Nah. If you live in one of those tiny houses, all you have to do is hitch it to your truck, and tow it to someplace with a really big window. And then you'd be able to claim for the rest of your life that you'd defenestrated your house. If I ever win the lottery, I'm totally doing this.
Oh my god I think I'm in love.
Sadly, there's no way in hell I'll be able to pay over $2000 for a Mac tablet anytime soon. Especially not with a 6 month old tablet that works quite nicely when I don't accidentally run over the power cord.
Are you trying to ruin my dreams of watching the politicians pass the law forbidding use of iPod while crossing the street? I would take great glee in getting hit by a car if it meant I could laugh at the city when it tried to fine me for that.
Of course, I'd still be in the hospital. Maybe I need less masochistic dreams.
I doubt anyone could read an entire book during a visit to a bookstore like Barnes and Noble. Er. Um. Well. At least the people who can and have read so many books they've lost track during visits to Barnes and Noble (or Borders) tend to be obsessive readers who are the bookstores' best customers anyway? Regardless of what some ass in my last trip to one of my nearby Barnes and Nobles implied. And I usually avoid finishing books due to some sort of moral qualms about reading entire books for free at the bookstore, although I'm not sure quitting fifty pages before the end of a 400 page book really counts.
What's really a bad sign, though, is when you go to Borders to reread a book that you own. Except it's buried somewhere in the thousands of books you own and you can't find it anywhere.
You should see what happened to the guy who played the Nirvana song "Rape Me". You mean the computer could actually understand what that song was saying? Damn, maybe Vista really is advanced after all.
I have mod points, but I'm commenting instead because you kind of hit a pet peeve of mine. I used to feel the same way about low calorie foods. The lower the calories were per serving, the better it was for me, even if it tasted like someone had put dog turds in it.
Only I was never satisfied after that, because everything was so bloody tasteless. I want food with flavor and texture and interest, damnit. So I ate more because I was craving something that resembled real food. I gained a lot of weight following that advice. Then I switched to cooking more from scratch (which I enjoy anyway), to paying more attention to the flavor of the food than the caloric content, and to enjoying what I ate. And to not eat crap food when I wasn't hungry simply because it was time to eat. Didn't lose the weight I gained (partially, I'll admit, because a hobby of baking desserts, especially when bored or stressed, just never helps on any diet), but didn't gain any more. And I was a hell of a lot happier with myself than when I was eating cardboard for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I'm not saying you should always only eat high calorie foods, just don't eat low-calorie food if you think it tastes like crap. Life's too long to waste on bad food every day.
Hell, they used to sell tapeworms in a pill as a guaranteed weight-loss plan. Toxoplasmosis should be easy.
And I will gladly sell the right to clean out my cat's litter box to anyone who would like to catch it. Hell, I'll let them clean it out for free.
Let's see... So my work is twenty-five miles away. By going ten miles an hour over the speed limit, I save approximately 8 minutes, round trip. Every single day.
Multiply that by however many days a year I work, and I'm saving a hell of a lot of time by going the speed of traffic. Okay!
And in the 6 years I've been driving on the fairly busy two lane road I use to leave my house, I've even seen one or two people actually follow that law! I may have been hallucinating, though.
Speak for yourself! I embroidered half a dragon playing FF6. Of course, I was using my foot to hit the x button, and holding the embroidery hoop in the same hand I hit the direction button.
I miss games where you could just hit x indefinitely to level up. I got so much more studying done.
...No. They don't. I went to private schools my entire life, and the teachers always, always knew damn well that they could be getting paid a hell of a lot more in public school and complained about it regularly. The average starting salary for a teacher in CA is $33,000. Most of my teachers were getting maybe $25,000. Maybe.
The reasons why they weren't paid as much was purely and simply that the schools I went to couldn't afford to. A minimum of 25% of the tuition at my high school was guaranteed to go to the teachers' salaries. Probably another 25-50% went to expanding school facilities, since in the 6 years my brother and I were there, they built a gym, and built a whole new school next door because they ran out of room in the old building. The rest went to administration and miscellaneous expenses. Please note that this was a for-profit school. That generally didn't. Profit, that is.
The teachers themselves taught for a variety of reasons. One big one was that their kids could attend for free. I knew a number of teachers back in elementary/junior high that planned on quitting working at that school the second their kid graduated. Another reason is that they had a lot smaller classes, a lot more capability to discipline, and could and would expect a lot more out of their students than they felt they would ever be able to in a public school. They just enjoyed teaching at a private school a lot more than they had at a public school, and thought the loss of pay worth it.
A very few of my teachers did get paid more than they would at public high school. But the only one I know who did was the one who completed med school before deciding to take a job as a high school biology teacher, and who was, as I recall, in charge of the science department. This was a school where a lot of the students were doctor's kids who were expected to become doctors themselves, though, so it made a great deal of logical sense to invest in that department.
For the most part, though, teachers at private schools are paid a great deal less than their counterparts at public schools.
Hell, my dad visited a factory a few months ago that was assembling a crane without power tools. People were tightening the nuts on the chassis using a hand held wrench. This was because the company was too cheap to supply their people tools, and required that they supply their own, and was thus not exactly a shining star of competency, but still.
And someone thinks that advanced machines are sorting the widgets for shipping. HA.
Dude, if everyone using an Ipod has it filled with stolen music, that says more about the complete and utter failure of your industry to accommodate willing customers than it does about the iPod.
I, personally, have a 1 gig MP3 player that I use on occasion. My entire music collection fills less than half of it. All of it is pirated. (Usually pirated in the sense of me having a standing invitation to steal whatever music I want from my brother's collection of cds, but occasionally downloaded.)
I don't like Apple. (Sorry, Apple fans.) I don't like iTunes. I don't care enough about any cd to spend 15 bucks for it. I'd be willing to start listening to music on a regular basis if the music industry made it easy and convenient for me to give them a reasonable amount of money in exchange for DRM-free mp3s. Especially if I knew that a significant portion of the money I spent goes to the artist. Why is this so difficult to ask for?
Except if you pay any attention at all to the news about which company is evil today, you can't act on all of it. Or, at least, I can't.
Offhand, I can think of several dozen companies at the moment that did things that I consider unethical. Jet Blue did their sleep deprivation testing on live planes with passengers. Sony speaks for itself in this context. There was the HP scandal, the e-coli spinach scandal. Going back a bit further, Target blocked the Salvation Army from standing at their door last Christmas. U-haul is generally a disastrous company to deal with. I completely forgot what the Adelphia scandal was, and I can't be bothered to google it. There's AOL, and its customer retention policy. There's pretty much the entire music industry, which I don't think I need to comment on further. There's big scandals, there's minor scandals, there's scandals that I only know about because I work in the industy involved. Etc.
Some of these things I care about deeply. Some of these things I think are stupid. But even the stuff that I care deeply about is, frankly, stuff I'm probably just not going to remember when I'm out shopping. Sometimes I do. I won't buy stuff that I can tell is Sony anymore. Haven't since the rootkit scandal. I avoid Jiffy Lube because I've heard too many horror stories of Jiffy Lube not doing the work they've been paid to do, and messing up the car in the meantime. I don't buy, or even really listen to music anymore, because hell if I can tell what's even remotely associated with the RIAA or not.
But I just don't have the energy or the interest to keep track of all the companies that do things I find unethical. If I remember when I'm purchasing, yes. But the odds of me remembering five years down the line, when I might actually have the money to afford to travel, that Jet Blue did a sleep deprivation study without warning the passengers are not high. I might, because I prefer to go on airplanes where I have as low a chance of dying as possible. But I doubt it. I make an effort when I see a company consistently doing unethical activities, but a large part of that is that I don't want them to screw me over too.
Not to mention subsidiaries. What, should I start studying what companies in every single scandal I care about own/are owned by? I hear about, on average, probably two scandals a day that I care at least a little about. Sometimes more. I flat out do not have time to research all of them. I have class. I have work. I... Okay, I don't have a social life. But I do have Civ IV.
Theoretically, yes, I could do something about every company that does stuff I disapprove of. But I have other things to do with my life.
What seems to be the source of all the press I keep hearing about WoW is that the people who are becoming addicted to WoW are NOT the people usually destroying their lives through some other addiction. Most of the time when you hear of someone destroying their lives it's because they're gambling, drinking, doing drugs. WoW attracts an entirely different audience to destroy their own lives. It's that, I think that gets all the attention.
For example, I know I have a tendency to become obsessed with whatever game I'm playing. This is why, when my brother gave me WoW for Christmas, I chose not to play it. I know myself well enough that, well, it's just a better idea overall not to let myself get addicted in the first place. On the other hand, I don't drink, I don't gamble, and I don't do drugs. None of these have any appeal to me whatsoever. At the same time, I've known myself to obsessively play even games that in all honesty, the gameplay doesn't particularly interest me. I'm also generally a little too disconnected with rl as it is. I don't want to know what I'd do with WoW.
Because some of us don't say "fuck off and leave me alone you small dicked loser." I try to turn guys down politely, and therefore, it usually takes quite some time. Especially since I'm terrible with people.
Considering that most of the time, I'm hit on when I'm in the middle of doing other stuff, this can become a pain in the ass. If I'm at a bar or at a convention, or something of the sort where at least half the reason I'm there is to meet people, I don't particularly mind getting hit on. When I'm trying to shop for groceries, or grab a quick lunch between classes, or reading the new David Weber in the Coldstone across from one of my favorite bookstores (I swear, this has happened the last three David Webers I've gotten), I'm probably not going to be interested.
Then there's the guys who think it's perfectly appropriate to hit on you when you're home alone having pizza delivered. Because hitting on women when they're in their houses, alone, at night, is the perfect way to make them feel safe. That was damn nerve-wracking.
Do I think that being hit on is like being assaulted? No. But I do think it's damn annoying in most situations. And dangerous in some.
Warning: I'm not entirely emotionally rational on this subject. Please read the rest of my post with this in mind.
Look. I am a woman at extremely high risk for breast cancer. My mother had breast cancer. My father had cancer. Going back further, the family history I have of cancer borders on the ridiculous. Furthermore, I have extremely large breasts, which is another risk factor. (The more tissue, the more room there is for tumors to grow. Also, larger breasts make cancer harder to detect just by feeling it, which is your best chance of catching it early.)
At some point within the next five years, I'm probably going to have to undergo breast reduction surgery. I'm still young enough that it hasn't become medically necessary yet, but my doctor's been suggesting it since I was 16. I'm terrified of this. I hate surgery. I hate the risk that I'll lose all feeling in my breasts. I hate the fact that I probably won't even have the option to breast-feed. I hate the fact that no matter what, I'm going to end up with scars on my breasts.
But you know what? At some point, assuming they don't come up with a sure-fire cure for breast cancer, I'll go through with it. Because I'd rather have scarred, numb, tiny breasts than risk dying.
As such, as you might imagine, I am EXTREMELY supportive of breast cancer research. I try to do whatever I can to get those extra dollars in that might allow me to avoid having surgery. I try to attend those goddamn money-raising breast cancer things, despite the fact that I hate hate hate crowds. If I were any good at dealing with people, I'd organize one. Or several. I do do as much as I can within my areas of expertise to raise awareness. Because. Well. I watched my mother go through chemotherapy. I watched my father go through chemotherapy. I heard about my aunt, and my cousins, going through chemotherapy. And every last dollar that goes to breast cancer research is one more chance I have of not dying.
You want prostate cancer awareness to reach the level of breast cancer awareness? Then advertise it yourself. I'm busy.
Except lj, in my experience, has always had an extraordinary number of people with paid accounts. I used to have a paid account (that I let expire, and haven't bothered renewing at the rate they're irritating me). I'd estimate half of the people I talk to on lj have paid accounts. I watch a very large roleplay where almost every single player has at least one paid account, and some have up to six paid account, because they're playing just that many characters. (Yes, granted, they're almost certainly insane. But hey, they write well.) And the paid account users are for the most part more pissed off than the free users. No, they don't see ads when they're logged in (well, except for the sponsored communities on the front page. Which even I think they're lame for complaining about.)
And to a lot of paid users, well. They aren't always paid users. Their account runs out when they're broke, they have a spare free account for their writing/art/roleplaying/pretending to be half the Harry Potter fandom, whatever. But they still paying lj and don't particularly want to be bombarded with ads by lj when they use a different account.
Sorry, I wasn't clear with that. I don't have a problem with it. I was just seeing a lot of comments that implied that they thought only people who opted in to see advertising (Sponsored+) would see advertising, and I wanted to correct that impression. Especially since a number of people have had free journals since well before they put in advertising, when lj was still promising no ads whatsoever, and thus in no sense ever agreed to see advertising.
I'll admit I'm irritated at this. Frankly, more irritated than the news itself deserves. The features themselves are (both) things that could be nice, but both have the potential to mostly just irritate me. And judging by lj's recent history, I judge the latter more likely than the former.
Ever since Six Apart bought lj, they've been adding features, and shoving them down the throats of the users without paying much attention to their complaints. Or any. There was the Sponsored+ account (which, incidentally, displays ads to anyone who visits who isn't a paid user, not just people who also have Sponsored+ accounts. This seems to be a fairly common misapprehension in the comments.) There was a new userinfo, that, to give them their due, they did scrap when out of the thousand+ complaints I saw, there were two people who liked it. Their standard implementation of new features nowadays seems to be to force people to opt out, which irritates me when I come to my lj and realize that I need to remove the new bar at the top of my layout/change the new bar on the comment page back to my old bar/whatever. And generally, their response to people saying "I don't like this!" is "But, but it's cool! Look at the shiny and profitable^W^W thing we made for you! Don't you like it? D: D:" And the tone of their response irritates me as much or more as their original announcement. Damnit, if you're going to start shoving new and exotic ways of you making a buck down my throat, at least have the decency not to act like you think you're doing me a favor.
I have a lot of friends on lj. I'm moderately active in several fandoms, and for years, lj's been the place for people writing fanfic to gather. And I'm seeing more people beginning to talk about moving to greatestjournal, or deadjournal, or journalfen, that a year ago would never have even thought about it. And that makes me sad, frankly. If fandom starts dispersing across all the lj clones because lj decides to turn itself into a myspace clone, I'm going to have to go to all the trouble of tracking people across multiple sites, rather than just the one today. And I don't want to have to do that.
You know, I can't be the only person out there who never really got into music, mostly because the RIAA pisses me off.
If the RIAA ever looked at my purchase history, they would assume that I was the world's worst pirate, because the last time I bought a cd was when my brother asked me for one for Christmas a few years ago. I think I've bought less than ten CDs in my life. My brother occasionally tosses me one of his old cds, or a friend does, but I'm not going to pay $15 for a cd. I play those if I want background noise. I'm also not going to download illegally. I'm also not going to pay for DRM-covered crap that I can't guarantee having permanently. There are quite simply no means of me obtaining music that are both legal and acceptable to me (that I know of).
Until the RIAA dies, and the music business works out a sane business model that I'm willing to spend money on, I won't let myself get interested in music. It's just that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. If you live in one of those tiny houses, all you have to do is hitch it to your truck, and tow it to someplace with a really big window. And then you'd be able to claim for the rest of your life that you'd defenestrated your house. If I ever win the lottery, I'm totally doing this.
Oh my god I think I'm in love. Sadly, there's no way in hell I'll be able to pay over $2000 for a Mac tablet anytime soon. Especially not with a 6 month old tablet that works quite nicely when I don't accidentally run over the power cord.
Are you trying to ruin my dreams of watching the politicians pass the law forbidding use of iPod while crossing the street? I would take great glee in getting hit by a car if it meant I could laugh at the city when it tried to fine me for that.
Of course, I'd still be in the hospital. Maybe I need less masochistic dreams.
I have mod points, but I'm commenting instead because you kind of hit a pet peeve of mine. I used to feel the same way about low calorie foods. The lower the calories were per serving, the better it was for me, even if it tasted like someone had put dog turds in it.
Only I was never satisfied after that, because everything was so bloody tasteless. I want food with flavor and texture and interest, damnit. So I ate more because I was craving something that resembled real food. I gained a lot of weight following that advice. Then I switched to cooking more from scratch (which I enjoy anyway), to paying more attention to the flavor of the food than the caloric content, and to enjoying what I ate. And to not eat crap food when I wasn't hungry simply because it was time to eat. Didn't lose the weight I gained (partially, I'll admit, because a hobby of baking desserts, especially when bored or stressed, just never helps on any diet), but didn't gain any more. And I was a hell of a lot happier with myself than when I was eating cardboard for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I'm not saying you should always only eat high calorie foods, just don't eat low-calorie food if you think it tastes like crap. Life's too long to waste on bad food every day.
Hell, they used to sell tapeworms in a pill as a guaranteed weight-loss plan. Toxoplasmosis should be easy. And I will gladly sell the right to clean out my cat's litter box to anyone who would like to catch it. Hell, I'll let them clean it out for free.
Let's see... So my work is twenty-five miles away. By going ten miles an hour over the speed limit, I save approximately 8 minutes, round trip. Every single day. Multiply that by however many days a year I work, and I'm saving a hell of a lot of time by going the speed of traffic. Okay!
And in the 6 years I've been driving on the fairly busy two lane road I use to leave my house, I've even seen one or two people actually follow that law! I may have been hallucinating, though.
Speak for yourself! I embroidered half a dragon playing FF6. Of course, I was using my foot to hit the x button, and holding the embroidery hoop in the same hand I hit the direction button.
I miss games where you could just hit x indefinitely to level up. I got so much more studying done.
...No. They don't. I went to private schools my entire life, and the teachers always, always knew damn well that they could be getting paid a hell of a lot more in public school and complained about it regularly. The average starting salary for a teacher in CA is $33,000. Most of my teachers were getting maybe $25,000. Maybe.
The reasons why they weren't paid as much was purely and simply that the schools I went to couldn't afford to. A minimum of 25% of the tuition at my high school was guaranteed to go to the teachers' salaries. Probably another 25-50% went to expanding school facilities, since in the 6 years my brother and I were there, they built a gym, and built a whole new school next door because they ran out of room in the old building. The rest went to administration and miscellaneous expenses. Please note that this was a for-profit school. That generally didn't. Profit, that is.
The teachers themselves taught for a variety of reasons. One big one was that their kids could attend for free. I knew a number of teachers back in elementary/junior high that planned on quitting working at that school the second their kid graduated. Another reason is that they had a lot smaller classes, a lot more capability to discipline, and could and would expect a lot more out of their students than they felt they would ever be able to in a public school. They just enjoyed teaching at a private school a lot more than they had at a public school, and thought the loss of pay worth it.
A very few of my teachers did get paid more than they would at public high school. But the only one I know who did was the one who completed med school before deciding to take a job as a high school biology teacher, and who was, as I recall, in charge of the science department. This was a school where a lot of the students were doctor's kids who were expected to become doctors themselves, though, so it made a great deal of logical sense to invest in that department.
For the most part, though, teachers at private schools are paid a great deal less than their counterparts at public schools.
Hell, my dad visited a factory a few months ago that was assembling a crane without power tools. People were tightening the nuts on the chassis using a hand held wrench. This was because the company was too cheap to supply their people tools, and required that they supply their own, and was thus not exactly a shining star of competency, but still. And someone thinks that advanced machines are sorting the widgets for shipping. HA.
Dude, if everyone using an Ipod has it filled with stolen music, that says more about the complete and utter failure of your industry to accommodate willing customers than it does about the iPod.
I, personally, have a 1 gig MP3 player that I use on occasion. My entire music collection fills less than half of it. All of it is pirated. (Usually pirated in the sense of me having a standing invitation to steal whatever music I want from my brother's collection of cds, but occasionally downloaded.)
I don't like Apple. (Sorry, Apple fans.) I don't like iTunes. I don't care enough about any cd to spend 15 bucks for it. I'd be willing to start listening to music on a regular basis if the music industry made it easy and convenient for me to give them a reasonable amount of money in exchange for DRM-free mp3s. Especially if I knew that a significant portion of the money I spent goes to the artist. Why is this so difficult to ask for?
Untrue! I became a libertarian so I could argue with everyone.
Except if you pay any attention at all to the news about which company is evil today, you can't act on all of it. Or, at least, I can't.
Offhand, I can think of several dozen companies at the moment that did things that I consider unethical. Jet Blue did their sleep deprivation testing on live planes with passengers. Sony speaks for itself in this context. There was the HP scandal, the e-coli spinach scandal. Going back a bit further, Target blocked the Salvation Army from standing at their door last Christmas. U-haul is generally a disastrous company to deal with. I completely forgot what the Adelphia scandal was, and I can't be bothered to google it. There's AOL, and its customer retention policy. There's pretty much the entire music industry, which I don't think I need to comment on further. There's big scandals, there's minor scandals, there's scandals that I only know about because I work in the industy involved. Etc.
Some of these things I care about deeply. Some of these things I think are stupid. But even the stuff that I care deeply about is, frankly, stuff I'm probably just not going to remember when I'm out shopping. Sometimes I do. I won't buy stuff that I can tell is Sony anymore. Haven't since the rootkit scandal. I avoid Jiffy Lube because I've heard too many horror stories of Jiffy Lube not doing the work they've been paid to do, and messing up the car in the meantime. I don't buy, or even really listen to music anymore, because hell if I can tell what's even remotely associated with the RIAA or not.
But I just don't have the energy or the interest to keep track of all the companies that do things I find unethical. If I remember when I'm purchasing, yes. But the odds of me remembering five years down the line, when I might actually have the money to afford to travel, that Jet Blue did a sleep deprivation study without warning the passengers are not high. I might, because I prefer to go on airplanes where I have as low a chance of dying as possible. But I doubt it. I make an effort when I see a company consistently doing unethical activities, but a large part of that is that I don't want them to screw me over too.
Not to mention subsidiaries. What, should I start studying what companies in every single scandal I care about own/are owned by? I hear about, on average, probably two scandals a day that I care at least a little about. Sometimes more. I flat out do not have time to research all of them. I have class. I have work. I... Okay, I don't have a social life. But I do have Civ IV.
Theoretically, yes, I could do something about every company that does stuff I disapprove of. But I have other things to do with my life.
If that makes me a sheep, so be it.
War makes change easy.
No, it doesn't. It just makes it necessary.
To give the writers a warm feeling of accomplishment, and the ability to wave that accomplishment in front of their partisans, of course.
Let me know if they ever actually do anything with this. Until then, who cares?
What seems to be the source of all the press I keep hearing about WoW is that the people who are becoming addicted to WoW are NOT the people usually destroying their lives through some other addiction. Most of the time when you hear of someone destroying their lives it's because they're gambling, drinking, doing drugs. WoW attracts an entirely different audience to destroy their own lives. It's that, I think that gets all the attention.
For example, I know I have a tendency to become obsessed with whatever game I'm playing. This is why, when my brother gave me WoW for Christmas, I chose not to play it. I know myself well enough that, well, it's just a better idea overall not to let myself get addicted in the first place. On the other hand, I don't drink, I don't gamble, and I don't do drugs. None of these have any appeal to me whatsoever. At the same time, I've known myself to obsessively play even games that in all honesty, the gameplay doesn't particularly interest me. I'm also generally a little too disconnected with rl as it is. I don't want to know what I'd do with WoW.
Because some of us don't say "fuck off and leave me alone you small dicked loser." I try to turn guys down politely, and therefore, it usually takes quite some time. Especially since I'm terrible with people.
Considering that most of the time, I'm hit on when I'm in the middle of doing other stuff, this can become a pain in the ass. If I'm at a bar or at a convention, or something of the sort where at least half the reason I'm there is to meet people, I don't particularly mind getting hit on. When I'm trying to shop for groceries, or grab a quick lunch between classes, or reading the new David Weber in the Coldstone across from one of my favorite bookstores (I swear, this has happened the last three David Webers I've gotten), I'm probably not going to be interested.
Then there's the guys who think it's perfectly appropriate to hit on you when you're home alone having pizza delivered. Because hitting on women when they're in their houses, alone, at night, is the perfect way to make them feel safe. That was damn nerve-wracking.
Do I think that being hit on is like being assaulted? No. But I do think it's damn annoying in most situations. And dangerous in some.
Warning: I'm not entirely emotionally rational on this subject. Please read the rest of my post with this in mind.
Look. I am a woman at extremely high risk for breast cancer. My mother had breast cancer. My father had cancer. Going back further, the family history I have of cancer borders on the ridiculous. Furthermore, I have extremely large breasts, which is another risk factor. (The more tissue, the more room there is for tumors to grow. Also, larger breasts make cancer harder to detect just by feeling it, which is your best chance of catching it early.)
At some point within the next five years, I'm probably going to have to undergo breast reduction surgery. I'm still young enough that it hasn't become medically necessary yet, but my doctor's been suggesting it since I was 16. I'm terrified of this. I hate surgery. I hate the risk that I'll lose all feeling in my breasts. I hate the fact that I probably won't even have the option to breast-feed. I hate the fact that no matter what, I'm going to end up with scars on my breasts.
But you know what? At some point, assuming they don't come up with a sure-fire cure for breast cancer, I'll go through with it. Because I'd rather have scarred, numb, tiny breasts than risk dying.
As such, as you might imagine, I am EXTREMELY supportive of breast cancer research. I try to do whatever I can to get those extra dollars in that might allow me to avoid having surgery. I try to attend those goddamn money-raising breast cancer things, despite the fact that I hate hate hate crowds. If I were any good at dealing with people, I'd organize one. Or several. I do do as much as I can within my areas of expertise to raise awareness. Because. Well. I watched my mother go through chemotherapy. I watched my father go through chemotherapy. I heard about my aunt, and my cousins, going through chemotherapy. And every last dollar that goes to breast cancer research is one more chance I have of not dying.
You want prostate cancer awareness to reach the level of breast cancer awareness? Then advertise it yourself. I'm busy.
Except lj, in my experience, has always had an extraordinary number of people with paid accounts. I used to have a paid account (that I let expire, and haven't bothered renewing at the rate they're irritating me). I'd estimate half of the people I talk to on lj have paid accounts. I watch a very large roleplay where almost every single player has at least one paid account, and some have up to six paid account, because they're playing just that many characters. (Yes, granted, they're almost certainly insane. But hey, they write well.) And the paid account users are for the most part more pissed off than the free users. No, they don't see ads when they're logged in (well, except for the sponsored communities on the front page. Which even I think they're lame for complaining about.)
And to a lot of paid users, well. They aren't always paid users. Their account runs out when they're broke, they have a spare free account for their writing/art/roleplaying/pretending to be half the Harry Potter fandom, whatever. But they still paying lj and don't particularly want to be bombarded with ads by lj when they use a different account.
Sorry, I wasn't clear with that. I don't have a problem with it. I was just seeing a lot of comments that implied that they thought only people who opted in to see advertising (Sponsored+) would see advertising, and I wanted to correct that impression. Especially since a number of people have had free journals since well before they put in advertising, when lj was still promising no ads whatsoever, and thus in no sense ever agreed to see advertising.
I'll admit I'm irritated at this. Frankly, more irritated than the news itself deserves. The features themselves are (both) things that could be nice, but both have the potential to mostly just irritate me. And judging by lj's recent history, I judge the latter more likely than the former.
Ever since Six Apart bought lj, they've been adding features, and shoving them down the throats of the users without paying much attention to their complaints. Or any. There was the Sponsored+ account (which, incidentally, displays ads to anyone who visits who isn't a paid user, not just people who also have Sponsored+ accounts. This seems to be a fairly common misapprehension in the comments.) There was a new userinfo, that, to give them their due, they did scrap when out of the thousand+ complaints I saw, there were two people who liked it. Their standard implementation of new features nowadays seems to be to force people to opt out, which irritates me when I come to my lj and realize that I need to remove the new bar at the top of my layout/change the new bar on the comment page back to my old bar/whatever. And generally, their response to people saying "I don't like this!" is "But, but it's cool! Look at the shiny and profitable^W^W thing we made for you! Don't you like it? D: D:" And the tone of their response irritates me as much or more as their original announcement. Damnit, if you're going to start shoving new and exotic ways of you making a buck down my throat, at least have the decency not to act like you think you're doing me a favor.
I have a lot of friends on lj. I'm moderately active in several fandoms, and for years, lj's been the place for people writing fanfic to gather. And I'm seeing more people beginning to talk about moving to greatestjournal, or deadjournal, or journalfen, that a year ago would never have even thought about it. And that makes me sad, frankly. If fandom starts dispersing across all the lj clones because lj decides to turn itself into a myspace clone, I'm going to have to go to all the trouble of tracking people across multiple sites, rather than just the one today. And I don't want to have to do that.
You know, I can't be the only person out there who never really got into music, mostly because the RIAA pisses me off.
If the RIAA ever looked at my purchase history, they would assume that I was the world's worst pirate, because the last time I bought a cd was when my brother asked me for one for Christmas a few years ago. I think I've bought less than ten CDs in my life. My brother occasionally tosses me one of his old cds, or a friend does, but I'm not going to pay $15 for a cd. I play those if I want background noise. I'm also not going to download illegally. I'm also not going to pay for DRM-covered crap that I can't guarantee having permanently. There are quite simply no means of me obtaining music that are both legal and acceptable to me (that I know of).
Until the RIAA dies, and the music business works out a sane business model that I'm willing to spend money on, I won't let myself get interested in music. It's just that simple.