life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

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!

It's Dirty Baldy Harry! OotP set pics can be seen here. New Luna pic here.
( I'm going to talk about the pics )

Work is utterly mad. They're talking about bringing people in at the weekend on overtime, an occurrence as rare as flying pigs (the overtime, not the overwork, that is).

Aaaarh! It be 'Talk like a Pirate Day', and our usericons have all changed to: (A user gif with a little eyepatch, for the benefit of those people who can't see it). Now I want to go and see PotC2 again!

I've started using LJ's new notification system. It's pretty good. There was a great kerfuffle when it came out about 'people will be able to see when people have commented on public posts!', which I think rather silly. If you post in public, it's out there for people to read. For the record, anyone can track whatever they like on my journal.

My mother heard an article on the radio about blogging. Suddenly this LiveJournal has become more respectable in her eyes :) Not that she actually reads it (I hope!)

I've given my LJ a new look, all rainbow coloured. I'm not sure I'll stick with this style though, because I miss having my links in the sidebar.

From fernwithy

( Read more... )

Don't know how I got that result, as I was guessing most of the ones that weren't European.

The man put in a new DVD drive (yay!) so now I can install broadband, hopefully. Once me dad comes home to tell me what the password is, and when I work out where to plug in the Ethernet cable.