Got logged out on my phone. Could have done without the aggressive ad takeover that threw me to the app store. Twice. No chance to log in.
Might stick around to comment.
Since my flounce entry last year was all carefully backdated, figured I would let those of you still reading your friends pages know that I still am updating semi-regularly. Elsewhere. All listed in my profile.
luminairex is coming through the US for a bit of a visit, and had a day in San Francisco. He proposed group dinner with any/all takers. It's been a while! I set out running a bit late, and commenced to run a bit later answering some questions. For the record, when the question is suicide threats on LiveJournal, the answer generally involves the Abuse Prevention Team, and as fast as you can summon them.
I arrived at the 21st Amendment (rather than the abstract amendment itself, it is a pub in honor of same) and did not recognize any party members. The hostess did not recognize any names. I texted a few crucial people (jd, Elliot) and then my phone rang: zarhooie, with a question of general holiday celebrationy logistical sorts of matters. JD and Elliot announced their imminent arrival; Elliot's ride (people I didn't know, brothers) arrived shortly thereafter. We were seated, the five of us.
General cheer ensued over the menus and options. There were a number of interesting-looking things. JD and I both wound up with mead. Somehow, despite various renfair excursions, I had not previously tried mead. (Is it even available at the Arizona fair I used to go to? I don't recall seeing it, but then, I was not looking for the selling of booze there. I've relaxed considerably that I can find the thought of any loss of control, voluntary or otherwise, in a public place at all appealing.) I wasn't sure what to expect. It was less sweet than I might have thought, and had the complex and slightly bitter taste of fermentation that I thought was somehow inherent to grapes. Interesting.
JD got some cider later, and I tried a sip of that. Not sure that I would seek out that particular cider, alas; just not quite my thing.
I may be acquiring a tolerance, but one drink is generally enough when I'll be driving home in the next few hours.
It is football season, and the 49ers were playing. Twitter had advised me that there had been a power outage at their park, cause still unknown and under investigation. There were some TVs on in the upstairs balcony, and noise periodically emitted from that area whenever something particularly exciting happened.
We had a great fireside seat, close to the kitchen: the grill area is visible from the restaurant, and gouts of flame periodically rise an astonishing height, lighting and warming the pub.
It was a bit noisy, but there were good times.
My phone pinged. I had my phone out because I really didn't have much in the way of pockets, as instead of my usual slightly tatty black cardigan I was wearing the lovely grey lace short-sleeved sweater from norabombay, over the fabulous sparkly-shirt. (Yay, *clothes*!) Facebook let me know that marta was inbound, if we were still there. I advised the rest of the group; shortly, we caught sight of each other and she piled in to the booth. There was catching up on news, shop talk, and so forth.
We closed out our dinner bill and headed for the bar, and from the bar to one of the lower-volume front tables. It's very good to be alive in an age where not only does one have the family that one is born into, if one is so lucky to have drawn a good one of those, but also the family that one can acquire on the internet. *hugs fish*
The 49ers won, and the roar from upstairs became insufferable, and dispersed loudly downstairs to the bar, accompanied by many declarations of how football, and the 49ers, and the fans thereof, were totally awesome. Loud declarations. A young woman unlucky enough to be visibly rooting for the Steelers entered, and was met by a certain amount of derision before she was embraced to the bosoms of some of the locals. Ah, sport.
It was amazingly good to see everybody.
I took JD home, then myself. Kat was in bed. I hammered away at my Yuletide, occasionally cackling at my own cleverness. The Yulebears shall be defeated!
I have a history of doing somewhat stupid things when I'm mad. I have now sufficiently calmed down that I don't think I'll actually delete my LJ, but I did consider it until wiser heads (zarhooie) prevailed. I was on my Manage Friends page removing people when I stopped and realized that I really needed to make a public entry so no one panics when finding themselves removed.
The phrasing is such that I am not 100% certain, but my interpretation of the edit to this entry on new comment revisions by the dude who I hear is now in charge of LJ design stuff is that once this is in place, users would have to choose between comments pages with no subject lines in the comments in regular/S1/sitescheme, or S2-styled/fancy/matches-the-journal comments pages with the option to have comment subjects. (The original entry had the removal of comment subjects as non-negotiable, which caused some yelling all up in some places that I got pointed to. norabombay can attest that I did some yelling of my own when I heard about that, and she joined me. Both of us spend enough time in the lands of entries that have hundreds or thousands of comments on multiple pages that we rely on comment subjects, though they are rare sitewide.)
My loathing for S2 comment pages is legendary.
There was some discussion on Twitter yesterday, and between that and some of the discussion in the comments there, it emerged that the primary reason for the decision to take away the comment subjects was not for performance or other database-administration reasons (which I could become resigned to), but instead because the look of long collapsed comment threads with "(no subject)" is aesthetically displeasing to this dude-in-charge. And maybe something has gone missing somewhere in the multiple possible points of failure to communicate between this guy's brain and my brain, but I entirely fail to see why the answer to this problem is to take away subjects entirely (even when they are present on legacy comments), since people do use them: for summaries of long comments, for information when comments have collapsed, to make browsing large pages full of collapsed threads easier, for email threading/tracking on entries with a lot of comments, for trigger warnings if the comment should not be read by certain classes of people, first lines of comments as read in a suitably dramatic tone, and probably more. If it were up to me, I'd redo the display so that the time, not the subject, was the comment link, and then only display the subject if there were one. There are possibly other ways, but that one sounds the best to me. Auugh.
While I have friends volunteering and working at LJ, and I care about them and respect their professional skills immensely, they are not the people making the decisions on the highest levels. (Not that I'd automatically agree with everything if they were in fact in charge, but it really helps to know someone's general decision-making history and outlook on life. See also: how denise and I are doomed to disagree forever on the subject of single-journal comment bans by IP address (which will probably be my go-to example for such issues without possibility of resolution until something worse comes along). Yet somehow we manage.) The people running LJ have every right to make decisions that make design and business sense to them. I do not have to agree with those decisions, I do not have to like them, and I am continuing to take steps to ensure that I won't have to live with them. I'm getting better about being civil when I'm yelling (and I deeply appreciate everyone who has called me on it when I've failed), but I don't like the person I am inside even then, and it's hard on my nearest and dearest who have to talk me down.
No matter how this falls out, it's one more step away from LJ for me, and I don't think that I'll be stepping back closer once things resolve.
The relatively recent (but I believe past rather than current) problem with some people getting pages as if they were logged in as other people was the impetus for me to turn off comments on my LJ, and stop automatically crossposting. When I was less mad about that, I re-enabled comments on old entries and did start to crosspost a few things by hand.
This time I thought (again) about deleting my journal entirely, but the fact that I have a permanent account and I would be annoyed if I couldn't subscribe to various threads, and Kat reminding me of this, kept me from actually going through with it. I was staring at the option on the page quite a while, though.
So, long story short, I'm cleaning up my friends list on LJ. I'm trying to do this in a way that mostly won't affect people who actually still do use and like LJ, although I would like nothing better than for everyone I cared about to join me on the site I'm actually comfortable on. (See also: why I still have a Facebook account. I never cared about Facebook, though, so I am happy to display my open contempt for Facebook while playing its shiny little addictive games, while scaling my LJ use down to still-more-than-Facebook is causing me untold agonies. Except I'm telling them, because what is LJ for if not airing one's emo?)
Basically, if someone is reading me on DW now, there's no need for me to give them access on LJ too. There are no comments to read on any of the new stuff on LJ. I should make sure that everyone who needs to from LJ has access given to their OpenIDs so they can comment on locked things/read comments on locked things.
My email is this same username at gmail, though Google's on my shitlist as well. ("No one man should have all that power / The clock's ticking; I just count the hours / ... ")
Sleep is a thing. It was cold out. There were no firm plans for actually anything. Thus it was that norabombay and I stayed in, got delivery, and watched two of the most m/m major films of the year that do not portray actual m/m sex: The Eagle & X-Men: First Class.
Tucker is remarkably singleminded. He will ignore bits of tasty food flying literally past his head in favor of staring at the person who finally threw him one (1) piece of food five minutes ago, in the hopes that it might happen again.
This was one of the newly-hatched chicks at the MSI. I watched it come out of the shell. It still hasn't got the hang of how to move. The other chick is a little older and has grasped how gravity works.
![[personal profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/9416b3b07b43fe521f2987b3839fa117b1e1d71b/BRJ0j5hq9m5urMW83ZhGRfSvvxqh_HQoS8QoGPL2Id6odbcyXffQyypB8jpJKQnhB3H7q5z1tMV-JaczRx0VzQtANGI3JoIjpWwExUrCZ7w)
azurelunatic
azz_on_dw. sad
happy