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Sunday, October 4th, 2009
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9:48 pm - Nota Bene In Vacuo
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In re rumors I have been hearing about ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif) unfunnybusiness:
1. There are two active moderators at UFB, and only one of them is ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif) pyratejenni.
2. Nobody has *ever* contacted the other moderator with a complaint about PJ's moderation at UFB.
3. There are currently exactly two accounts banned at UFB; one was a blatant troll and one was that annoying guy with the tea icon (He got a permaban mostly for trying to cheat his way out of a temporary ban.) They were joint (and very satisfying) decisions.
4. In the year since the new, clearer moderation policy was posted, nobody else has been banned for more than a one-week cooldown, and there have been very few bans total. (If this statement is wrong, *please* correct me.)
5. If you want to see something at UFB change, you probably want at least one moderator on your side.1 Insulting one of them while assuming the other is either nonexistent or irrelevant is probably not a good strategy.
6. As far as I am aware, everybody who has ever followed the policy for contacting moderators that is in the community userinfo has gone away satisfied. Failing to read or follow the userinfo is also probably a bad strategy if you want to be heard.
(This is not me speaking officially, btw, as officially, I have never been given a complaint. This is me speaking as somebody who is darkly amused by people's consistent inability to at least complain *accurately* or *usefully* when they complain, since I run across someone whining that UFB is ground under PJ's iron boot at least once a month.)
1Technically, in fact, the other mod is the community owner and could lock everyone else out if she felt like it, so if you have an irrational grudge against PJ, your best bet is probably bribery. I happen to know that she would currently do just about anything for a Doble Model E steam automobile.
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| Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
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10:56 pm
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My opinions on the Lambda Awards debacle (not that any of you care about my opinions on it, but it took me long enough to figure them out; I want to record them for my own posterity, if only so I can later marvel at how wrong I was. Also, may I note that I am continually befuddled by what does and doesn't wind up on UFB? ..oh god, while I was writing this it ended up on f_w instead, heaven help us.)
1. The Lambda Literary Foundation has every right to make this decision, they are not oppressing anyone by doing so, and I think it was, in fact, a good decision: the nature of glbt literature and community has changed, and the LLF needed to change as well, to keep doing what it wanted to do.
2. The way they went about implementing and publicizing this decision was deeply, deeply unprofessional, and has major problems with the implementation. (And frankly, the more I read, the more I suspect that it was also made for the wrong reasons, and some of the people closely involved who oppose the decision probably have reasons to oppose that aren't visible to us.) All the same, I still support the decision itself.
3. People talking on all sides of this argument are full of entitlement, privilege, and bonus!racism, and I don't want to be on a side with them. :/ The people on the anti-lambda side are managing to be offensive in far more creative and comprehensive ways, while the pro-lambda side are being more offensive in ways that are grindingly personal to me, so congrats there guys!
4. If I try to talk about it in any more depth, I run smack-dab into my major issues about the umbrella label glbt and its component parts (and, yes, glbttqqi++ too), and any attempt to go into any depth beyond that rapidly involves into me rambling at tl;dr length about that instead of privilege, so I shall keep my thinking about labels until a better time to talk about them.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, September 25th, 2009
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11:14 pm
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I am at Small Press Expo!
Well, actually I am currently at the home of Das Flughafen, where we are lairing for the weekend to get to the convention. We went early tonight to pick up our exhibitor badges and go to the special exhibitor panel with Gahan Wilson & networking reception. I met a Harry Potter slash fan already! (there are fangirls *everywhere*. I will be wearing my pin from last year's con.txt all day tomorrow, and see how many I can smoke out.)
So, yeah, Interrobang Studios has an exhibitor table, selling comics and prints and Spinks what I have crocheted, but there are five of us to about five feet of table, so I will probably get to do quite a bit of wandering around. We are under orders to actually talk to people and make friends at this con. Making friends is *hard*. (Unless they are fangirls.) But SPX is awesome! How have I lived here all my life and never gone before? Everyone here is whacked! It's awesome!
Also, Kevin from the studio has a design up for voting at Threadless. It is a cartoon of a vegetarian zombie saying "BRAIINSSS!". If you grok Threadless, will you please go there and vote for him? Thank you. Otherwise Kevin's girl user will do dreadful things to me for not promoting it hard enough.
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| Thursday, September 10th, 2009
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11:06 pm
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Hi! Remember when I used to talk about Doctor Who on here all the time?
Let's do that some more.
The best_enemies community on lj is picking up speed, and they've started an Academy-based rpg (or something, rps confuse me these days) and that combined with going through some of my old school papers, has me reading the Wikipedia entries on "Theta" again and trying to understand them. ("Theta", of course, is the Doctor's school nickname, short for Theta Sigma which may be his actual use-name on Gallifrey, or as close as can be rendered in English.)
And now I want a Doctor Who fic fest (preferably doctor/master, but I'm easy) with these as prompts:
( C'mon, 'Big O Notation'? 'Axiom of choice'? 'A Function defined for two complex variables'? This is like Time Lord porn. )
(Also, Θ looks like an egg with a needle in it, which is where Koschei left his heart. just sayin'.)
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| Monday, August 10th, 2009
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11:09 am
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I love my jf flist: I can be away for ten days, and it only takes a perfectly reasonable amount of time to get caught up on reading. :D
Of course I suppose I should still check over community business more closely. And read the h_d picspam. But I haven't *dared* even look at my other journals yet...
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
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12:05 am
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| Monday, June 29th, 2009
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6:31 pm - Hi I am here.
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Among other things, have been catching up with JF happenings for the past week. Wow. Unfunnybusiness sure isn't being funny right now, is it?
Every so often I think maybe I should start actually paying attention to comment threads there, and even doing vaguely mod-like stuff. But then, the mob there presumably knows what they're getting into, and are fairly good at shouting each other down when necessary, so why bother unless there's an actual TOS issue or something?
Then I remember that a large part of my initial purpose for the community was to put all the ferrets down one pair of trousers, after all, and I wander off and do something else.
(I am currently playing with a ST fantarty meme, my response to which that gets the notes "tentacles, hybrid babies, cocktail metaphors, space floozies, old people, Rihannsu, crossdressing, Star Wars quotes, JF injokes, Captain Rachel Maddow, Vulcan-touching, anthropomorphization of spaceships, bad art, large image files without alt tags, and girlsex." I feel this is adequate warning, and only spoils as much as is necessary.)
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| Sunday, June 21st, 2009
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1:27 am - Things I have learned today:
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Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei are not the same person.
I am ashamed of the fact that I didn't know this.
I would be more ashamed, if it weren't for the fact that when I tried to tell RL people how ashamed I was, none of them even had any idea who Ayatollah Khomeini was. D:
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| Thursday, June 11th, 2009
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1:58 am - librarything is dangerous
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| Saturday, June 6th, 2009
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10:08 pm
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There is a giant (anti-gay, anti-choice, pro-hate) evangelical church in my town that is currently running a giant ad campaign themed around God Loves Shrimp.
No, really.
I... don't even know where to go with that. I ... where are *they* going with that? When I saw the ads I assumed they were a with-it, liberal church, riffing on the protest slogan to point out that not all Christian bank on hate, but according to their website, *not so much*. How to you run a message series with that title (apparently actually *about* the way that Christ's sacrifice frees us from the old laws of the Pentateuch) and still preach in support of Focus on the Family? ...it's. just. And, yes, considering that the filename of the ad is "god_hates_shrimp", they know exactly what they're referencing.
You know that bible quote about the log in your eye? Yeah. That one. (I love that searching the internets for "beam in your eye" gets links to people talking about robots with lasers.)
To keep on the topic of my town and Christians, though, there's one thing that always makes me happy coming into town. If you're not American, you may be unfamiliar with the phenomenon of people who own land near a busy highway putting up three crosses so everyone who drives by has to see them, usually with a sign quoting John 3:16 or some other over-referenced-to-the-point-of-triteness Bible verse. (If you are American, you're probably all too familiar with it.)
Well, someone's done that on the road into Annapolis, but instead of three crosses, they've got a cross, a crescent, and a star. And instead of referencing John 3:16, they reference 1 John. (Alas, I don't remember the exact verse, but I think it was 1 John 2:11. Something along those lines, anyway; most of 1 John is like that.) I'm with that guy.
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| Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
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8:51 pm - GIP
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There is a new Tek Jansen comic! So I have a boobies icon. Now that nobody's bothering with boobies icons anymore.
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
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4:55 pm
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Ah, graduation day at the U.S.Naval Academy.
(At least, I assume it's graduation day. That would explain the jets that have been flying over the house since o-dark-thirty this morning.)
I actually find it soothing. Growing up on the main flight path to an international airport will do that to you: I don't notice how much I miss the airplane noise, because when I'm at Mom's house or the school, it just gets filtered out. Until I'm somewhere else and I hear it and suddenly it feels like home.
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| Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
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5:33 pm
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Ooops, I seem to have jumped into the middle of sockpuppetry wank.
Seriously - your live-in gay boytoy is suddenly off on a TOP SECRET WORLD ENDANGERING MISSION, and you post on your LJ about how scared you get when he goes on a TOP SECRET MISSION without you, and you don't expect people's thoughts to go immediately to sparklepens and lipgloss?
(Context for the unitiated: the journals in question are RP journals belonging to AU versions of an AU of an AU of a couple of Stargate characters, and due some rather complicated circumstances, one of them is living under an assumed name. So those of us trying (by invitation) to convince everyone else that they're attention-whoring sockpuppets in-character have a hard row to hoe. :D )
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, May 10th, 2009
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5:30 pm - mother's day
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The coolest things I found while helping Mom clean out Dad's workshop (*still* the best mad scientist lab ever! Even after she's cleaned it out about five times!):
1. A bolt about 5" long with a metal pulley on it. (The general coolness of pulleys cannot be overestimated. Once you figured out pulleys in Miner's Cave, you were golden.)
2. A thingy that you stab into a can that turns into a spout, for when you have a can with no spout that needs one, a situation that one surely must always be prepared for.
3. A huge bottle of muriatic acid. (We used to raid Dad's shop chemicals for our science experiments in middle school! How come he never let us use the muriatic acid? It's okay, though, we had a huge bag of CaCl2, so I figured out how to make my own.)
4. A sheet of radiation-shield glass. Just in case we ever need to put a glass window in a radiation shield.
5. Two giant suction cups connected to a handhold, like burglars use on plate-class windows in caper movies.
6. An old juice bottle with about a half-inch of white powder in the bottom, labelled "hydrated lime", and another old juice bottle half-full of pale blue liquid, with a tag tied around the neck that said 1/2lb = 3/4 cup hydrated lime
in 1qt water (~=1lb:1gal)
1/4lb = 3/8 cup copper sulfate
in 1qt water(=1lb:1gal)
1/2 cup lime sol ->
1/2 copper sulfate
+6 cupts h2o
~=7 cups 4:4:5048
Bordeau mixture According to the wisdom of the Internets, Bordeaux mixture is fungicide for plants. The internets knows not of 4:4:48, but it suggests 4:4:50 for common diseases of, er, Cannabis sp. (Dad did spend his summers in the late '60s "finding America" with a motorcycle, backpack, and goatee, but he wasn't really the herbology type, I swear.)
So question one, is the blue stuff Bordeaux mixture or pure copper sulfate? And question two, will Mom throw it out instead of devising an experimental protocol to answer question one? (Answer to question two: yes.)
7. ( This. )(photo under cut): it's approx. 3' long, and consists of 18" of broom handle socketed into about 18" of aluminum pipe, with gray pipe insulation along most of the length. The broom handle end is capped with an old detergent bottle lid, held on by a twist of wire. The pipe end is cut off in a long J-curve to make a sort of scoop, with the pipe insulation trimmed to match on that end, and it has a small L-bracket bolted to hang down into the cut-off part of the pipe, with a another small bolt about 2" farther down the pipe.
Whatever it was that Dad built it to do, I'm sure it did that thing very well.
...no one Mom has showed it to has even a vague hypothesis as to what Dad might have built it to do.
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| Friday, May 1st, 2009
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6:00 pm
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FRONT PAGE NEWS: MELANNEN LOOKING FOR A JOB
No, rly, see:
I always get my picture in the paper for the most RANDOM things. Buying rollerskates, going to a Girl Scout event, being evacuated for a bomb threat... (I think this makes at least the fourth time I've been on the front page of that paper for being in the right place at the right time.)
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| Sunday, April 26th, 2009
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11:08 pm
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Vote Muppets at hot_daily!
That is all.
Oh! I also got rec'ed on crack_van! (What, you didn't know that I used to write fic?) I once said that my goals in life were to get on both metafandom and on crack_van. Well, now I've done both in the same week! I am *win*. Of course, it was a small-fandom story for Earthsea, that I wrote, for the person who is doing the recs, in a ficathon on her community, and she's also on my friendslist, but. It STILL COUNTS.
also my jf user number is cooler than yours.
EDIT: Also:
I have one Dreamwidth beta invite code unclaimed after offering to all the flist people who wanted one.* Tell me about somebody else who posts on JF who ought to get a DW invite before open beta! (Or send them here to ask for it!) And I will choose a worthy recipient from among them! Yes! Possibly using tyromancy.
*unless I missed somebody, in which case speak up quick.
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| Sunday, April 19th, 2009
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8:18 pm - OpenID tutorial for JF
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Hi, all. I am still messing with JF/DW imports and stuff. And thus I have created this tutorial for getting an OpenID through your journalfen. I'd love it if a few of you'd try to work through it and tell me if you succeeded and where it's confusing; it shouldn't take very long, if it works. I'll probably be crossposting it to a few JF and DW communities eventually.
So, Journalfen is an LJ clone site from which you can import to DW, but it does not actually have a functioning OpenID server. So it is difficult to actually use the openID JF accounts that the Dreamwidth importer creates.
However you can still use a JF OpenID by using OpenID delegation. That is, link your JF page to an account that *does* have an OpenID server, and Dreamwidth will use that server to give you a JF OpenID.
( Here's how to set up OpenID on JF, the easy way, by which I mean, in S1. )
( How to give your JF an openID the hard way, by which I mean, S2 )
current mood: *thud*
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(12 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
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11:55 pm - More Dreamwidth-ness
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I gave out some more invite codes today to people who answered the poll, in more or less random order. If I get more, I'll keep contacting people from that entry, so if you didn't answer yet & you want one, you can still go to the poll, though again, no guarantees.
Meantime, they're giving invite codes out at random to people with validated openIDs, and they've promised one invite on April 30th to everybody who has a validated openID on DW, so if you want to get one, make sure you have openID set up!
(At some point I'll post about something that's not DW. Probably. :D )
ETA: list of people JF denizens who I think have accounts at DW already (not all from my invites, obviously):
stellar_dust
kadath
threegoldfish
sepiamagpie
also_not_a_pipe
notjo
sparkysrevenge
b_jellybean
Also, lol_meme.
If you should be on the list & aren't, or you're on the list and shouldn't be, or don't want to be, or there are other jf posters who are over there already, let me know!
current mood: Amped
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, April 12th, 2009
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8:44 pm - The Easter Bunny always leaves a map.
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Easter miracles!
Number one, I can get internets at my 90-year-old grandfather's house now! This is more of a miracle when you realize that his house has swamp on two sides and a wide highway on the third, so the unsecured wireless must be coming from the one next-door neighbor.
Mind, I didn't get time to post or anything over the weekend (at his house, we sit at the kitchen table and listen to him talk. Because, well, he tells stories. Sometimes for eight hours straight. Going from the person who visited yesterday, to tales of his grandfather's youth. And he won't be telling them forever.) But I did manage to check every night, which means I'm not actually backlogged on flists and e-mail for once!
And Number two, I got my first DW invite code! They sent them out to basically everybody with a personal account. I gave mine to my sister stellar_dust, but if more come I will keep working down the list of people who answered my dw interest poll. Though at this rate, ya'll will have accounts of your own before I get a chance!
Oh! Also, as you may have heard, stellar_dust will be spending six weeks this summer working on a Viking-age archeological dig in ICELAND! and I am filled with envy. I got to read the grant proposal for the dig, and it sounds really fascinating and fun, but I kept just thinking PERN. Because, see, the main research question is about household sizes, and the shifting relationships between large and small farmholds in the just-post-settlement period.
And what always fascinated me most about Pern (no, not the soulbonded dragons or talking dolphins or Anne's Daddy issues, sorry) was the Hold and Hall system and the ways it changed alongside population cycles on the planet. McCaffrey has a lot of problems, but Pern is still probably my favorite account of a semi-isolated colony. (I would love recs for others, ones that concentrate on the adaptive social and economic organization among the settlers rather than engineering or biology or galactic politics.)
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
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3:40 pm
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So I wasn't planning to do this until closer to open beta, but there have been some very vague hints that having a list of people eager to move to Dreamwidth gets you a better chance at getting closed-beta invite codes, so just in case, haves a poall:
Poll #456
Open to: All, results viewable to: AllIf I had Dreamwidth invite codes, would you want one?
(Dreamwidth invite codes will be assigned to users according to arcane rituals determined by how well your last set of invite codes were used. So answer all poll questions that apply to you. Honestly, pls!)
(If you don't have a JF account/I don't know you by your jf, feel free to answer in comments, w/an e-mail in case I need to get back to you. Anon comments will be screened.)
(There are no guarantees I'll have any invite codes to give out before open beta.)
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9 (45.0%)