Enthusiastick Journal

Belatedly stolen form onceupon.

RULES:

• Pick your birth month.


• Strike out anything that doesn't apply to you.


• Bold (or italicize) the five-ten that best apply to you.


• Copy to your own journal, with all twelve months under a lj-cut.

MARCH: Attractive personality. Sexy. Affectionate. Shy and reserved. Secretive. Naturally honest, generous and sympathetic. Loves peace and serenity. Sensitive to others. Loves to serve others. Easily angered. Trustworthy. Appreciative and returns kindness. Observant and assesses others. Revengeful. Loves to dream and fantasize. Loves travelling. Loves attention. Hasty decisions in choosing partners. Loves home decors. Musically talented. Loves special things. Moody.

( Other months under the cut... )

sweetafton23 and miss_cris did it first.

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon.


2. one song blasting on the speakers.


3. one famous person to fight alongside you.

* Weapon can be real or fictional; you may assume endless ammo if applicable. Person can be real or fictional.

Impulse decisions, go!

1. A nagamaki


2. "No World For Tomorrow" by Coheed & Cambria


3. Faith

So apparently SUP (the Russian company that recently acquired this site from Six Apart) has disabled the creation of ad-free Basic Accounts on LiveJournal. So it's been reported, anyway -- my understanding is that they tried to slip the change in under the radar, buried in obscure language in an announcement, but their cagey users found them out. They also noticed some subtle censorship taking place in the Most Popular Interests list, and now the hardcore LJ kids are up in arms.

I could get riled up about this, about the fundamental lack of understanding of the user base being displayed, but really, why bother? The site is a business, and they are trying to run it like one. And they're doing it in a shady and asinine way, and if they piss off their user/customers enough, they'll lose money. That's a pretty strong feedback loop, a pretty sharp learning curve, so here's hoping they'll learn.

But I'm honestly not sure how much I care anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a die-hard. I'll be here until the bitter end. I've been on LJ for over 6 years, and I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. My friends page is still an important stop in my daily browsing, and I expect it to remain as such for the foreseeable future. If nothing else, it's a convenient aggregator for RSS feeds from elsewhere (I kid, I kid.)

Still, this flub on SUP's part makes a pretty convenient clarion call for the beginning of the end. It will take a while, but sooner or later this too shall fall into obscurity (and go dead, entombed in distant servers, &c.) And it will just be another cultural phenomenon that exploded and changed the way human beings communicate and went mainstream and, in the end, was displaced by something newer and smarter.

Oh, you thought I was talking about LiveJournal? Oh, no. No, I was talking about blogs. In general.

But I digress.

In a conveniently related announcement, I have started moving some of my blog-like content elsewhere (this is in addition to the Twitter account I've had for a while now.) Redoing my tags made me realize how much link-dumping I was doing here, in place of actual posts, so now I have a Tumblelog (by Tumblr), and I highly recommend you check it out.

I've also started putting a bunch of my really pretentious indie gaming musings on an entirely separate blog (syndicated here: enthusiastick.) I knew not all of my LJ friends would be interested in reading that stuff, and a lot of my other friends in that circle have WordPress blogs. I could have set up a custom friends filter, but as I said, why bother? I was moving webspaces anyway, so the timing just seemed right.

And, as it turned out, it was.

Maybe I'm just an internet fogey, but it seems to me that, as a means of communication, Instant Messaging seems to be dying off. It certainly is in my social circle. I have something like 100 AIM buddies. Fewer than half of these regularly sign in and spend any amount of time online. And of those, I only actually communicate with a handful. The rest are legacy buddies -- people I used to know. Once upon a time I was obsessed with keeping track of their away messages and AIM profiles. But that art form also seems to be in decline, and so my interest in it continues to wane.

So -- again, within the limited sample of my own social circle -- AIM is dying off. Where does that leave me? I'm intrigued by mini-blog utilities like Twitter, but they hardly seem like a replacement. That's comparing apples to oranges. I do a fair bit of text messaging these days (SMS) but that only works if I already have your phone number. A lot of folks seem to like Skype, but I've never gotten to into it. The only other instant messaging service I'm actually using is Google Talk, which really only works for people willing to get Gmail accounts (now, admittedly, I think everyone should go ahead and get a Gmail account, but that's another technology rant entirely.)

Recently I was having a conversation with my far-more tech-smart friend locke61dv about all this, and he pointed out that Google Talk is really just using an implementation of the Jabber protocols. It isn't anything new or clever; its an open and free alternative, specifically designed to compete against more commercial IM services like AIM. Its gimmick lies in the fact that, as soon as you log into Gmail for the first time, there's a little widget available to let you Jabber away -- a widget that dynamically updates with your contact list, thus putting you rapidly into touch with all the people you e-mail (i.e. the people with whom you might wish to chat.)

You know who else did a whole-cloth implementation of the Jabber protocols? LiveJournal.

They did it without the nifty little web-based widget, of course, which is probably why it never caught on. But the fact that it never caught on blows my mind a little. After a certain threshold, I stopped using the little Google Talk widget, in favor of downloading a client. But I also don't use the AIM client anymore, because at this point (by definition) I have multiple instant-messaging accounts. So there's utility to having all of those things rolled into one application. That's how most of my internet-savvy friends tend to roll, as of late. On my work laptop I'm using Pidgin. On my home laptop I'm using Adium. Which means that both computers could theoretically have my LJ Talk account logged in whenever I'm Instant Messaging.

And you know what? I'm going to go ahead and do that. Because there are a lot of people out there with whom I'd like to IM, if they're still actually doing that. But I'm not going to cling to the dying wreck that is AIM. And I'm not going to wait for all of you to get Gmail accounts. If you're reading this, by definition, there's a decent chance you already have a livejournal account. Which means you already have an LJ Talk account, even if you don't know it. So if you were to go ahead and set it up on whatever IM client you use, then your buddy list would automatically be populated with all your mutual friends on LJ (including, potentially, me.)

And if enough of us do that, the thing might actually become useful. And I could stop staring at the AIM screennames of people I haven't talked to since high school, and actually start chatting with people I care about.

I started to feel like I was coming down with something Tuesday evening. Woke up Wednesday morning with a full-blown cold and have been feeling crappy ever since. I mega-loathe being sick.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, and this hardly counts as a post. But loopygirl is entirely correct, Friday is for memes.

The 4 Things Meme

4 jobs I have had:

• file clerk
• deli slicer
• guest relations at a children's museum
• quality assurance

4 movies I love to watch over and over:

• garden state
• love actually
• shawshank redemption
• super troopers

4 places I have lived:

• west hartford, ct
• evanston, il
• allston, ma
• cambridge, ma

4 TV shows I enjoy watching:

• avatar: the last airbender
• doctor who
• heroes
• pushing daisies

4 places I have been:

• berlin, germany
• edinburgh, scotland
• london, england
• st. john, us virgin islands

4 websites I visit daily:

• google
• facebook
• livejournal
• wikipedia

4 favorite foods:

• burrito
• chocolate chip cookie
• milkshake, chocolate
• steak

4 places I would rather be:

• b-fest
• cape cod (in the summertime)
• disney world
• larping

SixApart and Livejournal recently changed the way they gather user statistics to a significantly more invasive format (i.e. collecting user surfing histories). You are automatically signed up -- if you don't want to be tracked you will need to opt out. Likewise community moderators may wish to do this for their communities.

Further information and instructions on how to opt out.

Walking around outside in Boston the past couple of days its like watching the polar ice caps melting in miniature. Someone more clever than me is ultimately responsible for that notion. There have been a lot of discussions of the ridiculous storm, and how it layered various different kinds of moisture atop one another and then conveniently froze them all. And someone, I forget precisely who, quipped that they now understood how glaciers formed. And its true; there are these little hunks of ice everywhere that are remarkably resistant to melting. For the past couple of days we've had temperatures well above freezing and a healthy dose of sunshine, and so the little buggers are losing moisture without losing structural integrity, so everything that hasn't been salted or sanded is wet and icy and treacherous underfoot.

Twice in the last month I've made "friends only" posts, and its got me thinking. I don't like making friends-locked posts for the same reason I don't like using lj cuts. I didn't like them before theferrett laid down his guidelines (parts 1 and 2) for a succesful livejournal and forbade them. (And, whether consciously or not, I have used those posts and the ones related to it as a sort of style manual. I am aware of the ways in which I diverge from it.)

Ferrett more or less articulated what I was already thinking. I'm neurotic enough about friends-locked posts that I feel compelled to make public posts pointing to them, because I fear otherwise that they will go unread; people browse their journals without being logged in all the time. But that kind of defeats the point. Its like standing on the rooftops shouting "Look, look, I wrote something I don't want the whole world to read and its right over here!" As a general rule if I don't feel comfortable with the notion of an entry being public then it doesn't belong in my livejournal.

Except of course there are exceptions, because there are exceptions to every rule, and I just happened to run into two of them within the arbitrary period of the last thirty days. Sometimes there are things I want to say that I'd rather not everyone be able to read, for one reason or another. And I'm aware that friends-locked posts are far from secure, so its only things in that grey area that make the cut. It would be OK if other people read them, I'd simply rather they did not.

The whole thing is preposterous, really. There are scores of people in this world who's journals range from mostly to exclusively friends only. I count some of them as actual real-life friends of mine. I don't want my livejournal to be friends only, but if I'm going to make some sort of blog entry every weekday then every so often I'm going to come up with the sort of entry that makes me hesitate. I guess the trouble is that there's no easy litmus test, and that bothers me. Thus far I'm dealing with these things on a case-by-case basis, and I'd much rather be able to say "this post meets criteria XY and Z, and so it must sadly be friends-locked." And until I come up with one, I'm probably going to continue to be antsy about it, because sometimes there's no avoiding that grey area.