Strikethrough ‘07 aside, I am so bored. Turns out one of the boys turned off my machine last night, thank goodness, and I remembered to today. Shan’s department leader sliced open his arm at the end of the day. I don’t know how bad it was, but the first aid team called 911 and he was headed to the hospital when we left. And they’d given him an oxygen mask. This sounds pretty horrific, but it’s procedure, as I understand - and not very unusual for Sheetmetal. Shan works in a fairly dangerous department. I guess I do too, now, although most of the danger is of me breaking things. I broke a knob today. Kinda. It still works, I just… stripped out half the threads so it doesn’t want to screw down? But it works, so, all is well.

So Jack’s dad is Keith Richards. How awesome is that? He played a little in the movie, apparently just some warm-ups, and he just looks so cool. <3

Lj ended up killing communities for, oh, supporting victims of pedophilia and incest. Oh man, they screwed up big time. They killed groups for discussing the novel Lolita. They violated their own TOS. Then SixApart (who owns LJ) made statements to some news thing, which were misquoted, and refused to actually tell their customers anything. Finally, last night, SixApart made a statement to the LJ collective, apologized, and promised to do more in-depth checking before they run off to SAVE DE CHILLUNS OMFG. Then they crashed. Seriously, LJ is just… not there. This is not unexpected, and it happens all the time anyway, but the timing is suspicious.

They keep saying, “the affected journals are just 500 out of 13 million, what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that we feel under attack, and we are fandom. Imagine if every BNF rose up against one thing in outrage. Imagine how that round resound through fandom and rally up even the smallest anonymouse lurker. That just happened. Fandom_counts is a community trying to get a headcount of the journals considered fandom; thus far, they’re at 27,500 journals. That’s 2.3% of LJ. Paid users make up 3.8% of LJ. Amusingly, these groups overlap a lot. Say bye to your income, LJ! The only thing they did right was to not take their own initiative and actively search for journals. They did everything else wrong.

Ah, LJ is back up. I am considering saving every fic I will ever want to read again. Trust, once lost, is almost impossible to win back.

Shan got the Firefly boxset a little while back. We watched it. It is really good, I dunno why it got cancelled - they creep in on you and make a cozy little home while you’re not paying attention. Plus, dude, spaceship. Cowboys. Kinda. They’re so awesome. I adore Jayne, and Kaylee, and River and Wash and and and. Which is why the movie broke my heart. I was sobbing so bad Shan barely made fun of me, just let me curl up with him and cry it out. It’s really kinda sad, how I cry more for fiction than I ever have for real life, but real life always needs dealing with. Fiction, you just feel.

But Dad, that one time you tried to say something about my LJ and I yelled over you because I was still a teen and stuff. D: Anyway, it’s good policy and a good way to remind myself that small kids do not need to be reading some of the things I might decide to write. “Would I want Dad to read this? No, locked it is.” Plus, Uncle G freaked me out that one time when he started talking about some HP author I had read, who did the Secret Diaries of LotR, you know, “Still not king!” It made me realize that the Internet is not private. I know, I know, but man, it’s always right there. It’s this other world, but that just makes you forget how much a part of this world it is. I live in another world myself, and I tend to forget it intersects with reality, but anyway.

Two other temps got fired today. Fortunately, it was because they kept not showing up and ruining loads of parts and the like, so they make me look good, and I also heard through the grapevine that my boss likes me. Yay me! I’m keeping right around 100% rate, which is wonderful, but like 80% efficiency, which is not surprising since I have to have someone else set everything up for me and only just figured out how to put things away. Seriously, this shit is complicated. I will never, ever be able to program one of these machines. Nor do I want to learn; that would mean staying in the place for years. Not happening. No way, no how. At least I’m on a good job right now; I’ll start off the morning with two hours of sitting on my butt. Oh shoot, did I forget to drain the air on my machine? I hope the boys checked it. *fret* I think I only turned off the front, dangit. Stupid Lisette. ):

LJ is in a tizzy. Some vigilante group is targeting the collective fandoms under the banner of driving out all the pedophiles. Of course, since they have no training and no association with any legal authority and are basically just doing it for the attention, they’re just driving the real pedophiles underground and upsetting the people who get their rocks off on textual fantasy erotica.

Now wait a minute here. They’re targeting… fandom. The people that make stuff up. Not the people that molest children and take photos of, you know, actual children, but the people who make stuff up and write about it. Not the people that pursue actual children in IM and chat, but the people that… make stuff up. And write about it. Hmm. Words on a screen about something that could not possibly happen (I dunno about you, but a relationship between two brothers who hunt werewolves and poltergeists for a living since their mother was killed by a demon is totally realistic, mm-hmm) versus, you know, actual harm. Someone has their priorities in order, yup.

What bothers me, really, is the… I don’t have a word for it. Vigilantism. They know best, better than law enforcement and the people that have been trained to catch pedophiles and all the people that, you know, do this job already and quite effectively. They have no transparency in their operation - no code of conduct, not even a clear statement of purpose, no way to know how they choose which LJ users to harass. And it is harassment. And it’s bullshit.

Ironically, I’m not at risk. My questionable content is friends-locked, which means a casual reader won’t see it. I’ve edited my interests to be the most bland, undescriptive trite conceivable. Why? Well, there is the small matter of my Dad having known about my LJ since it was created, and I KNOW he’s read the public entries at one point or another. He’s like that. So anything I wouldn’t want my dad to read gets f-locked. There are a few entries that might be twisted - Crimson involves branding, in a roundabout way, as well as a controversial view of war, sociopathy, and the like - but if anyone takes that much interest in me, I believe I can argue against it. These people don’t have lawyers; they’re just twisting the TOS to suit them, and LJ is afraid of getting sued so they’re cracking down hard. I don’t blame LJ. I blame these idiots who think they bring the wrath of God on the heathens.

Here’s an idea (don’t ask how it came into being, please, just don’t): “tactical” Kevlar lingerie for men. It could work, man. It could work. We can even use the tagline, “go commando.” Yes, you just groaned in agony. I know. It’s okay.

Trying this dumpling thing again, this time with ground pork, less sesame oil, and some extra flavoring in the steaming water. Unfortunately, I used the last of the flour, and I think the dough came out really funny. How this happened, I don’t know, since it’s just flour and hot water, but if anyone can mess that up, I am confident I can. Rock on, Lisette! We’ll see how they turn out, I guess, but since the last batch was almost edible, I have hope. It’s a very forgiving recipe - pretty much just a list of ingredients, almost no measurements at all. I like that. Also, it uses like, four ingredients. <3 Awesomecakes.

Eeeeee Pirates of the Caribbean! I love so much. Mmmm. Incoherent noises of happy are go! <3 I still love Davy Jones’ tentacles, and I desperately want to know how they did that. Mostly animation, I assume, but I can’t tell! It looks so real! The little facial tics spreading out into the tentacles, man, it’s so… and they don’t flinch from it, from having him in the background in a shot, which is more of a budget issue than anything, I think. A lesser budget would quail at background special effects like that. Oh, the pretty translucence and the wavy and the grabbing and the neck-snapping and strangling~! It is a good movie; perhaps not as good as it could have been, but nowhere near bad or even disappointing. Excellent, but not incredibly mind-blowing. Well, except for certain parts, most of which were ruined by this chick halfway across the theatre who did not realize that “no talking” also means “stop making loud noises every time someone delivers a line, omg”. I was about three second away from hurling my Reese’s Pieces at her head when she got into the movie enough to shut up, and then I ate them, and then she started making noises again and I almost got up to tell her where to shove it. I want to enjoy my movie, bitch, not your porny noises whenever you see Jack on screen. Bleh.

Apparently someone tried to steal our apartment last night. I dunno, I slept through it. Shan figures with all the empty apartments, someone was looking to crash somewhere. Or something. We had the chain on the door, but no deadbolt, and all the windows were open (including the one with no screen), so… what were they thinking, seriously. He says the door jerked open, stopped at the chain, and slammed shut. And about two second later he had the .45 out and waited for shit to go down, and it didn’t, and I snored. Heh. I’ve been waking up the last few nights, so I guess I was due for some heavy sleep? I feel pretty embarrassed. And totally in awe of Shan’s awesome gunslingerness. But still, kinda freaky. We’ve never had any problems around here before, other than that one chick getting murdered right before we moved in. No, I’m serious. Why do you think we own so many guns? She was last seen outside this jewelry store down the road, which of course I walk by on my way home from school at 9pm. lolz. I’ve yet to actually feel scared or threatened around here, though. It’s an awesome neighborhood.

Now for sleeping. Today was a good day, so very good, and I have nothing to fret over this weekend. Well, other than calling Uncle G. and buying my book for summer. Oh, and I should get a new notebook, or a new binder, because this one is falling apart. Maybe even a bookbag. …Nah. Worst comes to worst, I’ll just shove them in the headcrab. :D

I was right. It sucked. I might walk down to the store later, just for the hell of it. $12/lb for salmon, jeez. Stupid organic crap. Maybe I’ll get things to cook with. You know, instead of pre-prepared frozen things.

Yesterday, until 3pm, I had less than 400 calories. Then I had a chicken sandwich. No idea how many calories that is. But I am proud of me. However, I suck so bad at badminton that people are getting mad at me, so there goes the daily exercise. I never played sports for a reason, with the fine exception of volleyball. I forget how to play that now, though. But anyway. I suck at badminton, which is sad, because it was fun, and I wanted to get better, but not at the expense of other people’s fun. I will console myself with a once-annually game of bowling, I suppose. I alternate between totally sucking and totally rocking bowling.

Maybe I should make something. …Nah. Excruciating walk to the coop it is, and then the REALLY excruciating walk back up the hill. Reminder to self: finish email to Uncle G, call him with SS#, and also class starts June 4th on Mondays at 5:30pm, and it is Intro to Psych and you might want to find out what your book is and you know buy it.

Today was a good day, but for some reason I have this horrible, ominous feeling about tomorrow. What the hell. And the final episode of Supernatural keeps screwing up just instants before the really, really good part. And then the better part. And oh man, I want the next season.

I really desperately painfully want a new job. Gonna stick with it. I can do this. The internship at the aquarium isn’t paid, damnit, stop thinking wistfully about it. And there’s no way the bookstore pays enough to live on. And you really don’t want to work retail. Or cashier. What you really want is a buffer so you can temp some office jobs long enough to know what you’re doing and then get a nice desk job as a receptionist or something. God, no, what you really want is to be a snake milker, but seriously, grow up. Think wistfully of the aquarium and then go to bed so you can do unspeakable things to metal tomorrow.

P.S. There was a good foot of overhead and at least half a foot towards the front of the car. Just remember, you have to transport it vertically! But it won’t fit! Was he trying to sell us a U-Haul or something? Weird.

So the TV is a multi-purpose machine. Ours is connected to Hammond, who is a decent computer in his own right, and who is also our homebrew Tivo. He runs Linux and is also our personal networked fileholder that both Shan and I can get at from our own computers. So the coaxial cable runs from the wall to Hammond, who uses the TV as a giant monitor to display TV and stuff. And we have seperate speakers from the TV so we can not only use one remote for everything (it doesn’t control the TV, just Hammond, you see) and also listen to music at bedtime without leaving the TV on or another computer - Hammond is on 24/7 anyway, might as well make him even more useful, right? Right. So. New TV went in, and so did horizontal lines moving vertically. Apparently Shan did a lot of research last night to find out what it’s not, and this morning tests revealed that unplugging the coax made the lines disappear. So while he got grumpy (and I don’t blame him, it totally sucked and we thought it might be the TV, which would have sucked SO HARD) I did a little Googling and found out it was a “ground loop” problem. Further Google use revealed that we could either get a cable RF ground loop inhibitor or a new surge protector that ran the coax through it - the latter would make everything the same grounding, and the former would just reduce backwards-flowing current or something. So we got a new surge protector, and all is well, and I am very proud of myself because I totally understood what was going on and I totally helped fix it. Yay me! So now we have a giant, crystal-clear HD-ready TV and free homebrew Tivo and a bajillion computers and dude, watching Supernatural on this TV is so awesome, the emo almost jumps off the screen at you. <3 Oh boys. Oh John. If only I had season two.

Now I shall update my Amazon wishlist, for no particular reason. I feel like wanting things.