Flaming Chords

This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.

It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)

I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.

People are getting pissed off at LJ again. Something about anti-queer organizations getting advertising space on LJ. Because I'm sure that someone on LJ's staff is vetting each and every advertisement that shows up on their site. After all, companies like LJ never arrange for other companies to fill in their ads automatically!

Not that I support NOM or anything. Believe me, I don't. I think they're brain-dead bigot assholes who aren't yet over the fact that laws against murder and workplace discrimination protect those ebil homosexuals, and now they're pissed because the uproar over marriage threatens to bring us all one step closer to treating homosexuals like real human beings. Their very fucking existence offends me in ways I lack words to describe.

But! I'm not convinced that the powers that be at LJ are to blame for this, or are even aware of it, so I refuse to fly off the handle just yet. And personally, I like this person's take on it.

It's all caprine's fault. She just posted a link to a website called Blingee, which lets you upload pictures and then festoon no end of animated sparkly shit all over them. Then, when you've finally finished created something that will induce either diabetic coma or epileptic seizures, you can save your masterpiece as an animated .gif, and post it anywhere!

(Sorry. There are certainly some cool things you can do with Blingee -- this picture of sparkly anarchist Emma Goldman is a work of twisted genius. But imagine this tool in the hands of a horde of twelve-year-olds...)

In related news, I decided that I needed more Twatlight icons that were in questionable taste, so I decided to make His and Hers. (NSFW!) For those of you unfamiliar, "sparklepeen" is a reference to this review.

Remember when I promised that I would try not to post anything related to the upcoming election unless it was obviously for laughs?

So far, I've managed that.

My cat, however, has not. I swear, he'll take up camwhoring next...

These two videos are for aries_ascendant!





And of course, many more.

(Normally, I'd just post these in your LJ, but I'm still in that annoying "new convert" phase with respect to Doctor Who, so I'm inflicting them on EVERYBODY!)

Maybe some new friends?

A few of you may have noticed I just friended you. Maybe I met you, however briefly, and thought you interesting. Maybe I got a chance to talk with you, and thought you interesting. Maybe we have friends in common. Knowing me, probably a little of each. In any case, if you're the sort of person to say to yourself, "who's this guy who just friended me," and then to look over their journal to get a feel for them, this paragraph is for you. Hiya!

(If it helps you place me, I have long red hair, and you may have seen me as the Dread Pirate Roberts.)


Caffeine, my sweet bitch-muse...

I sorta fell off the wagon, with respect to my long-dormant Mountain Dew habit. Well, no. "Fell off the wagon" isn't the right expression -- a better description might be "took an olympic caliber high-dive off the wagon." Or swan-dive, I'm not sure which. After drinking an average of a liter and a half per day at the convention, I'm weaning myself off of it again. Down to a can a day, but man, I'm feeling it.

Ugh. It's only barely 10:30, and I'm already off to bed.

For those of you who didn't know, I keep an HTML cheatsheet up on my computer. Mostly, I use it for things I use regularly, like footnotes or the altered formatting I use for dream posts, or for putting the self-cleaning-anus in tiger(self-cleaning-anus)wolf or the extra-long vowel in faaaaabio. That way, instead of typing five lines of code for tigerwolf or four lines for fpb, I can just copy and paste.

Well, I've recently decided that someone on LJ needs to be addressed in future as shit_cauldron, by as many people as possible. You can find out why here¹. Since this is about four lines of code, I've added it to my cheatsheet.

<span style="white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://hypersurfaces.livejournal.com/profile"><img src="http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif" alt="[info]" style="border: 0pt none ; vertical-align: bottom;" height="17" width="17"></a><a href="http://hypersurfaces.livejournal.com/"><b>shit_cauldron</b></a></span>

If you have a cheatsheet of your own, I encourage you to borrow my code. And spread the word far and wide!

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1. No, I'm not calling her a douchebag, faggot, baby-raper, dyke, fudge-packer, and/or mother-fucker. You've heard of TinyURL, haven't you? Well, this is a neat little toy called IndecentURL. It exists because even pictures of cute little kitties can be made hilarious with a URL that includes things like twat, lemon-party, mother-fucker, shit, asshole, slut, splooge-balls.
   
   But mostly, I'm using this URL redirection so that her real name does not appear anywhere in my post, either in text or in source code. Yes, she has a real name. I won't use it. "Shit Cauldron" suits her much better.
   

Dear theferret, spelled with one T on the end,

Firstly, may I congratulate you on both knowing how to spell the word "ferret" correctly, and your most fortunate timing. Clearly you were the first person to get an LJ named "the ferret," and as a result you got first dibs on the correct spelling. This forced people who came after you who also wanted to be known as "the ferret" to go with extra underscores, numbers tacked on the end, or creative spellings. (Tacking an extra T on the end, for example.) But hey, that's their problem.

Well, usually.

Secondly, oops. Fixed now. Judging from your userinfo, it's a common misunderstanding, but I'm not claiming that as an excuse. I goofed.

Sorry about that.

Sincerely,
flamingchords

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Dear everyone else,

Since a lot of you are out to invite theferrett (spelled with two Ts on the end) to a barbeque, you should be very careful with the spelling. Yes, I know. Your mental spellchecker automatically spelled "ferret" with one T, i.e. correctly. I made the same mistake, and fixed it as soon as I was aware I'd made it.

Just be careful, is all I'm saying. We've already broken out the tar and feathers. Let's not hit innocent bystanders with the tar, okay?

Sincerely,
flamingchords

One last post for today, and then I have a life to get back to.

LJ Abuse has concluded, after no doubt considerable debate, that Nicky-boy is a public figure. This means, among other things, that if you feel compelled to mention the name "Nickolaus Pacione" in your LJ, Nicky-boy can't complain to LJ Abuse just because you mentioned his name. Well, he can, but LJ Abuse will no longer threated to suspend your journal over it. Let the mocking begin!

Well, no. The mocking has been going on for years, and he's deserved every bit of it. But "let the mocking continue unhindered" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

(As I understand it. LJ Abuse generally takes a dim view of people posting personal information about people, and this includes given names. They simply don't apply this rule to people who use their own names publicly if they are "public figures," and Nicky-boy apparently now qualifies as such.)

The post in which this is discussed is here. Many kudos to tjcrowley for having fought for this small victory. I have already favorited it, and I expect I am only one of many who have done so, or will do so.

I'm half-tempted to create a new LJ account, and have it be a Sponsored account. Sponsored by Coca Cola, I think. Then my first entry will be an embedded music video. "Mom, just give me a Pepsi please! All I want is a Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me! All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me! Just a Pepsi! They give you a white shirt with long sleeves, tied around your back, you're treated like thieves..."

My second entry would be about snorting shitloads of coke. No doubt I'd work in some musings about how Coca Cola was probably so much better when it actually had cocaine in it, but it sucks now, because it doesn't. Caffeine is for wussy wusses, at least in the meager concentrations occuring in Coca Cola.

My third entry, and the next several afterward, would be about how I work in a soda fountain of some sort, and we only serve Coca Cola and other products by that company, but I prefer Mountain Dew. And I'm so pissed off by my company's decision to carry only Coca Cola products, that I retaliate by adding Mountain Dew to the syrup that Coca Cola sends us. Used Mountain Dew, if you follow me, and I think you do.

After a while, I'd get bored with writing about the frustrations regarding my inability to obtain Mountain Dew, my favorite high-caffeine antifreeze, at work. So, I'd write about frustrations of another sort. After all, it's starting to get warm out, and girls are starting to dress for the weather, which is to say more provocatively than they were when it was raining. This would naturally result in a different secret ingredient in the Coca Cola products we serve at work... too bad we don't serve milkshakes, huh?

Then, I'd write about getting my hands on a half-kilo of cocaine, and naturally, I've already complained that Coca Cola wussed out all those yeara ago. I'm too young, of course, to have ever had the version of Coca Cola that included cocaine, and curiosity is only natural. So, I'd write about how I tried it, and it lived up to my expectations, and how I just had to share my discovery with all of our customers. Think of it as my way of apologizing for having spent the last few months depositing my various bodily fluids in their drinks!

Yeah, I could have so much fun writing all this in a journal sponsored by Coca Cola.

Or I could, you know, go out and get laid instead. And let's face it, if I'm going to all this trouble just to complain about ads that I myself will never see anyway, I really need to get laid. Desperately.

In other news, this post mentions Coca Cola eleven times, Pepsi six times, and Mountain Dew five times. And it's a public post, which means that SUP probably has software sniffing it for marketing purposes -- software that probably can't tell I'm talking a whole bunch of shit. In other words, I've ever so slightly skewed their numbers with respect to fizzy drink marketing, and quite possibly I'm slightly responsible for a chance of an increase in fizzy drink advertising on LiveJournal. Go me!

...and some of you will be coming back to LJ after having not used it for 24 hours.

I'm going to bite my tongue on just how effective I think this boycott is -- plenty of people have said it much more eloquently than I could. Besides, the fact that I'm obviously aware of the boycott -- and posting regardless -- probably speaks enough for me.

For those of you just coming back... you've had a day free of internet drama. May you all have done worthwhile things with it.

At agilebrit's suggestion, I have added "watching lj implode" to my interests. (Hey, it amuses me, at least!) So has my sock-puppet, and so has my cat. The last time I did this, it was for the interest "blasphor-everybody in the room," and doing all this made the interest linkable within hours. And now, you can add "watching lj implode" to your own profile with two measly clicks!

Having said all that... I don't think that keeping certain subjects off the "Most Popular Interests" page is that big a deal. Compared to all the truly annoying shit that LJ has pulled, this barely even registers.

Look... firstly, advertisers are going to see that list. They're going to make marketing decisions based on that list. If they see "bisexuality" and "yaoi" in the top spots on that list, the next thing we're going to see is advertisements on LJ with two pretty boys kissing, and captions like "Hi, we're two trendy bisexuals, and we use Trojan condoms!" Granted, I like watching pretty people kiss as much as the next person, but wouldn't such an ad strike you as just a wee bit patronizing? Personally, I think advertising is offensive enough when it's impersonal -- it disgusts me much more when it pretends to be just like me.

Secondly, I know a lot of people are crying out for SUP to be burned at the stake... but does anyone know if SUP is actually responsible for this? It's quite possible that Six Apart did this, and SUP simply failed to undo it, or even notice it. Not only possible, but likely, considering that Six Apart had problems with letting people search interests like "spicy food" because their censorware found the substring "spic" in "spicy food" and assumed that it was hate speech.

Thirdly, the interests in question are still indexed. You can still look for other people interested in bisexuality or yaoi, if such is your inclination. You can still find "fanfiction" communities... and LJ is not drawing extra attention to them. Considering that fanfiction is on some pretty iffy legal ground, I'd think that fandom wouldn't want the outside world knowing just how big it is.

I'm not saying that the people who run LJ haven't done some assaholic things -- obviously, they have. But can we pick our battles a little more carefully than this?

I have just added "bisexuality" to my list of interests.

No, my identity has not changed. I'm still a straight dude with a couple of male friends for whom I make exceptions, because they're just that damned awesome. Still, considering how many times I've had a guy make a pass at me, and then thought "if I wasn't straight I'd totally fuck you," I figure I can legitimately claim an interest.

Well...

Okay, all this is true enough, but completely irrelevant. I added the interest mostly as an experiment, because I'm hearing rumors about LJ being assfaces. But then, the last batch of assface rumors hasn't died yet...

Normally, customers_suck is full of whiny brats who bitch at length about how they're required to deal with people for a living. This post, however, is funny as hell. And the replies to it are even more so, though some of them are unintentionally funny.

In case you hadn't heard, LJ is no longer offering basic accounts. If you're starting a new journal, you now have two options: pay money, or see ads. That third choice -- pay nothing, see no ads, get no extra features -- doesn't exist anymore.

I can understand this. LJ must use a shitload of bandwidth, and bandwidth has to be paid for. All those new features (some of which are actually useful) were put there by programmers, and they need to be paid, too.

The fun starts when they bury this bit of new info in one of the FAQs, and neglect to mention it in the latest post in news.

Then, all hell breaks loose.

I'm trying to be amused by this; it certainly has all the elements of good wank. On one side, management trying to take away benefits in a sneaky manner to raise their bottom line, because that's always worked so well in the past. Oh, wait, it hasn't. One the other side, hundreds of howler monkeys screeching at a volume that could wake the dead, insisting they would have handled it like adults had they been properly informed, because that's always worked so well in the past. Oh, wait, that hasn't either.

(Sighs.)

Fuckin' reruns. Maybe we'll see a video flounce. Oh, wait, that's already been done, too.

My cat ologbu has just started an LJ community called kf_hardcore. Yyyyyyep. Kitten-free hardcore. Ostensibly, it's for adult cats to bitch about kittens. Obviously, most adult housecats are in no danger of being breeder bingoed because they've been spayed or neutered, but they can still complain about how poorly behaved kittens are, right?

In reality, it's just a place to put all things (videos, pictures, even stories) involving cute kittens. My cat requests, though, that if you do post there, you make the text of your post look like a complaint about how kittens are so much trouble, but they get away with it because they're so fucking kyuuuuuute! Bonus points if you post from the POV of an adult cat, or use an icon of an adult cat. Don't worry about looking like you genuinely hate kittens -- we all know this is a joke, and cuteness can speak volumes for itself. (Of course, some idiots will accuse you of hating kittens, but think of them as doing you a favor by identifying themselves to you as idiots.)

Later, I may create a sockpuppet called "Nermal" and troll the comm with it.

(Dammit. nermal is already taken!)

I have a penis! P-E-N-I-S. Penis! And even more shockingly, I sometimes USE IT!

(OMFG, this flagging feature is going to blow up in LJ's faces, and it's going to be so much fun to watch!)

I just added three interests to my profile:

blasphemy, blaspheyou, blasphor-everybody in the room!

And best of all, they appear in that order!

(I'm too easily amused.)

Dear Livejournal,

I just thought I'd let you know that I wholeheartedly approve of your recent decision to make Pepsi Max themes and virtual gifts. Personally, I think that people are overreacting, and that this is a great way to go -- it lets people who don't feel like coding announce their loyalty to their favorite fizzy brown soft drink. Certainly, I don't drink Mountain Dew (another Pepsi product) any more, but I'm not thinking of just myself, here, A lot of people are still slavishly devoted to Pepsi and its caffeine-y, sugary goodness! They can proudly display their allegiance to Pepsi, Pepsi gets extra exposure, you get extra ad revenue... it's a win-win-win situation!

May I recommend that you approach Enzyte for sponsorship, next? You can make a neat little tiled background of little blue pills, though I'd suggest fading the tile pattern to near-white so that black text on top of it is still legible. On second thought, I'm sure that the artistic souls over at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals would make it such a pretty tile pattern that we'd all be happy to use it even if it did make our text a little hard to read.

Just picture how cool this would be! You could embed a midi with that cute little jingle directly into the theme's journal code! Granted, the midi standard doesn't include whistling, but I'm sure that virtual flutes would come very close -- and hey, who wouldn't want to have a journal that plays that theme music for everyone who reads it? And if you felt like a little extra coding, you could put a banana in the top corner of the window, and each time the user used "Current Mood: Confident," it would make the banana a bit larger, until it was so big and impressive it took over half the screen!

And on the subject of mood themes? This would be really fun! Check this out:

Current Mood: confident

And if I didn't feel so confident, I could go with any of the other moods available in that drop-box, such as...

Current Mood: irate

Current Mood: lethargic

Current Mood: worried

Current Mood: stressed

Current Mood: envious

Current Mood: numb

Current Mood: depressed

I think you should give this some thought. After all, millions and millions of people already drink Pepsi; by making a Pepsi Max theme, you're preaching to the choir. Pepsi products have already saturated the market, and what market remains untapped is being firmly held by Coca Cola -- and is therefore likely to remain out of Pepsi's reach. On the other hand, lots of men out there haven't tried Enzyte -- or for that matter, any form of penis enlargement at all! It's practically an untapped market!

Sincerely,
flamingchords

Dear bookshop,

I saw your recent flounce, here, and I must say you've inspired me -- for the second time, actually.

First of all, let me not go into the subject of whether LJ is justified in suspending people for drawing explicit pictures of Harry Potter getting sucked off by Professor Snape. Plenty of people smarter than you -- some of whom are also smarter than me -- are discussing this, passionately and with very sore wrists. It is one of those matters of Law, on which most of us have an opinion, but relatively few of us are qualified to have an opinion¹. With that in mind, let me just confine myself to the content of your video.

I never thought I'd be saying this to you of all people, but YOU FAIL AT DRAMA. I mean, come on! You are a legendary drama queen, a drama queen's drama queen, the drama queen all other drama queens dream of being when they grow up... and this is the best you can do?

I am not impressed. Not impressed at all.

Couldn't you have soaked the shirt in alcohol or something, first? Maybe some gasoline, or kerosene? As I said, you are a legend in your field. As such, you have a reputation to live up to -- I was expecting you to burn that t-shirt with the sort of pyrotechnic displays you normally see at a rock concert. Failing that, a can of hairspray and a cigarette lighter, together, can produce an impressive fireball. Instead, you went with that thing? Honestly, if your method of burning a t-shirt is safe to perform indoors, you aren't trying.

Further, I'd comment on the similarities between burning t-shirts and burning books, but that's a little closer to Godwin's Law than I care to go, except in jest. Besides, I think Dave Mustaine, of the band Megadeth, had a few choice words about people who burned his records -- these words were along the lines of "hey, at least they bought them!"

Sincerely,
flamingchords

PS: It's either "unequivocally" or "irrevocably." Pick one or the other. Or if you must use both, use a separate word for each. Using "unequivocably" makes you look indecisive at best, and at worst, it makes you look like you throw out big words you don't fully know how to use in a desperate bid to appear smarter than you really are.

Edited to add: Oh, look! She's been attacked by vikings!

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1. To spotts1701, if you're reading this -- your thoughts?