channonyarrow

Let's see ...

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You have friended two friends of mine, one of whom last updated his account in 2006.

I don't think so, buddy.

*****

In other news, today is FUCKING FIRED. Unfortunately, it might be taking a pair of my shoes with it. At least, SOMETHING tore a second ago, and I don't really think that it was my stocking.

FUN TIMES.

Oh christ. At least my Visual Basic homework's done.

So apparently one of my journals is going to send V-Gifts to theferrett approximately every fucking twelve hours until Livejournal actually gets back into the fucking office and fixes this. I am not happy.

So. Valentine's Day.

I don't particularly have a negative association with Valentine's Day per se. It's not my favourite day, but that's more because I'm not super impressed by commercialism, and at least with Christmas you have a runup to do a lot of other things. It's a holiday season. Valentine's ... not so much.

I also really don't like stereotypical love songs. I listen to them, but that's not what love is, not when you're doing it right. When you're doing it right, it's destructive and creative, it's all-consuming, it's something that takes and gives in equal measure. Love, at the end of the day, is a promise, and that promise is sometimes entirely as destructive as love itself can be.

And there is something so amazing about the thought of someone who loves you so much they would drive off a cliff with you.

There are songs that did not make it on here: Demolition Lovers is on everyone's playlist, and I just put it up a couple months back. If you want it, you've got it. By the same token It's Warmer In The Basement didn't make the cut. There are others that never made it that I think of as love songs, but that would take even more explaining than these might.

All files are mp3. Uploaded to Mediafire; if you need them in a different host that is not Sendspace, let me know. If you want them in Sendspace, you're talking to the wrong person.

( Cut for thirty songs )

Oh wow. That new userinfo page is phenomenally ugly, and nonintuitive. Where is the off switch?

I take back everything previously said about SUP. Obviously, being away from the computer for 24 hours dictates a complete meltdown.

On the plus side, I now totally know how my story bible retcon is going to go, and I also totally got my bonus and somehow managed to forget about, oh, a fifth of my salary, so, better than expected!

And I also got to send an email to a licensor that said "AHAHAHAHA, are you fucking kidding me?"

And then there was less work. Whoo!

I am not pleased to return from GenCon and find out that one of my secondary accounts (which, actually, is at an address no one knows) gave a virtual gift to a community.

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.

Wow.

So, I logged out of this account to do something else. Then I forgot that I'd done that, looked at my flist, and clicked on a three-word-entry that I wanted to read the comments on.

NOW I know why I pay for an account. When the ads are larger than the frigging entry? Yeah, that's bad. Of course, the ad would have been larger than the entry unless the entry had been a 20K-word polemic on Kant, honestly. Is it new that they put an ad bar IN the entries of Plus accounts, between the body of the entry and the comments? I hadn't thought that was something they were going to do, but then again, I'm paid.

Now I wonder why ANYONE signs up for an LJ if that's the sort of shit they see when they log in with a free account or just go directly to the page with no account

According to al-Jazeera, the UN's Middle East policy is "failing".

NO MOTHERFUCKING WAY! *headslap* THAT'S WHY THERE'S A BUNCH OF WARS AND PROBLEMS THERE, ISN'T IT? SHIT, I NEVER KNEW!

Admittedly, I know more than a lot of people on Israel/Palestine, but STILL. WE ARE IN A WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST. I know we're not the UN, but it's practically just a rubber-stamp body for the US, and it hasn't stopped us yet.

And to be honest, I think we could go all the way back to the late 1800s and say that Ottoman rule didn't help the Middle East, and neither did making all the people into pawns in the Great Game. If you ever wonder why Lebanon has so many problems, go find out what France wanted when they started drawing boundaries! Seriously! I love the remnants of colonialism! It's all "We don't get along, so rather than do the reasonable thing and partition, in recognition of the fact that the colonial boundaries here are stupid, we're gonna kill each other because this land ain't your land! Game on!"

I've been up far too long already, and the day is young. Count yourselves lucky that I probably can't spam because I have something like five hours of meetings today.

Also, I have no love for the new logged in page and cannot wait for the inevitable "Oh shit, you didn't like it? Well, this is how you turn it off. You mean you really don't like it?" post.

Okay, not pleased with LJ's IT ALL FELL APART algorithm.

Christ, I had to type that four times. MAYBE I AM STILL DRUNK.

See, my paid account expired today, and my extended icons expired last week. I decided to wait to reup the icons until I reupped the journal, which, with some trepidation, I am willing to do this week (I really need to find out how many checks are going to hit the bank, but if my student loan cleared BEFORE last Friday, I'm fine) because then everything expires on the same damn day.

I will add that my trepidation has more to do with the fact that so many of my LJ-friends are leaving the site, presumably because of their monkeyshines.

However, all this is beside the point.

When it all fell apart, I was left with six icons.

Why are three of them MCR ones? WHAT. I KNOW they're not even the icons I've used most recently. They're not the newest, either!

Off to ponder this fact, and to ponder the fact that the person who used to drink entire bottles of Malibu now gets goddamn drunk off three martini-glass drinks.

Also, I have an iPod. I am totally NOT sure what the hell the fuss is. This thing is the most horrible thing I have seen - but if it comes down to it, I have to argue with either a CD player plugged in to my tape deck to NOT just cut out randomly halfway through an album...or ten seconds into a song...or whatever...or I have to argue with the iPod to figure out which station will, in a fifteen-mile-on-a-side-square, NOT devolve into static so that I'm frantically changing the station and practically getting killed.

I am thinking I could have better spent the money on a CD player for the car.

I'm losing my voice from singing so much. And so very loudly. Also, I think I am incipiently-speaker-blowing. But...damn.

This too shall pass even if it means giving all the damn cds and the damn dvd to someone ELSE to keep over the weekend so I can do SOMETHING ELSE with my life.

Dear metaquotes,

Asshattedly refusing to acknowledge that mouthfulofrain/mouthfulofsperm is, in fact, an icon troll, means that you now look even more like asshats than you did before this all fucking happened.

So. Banset the fucker and we can all return to metaquotes. This is just stupid drama about a pair of fucking icons. But no! That would mean that you were censoring, and apparently the only reason that's bad is because the first mod stepped in to the first post at something like comment 100, with about ninety of them in support of not using fucking gratuitous-nudity icons in a top level post! I realise that the quick response time meant that the Will of the People should not be followed because zomg you're totally there not to fucking censor, but Jesus Christ fucking a motorhome! You already recomment/require that posts with "offensive" content be placed under a fucking cut! How does preventing icon wank NOT MERIT A RESPONSE?

No fucking love whatsoever,
Me

I've left the comm over the fucking wank, and I'm not the only one. I would like to be back to that comm, but honestly, at this point it's not the fucking icons, it's that one person felt that they could, clearly, have moderator support for a pair of NSFW above-the-cut icons, so now they've done it again! Via a sock journal that's not even very hidden! Just to prove that the rest of us are a bunch of squares who shouldn't be reading LJ at work!

*screams*

*kills with fire*


ETA: (if anyone cares) I am not leaving the comm because of the icons in question. I have seen dicks and cunts before, I feel fine with those facts, even if I really have seen less disturbing versions of both of those pieces of anatomy. In fact, my NORMAL reaction would be to stay, and damn the trollz to hell. I am leaving because sometimes being a mod means that you really need to rein in your community before it goes to shit, and letting idiots post unfunny things JUST so they can start an icon wank is the sort of thing that needs moderator attention. When the purpose of the post is the slimmest excuse for "funny", you're all being used. But hey, I understand that "freedom of speech", hereinafter referred to as "not making a fucking decision other than to lie back on the Constitution and take a nap", is important too.

I just also realise that a spine is important too. And shouting that these two (?) dickheads can be assholes all they want because the comm never claimed to be SFW is lacking a spine, not promoting the glory of the Constitution.