baratron | Entries tagged with livejournal meta

My livejournal profile was horribly outdated again. Time to adjust my interests. Bloody hell, I had a lot to change - stuff on there that should have been removed 4 years ago, and other stuff that I should have added 4 years ago.

Removed: ( Read more... )

Added: ( Read more... )

Also, there is an actual description of me in the big box that previously said "This profile intentionally left blank", so if you've recently friended me (and I know I've gained 3 new LJ friends in the past couple of weeks), you should probably go and read it. Just to make sure that you don't suddenly hate me or something :D

Any comments or questions? I doubt any of you care that much, but feel free to ask if you do.

Current Mood: okay

Dear friends,

You make no sense! On Thursday, I posted about something very, very important to me - and received 4 comments. Yesterday, I posted about something incredibly annoying, yet trivial in the grand scheme of things - and received 7 comments.

Guys - I WROTE A BOOK! I know I've written books before - technically my MPhil thesis is one; but this is a novel, and I've wanted to Be A Writer for years. And now I am one! Maybe you think it doesn't count because I borrowed the plotline and characters from a video game. Well, lots of people borrow plotlines (a certain Terry Pratchett has been known to borrow liberally from a certain William Shakespeare), and I've taken perhaps all of 3,000 words from the game. The rest of it is mine.

Maybe you were waiting to congratulate me until I finished it completely? I dunno. I'm pretty proud to get to the end of the 50,000 words. Given that I'm feeling better and am likely to be back doing College work next week, I don't know how long the rest of it is going to take. A while. Certainly longer than another month.

...People are strange.

Current Mood: confused

Why in hells can we not ban 46.119.116.168? Does that IP address correspond to a major proxy or something? If I see that ad about having a huge crush on me one more time I will EXPLODE!

Current Mood: frustrated

I have finally disabled anonymous comments. If anyone who doesn't have a livejournal wishes to contact me, then email to baratron at livejournal dot com works.

Although I'm not sure if this is enough, given that the latest scam is to set up a throwaway livejournal account to comment from. If I see that "I have a massive crush on you" spam message one more time, I will scream. There should be a way to disable further comments on old posts without also deleting the comments that are already there.

I hope that I won't have to switch to friends-only commenting, because that rather gets in the way of making new friends, but we'll see.

Current Mood: annoyed

I am "okay". Magically started feeling better about a month ago, and have been working steadily on my PhD research ever since - but I am still buried up to my eyebrows in work and sinking.

I have a deadline of 6th July for my next report due in to the Graduate Committee, with ideally about 3 months of work to do between now and then. It's okay - I've discussed the situation with my supervisors and we've worked out what I need to do rather than what it would be nice to do, and got that 3 months down to what's possible in a few weeks, but nonetheless I am busy and barely coping.

Also, to make things worse, we have tickets to see Adrenaline Mob on 5th July, meaning that I actually need to get the report almost-completely-finished a day early. I am not missing that gig! It was bad enough missing Steel Panther, Mötley Crüe & Def Leppard in December, but they're all bands that I only "vaguely" like, playing in a big arena. I'm not missing the mighty Mike Portnoy playing METAL in a tiny venue!

So I am being a "crap friend". People are posting about difficult things in their lives, and I've been reading livejournal but hardly commenting on anything - even when the other person desperately needs comments! It's not that I don't care, it's that coherence is not happening awfully well. I need to find out again who is happy to receive blank comments (meaning "I have read this and am sorry that things are difficult for you right now, but I have no spoons for coherent thought"). Either that, or I need to get the copy-and-paste on my phone working better so I can paste that sentence in every time.

In other news, my birthday is mostly cancelled this year - due to the fact that I'll have to spend it working. I'm planning to be at BiFest on Saturday briefly, probably from 2.30-5pm. Let me know if you're going. Also we've been planning to go to Whipsnade Zoo for months (we need to see the bears. Bears are good for stress relief), and finally settled on Sunday June 24th. Let me know if you feel like coming along, especially if you have a car. It's possible to get there by public transport, but not desirable. The bus from the nearest station is only every 2 hours on a Sunday, and is timed so that you miss it.

Anyway, I'm sorta falling asleep now, so I'll post this and go to bed. G'night :)

Current Mood: tired

US SIM card not all that helpful. Reception in the house is flaky at best. Yesterday it took me a full 3 hours simply to post (a) one message to a web forum giving the people I'm supposed to be meeting up with my address & US phone number, & (b) one LJ private message with the same details. ARGH!

I have no idea whether any of these meetings are actually going to happen, as I haven't heard back from anyone yet.

Also, this SIM card is locked down somehow so I can't use my phone as a WiFi hotspot for my computer, like I do at home when away from a modem. So it's tiny screen phone internet only.

And just to add insult to injury, T-mobile, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to put a "Web Guard" on my phone. This blocks access to LiveJournal & deadjournal, but not *actual* dubious content - I had no trouble viewing the NSFW webcomic Menage à 3!

Currently I am sitting in the sun outside the Walmart on the 192 at W Vine St and Oren Brown Road (feel free to look it up on Google Maps if you want to stalk me in the next half hour). I got so "claustrophobic" in the house that I had to get out, even though it meant trundelling along the grass verges of main roads. Claustrophobia isn't really the right term because that's a fear of open spaces, and there's nothing BUT open space here. But I felt totally trapped and panicky in a place where you need a car to get anywhere.

It's bloody weird here. Apparently Floridians don't believe in pavements/sidewalks. They exist, but only in actual housing estates. You go along the pavement & suddenly it vanishes, to be replaced with a naked grass verge. WTF? This happens over and over again down the length of a road. I have no fucking idea why, because the weather is so glorious here that walking or cycling in the outdoors seems a way better option than being stuck in a metal box, but go figure.I am also having severe environmental rage, all the time.

They don't recycle here. At all! EVERYTHING goes into the normal dustbin for landfill. ARGH! What a waste! Just add all the overpackaging issues (e.g. tons of disposable plastic bags, handed out like sweetie, even for things like 1 gallon drinks bottles WITH THEIR OWN HANDLE), and you can see why it's making me angry.

Anyway, going to try unbarring my phone again now. Hopefully will be able to read LJ again soon.

Edit, 22:06 Couldn't get my phone unbarred since T-Mobile's system was "being upgraded". However, I am now in HOOTERS of all places, using their free internet :D

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Current Mood: stressed
Current Location: Orlando, FL, 32836

I just added someone to my friends list, and I noticed a brand new (to me) option in the add friend page:

Read entries by tags

[info]your friend's name uses N tag(s). All entries can be read by default or you can personalize your feed to include/exclude posts tagged with specific words or phrases.

How long's that been there? Sounds incredibly useful, as long as your friend is good about tagging (and doesn't overuse certain tags).

Oh yes - it's 7.06 am, I'm at BiCon, and I haven't managed to get to sleep yet. HELLO MY LOVELY BODY CLOCK! I kinda want to get to a workshop at 11.30am, but I don't honestly think that's going to happen.

Current Mood: tired

How do I add someone from Dreamwidth as a livejournal friend? Is the FAQ about OpenID still accurate? I thought it was now possible to add someone as Username@LivejournalCloneSite, rather than as ext_number.

Current Mood: curious

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 13.

This suggests that your writing style is conventional (to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).
Your blog has 20 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by verbosity (writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 53% male and 47% female (for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle.
Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.
Find out what your blogging style is like!

Most of this analysis falls into the category of "Well, duh". It's my livejournal, of course I write about myself. (I wonder if the Blogalyser recognises <lj user=blah> as writing about my social circle?). I write less about the world in general than I'd like to, but spoons often do not exist. As for my verbosity, well :P~

The male/female analysis based on key words is hilarious, though. Apparently, "the" and "a" are masculine keywords, whereas "and" is feminine. Uh...

Current Mood: amused

I have come to the conclusion that my friends (or at least, the subset who read my livejournal) are just too intelligent. Every time I post something which I think is profound, I expect to get replies along the lines of "Wow, that's really interesting!". Instead, I get replies that are more like "Mmm, okay, but have you thought of...?". So I clearly need to cultivate a new set of friends who are less bright :P :D

Current Mood: not altogether serious

I am about a trillion years behind on livejournal. Don't think I've been reading it properly since the middle of May. We're now at the start of July and the oldest stuff on my friends page is from June 25th or so. Therefore, if anything important, interesting or noteworthy has happened to you recently, please leave me a message/link to your post!

I hope that more spoons will exist soon :X

I am so far behind with both livejournal and life that I haven't even read the entries on the last page of my default view (?skip=680). I'm really only reading the journals of partners plus some specific other friends. If anything important or interesting has happened to you, or if you've written any long meaningful entries that you'd like me to read, please leave a message in the screened comments below. Or, y'know, even if you don't have anything you want me to read but just want to say hi :)

Current Mood: busy

I really "should" get caught up on livejournal. The list of posts I was intending to make but have not yet got round to has entered double figures.
* Review of the "new" Freezepop album - which has "only" been out since September.
* Review of the Wildhearts & Wolfsbane in December.
* Stuff about my trip to Las Vegas - with photos. (Which need to be cropped/edited & uploaded also.)
* Review of alt.polycon panels.
* Update on various family things (x 2).
* The current state of my mental health and/or why cognitive behavioural therapy rocks.
* Books read so far this year.
* The rest of those reviews of the various science fiction & fantasy short story compilations.
* Update on some super sekrit news (which requires that spoons are acquired so that it exists to tell you about).
* Probably some other stuff that I've forgotten.

Blah. I desperately need more hours in my life when I'm not working.

Also I am trying to resist the urge to say that I'm not ill when the evidence suggests that I am suffering from moderate fatigue (the kind where you have to sleep a lot, can't walk well and do things more slowly due to lack of brain; as opposed to the kind where you're completely bedbound) and have reasonably bad allergies at the moment. What I should say instead is that I'm not ill with anything external. Saying that I'm not ill a) trivialises my lack of spoons, b) makes me feel that I should be capable of doing more with my days than I actually am and c) is therefore dangerous to my long-term health. Because if I'm exhausted and have no freaking spoons, the last thing I need to be doing is telling myself that I'm Not Ill so that I get to beat myself up for being "crap" and "lazy". Now I just need to believe that. ( More stuff, sounds like moaning. )

Current Mood: drained

I still hate the 150 limit on interests. Every time I want to change my profile I run up against that, and have to drop a few more things. *sigh*

Interests removed from lj profile:
Bemani games, digital cameras, Konami, rainbows, Skippy peanut butter. I don't care about any of those enough to add them to my interest overflow extension page though.

Interests added to lj profile:
cognitive behavioural therapy, innocent smoothies, Okami, Peanut Butter & Co (I am ridiculously addicted to White Chocolate Wonderful), Questionable Content.

The next thing to go *might* be Laurell K. Hamilton, as I can't stand the way the Anita Blake series has become a massive sex-fest. I thought about removing mobile phones, as I'm not the world's most uber-geeky mobile user, but the fact is they remain a VERY important part of my life, and I'd find it hard to exist without one.

Today, this userpic of

epi_lj's got replaced on my computer with this userpic of

taimatsu's. Cue brain breakage, as both of those are userpics that I very closely associate with the person concerned, and having an If turn into a Lucy was... umm. Also they kept posting either side of each other, causing massive confusion.

Forced reloads of my friends page did nothing - but going specifically to the link of If's userpic and forcing a reload of that worked. Phew.

Meant to post this a few weeks ago, but life has been too ergh to allow it. Just to let you know the girlfriend formerly known by her real name is now called

otterylexa. I'm not sure I can be bothered to go back through every single livejournal entry I've ever made to change her username, but you never know... one of these millennia I need to tag all my old posts (4 years worth of 'em).

Waaah! It's the end of BiCon!! Everyone in my flat has either gone home or is at a party somewhere else. There's a communal party outside but it's TOO COLD. And both my girlies are in bed elsewhere so I'm on my own, having post-BiCon comedown even though I haven't left yet! Tomorrow, we have to be up & out of the accommodation at the completely unreasonable hour of 10am :X

Wi-fi turned out to be a lie, and I didn't realise my laptop could do a wired connection (!), so this is the first time I've been online from my computer at the con. So I haven't bothered writing anything yet :P A full writeup of BiCon will follow much, much later (I'll add it to the queue after my alt.polycon report & New York travel log & soc.biter wedding & Canadian travel reports... oh, and there's also some Paris & Canada photos to upload, and last year's Manchester BiFest report that's half-written on the computer if I ever have time. (!!)), but here are some random comments to amuse you until then:

Conversation between me &

mhw a few minutes ago:
Kay: I'm not saying "I don't want to go home" this year, I'm saying "I don't want it to be over". I do want to go home.
h-l: I want to go home to my own bed, but still be at BiCon.
Kay: Wahoo, BiCon in h-l's bed!

Comment made by

softfruit earlier this evening: "Honestly, some people - expecting people at BiCon to be wearing knickers!"

Random people who met me at BiCon: please note, my friends list adding policy is here (brief version: feel free to add me without asking, but I will only add you back if I know you well enough to trust because my livejournal "friends" list == my trusted people list, not my reading list. I only read about 1/3 of the journals on my list and I read several others that aren't on my list. I may well read your journal if you add me even if I don't add you back. I do really need to have a livejournal dead-journal prune, but that should wait until I'm home again.)

Current Mood: sleepy

Also, just for your information, it is the early morning of 20th July (as my friend

stellarwind says, "latearly"), and I am reading livejournal entries from 9th July and congratulating myself on how caught-up I am. If anything time-critical is happening (e.g. if any London-based or visiting London friends want to get together in the next couple of weeks), commenting here would be a good idea.

Interesting things that people have said recently:
From

kightp in a friends-locked post on

mactavish's journal:

I tend to be in "relationships" with people *before* I date them, since I count friendship as a relationship of equal and sometimes greater value to romance.
...
I think it's different for people who put off having lives of their own until they're involved in Serious Relationships. I can remember doing that when I was very young, but the memories come with a sort of vague puzzlement at why I did things that way, and no surprise at all that it didn't work out.

Now, though, I've got this great big life full of friends and joys and obligations, and I don't think it would be fair to even consider a serious relationship with someone new until they'd been pretty well exposed to all the stuff that makes me me, and shown that they were not just OK with it, but actively attracted to it. (The same holds true in reverse: I don't think I could get serious about anyone whose nooks and crannies I hadn't already explored and found comfortable).

From

papersky: Have you ever noticed, nobody ever says books have too many heterosexual people in them?

From

skibbley: So, if we were to give everyone in the country a basic amount of money to live on from general taxation and abolish unemployment benefits and associated agencies?

From

firecat: Speak well of your body pledge & commentary. I like Stef's commentary and the amended pledge better.

Some silliness:
"Translation" of a Rammstein song. With Fraggles. By

transversecity.

The Zombie Food Pyramid. By

moosl. I want this on a t-shirt. Hell, everyone wants this on a t-shirt!

Links, that you may have seen other people posting in the last 2 weeks :P :
We Have No Comment About The Name Of This Box Of Walmart Fireworks

News: A possible squid/octopus hybrid has been found?

Earth Erotica Photography by Heather Firth. Technically work-safe photographs of... rocks, and landscapes, and trees... that look like interesting parts of people. Really rather interesting.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Just to let you know, I have been posting to livejournal but not actually reading. This is because I've been spending an awful lot of time on buses and trains, which is good for tapping entries into my Windows Mobile Device (TM), but not for reading lj, as I still haven't found a style that is usable on the tiny screen. I think I'm about three weeks behind, and I can't see me catching up anytime soon. Also haven't read email in about five weeks. So if there is anything you want me to know (or even if you just want to say hi), comment with a message or a link to journal entries you think I should read. Comments screened for now, will be unscreened if innocuous.

Insane busyness will continue until Wednesday 6th June - after that less insane busyness will continue until Monday 25th June, then I have several weeks of blissful boredom (I hope). Looking forward to the end of June, except that some of my horrible students are still in no fit state to be taking an exam in two weeks, so it feels unfair to them to wish the next couple of weeks away. And as well as work-for-money we have work to do on our house and the flat we used to live in and argh. Sleep, it is for ze weak.

Current Mood: rushed

Hooray! I'm only 60 entries behind with livejournal. Have caught up on "business" email too, and only have "pleasure" to deal with. Yay!

To do tomorrow: Get up early enough to buy cow milk, soya ice cream & innocent strawberry-nana smoothie and pay two cheques into the bank before work, which requires me to be in Malden Manor (a place ~45 minutes away with the traffic at that time of day) by 3.30pm. This means going into town by 2pm at the absolute latest, because while I can pay the cheques into the bank in New Malden, I can't buy ice cream or fresh smoothie there and carry it around all day. The cow milk is optional; enough places sell cow milk after 6pm that it's not a problem, whereas almost nowhere sells soya ice cream even before 6pm. I also have to do 3 invoices, though I doubt I'll get any of them done before work, so I need to make sure I rest on the bus so I'm not completely knackered come the evening.

This is one of these livejournal entries that should spontaneously combust a day after it's no longer useful. In practice, I don't delete entries ever, although a handful of more public entries have been made private because of Things and Stuff. I suppose it is vaguely possible that I might have this exact same things-to-do list in the future, but I'm not convinced...

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helen-louise's journal

Entries tagged with livejournal meta

Too Many Interests Time Again

I shall never understand LiveJournal...

For gods' sake!

Too much comment spam.

Birthday and BiFest and Zoo and Work.

Apparently I go nuts without internet when suffering severe culture shock.

Since when has this been an option?

Quick lj friendslist question.

and while we were talking about gender...

Observation

eeep

sooooo behind

Current state of the h-l

changed my lj profile, again

Things that are mildly alarming.

A Note About Partners

randomness from the last night of BiCon 2007

Not A Life Update & Links

zzzz

mainly for my benefit