life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

The council has put up Christmas lights. Gah.
I passed a woman in the street today selling little bunches of white heather. I didn't know anyone still did that nowadays.
So the American election is over. It always seems weird to me to have only two parties so if you don't like one there's only one alternative. Perhaps they need a Monster Raving Loony Party? In Northern Ireland we have 9 or 10 parties that run, though most of them are raving loonies. My voting doesn't have any effect on who's in power at Westminster, so it's mostly concentrated on Not Sinn Fein Or The Other Lot.

Productive things I have done since I came home at 6:

Tidied bedroom, made bed
Hoovered upstairs.
Did 10 minutes on rowing machine

Gakked from shezan



That would be because I don't have a high school diploma; I have A-levels. And it was a grammar school I went to, as well.

This Friday I have a training thing. I remember back in the summer when Carol told me about it, saying to myself, Well, I'll probably not be here then. Huh.

Sometimes I feel as if I'm on hold. Whenever I get a permanent job/house /whatever, then I'll start to live my life! But on the other hand I'm always waiting eagerly for things that have a set time limit: lunchtime, bedtime, the nest episode of a series I like, the DVD, a new novel. And I wish away those chunks of time in between. So what part of my life do I really feel like I'm living?

My uncle, aunt and cousins form england visited us last night, so I forgot to watch the repeat of Torchwood. Oh, well, it's not like I need another fandom. I read some spoilers, though: ( Spoilers )

The 'things I do not want to happen in Book #7' meme, gakked from everyone:

1. Dead Harry. We've spent six years of his time and...what...nine of ours? with this boy. I want to think of him happy and alive after all he's gone through.

2. Dead Ginny, Ron or Hermione. I don't want to see Harry have to go through that.

3. Voldemort defeated by the power of luuuurrrve. I didn't like it when the Harmaniacs* came up with the theory, and I still don't like it with added Ginny.

4. Resurrected!Everyone. I could buy the return of Dumbledore, as his demise whiffed vaguely of cod, but not James/Lily/Sirius.

5. Dead Remus or dead Tonks. Hasn't the poor guy suffered enough?

6. Evil!Snape. I'm a soft touch. Or, at least, I don't want it to be, 'He was working for Voldemort all along, fooled everyone!' It's too facile.

.....

7-111. Dead!characters, apart from Voldemort and co.

This is a problem with an open-canon fandom. You get attatched to these characters and you don't know what's going to happen to them. Especially in TV series, because then there's the actor's plans as well as those of the writer(s). I don't know how anyone can get fannish for soap operas or hospital dramas, where the characters and relationships are like revolving doors—and that's all the story is about—and your favourite character's actor decides, 'ok, I've had it with pretending to be an East End barmaid 5 days a week'. At least with my skiffy series there is a plot as well. Mostly.
Closed canons: Antonia Forest's novels, Hornblower books, Aubrey/Maturin books, probably several other historical novels. Admittedly, a lot of these canons are only closed because the pen was pried away from the author's cold, dead fingers, but I don't fan anything that you could point to and say it was incomplete.
Confusing canons: Star Wars. I came in during the PT. I always where Anakin was going, just not how he got there. The only major character whose fate was in doubt was Padmé, and I wasn't pleased with what it eventually turned out to be.
Open canons I have fanned: Harry Potter, BSG, PotC, the Vorkosigan novels, Doctor Who (Sort of. Yes, companions die or leave and the Doctor regenerates. It's still always the Doctor and his Companion(s) in the TARDIS with the lead piping week after week after week.
In all of these the authors have been threatening character deaths and other horrors, and I've been going...'no..no...no....don't kill my babies...don't kill my 'ship'....and occasionally dreaming that all the worst has happened in my currently predominant fandom.

* as opposed to the sane H/Hr shippers

I don't know if this was a joke on the part of the editors or not, but I was flipping through SFX magazine and I saw a little gossip bubble saying that Daniel Radcliffe was eager to play Ponder Stibbons in Hogfather. He would look good for it if he were a little chubbier (uses Ponder icon for comparison), but it's not a role to break out of being typecast as a bespectacled student wizard.

The Manage Profile Page now has a series of ticky boxes to pick interests. Yuk. And brad doesn't like it either*.

Aren't those interests overused already without encouraging people to add them? It's practically impossible to search by them because so many users have I've unclicked 'computers', changed 'writing' to 'writing fiction' and 'history' to 'European history', but what about 'books' and 'reading'?

I've made a tag called 'livejournal whinging', because I seem to be doing that a lot lately. I love LJ, and I definitely don't complain about everything; I like the nav strip and the notification system is great. It's just all this ad stuff I don't like. I wouldn't mind seeing a 'this feature is sponsered by' on the page for the SMS, when it arrives, and I'm permanent, so I'm not affected by plus people's ads, but the sponsored comm left a bad taste in my mouth.

On the bright side, the 404 page is fun. Make sure to refresh it a few times! My favourite is the 'All your base are belong to Frank' one.


* Link by liadnan

Over on lj_biz, they announced the arrival of more sponsored features, ones that will be visible to paid/perm users; an SMS service and the arrival of sponsored communities. Cue 68 pages, to date, of disgruntled comments. brad does damage control. And so does burr86. And they change the icon and utter soothingly some more. brad continues here.

I'm not concerned about SMS because, like voice posts, it probably won't be available in the UK. I took a look at the first sponsored comm, scienceofsleep. (Note the sponsored comm icon, utterly distinguishable from the normal one if you squint, and unless you happen to be colour-blind).
Its maintainters and members have a suspiciously high proportion of new journals. In typical LJ fashion, the mob have gathered and are calling them on this.

Why on earth did the advertisers not announce who they were up-front, and whatever features (news, exclusive pics, whatever) LJers are supposed to get out of the community? Surely anyone with half a brain could have worked out that making posts in extravagant praise of the film, while pretending be real users, would only put people's backs up? And presumably someone was paid to set up this community.

A day off, huzzah!