May I Please Speak to the Complaints Department

(See what I did there?)

Anyway, Facebook has a new application, where you de-friend 10 of your facebook friends and get a free Whopper.

Considering how srz bzns friending can be, and to throw it all away for a sandwich, I predict WANK.

The curious case of Omar González (some images NSFW), a Spanish-language fanartist whose art seems to have been entirely copied (though perhaps not traced) from other fanartists. Ho hum. The more surprising part: he charged $25-$150 commissions for his work.

Noticed it's been awhile since I posted anything. To recap briefly:

1) I'm helping my brother manage our mother's care. We're working to get her into a rehab facility for her broken shoulder. My job is to a) call people to coordinate this and b) listen while my brother vents.

2) I move into the new apartment this weekend. I am packing like a madman.

On that related note, I had a wee accident this morning concerning a piece of paper that had my new address written upon it and a visit to the bathroom. I will spare you the details. But thanks to my new anti-depressant, I find I'm writing again, to be precise a Eureka tale called "The Hunting of the Stark", in which our intrepid characters attempt to recover an outside-of-time Nathan. I wrote the following this morning just to freak The Redhead out:

( A proposed scene for The Hunting of the Stark follows )

Is LJ being exceptionally robust, or is it just me?  Vandalism by pissed-off ex-employees?

It's probably just me.  But I can't get to LJstatus to find out for sure, so I thought I'd post here.

Sorry to bother everyone (okay, I'm not.  Not really.)

Edited to add:  Okay, not just me, then.  On the one hand, Phew.  On the other hand...I bet this has the potential to become epic.  Even when it turns out to be just a hiccup.

Edited again to add:  Now when LJ comes up it shows the following message:  LiveJournal.com is currently unavailable due to emergency maintenance. Don't worry, this has nothing to do with our recent company layoffs! It's a technical problem, not a lack-of-personnel problem.

Thank you for your patience.

Final edit:  It's baa-ack.  And I'm going to the bookstore.

And GreatestJournal is dead.

http://www.greatestjournal.com

A week in the new year, and two journaling services are already dead? That's harsh. Check out the 403 error.

While gamer sites are doing the "Best/Worst of 2008" awards, Zero Punctuation decides to do one too... but a little bit differently.

Doubtless you saw this in Metafandom, but I thought I'd post it here too.
Portfollies.com poll

"Portfollies will be a social networking website where people can upload their portfolios (text, image, video and audio files), both original and fan works. The website will also offer communities/forums, and a variety of tools to help with creation and communication."

( Water. And bubbles on water. Fun. )

BTW when I asked what people would see in the ice picture I was curious if I was the only one who would see the bovine face. Turns out it maybe wasn't as obvious as I thought, but I wasn't the only! \o/

This is pretty and elegant. And Chinese. Flowing. I wish the audience would save all that clapping for the end though. I mean, I can understand being excited, but still.

Look at those kittens from the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee.

I wanted to write more but I'm busy playing around with animated gifs, so maybe I'll attach an ETA or two later.

ETA: In a complete reversal of the way the things are, it turns out that P!cat makes great icon-sized animations, while D!cat's turn out lousy. I guess stripes just don't do the resizing so well. :P
( 6 animated gifs )

Transformers comic book fandom wank.. Early this morning, it was about pedophilia.

My doppelgänger from the IDW fan forum Skwege learned that he had been accused of having sex with children by the IDW forum fantards on Transfans.net. Sprunkner is a real internet tough guy. Unfortunately, he made it quite easy to find his dox.

Skwege was not happy to find he'd been slandered as a pedo. So he calls (yes, as in calls Sprunkner's landline) to tell him to take it down. No yelling, just something along the lines of "call me whatever you want but accusing me of child fucking is not cool."

What does Spencer (Sprunkner's IRL name) do? He freaks out and hangs up!

That's right-he's a coward. So Skwege leaves him a voicemail:

"Hi Spencer :

You like to make libelous accusations about people having sex with kids? That is really grown up of you. Oh wow, you live in Washington State as well? What a coincidence! Bellingham is only an hour from here.

It's not funny! I know little punks like you think they can run around all anonymous on the internet and think nothing can bite them in their ass. However let me tell you little man, you are going to retract your statement, and then apologize. Talking shit about someone is one thing, but making a disgusting and FOUL comment like that is libelous. I have the time, money, resources, and most importantly the fucking patience to see this through so don't toy with me little man."

Then Sprunkner has his wife (yes, someone actually agreed to marry him) respond. He doesn't have the balls to answer Skwege himself-he makes his wife call him back and tell him not to call. Unfortunately, Spencer posted her phone number and email as his contact information.

Some PMs get exchanged on the IDW forum and Sprunkner accuses Skwege of threatening him (although I doubt the police consider being asked to take down a post or telling someone you're suing them for slander are violations of any particular laws). He makes an announcement on Transfans.net, crying that Skwege is harassing his family and that he called the po-po on him.

Sprunkner did call the police and they in turn contact Skwege.

The result? The police are highly pissed off-at Sprunkner. Because this is much ado about comic books.

All this name calling and wank is over whether or not the comic book series All Hail Megatron is in continuity.

The police were not too happy about being called to mediate a dispute over Starscream's alt mode.

They lecture Sprunkner and felt Skwege was somewhat justified. Skwege apologizes for dragging the wife into the mess because being accused of fucking children is serious business that involves the IRL banhammer.

The wank continues on Tranfan.net where Sprunkner whines some more (I guess his wife made him sleep on the couch) and Skwege threatens to post a scan of the police report.

These fine examples of male adulthood continue to fight about giant robots. I believe Sprunkner's wife summed it up succinctly in an email to Skwege: "This is a fight over made up robots-let it go."

Unfortunately, everyone ignores her.

Edit: I accept this is total fail. Need more recipes and fail macros, please.

2.1-Meter-Tall Pine-Cone Totoro Unveiled in Japan.

If only that had been in the Rose Bowl Parade, I might have watched.

Whoa, how many times are you going to reply defensively there, bucko?

I thought the new Doctor was going to be black. This Smith guy looks more like a foot than that Edward Cullen actor.

This has been a rather bad few days for me. On New Year's Day, feeding the dog, I pulled a neck muscle that still has a twinge now, and then drove two hours and a day early to my sister's place to help her bake a wedding cake for her bff.

Which meant no one was set to feed the dog and cat that evening and the following morning, as my parents were off in New Hampshire visiting relatives. And even though it was my own stupid fault and even though it was easily taken care of, I really wish somebody had said, "Wait. Why are you going to your sister's today?" because apparently everybody realized this except me, but when I (accidentally) changed the plan, they just accepted it in due course.

The next few days of making the wedding cake and the groom's cake were no issue, but then on Saturday night, just hours after getting home, I started vomiting everywhere and didn't stop until yesterday evening. My sister's bff's family all had the flu a few days before.

So, yeah, it could have been worse. I can be thankful that it wasn't my wedding that I was barfing around (the bride delayed her bachelorette party because she was so sick), and that I also wasn't barfing at my sister's place while we were making the cake.

But it still kind of blew as far as the first days of the New Year, yanno?

Also I didn't get laid and I bet I could have. Even with my inability to move my head to the left without horrible pain.

The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut about 20 of 28 employees — and offered them no severance, we're told.

The company's product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support. Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, is also believed to be gone.

Source

Can you imagine the amazing bitchfest wankery that would go on if anything happened to LJ??? The internet would implode...

Note: This rant and the linked article refer to the upcoming Astro Boy CGI movie. If you are at all familiar with the source material, you will probably be offended by this article. Also, I hope none of you out there are big on Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, as Imagi promises that since "it is not as well known as Astro Boy, the project, about five super-powered teens fighting monsters, is open to interpretation. 'We’re kind of making up our own version based on the original 1970s cartoon.' "

http://www.star-ecentral.com/news/story.asp?file=/2009/1/4/movies/2871865&sec=movies

At the risk of pushing this into i_wank territory, WHAT THE FUCK. I mean, seriously. WHAT THE FUCK are you people thinking?

You did not just seriously say that you want to make Astro 'less feminine' because he has large eyes and, oh no, EYELASHES? He's a FREAKING 6-year-old-analogue ROBOT. What, are you worried about robo-pedophiles or something? It's not like he has tiny little robot-boy nipples to put pasties over, or a tiny little robot e-peen to cover up.

You did not just seriously argue with the goddamn Tezuka estate about the size of his ASS.

You did not just seriously say that you didn't MEAN to make a legendary Japanese iconic character look "American" but that it just kinda happened.

Just plain fucking NO. A huge bag of no.

(edit to fix URL)

This one is for my mom - she just finished reading Phantom of the Opera (book, obviously) and wants to know where the fandom is - or at least where the fanfiction is: if anyone could rec me some good bookverse fic* I would be very, very much obliged. Good mimickry of Gaston Leroux's style (in the puffin classics translation) is a gigantic bonus.

Also one from/for myself - now that I've exhausted Yuletide's offerings and am already in the middle of the Dragonchoice duology (it's good!) - is there any other good Dragonriders of Pern fic on the net? I'll read most anything, although I really like metay fic.

* (gen or het, ideally; I think she would freak if I linked her slash. Also, non-porny, since I would freak at sending links to porn to my mom)

Dear Fansubbers,

I appreciate all the hard work that you put into subbing anime and other international titles not available in the English language.

But for the love of god! Please use common sense when you decide to get creative and place text on random spots of the fucking screen. While I don't have a problem with a line of text appearing occasionally on top to translate signs or to briefly explain certain phrases unique to that language, I don't however want a whole freaken paragraph that covers up half of the characters' faces, while at the same time translating their dialogue at the bottom of the screen.

If you must write a full explanation for a particular idiom, or a particular event in the story, please DO so at the beginning of the episode before the actual opening credits start. Do you have ANY idea how it annoying it is to see a paragraph of text over a character's face JUST to be able explain a reference that you noticed early on? It's not only distracting, but if I'm reading a paragraph of text on the screen, I'm not seeing the action that's taking place, nor reading the dialogue that's being said. I can notice events for myself without you having to point them out to me, and if I missed a reference to something, it's very unlikely that I'll give a damn. I just want to watch the damned show.

Another thing bothers me: please, please, PLEASE! Keep the subtitles at the bottom of the screen? I don't think it's asking too much to not want my eyes to have to follow a trail of text appearing on different sides of the screen at random times. That's also really annoying and really distracting. I'd like to be able to focus as much on the action as possible rather than the actual text thank you.

Sincerely,

A Lover of Foreign Entertainment

Written up here by stewardess.

(May shortly be wanky, but not provocative enough for clairvoyantwank just yet, I thought.)

...I'm asking on behalf of someone who's doing a..unique trivia contest, so there's a slight time-sensitive element.

I'm trying to find more info on the old "Fandom Unite!" LJ controversy that used "Hoist The Colors" as its theme song -- i.e., exactly what was fandom uniting about? I'm vaguely remembering details -- which of the "scrapping communities" stunts LJ pulled did it pertain to?

Thanks in advance. I'm kind of sleep-deprived and can't function too well.

Still sticking by my pick for 12.

No, not Gene Wilder, but it would be cool to raise him from the dead. Also, not ginger, not matter what 10 wants. It would also taint the Rose/Doctor shippers along with the "OMG HE'S TOO YOUNG" thing. I mean, one of the main themes in the book is about him and his rose.

The last link is my favorite because the kid is adorable and from the French musical. Also concerns the scene with the fox.

ETA: Oh wait, He's not dead! Unlike all the other celebrities! Can we has Gene Wilder 12 and "HE'S TOO OLD" wank, with people forgetting how old the orignal was? Bonus "BUT HE'S NOT BRITISH" wank!

Dude, what's wrong with his chin? If you glued some plastic bolts to his temples, he'd look just like Frankenstein's monster. Except with emo hair. D: