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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
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| Thursday, March 18th, 2010 |
pentomino
|
8:23a |
last weekend
Last weekend I was all over the place. Friday night I went and saw "Creation" at Valley Art. Ir was the story of how Darwin wrote Origin of Species. Except it had not enough cool animals and adventures, and too much tragic Victorian family drama that was mostly made up or exaggerated. After that, I went to an Irish pub with some of the attendees. From there, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tamtrible picked me up and we went to see Alice in Wonderland with her gaming group. Does Tim Burton keep Johnny Depp in a deep well between movies, occasionally spraying him with a hose full of white grease paint and eyeshadow? Because he was a bit of a distracting force in the movie. Not bad otherwise. Stephen Fry was the cat. Saturday I did a bit of shopping and then went to justinsane's got-a-job party with tamtrible where we both sang karaoke and met interesting people. |
pentomino
|
8:05a |
I had a dream that I was moving to another new apartment, except that I had completely not prepared for the task. I hadn't packed, I hadn't hired movers, and I hadn't even told my destination apartment complex that I was moving in, or my current place that I was moving out. In the midst of it all, I checked my email from work and everything was going crazy and, in mid-move, I had to go on a conference call or something to fix something. |
kerri9494
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8:02a |
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thereallinda
|
8:42a |
how dare you
"Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that witches are often betrayed by their appetites; dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you can betray them with your tongue." - Neil Gaiman |
| Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 |
urbeatle
|
12:44p |
Puzzler Follow-Up
Yeah, I was being snarky about Seven Ages of Rock inventing "Stadium Rock" to cover Led Zeppelin, Queen, Kiss, Bruce Springsteen, The Police, Dire Straits, and U2. The documentary is informative, but it is flawed, and I've decided that a lot of its flaws come from the documentary maker's stubborn refusal to admit the existence of pop. Exhibit A: the absence of the Beatles or rock 'n' roll. According to the series, rock begins with Jimi Hendrix coming to London. The VH1 edit of the series doesn't mention the Beatles at all, and the BBC edit doesn't talk about rock 'n' roll. If they want to discount both as being part of a Pop tradition instead of the Rock tradition, that's fine, but then you have to, you know, say that. The series tries not to say the word "Pop" at all, or mention bands they don't consider a form of Rock, except when a musician they interview forces them to acknowledge bands like ABBA by pointing to them as an inspiration. This gets weird in some places, because in the Sixth Age (Alternative Rock,) they discuss how Kurt Cobain agonized over whether to aim for broader commercial success. Basically, it's a struggle between Rock and Pop, and that theme surfaces in a couple other places in the series, but the guy behind the series doesn't want to talk about pop. But that leaves him with a problem: he's got a couple bands he wants to talk about (Dire Straits, U2, The Police) who don't fit into any of the six styles/ages he's identified (blues-rock, art rock, metal, punk, alternative, British indie.) You know, because they're kind of Pop. So he invents Stadium Rock as a catch-all category for really, really popular "Rock" that doesn't fit in his scheme, but he carefully excludes performers who also play in stadiums but who seem more Pop than those bands. He also excludes New Wave, even though most of the early New Wave bands came out of Punk; New Wave is too Pop, so they don't exist (which leads to the absurdity of interviewing the lead singer of Blondie without talking about the band.) And, of course, they exclude funk because that's tied too closely (via disco) to the development of Pop... even though a couple of the punk performers dare to mention funk. There's a couple other weirdities: apparently, the BBC version included girl punk bands, but they've been cut out of the VH1 version, except for Pattie Smith; The Damned are mentioned, but not no wave, and hardcore isn't mentioned until the Alternative Rock episode, because the Nirvana and R.E.M. people forced them to explain it by mentioning Black Flagg. Prog Rock doesn't exist, even though it could have been mentioned as a footnote to Art Rock, since it expresses the same desires in a different way. The central thesis of the episode on Metal is that metal never dies, because it creates new forms of metal... but their history of metal seems to stop with Metallica. Metal begins with Black Sabbath, but there's no mention of Steppenwolf basically inventing the name (in "Born to be Wild".) On the whole, informative but flawed. |
fmyates
|
10:42a |
Calm, before the storm.
Well, tomorrow's the cattle call, but I am done. Yes, while the rest of you sit in front of your screens tomorrow and watch a tiny rotating sphere, all the while chanting: 'no whammies, no whammies...' I am done. Hotel booked, San Diego, here I come. now all i have to do is survive May 1st. and June 1st. 7/6, and 8/3.... |
kerri9494
|
8:01a |
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| Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 |
urbeatle
|
10:10p |
A Puzzler
What's the name for that genre of rock that includes both Bruce Sprinsteen and KISS? I need to know for a report. |
news
[ theljstaff ]
|
3:33p |
LiveJournal Major Notes: Global navigation, Mobile, Bug fixes
We're going to keep this short and sweet (Frank and birthday vgifts will be back next week). You've probably seen the updates to our main menu. Don't be alarmed. You'll find everything you need, just in slightly shifted format. Just so you know, we based these changes on input from both experienced and new users who were not familiar with LiveJournal. Our goal was to reduce barriers to usability and make LiveJournal more accessible and easy to navigate. Please note that this is a work in progress. We welcome your detailed suggestions in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) feedback. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve your LiveJournal experience.
We've updated the global navigation menu:
Here's a quick breakdown of what you'll find where:
- Scrapbook can now be found under Profile (thanks for your feedback, btw), along with Settings, Stats, and Edit Profile.
- You'll find all the tools you need to post and update entries under Journal, which includes posting and editing entries, managing comments and tags, and customizing your journal's style.
- Friends contains all of your friend settings, from filtering your Friends page to adding, removing, and finding new and existing friends on LiveJournal.
- Under Communities, you'll find links to manage your communities, accept community invites, and create new communities.
- Explore includes search features, RSS feeds, Question of the Day, and FRNK radio.
- Under Shop, you'll find links to upgrade or give a paid account, buy virtual gifts, purchase LiveJournal merchandise (like T-shirts), and view your payment history.
LiveJournal Mobile update:
We've enhanced LiveJournal's mobile site to improve usability and load times. We've made more of LiveJournal's features accessible via mobile, including posting comments, uploading photos, reading and commenting on friends' posts, finding and messaging friends, and more. We look forward to reviewing your feedback and recommendations for future improvements.
Other important changes:
- You can lock comments to prevent further commenting on a post, while leaving existing comments visible.
- We replaced the "Tell a friend" link with a new "Share This" widget that lets you share LiveJournal posts on other social media sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
- We changed some of the icons on entries (you can hover over the icons to view descriptions).
- You'll see a Tag count on your Tag management page.
- You'll now see the 10 most recent vgifts on your profile page. To remove vgifts, left-click on the vgift and choose whether you want to remove the vgift from your profile or delete it entirely.
- We've added options to help you control receipt of vgifts, which you'll find in My Stuff under Edit Profile. You can now enable vgifts from friends or everyone and disable anonymous vgifts.
We've got your fix:
- UPDATE: Rolling several updates into one listing here -- 1) Scrapbook should be back and working again. 2) The problem with the Update Journal page in IE6 and IE7 should be fixed now. 3) The problem with the userpic add-on package pricing has been fixed and refunds issued to anyone who was overcharged while the erroneous prices were in place.
- Non-conforming images will now be automatically resized for custom mood themes.
- Line breaks no longer count as two characters against your entry's character limit.
- We fixed a bug on the Manage Tags page so you can clear all tags and add new tags.
- We corrected the UI for the update.bml page so it displays properly in IE8.
Thanks again for joining us. Frank and company will be back next week! |
kerri9494
|
8:02a |
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| Monday, March 15th, 2010 |
kerri9494
|
8:01a |
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| Sunday, March 14th, 2010 |
urbeatle
|
3:10p |
Why rickroll someone when you can bonniebait them? |
urbeatle
|
11:13a |
Millennium Log
Previously, I've noted two instances in The Twilight Zone where they used the word "millennium" in a weird, non-standard way:
- The Chaser: a character says "it's like MILLENNIUM!" (no definite or indefinite article.)
- On Thursday We Leave for Home: Serling in his narration says that the space colonists "went looking for a millennium".
Just spotted a third:
- The Mind and the Matter: main character says he will hold off (on his ranting) when he has achieved "that millennium, that absolute perfection of solitude".
That makes two episodes written by Serling and one by a writing team (John Henry Collier and Robert Presnell, Jr.) from 1960 to 1963. Of course, I haven't spotted any non-Twilight Zone uses of "millennium" to mean "the absolute best thing ever" during that period, so maybe it's just an idiosyncratic usage by those three people. |
pentomino
|
10:22a |
dream highlights: 1. was in Chicago, during a cold spring. Animals I couldn't identify were underwater in Lake Michigan, the Chicago river, or whatever other body of water defined Dream Chicago. I was walking a winding city street that bordered the lake with no handrail. I worried about falling in. Then I fell in, though I was alarmed at how I wasn't immediately frozen to death, and I managed to find a ladder leaing out. I remember having to look frantically for a place to change out of wet clothes, and then realizing that my clothes weren't very wet. At some point I was taking a bus and transferring to another bus. But at the transfer point, the stop I got off and the stop with all the other buses was separated by a small moat full of water, that was only about three feet deep, so I just waded across with no regard for drying off when I got out. The bus hadn't arrived yet, but there was some college or something. Missy from Tucson was there, and I waved hello. I was watching TV at the bar and Star Search was on. I should probably document my weekend here as well but it has ess risk of fading from memory. I've been surprisingly functional. |
kerri9494
|
8:01a |
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| Saturday, March 13th, 2010 |
kerri9494
|
9:02a |
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| Friday, March 12th, 2010 |
urbeatle
|
6:57p |
How the Crazy Goes
I haven't yet started reading books using my portable DVD player yet. I did use it to read lists of verbs generated from the Moby Project parts of speech list, as part of a research project. The reason I haven't started reading is because I'm still collecting, classifying and converting texts to put on disc. I've converted pretty much all the plain-text versions of the Andrew Lang fairy books (Red Fairy Book, Blue Fairy Book, etc.) as well as some other folk/fairytale texts, and I've converted Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Spencer's Faerie Queene, and scattered other texts.
But right now I'm focusing on reference materials, starting with Roget's Thesaurus, because I really need these. But I can't just convert this as a single file; it has to be broken up into parts so that I can locate sections. And I'm doing this by hand, in Emacs (C-s % C-@ C-s C-s C-s M-w C-x b C-y and then save under the name of the section, then back to the original buffer to repeat, ad infinitum.)
I'm 40% through the text, and then I'll split the index into separate files.
Then it's on to the next reference work, probably a dictionary or encyclopedia.
I haven't tested RPG PDFs yet. Plan there is to open each PDF, autoscroll and record with CamStudio, then properly convert the video.
As I said: crazy. |
kerri9494
|
9:02a |
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urbeatle
|
12:44a |
A New Word for "This Sucks"
When not praising The Fifth Element and Krull, some other geeks on the forums I haunt praise Zooey Deschanel in Tin Man. I don't understand why; she played the role of Dorothy in a very drab, uninspired way.
Since I couldn't remember seeing her in anything else (although I must have seen her in Elf,) I figured I'd watch another movie she was in, sometime, to see if Tin Man was just a fluke. And lo, I spotted a movie named Gigantic, in which she plays the female lead. So I gave it a shot.
What a muddled, uninspired mess that entire movie was. It felt a lot like Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, only with some incomprehensible bits thrown in.
So the jury's still out on Zooey Deschanel, but at least I found out about a new film style: mumblecore. Never heard of that before. Now I know what to avoid. |
| Thursday, March 11th, 2010 |
news
[ theljstaff ]
|
4:11p |
LiveJournal Major Notes: March header, Charitable vgift, Squirrels in love
| We're finishing up a few odds and ends before our next major release. Our mighty Ops guys continue to slay spambots and balance load times on a highwire without a safety net (which is kind of tough dressed in full ninja gear). Down on solid ground, we're celebrating this week's virtual birthday party with a warm toast to pants. If you can rearrange the letters of your favorite city, state, and/or country (feel free to combine these elements) to spell one of Frank's favorite treats (e.g., pants, wire, paper, etc.), he'll send you over a can of whipped cream to top it all off (provided you return the empty can for his midnight snack)! And, with that, let the word scrambling commence!
| 
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Stuff you should know:
- We're still working on the delayed/missing notifications issue. Sorry, we're frustrated too. We'll keep you posted.
- Last week, we became aware that a recently-implemented script was overwriting affiliate referral fees for some of our users. Once we confirmed this, our Ops team quickly removed the script. Please be aware that, while we may beta-test other affiliate scripts down the line, we will take greater measures to ensure that no existing user-referral arrangements are impacted in any way.
- While we plan to stick to a weekly news schedule, if we have a release in between regular newsletters, we'll post here to keep you informed. You can also check lj_releases for current release information.
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To our paid users, we send squirrels in love!
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If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free Squirrels in love vgifts through Monday, March 15th at 4pm, PST! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 squirrels displayed until they've scurried off to their new homes. Please send only one vgift at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each vgift you send. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and select 'Do not disable' from the drop-down menu. Have fun!
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Help is on the way!
| We're pleased to announce the winner of our first charitable vgift poll, Doctors without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, which provides critical medical care to under-served populations around the world. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of the proceeds we raise from the sale of this vgift (we'll cover credit card fees). We invite you to start recommending nonprofits for our next fundraising drive at ljnewscontests. We'll take suggestions through the month and post a poll in the news during the first week of April to let you choose the recipient. We thank you, again, for your passion and generosity. |  |
We've crowned a header
Congratulations to ohterlus for submitting the winning header, which will go live next week and keep us leafy through mid-April! You can submit designs for our next header contest at ljnewscontests now until March 31st. We'll post a poll in the news to let you decide which header will sit at the top of LiveJournal from mid-April to mid-May. All artistic interpretations are welcome. The winner will get a $25 LiveJournal gift certificate. All other contributors will receive $5 gift certificates. Our heartfelt appreciation for sharing your talent and creativity! |
For this week's winning photo and more adventures with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut! ( Read more... ) |
urbeatle
|
2:24p |
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majorzed
|
3:22p |
|
interrocartel
[ majorzed ]
|
3:21p |
Wanted - voice actors
Wanted - voice actors for less than 2 minutes of dialog. Low pay, high credit, good karma. Project Aswan is up past the 100 hour mark now. Isn't it time the dialog got nailed down? I sure could use some help. There are two characters, and so far only me doing dialog, and I'm not real happy with it. The two characters are GN - middle age male, president of Egypt NK - older male, premier of USSR Both speak English with an accent. I think I did OK with NK, but not so good with GN. In any case, it is better to have different people do different characters. Unless you're Mel Blanc. I'm no Mel Blanc. If you might interested, contact me for the script and my vocal takes. Then you can check it out and see what you think. Here's a taste.CONTACT: send an email to me (my LJ name, all one word) atYAHOOdotCOM or just do it through LJ mail or post a response here (with your contact info) and I will send you back the links to the script and my takes and some other stuff, too. Oh - I should mention: we're on a deadline, so I need finished audio files by April 15. Also - Did I mention IBC music will be featured in the video? Current Mood:  sleepy |
kerri9494
|
9:02a |
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| Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 |
majorzed
|
1:42p |
Wall-E
I had the pleasure of watching Wall-E (see trailer) in HD on a big plasma unit last night. Speaking as a wannabe animator, there were two things that especially impressed me. One high-tech, one low-tech. High tech: dirt. The scenes on the spaceship have the usual slick plastic sheen you expect from this style of animation, but the scenes on Earth are quite realistically grungy, and that is hard to do. In particular, during a scene where Wall-E is in his "house" fooling around with various objects, I forgot this was CG. I thought I was watching real footage of puppetry or animatronics, like Johnny 5. Low tech: Eve's eyes. Wall-E's love interest is a smooth, futuristic robot whose face consists of a black screen with two glowing blue spots. Yet the animators manage to inject emotion into that face by changing the shape of the spots. Worth studying. |
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