LJ Idol Presents:

(begin Office Space voice)

I was told there would be cake.

(end Office Space voice)

Edited Date: 2015-03-18 03:02 pm (UTC)

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mac-arthur-park.livejournal.com

Yay, frist!

*grabs a lemon poppyseed muffin*

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::sings::

Someone left my cake out in the rain...
And I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe againnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Sorry. I couldn't help myself

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ryl.livejournal.com

OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

*wall of sound*

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bleodswean.livejournal.com

No more food!!!! Today is my ONLY break in a crazed week-long St. Paddy's celebration with family. I literally have NOT stopped since early Sunday morning. People, food, sights, food, four-wheeling, people, and more food. And it all begins again tomorrow.

I thought I would faint when I saw the 24 hour time limit this week. But as my family are all military, police, fire, and medical...I just channeled some of their moving storytelling....

I want to write something happy soon.

*falls onto couch and nurses a strong coffee*

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Ooh, sounds like fun :)

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tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com

i actually just had a cupcake. (with green frosting, coincidentally. :D ) so if there's a brunch buffet, i'll just go for some eggs. maybe some bacon.

that's... a lot of green rooms. O.O

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*snags a cup of tea and a biscuit from the buffet and sits in the corner*

I've been reading some fabulous things on the internet this morning, including those entries. :)

I'll sprinkle a few links around:
- Women characters redesigned by women artists (http://muddycolors.blogspot.kr/2015/03/what-women-wantin-women-characters.html)
- cool women of STEM cameos (http://www.aubergdesigns.com/blog/2015/3/5/women-of-stem)
- a lovely short story The Truth About Owls (http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150126/1owls-f.shtml) reprinted in Strange Horizons

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::plops down next to

lrig_rorrim::

People on FB keep pissing me off. Why am I still on FB?

::chomps a bacon sandwich::

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That's a FINE question. I mean, there are lots of answers, but I expect the answer is just "that's where the people are" and "it's easy". Those little notifications, that kind of thing. Trivial to tell when there's something new, and then get pissed about it. ;)

I've been poking my head into FB a bit more often lately, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just awful... I'm happier here on LJ. Well, I'm happiest lurking, but you know.

Think I might make bread pudding today. With or without chocolate chips is the question...

Edit: Mischief managed. Bread pudding with raisins is in the oven (this way I can pretend it's healthy). Also, I am feeling ridiculously proud for accomplishing bread pudding. I've been such a slug the last few days.

Edited Date: 2015-03-18 05:16 pm (UTC)

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Given the question, "With or without chocolate chips?" The answer is nearly always, "With. Duh."

The FB answer is there are too many people I would simply lose contact with altogether if I stopped being there. Some of them make it worth the rest of them. It's just hard to remember that sometimes.

I've done my best to improve the signal to noise. I don't friend everyone I've ever known, or everyone who sends me a request. I filter, so that I'm only reading the people who occasionally say things worth reading. It never ceases to amaze me that there are a handful of people I love dearly, even though they think so differently about so many things. I block most of the game announcements and invitations, etc.

I just can't block all the Stupid. Sometimes good people spread the Stupid. I've done it, too. I know. just. Ugh.

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I think facebook makes the stupid easy, because there are so many different super-fast ways to interact and react. Like buttons! Dislike buttons! Tiny little comment fields! Post on your own wall! Share what they and say something yourself! It's kind of a minefield of temptations for poor impulse control and gut-reactions and misinterpretations. "He liked my status about breaking up? WHAT THE HELL?", et cetera. I think it's an interesting place, in sort of a "studying the human condition" way, because there are so many different driving factors there - people want to stay in touch with their families! With high school friends! Hey wait, not that high school friend, ugh, she was awful! With that person I met at the bar last night! Oh wait, actually they kinda suck. With this internet celebrity! On and on. And then there are all these little narratives and mini-sagas that come out of the friction of those contradictory things.

I think you do a good job improving the signal to noise ratio! It's just so much WORK over there, ya know?

TL;DR: I overthink everything, especially places for words on the internet. Heh.

Edited Date: 2015-03-18 05:23 pm (UTC)

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What you're saying about Facebook could be said about internet culture in general—I mean, I don't think Facebook was the first to give us a 'rating' system (quick 'likes')—and more and more places are implementing it. You can leave a like or a dislike just by clicking, without having to interact or engage with the content being provided.

Livejournal doesn't allow you to do that. LJ does have an upper limit on how many characters you can post in an entry (though it varies from language to language, because it's ultimately about how large the entry is, in terms of bytes), and it does have a minimum (the text field can't be blank!), but you can't arbitrarily "like" a post. If you like something, you have to take the time to sit down and type a comment saying so—you have to interact with the content in a more meaningful way, something beyond clicking a button. :)

edited to fix my broken HTML!

Edited Date: 2015-03-18 09:42 pm (UTC)

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And this is why I <3 LJ and its various kin and kith. I mean, I understand the urge to get people posting quickly, interacting more, to make things easy. But words are great, and actually having to think a bit before interacting works well for me. Oddly enough, twitter's character limit has sort of the same effect for me - I'm so inclined to ramble that condensing my thoughts to 140 characters is enough of a challenge to slow me down, and though there are "favorites" and "retweets" and all that over thataway too, it doesn't seem as fraught as FB's, because it's so much more ephemeral.

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I am always totally shocked that I have as many followers on Twitter as I do. My Twitter is totally locked (which is apparently the antithesis of what Twitter is about these days...?), and I tend to go from very sporadic updates to suddenly posting like, 20+ tweets in the space of an hour, all about the same topic.

I'm, like, the worst tweeter ever. :P

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And now I can't stop comparing and contrasting LJ and FB in my head and coming up with why I like one better than the other. Heh.

I think where LJ really, really excels is in its definition of space. It's easy to conceptualize, and easy to use. You've got a space, and it's yours. You can do with it what you like. You can make it public, you can make it varying degrees of private. And you can visit other people's spaces too, and it aggregates those spaces in a way that's easy to see. But there's always the sense (at least for me) when I'm commenting in a community or a person's journal that it's, well, theirs.

And because the space is yours, there's also kind of a sense of responsibility towards it. Yeah, you can go ahead and put your BDSM furniture in your living room and leave the door unlocked and the windows open, but that means the neighbors are gonna talk. If you're ok with that, great! If not, just close things up a little bit more. There are ways and means of clearly stating how you want to interact in your space, and how you expect others to behave, and what the space is for.

FB does not have that sense of space at all. Everything is all mushed together. If I post a status, will my aunt in Texas see it? I have no idea. Maybe. I mean, if I post it publicly, perhaps? But with the algorithms, it's hard to say. And that feed where all the activity occurs, what's the real-world analogue of that? It's this weird thing with private and public and goodness knows what all mushed together and you're interacting on all these different levels with all these different people in the same weird mutated space that's a combination of shouts and whispers and game requests and notifications about what parties people are going to and hey did you know it's so and so's birthday today?

And that's why FB kinda fails for me. Everytime I think I've got a good, clear conceptualization of the space, and how to use it, and why, and how, they change the rules. Or someone who doesn't fit in that paradigm shows up on my radar and I'm like "hmmm.... I don't know how to fit you into this... I guess I'll just... um... screw it, I'll make everything relatively public. I think? Ugh, how do you do that?".

And I think the unclear conceptualization of space leads to the stupid. There. Now this comment is relevant. ;)

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To be totally fair, Facebook has improved how it handles privacy and filtering, at least somewhat. I feel like a lot of the 'advances' in terms of how it handles your "timeline" have been missteps, but it has become easier to filter things.

I have a lot of filters on lj. Most of my journal is public—but I keep certain things filtered from certain people, for personal reasons*.

I also have filters on Facebook, though I do not use them as extensively.

I think of Facebook as being a little like...oh, my backyard. I am surrounded by neighbors that can see in, but any passerby can't see most of what's going on.

There's a select group on Facebook that are allowed into the garden, so to speak, but for the most part I keep everyone at arms' length. I really value privacy online—even as, yes, I realize that's becoming an oxymoron—and so I'm careful about what I post. I'm careful about what I tie my 'real name' to.

If Facebook is the yard, then livejournal is the house, and the filtered areas are the bedroom. I am very open about my life on lj; I am not so open on Facebook. This is largely due to who I have friended—I mean, my sister and my mother are on Facebook, and while they're vaguely aware that I have a lj, they respect me enough not to read it (and I have a similar understanding that I am not to add my sister on Twitter, which I'm fine with :P ).

I see your point about not knowing who will see your posts or not. To be fair, I feel that's pretty true of lj these days—I'm never sure who I'm going to get comments from, or who Google Analytics tells me has been 'stalking'** my lj.

*Specifically: I'm still not super-comfortable with talking about the details of having been sexually assaulted with people outside of a very select group.

I wish it was for simple, "I WANT TO GOSSIP" reasons, but alas, it's something bitter instead.

**Mostly? My not-quite-most-recent-ex.

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This comment.

I think everyone on facebook wants to leave facebook but can't because then how would they meet up with people/ talk to people, know what was going on with people etc.

Also I watched the social network recently, and it made me admire facebook a little again, if only for its creation myth.

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Ohgod... now I'm picturing farfuture mythology books with creation myths about twitter and facebook, and bored kids drawing little squiggles in the margins while the teacher drones on about TRUE NAMES and the evolution of social media and connectivity vs. commoditization. "And the people did cry out, no, we shall not pay for our farmville, no!"

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LOLOLOL. YES.

And children holding the misconception that facebook invented the concept of timelines and that's why the history books use them.

From:

anyonesghost.livejournal.com

It's insidious, really. I kept hoping that G+ or Diaspora or Ello would be the Facebook-killer, but it's hard to convince people to leave for the party across the street when everyone's already at this one -- doesn't matter *that* much if they're serving bottom-shelf liquor.

Alas.

(Haven't actually seen The Social Network, but I think I've heard the soundtrack 1000 times.)

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Too true.

Although, I actually have an irrational dislike of google +, it may have something to do with them insisting on tying my gmail account (and thus my real name) with my youtube account whilst also insisting that this was 'helping me' as now everything would handily be in the same name. I mean I would have still not been okay with it, but they could at least admit they're just doing it for themselves and not trying to say it's 'for our own good'. Sorry about rant. :/

I've never heard of Ello or Diaspora. Are they any good? What I really want is for more people to get livejournals. Of course if everyone had livejournals there would be a lot of hurt feelings as I refuse to friend people.

You should watch it, tis good. Also The soundtrack is one of those things that sticks in the head isn't it. I like it though.

From:

anyonesghost.livejournal.com

Yeah, I can't say as I was really a fan of G+ either, for much the same reasons. I more just lumped it in because anything's better than FB. I'm not sure that Diaspora ever really took off, and Ello (sort of the anti-FB) is floundering out of the gate, which is a shame.

Really, what I want is for everyone to go back to doing their own personal websites in hacked-out HTML 1.1, Perl-based CGI scripts and a smattering of Javascript. None of this slick "Blogging-as-a-Service" stuff. ;-) But those days are gone.

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That does sound cool. Never know, all things circle.

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bleodswean.livejournal.com

Why ARE you?

I tried it a few years ago, on the urging of friends and family. I also am president of the community association and we should maintain a social media platform....

I dunno. It was SO not for me. I left screaming and did everything in my power to delete my account which is a feat in and of itself. For me, livejournal is the perfect medium. I miss the heyday...but becoming part of a community such as Idol brings some of that headiness back!

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LJ just doesn't do it for me anymore. Partly because so many people have left, partly because I'm tired of my own words anymore.

See my reply to lrig-rorrim about the why. Oddly enough, a couple of the people I'm there to keep in contact with are people who used to post regularly on LJ.

From:

ryl.livejournal.com

I'm a little disappointed in the redesigned characters. I was hoping for more practical armor and less sexiness overall. I mean, really, form-fitting costumes are not comfortable and I personally would like a bit more armor around my boobs because it would a) keep them contained and out of the way and b) protect my heart and lungs which were, last I checked, vital organs that keep one alive.

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*nods* Yeah, there's still a decent amount of impracticality, but it's at least tempered with some amount of sense. I like that there was a wide variety in the redesigns, though. I don't mind some of the sexy, if there's at least a little bit of practical - fighting in a thong? Not practical. And some of the artist's comments are amusing, like about giving Power Girl more support for her chest.

From:

crisp-sobriety.livejournal.com

*takes all the sushi from the buffet*

*shuffles off*

From:

Whoa. I need to go to the brunch buffets you go to, if there's sushi!

From:

crisp-sobriety.livejournal.com

There is!

Until I get there and make like a bandit, that is. >]

From:

gratefuladdict.livejournal.com

Just tell me there's coffee. Or kill two birds with one stone, and serve up some coffee cake.

Baby Owen woke up at 3:15 and then just felt like hanging out till around 6:30. Could've been worse; he wasn't fussy or in pain. He was just... Awake.

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BABY! :D

I have that afghan done, btw. I need to get it mailed—it's been finished almost two weeks!

From:

gratefuladdict.livejournal.com

Yay!!! Care package from Jenn!!!

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Afghans and jam! :)

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...that is...a lot of Green Rooms, Gary.

are you okay? do you need somewhere to lie down that's not green?

From:

gratefuladdict.livejournal.com

P.S. Didn't you say 1,600th before? Not 16,000th?

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What's a little order of ten between friends? ;)

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