriving."

And then they will go back to what they were doing. As will I. But I will be smiling as I do so.

That's sexy.

I know it means I'm going to the special hell, but I can't read "Dozens of Afghans killed in Nato raids" (courtesy of the RSS feed of al-Jazeera) without thinking about knitted items.

Please, for the love of god, use "Afghanis"!

I am not a wimpy person. Why was I home last night, ignoring work I need to do (and let me tell you, my halloween costume is an undertaking all by itself, to say nothing of the other five I'm now working on) crying because no one would ever love me and playing solitaire? For fuck's sake, I regard keeping squash as a rewarding activity, keep all photos in a box, have books on gay sex and drug use in the bathroom, and have enough plants on the coffee table (because it is the only place anything gets light) to qualify it as a jungle. I am a civilisation unto myself, and have been allowed to run rampant for thirty years.

Let's face it. Getting involved with someone would probably mean that I couldn't keep leftovers I have no intention of eating in the fridge because if I put them in the garbage now they'll rot and I don't want to take the garbage out yet, since there's like nothing in it. I just would like outlying parts of my brain to get the message.

You know, it's just kind of distressing when you realise that you need another bookcase.

The process goes something like this:

It's good, because books are good. They are the staff of life, beyond even food.

It's bad because, well, frankly, you thought two eight foot and one four foot bookcase were enough.

Then you realise that a fair few of your books are in storage or in the UK.

You go to IKEA and buy another bookcase.