(no subject)

I wish I did not feel so isolated. I wish I did not feel like I were withdrawing from the company of the people I cared the most for. The upcoming LJ post limit gives me the claustrophobic shudders.

I wish I did not feel like the people I care most for were withdrawing from me. I wish I did not feel threatened by the prospect of others' happiness that does not involve me.

I wish I were not making my boyfriend feel more lonely.

Bookmark Collector:

http://www.cpginc.com/ -- I may consider working for them, as I spend inordinate amounts of time at the computer in any case.

[12:45 pm]
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/owens/1.htm -- I'm going to read it, it sounds delightful, mctabby linked to it... just not now. Stuff is going on.

http://www.ansereg.com/fellowship_of_the_jewel-smiths.htm -- Have been slowly trying to read the series. Yummy. Too busy now. Come back later.

Quiz Receptacle

( Evidently I'm conservative. Not a surprise to me. )

Morning

Was dreaming about something or other. Woke up to the dentist's receptionist calling about my Monday morning (8 am) appointment. Yep, all is good in the world, but for people pissing and moaning, and for the goddamn congestion. By the sneezes, I think it may be allergies.

I should clean up. I'm to be watching Little Fayoumis in the afternoon, which will require some of the good ol' being awake.

Yep, whatever it is that I'm allergic to has just come into bloom. <insert cussing here> votania bets that it's the oleander. Bah, I say.

Did some flurry/scurry in the living room, in preparation for the big noisy carpet-scrubber, which is hopefully to show up today. There will also be a scrubby invasion of votania's room, which will misplease Nephew most mightily with the whole 'don't walk all over the wet floor' bit. Actually, it would be more convenient were they to show next week, as he'll be, barring catastrophe, un-grounded from movies then, and those are better for keeping him settled in one flippin' place for any given length of time. He's a six-year-old boy, and those creatures are naturally all over.

Nose is much clearer. Allergy meds work for me. I am grateful.

I have been working on some more usericons for myself: namely, that blue-haired character. She doesn't look too much like me IRL, but hey, I can look different if I were anime. I'm thinking that it may eventually wind up as a set of mood icons.

Excessive? Kiss my filter. (Recursive and rambling post about what LJ means to me, and why I use it)

As doubtless everyone on my friend-of list knows, I'm a high-volume poster. I post links, thoughts, randomness, the occasional bit of wisdom or history.

I write posts for myself. I don't write them for you. I leave them public because some of you like to read them, and I don't care to make them friends-only if I don't have problems with leaving that part of my life in public. I'm not writing this journal for everybody who reads it; I write it for myself. The keeping-in-touch-with-friends is merely a bonus. Keeping a journal is easier this way. I like it.

I write this much because I write. If I have a blankbook closer to hand, I write in that. Before the days of LJ, I wrote long, complex letters to friends, and long, complex journal entries on computer. I had been converting my old paper journals to computer files, to better organize them. I like the convenience of being able to open up a single day and see what had been going on. I use LJ to track my moods, my habits. I am a developer of the mind. If something isn't working for me, I try to change it. I keep track of the changes I make, on paper, then revisit them and see how it's been doing. Did the patch take? Has it been doing good things? Are there any interesting intersections? Cherryh's azi have to keep track of that mostly in their heads. I get paper, and links. I am lucky.

Surely there are other ways I could do this. I could keep it all on my own computer, set up an LJ server of my own. (I will do that, one of these days... probably years from now, but I have every intent of doing so.) I could keep it all in separate text documents. I could bookmark my links in the browser.

I write because writing is my life. I have too much thought to keep it all in my head and stay sane. In the absence of paper, I have been known to write on my arm, or air-type.

Find my entries excessive? Unfriend me. Filter me. Don't read me. I may enjoy reading about your life, but there's no reason you should be reading about mine if my writing style, my posting volume, and so forth, bores you. If you do like it, if you do read me, cool. That's why I leave it in public, so I'll give other people who will benefit by it the joy of sharing my thoughts.

I hate losing touch with friends; I dislike the confusion of writing the same thing over and over to too many different people; I am uneasy with impersonal form letters. LJ as a forum I like: it supplements, augments, the keeping-in-touch thing. I write my LJ as I would a letter to myself, leaving the bits that can be shown in public available, and the things I need to keep private, to myself. LJ does not replace, say, letters to my mother. I write her regularly, and post the letters to myself on private, because I always think of things to say to her that I wouldn't think of to say to myself, but I know I should.

Am I a loser? What a silly question. My life is writing, and computers, and things that are interesting to me. I obtain value from writing about what's going on with me; I like sorting out my thoughts by using the written word. If someone considers sports, or a high level of face-to-face socializing of high value, then my experiences are fairly well worthless to them. Again, why are they reading? Most likely they're not.

Note the huge number of online quizzes in my journal. Oh yeah. I have about ten of those puppies a day. They sure tell a lot about my personality. Frankly, they have for the most part ceased to amuse me. I still find it interesting to go back through my old entries and find the days when I did think that quizzes, lots of them, were fun, and figure out why I thought they were so fun. Matching up the questions to the answers, to figure out what was in the quiz creator's mind, is interesting. Comparing results with friends is amusing. Some of the quizzes are hilarious, if you're in the right mood. The recent LotR engrish subtitle quiz was hysterical. Years from now, I'm going to read that entry, and either wonder why the hell I thought it was so funny then, when I don't now, or laugh my ass off, because it's still funny, and be reassured that while much of me has inevitably changed, the important bits have been continued.

My mind is a populous place. I reinvent myself regularly, and it helps me to notice mental trends, things that do work, things that need to be discarded soonest, see when I'm happy, see when I'm sad, see what makes me think about myself... Several months ago, I had an interesting few days. At the worst point, I was curled up on the living room floor, unwilling or unable to sit upright, breathing ragged with panic, crying, biting my arms hard enough to leave bruises. After coming out of that enough to be coherent, I traced the mood back over several days to the root, and was able to fix it. Some weeks later, I had another bad night. I got suspicious, and jumped back a month. Yep: PMS. Bad PMS. Bitchy Witchy Week hit within the next few days, and I was all right. If I didn't write to myself, I'd be a mess. I don't seem to have a very good knack of internal communication without the written word as a medium...

I like the linkability. I'm very self-referential. I tell myself, "Hey, remember what I said then? Well, this is what I think about it now." I leave comments on private entries, because there are things I think of to say after the fact that would be inappropriate to put in as an edit, and somewhat useless as a separate entry unlinked to the original, but is necessary commentary.

I don't use <lj-cut> as often as I might. This is for my own ease of reading when looking at the archives. If it's fluff that I might as well skip over, I'll go ahead and cut it. If it's something that I think I'll derive benefit from reading the whole thing, I leave it uncut, or at least leave the important bits out of the cut. I will occasionally go back into my journal and edit in cut tags to avoid re-living ancient drama.

I post a lot. I am not a script kiddie attacking LJ with a thousand content-free posts for the sheer malice of it, blocking which was the intent of the post limiting. Yes, I have a life. It's not your life. If I hadn't a life, I'd have nothing to write about. Which I do. A lot.

Oooh, pretty:

In Whisky Veritas, Luthien

Phone

Called Darkside. He was, this time, waiting for an important phone call. This has become something of a refrain. I said a few things briefly and prepared to sign off. He halted this, and elaborated that they said they'd call back in fifteen minutes. It had been an hour. He could afford to spend a little time on the phone with me.

We chatted for thirteen minutes about this, that, and the other. It was nice. I don't think he's had someone to decompress to in a while. Up early Saturday morning, I will be. Continued the joke about him pouring soda down my shirt, this time with telekinesis, or his lack of telekinesis skills, as he never managed it. He could stand to answer my e-mails once in a while...

I'm glad he likes at least a few things that I can stand to watch. I have a sneaking fondness for Home Improvement. Cussing as part of comedy is not his bag; I can understand this. Shared with him the concept of that guy, and Counterstrike, and the resulting little song. That amused him. Will probably play it for him sometime when he comes over.

It was nice hearing his voice, and hearing that he wants to talk to me when I call.

The major point of my rant

I saw many people in the comments of the News post saying that 50 entries per day for anybody was way too many; even 20 was way too many. As one of the high-volume users, I feel crowded with a limit of 20, considering as I go over that regularly. A limit of 50 leaves me plenty of space for all the updates my tiny little mind desires.

The post limits were originally conceived as a way to block lusers with scripts from attacking LJ by posting a hell of a bunch. There are better ways that Brad could have done this; from something I read elsewhere, evidently his communication with the majority of the support staff is less than optimal. [Edit: When I say "better ways", I mean the "not springing this on us" and the "talking to the other people first" better ways.]

Either this will get worked out, or people will leave.

The one thing I am sick of hearing about is people thinking it will reduce load on the servers to delete inactive journals. It will increase storage space, yes, but what we're talking about is activity causing the problems. The inactive journals are probably some of LJ's best-behaved journals: not posting a gazillion quizzes, not refreshing their friends list every two seconds, and especially not mounting script attacks on LJ.

Usage Bitch

Let me introduce you to one of my favorite words. Two, in fact.

The first one is an imported word. French. In fact, it's not even quite imported to English yet; it hasn't been used enough. Adieu. It means, "Goodbye". "Farewell". It is what you say when you are leaving and waving at someone else, or what they say to you. Used: "I bid you adieu." Show's over. Night-night. Time to leave. Breaking it down at Merriam-Webster, we find that the component words include Deity, so one might resonably translate it to mean "Go with God."

The second one dates back to the 14th Century CE, and is English. This sucker's old. Ado. As in, Much Ado About Nothing. It means "1 : fussy bustling excitement : TO-DO; 2 : time-wasting bother over trivial details -- 'wrote the paper without further ado'; 3 : TROUBLE, DIFFICULTY." There was much ado when the water started pouring out of the A/C.


These words are not the same. They are pronounced the same, but they are not spelled the same. They do not mean the same thing. Do not confuse them. You will look silly, and I will know the difference.

Looks like my results have changed...

( Quizzy! )

Snape's List

Things that Professor Snape is no longer allowed to do at Hogwarts:
By excessivelyperky

Dedicated to the creator of www.skippyslist.com

And thanks to Scott Jamison for his assistance

1. Not allowed to sing "Black Powder and Alcohol" to the students. Especially not allowed to substitute ingredients that will result in napalm and methamphetamine instead.
2. Crucifying toads. Bad idea.
3. Not allowed to collect blood and/or hair samples from students or staff for potion-making. This includes Mrs. Norris.
4. Not allowed to train Hagrid's pets into biting Gryffindors.
5. May not call any members of the Ministry of Magic untrustworthy, corrupt slime. Not even Fudge. Ok, especially not Fudge.
6. Even if I still have the receipt for the last bribe I gave him from Lucius.
7. Must never tease Trelawney about what she puts in her incense.
8. May not sell any Weasley into slavery.
9. Gozer does not live in my supply cabinet. You'd be surprised what does, though.
10. The Forbidden Forest is not full of yummy candy, and it is wrong to tell first-years that it is.
11. I cannot trade McGonagall to the Death-Eaters for McNair, Avery, and a player to be named later.
12. "Poppy" is Madam Pomfrey's nickname, and not what she dispenses.
13. May not conduct psychological experiments on staff members or students.
14. I should not confess to crimes that took place before I was born.
15. While under Veritaserum.
16. 'To conquer the earth with an army of flying monkeys" is a bad long-term goal to give Lord Voldemort.
17. Rodents are not entitled to burial with full military honors, even if they are "casualties of war". Not even Pettigrew.
18. Not allowed to add 'In accordance with the prophesy' to the end of answers I give to a question Dumbledore asks me. Only Trelawney gets to do that.
19. Not allowed to purchase anyone's soul on school time.
20. Must wash my hair even if it tampers with my 'Sampson like powers'.
21. Must not taunt the Hufflepuffs.
22. Not allowed to appeal to mankind's baser instincts in Death-Eater recruiting posters. God only knows why.
23. Not allowed to put up Death-Eater recruiting posters on school property, not even in the Slytherin Common Room.
24. May not make posters depicting the leadership failings of my chain(s) of command. Neither Dumbledore nor Voldemort have any sense of humor.
25. It is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, no longer applies to Professor Snape.
26. There are no evil clowns living under my bed.
27. Except Peeves.
28. Nerve gas is not funny, not even at a Dark Revel.
29. Must not tell any Death-Eater that I am smarter than they are, especially if it's true.
30. May not hold sky-clad rituals in the Great Hall, no matter how much ore convenient it is than the actual sky.
31. Visiting Irish wizards are not after 'Me frosted lucky charms'.
32. Potions Class should not end in tragedy.
33. I may not produce or perform in "Hogwarts: The Full Monty". Nor may I encourage any student or staff to do so.
34. Not even Madam Hooch.
35. May not use Harry Potter as a body shield if Voldemort invades the school.
36. May no longer decorate the Great Hall for any function.
37. May not give Professor Sprout any plant named "Audrey".
38. May not feed Longbottom to "Audrey".
39. May not bring Moaning Myrtle as my date to the Yule Ball.
40. May not put banned substances on the Gryffindor Quidditch brooms just before a match (see attached list).
41. May not encourage Fred or George Weasley to boobytrap the Sorting Hat.
42. May not bring Longbottom to any Death-Eater function in the hopes he will 'fix' Voldemort's latest potion.
43. Even if the resulting explosion will leave a smoking crater a quarter-mile in diameter, thus resolving at least two of my major problems.
44. May not taunt Lupin at Christmas time by singing "Silver Bells", repeatedly.
45. Or send Sirius Black a flea collar in Extra Large. Though he could use it. "Dances with wolves, sleeps with fleas".
46. When asked to give a few words at a ceremony or staff meeting, 'Romper Bomper Stomper Boo' is probably not appropriate.

Besides, that's Dumbledore's job.