Green Room - Week 0 - Day 1

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Good morning.

As I understand it, there are some "Americans" who think they are having some sort of "election" tomorrow. I'm not sure why. My army of flying monkeys are already on their way to take over.

Don't worry. I fully intend to be a firm, but just ruler - who only occasionally forces the population in battle to the death writing matches. Things will be fine!

***

Speaking of - yesterday was fairly busy, so here are some links for you!

The topic thread for newbies: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/947581.html

The topic thread for veterans:
http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/947738.html

The Work Room: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/948116.html

***

I've been asking some more questions, and rather than put them in the FAQ, I will answer them here:

- Are Sign-Up still open? Yes. Yes they are! http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/945807.html Please keep spreading the word!

- When will sign-ups close? When I announce that they are closed. I will give you advance notice when that happens. :)

- I have an alt account, can I use that as well as my usual account? You can write under both accounts, but you can only vote with one. Also, if you are veteran, an alt doesn't make you a newbie. Please use the veteran link for Week 0 topic. Thanks!

- Can I promote LJ Idol in another community? Only with the permission of that community/group's owner/moderator/whoever it is that can make that sort of call. I don't want people promoting their stuff here without my OK, it's kind of rude IMO, and I don't want anyone doing that to someone else.

- Is LJ Idol a version of (insert another group here)? Heh. Nope. In fact the group that was directly asked about was founded by former Idolers who did the rare thing of actually getting banned from this site and went to make "their own version". (there's a long version of that tale, but that's the short one.) LJ Idol has always been LJ Idol. In 10 years, the closest thing I've ever heard that predates us, and the concept, is a Harry Potter fanfic group - as part of a bigger event, did a couple weeks where they wrote entries and voted on them. I've never seen that thread, but apparently it exists and happened a few months before I had the idea for Idol. We're our own thing, and I hope you will come to agree that it's a pretty great thing!*

(* I may be a bit biased)

- Is it true that I have an army of winged monkeys that are poised to take control of the United States and install me as dictator?
To be fair, there are also land sharks.

***

How was your weekend?

-

Comments

[adoptedwriter.livejournal.com]

FIRST!!! Yay! Happy Monday!


AW

[wolfden.livejournal.com]

*passes you a cookie*

[suesniffsglue.livejournal.com]

Fancy seeing you here again :)

[feritatum.livejournal.com]

Happy Monday! :)

[baxaphobia.livejournal.com]

(Yawn!) Good morning. I didn't sleep well last night (damn time change). So my brain is not engaged at the moment.

I think flying monkeys would win if they were actually on the ballot.

The weekend was fine. The concert we went to Saturday night was a total bust. We couldn't gracefully leave as the venue was small so we endured. Oh well, it was a night out at least!

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

No election talk. ::covers ears:: lalalalalalalala

I am on a FB vacation for exactly that reason.

Doctor appointment today. No fun.

Sleepy.

[baxaphobia.livejournal.com]

Hope the doctor goes ok. hope it's nothing serious!

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

I have no intention of allowing there to be "elections" in the future. So this is the last year you will have to hear anything about them.

Next time will be "who gets their own version of The Lottery"?

[dreamchaser.livejournal.com]

Good morning :) I didn't sleep too well last night (time change + nightmares + "Sunday night insomnia" = not a lot of sleep!)

I had a pretty good weekend though - I had my first improv class yesterday, and I had a blast!! I wonder why I put off taking the classes for as long as I did.

[baxaphobia.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who sufferes from Sunday night insomnia. It's annoying!

[banana-galaxy.livejournal.com]

Yeah!! Improv is awesome. I'm glad you enjoyed it! You're going to keep going now, yes? :D

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Was the last time I had to actually *ban* someone (not counting spam accounts) in Season 5?

It's extremely rare thing (and almost all of them happened in Season 4). But looking at the list, pretty sure the most recent one was Season 5.

Not saying there haven't been people who were annoying, or pissed each other off, but me having to step in and actually take some sort of official action was *that* long ago? Not sure if I should be impressed, or worried. ;)

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

heh, and yes - having painted myself as the extreme dictator with an army of winged monkeys I'm now doing the "But I really don't go around banning people", because it occurred to me that the newbies don't know me yet and I should make sure they know that it's rare and pretty extreme cases. :)

Such is the duality of the being Gary. :D

[majesticarky.livejournal.com]

Howdy all! My weekend was really fun. My library I work at threw a Comic Con and we had lots of people! Don't know the numbers yet, but I'm thinking over 400, which is a LOT for a very remote part of Texas with a population of 6,000.

[banana-galaxy.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sounds like a lot. Did you have people coming in from other neighbouring towns, or were they all locals?

[oxymoron67.livejournal.com]

I went to see Doctor Strange (which I thought was really good) on Friday and, then, on Saturday, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their "Jerusalem 1000-1400 Every People under Heaven" exhibit, which was amazing.

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Really excited about Dr Strange. But unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to the movies this weekend! :(

[ryl.livejournal.com]

I've been listening to Ozzy Osbourne (https://youtu.be/RMR5zf1J1Hs) waaaaaaay too much this morning because I just want this damn election over. I voted already, it's decided, time to move on! Bring on the flying monkeys! They have cute hats!

[majesticarky.livejournal.com]

Hah love that one. I went on Black Sabbath's farewell tour. My only complaint was that I really wished they'd have thrown in some solo Ozzy stuff, but I guess I can understand they wanted to focus on Black Sabbath only.

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

Today was my early day at work. I am gifted this when I work 6 days. It couldn't have come at a better time as I only got something like 3 hours of sleep last night :p

I need to get my car inspected. It's been over a month. Whoops!

[suesniffsglue.livejournal.com]

My inspection was up since August! Eeeep. I was actually going to leave early today and go get it done but "my car guy" is playing golf. Darn it!

[kschlotwrites.livejournal.com]

My weekend was pretty good, despite the Steelers losing. Played some Pandemic, and went to see Doctor Strange.

[kschlotwrites.livejournal.com]

Oh! And I also worried about and worked on the Week 0 entry.

[wolfden.livejournal.com]

My weekend was emotional.

You know how you get to the point when you are just like "screw it. I'm done." That's kind of how I felt about the entirety of this weekend.

The upside of my weekend was last night I finished the engine to the very cool Lego Holiday Train Set that I got for my birthday. Now that my massive knitting project is finished I have time to work on it.

My kid goes back to school today. They started their second trimester tomorrow. It still is very weird for her not to live here all the time.

[banana-galaxy.livejournal.com]

I love that you got Lego for your birthday. I put Lego on my birthday wishlist recently, because my birthday is coming up at the end of the month.

[geekmomof2.livejournal.com]

Weekend was good. Beautiful weather in Minnesota, which is kind of mind blowing for November

Crazy week ahead

[feritatum.livejournal.com]

I had to scrape the first frost from my windscreen yesterday.
By scrape, I mean, "throw half a can of de-icer on it."

[banana-galaxy.livejournal.com]

I answered an exit poll survey yesterday, so I guess that means my ballot was received when I dropped it off last week. :D I may hate the election process, but I'm grateful for the right to vote in this country. I may be a dual-citizen, but I can no longer vote in Australian elections because of how long I've not lived there. I've voted in way more US elections, even before I moved here. But this is the second one I've been able to vote in since moving here!

I wrote about part of my weekend in my introduction post. It's nice to get that out of the way early so I can focus on reading other people's entries when I have time. It also meant I actually had time to watch some movies and read a Young Avengers graphic novel this weekend. Was super excited to discover a bi male character in that series.

[murielle.livejournal.com]

I have not a clue what to do with the introduction prompt. Congrats on getting yours done!

[j0ydivided.livejournal.com]

My weekend was not great, but it could have been a lot worse, so I'll accept that.

I'm really dreading tomorrow.

[my-name-is-jenn.livejournal.com]

Hi, everyone! My weekend was busy. On Friday night, I went to an fashion show with a friend of mine. Her friend was showing off her new line of sci-fi battle armor. It was awesome. And there were aerialists, too.

The rest of the weekend was just busy adulting - cleaning, cooking for the upcoming work week, paying bills, etc.

But you guys, I work at a newspaper. We're a small town daily paper with a surprisingly large number of subscribers. As tomorrow is the election, it is going to be BONKERS here. And they won't let us drink wine. :(

[feritatum.livejournal.com]

Wine is forbidden? Yikes.
Have you tried Gin?

Also, what is this, "Adulting?"

[swirlsofblue.livejournal.com]

I'm now curious what happened in season 4 to cause people to be banned.

Also d'you know whether the Last Author Standing comms were former Idolers?

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

I don't know if they are or not. I looked it up, and there seem to be a couple groups with that name.

Summary of Season 4 "issues": It boils down to two people. Let's call one J and the other B.

J was super helpful. J wanted to be involved with everyone and everything.

B was super impressed with herself and her abilities, and often had things to say about how other people sucked.

They exploded "about the same time". (within a few weeks of each other).

J wanted to be in charge, or given some authority in the group. I talked to him on the phone for a bit, even told him something that I was working on - a "shorter version" of Idol, which would be a couple months instead of the full Idol version. (I called it "Idol Jr" as a working title).

When J was told that I really wasn't looking for anyone to help out, he got upset. When he was eliminated, during the course of the season, he got even more so. He started creating alts so he could friend people and "see what they were saying about (him)", actual quote. I told him to cut that out and that he needed to operate within ethical boundaries and let people know that he wasn't the middle aged woman alt he was pretending to be. He didn't like that. He didn't get why that was a problem and things got tense.

Around that time, his best friend C (a nice older woman who didn't seem to have a lot of friends) "came up" with the idea of a shorter version of Idol and started actively recruiting from our base. J, of course, claimed he knew *nothing* about this, and that it was a coincidence that someone close to him had come up with an idea that only he knew about.

There was a lot of spam telling people how awful we were and they needed to all come over to her new community instead. I deleted those messages and asked them to stop. They continued. I told them to stop. They continued. I banned them. They created new alts to spam the voting, and continued... I eventually beat them back just by willing to work harder and faster (and I had a lot more loyalty, very few people went over to them)

B (remember her?) was voted out around the same time. Of course this was an affront to her talent and "proved that Idol wasn't about the writing!"
To "prove" this, she started to try to spam the voting with fake accounts as well (which just motivated more people who didn't like her to motivate their friends to come out and vote. So... um... thanks?)
She *also* formed her own version of Idol - and was actively trying to get people to dump us to go over to her. With as much success.

She was also riling up her friends list with how awful I was. Between J and B's friends list, that was where I received the death threats. (they had my address and phone number and both had people not *that* far away, as they reminded me. That was more B's side than J's.)

The posts, spam and voting manipulation got to the point where it wasn't just a "she doesn't like me", I felt it was a threat to the site itself, and banned her as well.

Both B and J flat out told me that they wanted to see "LJ Idol destroyed" (and me with it, at least from B)

(used too many characters, the rest in the next comment)

[banana-galaxy.livejournal.com]

I just want to make a note that some of the entries currently posted are friends-locked, so we can't read them. If your journal automatically locks your entries, be sure to remember to edit them and make them public if you want people to read and vote for them.

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

Yes, some people's comment settings only allow commenting by people they have friended.

If you don't let people comment on your entries, you will miss out on all the love.

[lordrexfear.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to wave hello!

My weekend which I think I spoke about was quite intriguing and fun.
Saturday went to a Comics show, then helped my friends take down an art show I had a piece in.

Sunday I stayed in... but got the greatest Facebook video message ever. My "god niece" who has now moved to NZ with her whole family rang me up after they've finally settled in. I got to talk to my "sister" and her and it was excellent.

Tomorrow I'm working the polls. 5 AM - whenever we finish the work that needs to be done. Go out and Vote folks. Not voting is a vote for whoever you don't want in office and even if you want neither, not voting is a vote for who you REALLY don't want in office. Yes, electoral college and all... BUT electoral is still based on the popular... if a you don't win a state, you don't get that states electoral. Prove the media wrong! Prove the idiots wrong. Whoever you think those people are... prove em wrong and vote.
or don't... I made my plea.