anagram of brat

I didn't bother blacking out either of my sites - I get so little traffic to either that it would be about as useful as an OccupyPainfullyLiberalCollegeTown protest around here. But I am watching the internet today with a fair amount of interest.

One thing that's caught my attention is a surprising amount of backlash against Wikipedia. Seriously, go check out the #wtfwikipedia tag. Lots of kids bitching about not being able to get their homework done, and as a friend of mine pointed out, the closer the deadline, the more capital letters and vitriol used.

This amuses me for many reasons. a) you DO have other resources other than wikipedia for research. Pick up a book, maybe. Support your local library. Do an actual google search. It's not the end of the world. b) This SOPA/PIPA issue is waaaaaaay more important than your individual term paper, and if either go through you may lose Wikipedia for more than just today. WHAT WILL YOU DO THEN?! c) Wikipedia is still up in all languages other than English. So if you're not a "THIS IS AMERICA - SPEAK ENGLISH AND ONLY ENGLISH OR GTFO" sort of asshole and have the ability, either through learning at home or through language education, to read in another language, you can still get your shit done.

Sigh. People are dumb, y'all.

Anyway. Call your congresspeople (wikipedia has a little form where you punch in your zip code and it gives you a list), or if you're lazy and don't like the phone, sign the Google petition. Meanwhile I may have to cope with the lack of reddit today by actually getting something productive done. Horror of horrors.

Probably sign #8237492 that I'm getting old (other than someone attending the Super Bowl gathering last night mentioning that they were in 3rd grade the year I graduated high school - wat): I still have the ability to be utterly astounded by technology I use every day. Like the fact that I am currently in a vehicle traveling down an interstate highway and yet connected to and working on a stationary computer in an office in Westfield as if I were sitting in front of that instead.

What the shit is this future shit? When I was your age we needed to make a phone call to use the internet, and it was so slow that downloading things would probably feel like walking to school uphill both ways through a blizzard and a molasses flood. Just. What. Pass me the geritol, sonny, mama needs her hip medicine.

Now if only the outlets on this bus actually worked... XD

ETA: they do on bus #2, yay!

On searching for really specific images:

Chances you will find an image of the Earth, with the sun peeking out from one side and being orbited by a satellite: surprisingly small.

Chances you will find an image of three goats, Hans Landa, some dude in a plush pteredactyl suit and a provocatively posed and alarmingly young-looking schoolgirl: pretty good.


This post brought to you by a fruitless search for stock photography at work.

I need to play Shakespeare's Pants with someone (and by extension, Star Wars Pants). Y'all know that I consider 'pants' to be the third funniest word in the english language; this just makes that better. I has a Riverside Shakespeare, this could be an entertaining evening.

I always forget that after going away for a couple days, especially with the drive there and back, that a day or two later I have one hell of a crohn's attack. The last 24 hours have been fun.

I love summer nights when it gets cool enough to actually warrant a sheet and a blanket.

We watched Penelope the other day at Ladies Night. It was cute, though a little disconcerting seeing Older Octavian from Rome cropping up. Also I've actually started paying attention to Peter Dinklage, considering he's been cast as Tyrion in the Game of Thrones movie. And we luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuve ourselves some Tyrion, yes we do. Incidentally? I do find it rather interesting that two of my ranking favorite literary characters have some form of dwarfism. *sigh* I do need to finish picking up the rest of the Vorkosigan Saga, but I've hit that special point where I'm aware I have to move in 2 months, and maybe I should think about getting rid of stuff rather than acquiring it. Still, now that I'm done with Westeros until GRRM finally delivers book 5, I do need some kind of Miles fix. (As an aside, does anyone else kinda picture Miles as a short version of Ferris Bueller?)

Speaking of movies, I know my flist is already full of wonderfully race/privilege aware folks (yes, there are like five of you for whom that statement will read as extreme sarcasm) but even so, read this post on the upcoming Last Airbender movie. Because, I don't care how cool the trailers look, just no.

Work goes. I have enough to keep me busy when my brain decides to actually work. Which, annoyingly enough, it hasn't much this week. :P Which sucks. Getting paid is nice.

I've had a request to uncut my twitspam. I usually cut them out of respect for the people on my f-list that are either already on twitter or don't really want to read the sometimes copious blather I spit into there, but considering I actually filter out the @replies and the retweets, I don't know. I suppose if y'all don't feel like reading them you can scroll right? I kinda like the tidiness of cutting them... maybe I'll uncut them for July and see how it goes. Might be good incentive for me to stop blathering so much into there in the interests of making those posts shorter. It's not even so much that me tweeting is cutting into my LJ posting, I've found that I've gotten MORE verbose across the board with multiple outlets, lol. Cause you know what, sometimes I have more to say about something than 140 characters.

Speaking of which, I keep meaning to write my own post regarding the alleged death of LJ in the wake of Twitter, Facebook and dreamwidth... I don't really see it happening. I could see its effect in getting new accounts, maybe, but I and most of the people I associate with/follow here have been on LJ since the long ago dark ages of invite codes, and just because we've invested so much of our time and our words and in most cases our money (grrr, speaking of which, my paid account and userpics expired last night, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah) I don't see us leaving (though a lot of you lurk a lot more than you used to). Several of you have gotten DW accounts, sure, but you either crosspost or use each for different things; I've only had a couple of you completely ditch LJ for it, and one of you came back after three months. I made several hardcore friends out of complete random strangers here, which I can't really see happening on Twitter or Facebook because you can't really get to know a person through 140ish character blips, but when you read pages long blather about their dogs, cats, kids, cars, finances, romances, marriages, divorces, deaths, dramas, hobbies, dreams, terrors, fears and plain old ordinary ives every single day... yeah. So I don't know about the reports of LJ's slow demise, but I have a fair amount of confidence that me and mine will still be here until whatever end is rumored to be coming, and really, that's all I care about. I suppose what'll happen is that having an LJ account will become a mark of Old School Internet, kinda like how I used to be incredibly proud of having a seven digit ICQ number and still occasionally am, even though ICQ has gone the way of the dodo. It's kind of a "damn internet kids, get off my lawn" statement. We were here first. We saw it all happen. We remember when Twitter was even more pointless than some people still consider it being. We had to blow on our goddamn Nintendo cartridges to make them work and leave the console on all night if we wanted to save where we were. We are officially the Old Geeks. And you know what? Not a thing wrong with that. :)

It's Wednesday morning. Time to nut up and get on with the business of today.

It's really quite amazing what will have me on the floor howling with laughter some days, especially days like this one where I'm starting to hallucinate my ativan bottle as a big bag of plain M&Ms. Today it's the fact that you can add vuvuzela to any youtube video by clicking the football.

HELLO LADIES. LOOK AT YOUR MAN. NOW BACK TO BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

*dead*

i think this calls for a vuvuzela/World Cup gif party. Post if you've got em.

(hattip to _kyri)

harinezumi and htl_1126 are awesome for two completely different and yet no less helpful reasons. one involved rare dead thing and the other involved a website commission. Both were timely and needed.

Poked at the page of strange haiku some more. Reread a bunch. Some of that shit is hilarious. Even when it's taking shots at me.

spent a lovely evening at extrajoker's, catching up, hanging out and crafting. aersi's getting a birthday present, muuuuhahahaha. Also watched Zombieland, which was full of the ridiculously humorous. aaaaahahahaha twinkies. Must do that again soon. The crafting hangouts, that is. Now that I know how to get to her place without taking three wrong turns.

still wicked amused that I'm dangling my network antenna out my window and picking up a few networks I happen to have keys for. It's like fishing for internet! Boobyhaven should be back online tomorrow though. But it's good not to have to go to bed with email unchecked. Yes, I AM that addict, why do you ask? Also I love this neighborhood.

Wiped out like whoa; might have had something to do with the unexpected awakening at 4am this morning... >:) Gonna post this, go the hell to bed, and fall over comatose for a few hours... good night internet.