I've had to bring my rat Krümel to the vet today. He has some sort of very wet sounding sneezing, and for a few days now weird episodes during which he makes sounds as if to spit something out, or maybe it's like the rat version of coughing (though I don't think rats really cough) or choking, it's hard to describe and not quite like any of the sounds of respiratory trouble I've heard before. When I tried to tell the vet he looked at me dubiously, so I'm not sure useful my description was, but it doesn't sound good, though the scary episodes only happen once or twice every day as far as I can tell, so of course the vet didn't witness one of those. (Why don't pets ever demonstrate their symptoms in a vet office?)

Anyway, he listened to Krümel's lungs, and told me that those sound clear, which is at least something, so it's likely an upper respiratory thing. I got some oral antibiotic to give him, and hope that it'll work against the infection. Krümel is still eating okay, and he's lively, so he can't feel too bad, but with a year and nine months he's not young anymore, and I worry.

Also, on our way back Krümel was admired by a horde of children who were on some sort of class trip. Thankfully he's not really scared by loud noises as long as he knows they are outside of wherever he is (in this case his safe transport box), so he didn't really mind all the staring and the shouting that much as thirty or so elementary school age children were crowding around me while I was waiting for the train, all asking questions about rats as pets. He didn't even hide beneath his towel. Anyway, I tried to impress on them that rats need large cages, need to be kept in groups, and that they may need considerable vet care (as I was on my way back from there that came up, and it's not like I don't still remember the expensive eye operation he needed last winter), and so on, and thus to do my bit for the promotion of responsible pet ownership.

Unrelated to my rats, I've been getting the impression that I still get friended in periods when I barely post, but more readers unsubscribe when I'm updating more regularly. I guess it makes sense in that readers notice more easily that interests have diverged or that my LJ is boring or whatever when I actually post, whereas it doesn't matter whether or not they have subscribed while I'm quiet, but still. This kind of pattern is not encouraging... *frets neurotically*

While I'm less than thrilled (to put it mildly) with the views that SUP official expressed in that interview (I read the translated version here), I'm mostly boggled that they let someone say these things openly in a press interview. In a way it is refreshing compared to the totally vapid phrases in places like the most recent news post where they try to pretend they care about the users without saying much of anything.

So LJ discontinued the option for new Basic, i.e. ad-free accounts. Without announcing it beforehand, or even saying so outright in the actual news post (they used advertising speak describing this as "Other changes you may have noticed are the logged-out homepage and registration process for new users. We streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account." *snort*).

Considering how they pressed ads into more and more places and made them harder to remove also for paid users ever since the "no-ads" policy was first softened with the "Plus" account, like ads on the main site standard pages rather than just journals, this persistent snap.com hassle, all the "sponsored" communities and v-gifts, the "partnership links" like to MSN, and so on, I'm not surprised, but that they don't even realize that this is a major change for the site and its culture is disheartening.

And I've seen in comment threads a response "well, you can't expect a business to let you use up resources without anything in return, so it's no wonder they finally discontinued the ad-free accounts", but that completely overlooks that free users on a site like LJ aren't *leechers*, like say non-registered downloaders on a free file storage site, they provide the content that makes other users (some of those paying) and casual visitors (some of those seeing ads when browsing elsewhere on the site even if they enter the site through an ad-free LJ) come to LJ in the first place.

And maybe they did a cost/benefit analysis and decided it's not tenable to have free accounts anymore (not that they communicated that anywhere I could see, they seem to assume their users are too stupid for three choices in the sign-up and thus one needed to be removed), but it is just not true that they don't get anything in return for their services from free users. It may or may not be "enough" in their financial bottom line, but if all the free users connecting on LJ around a topic decide to go to elsewhere for whatever reason (better features, less ads, whatever), it's not as if the paid ones into that topic would stay either. For example, even while I'm not into fiber arts and crafts, even I noticed how many knitting-related things moved to Ravelry, and I suspect a ton of users who were on LJ mostly for knitting may have gone away completely, so now casual site visitors on the look for knitting stuff like a pattern, won't land through Google in some LJ comm and look at LJ's ads, but on Ravelry's site. A social site is nothing without user content.

This doesn't affect me much in practice, because I haven't created a new LJ account since I got my first one, and I surf with AdBlock on anyway, but it is still aggravating.

So I've been reading some question and answer threads to understand their new rules, and apparently if someone else flags a post of yours as "explicit" and the abuse team agrees, it will be administratively flagged, but you won't even be notified as a journal owner that they put restrictions on your content. In this comment the LJ employee marta explains: "The Adult setting is actually only voluntary, it won't ever be forced. It's the Explicit one which could be set administratively. If an individual post is set the owner won't be contacted. But if a journal or community has the setting put on it (again, multiple flags, review, agree first) the journal owner or community maintainer will receive an email. [...]"

Seriously, what?!? So now I won't even be notified if they administratively restrict my journal content and change the labelling of some of my journal entries?!?

This content rating is annoying as frell (notice my usage of the kiddie-safe expletive... *snerk*). Half my f-list is now collapsed into non-specific cut-tags telling me "You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors."?? Presumably this is because I joined back when you just had to tell them that you were over 13. You know, since I said I was over 13 more than five years ago, it would have been cool if their computer system leniently deduced that I'm probably well over 18 by now. Kind of a gesture of goodwill towards longterm users who joined under a very different atmosphere and management. But I guess I'm now forced to change my settings somewhere, and give them my data...

Poll #1046915 LJ auto-post feature: threat or menace?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

So, what do you think of LJ's new auto-post feature?

So in an attempt to start relying less on LJ's ScrapBook gallery functions I just spent the last few hours uploading all my drawble artwork (over 60 images) to my webspace, created thumbnails (thankfully I found a shell command automating that step), coded them to display on my page for assorted sketches, complete with the annotations that used to be gallery labels showing as mouseover, i.e. for whom I did it and what the prompts were.

Then I changed at least the posts for the most recent drawbles to link to these images instead of the LJ hosted ones, that in *three* places, what with the crossposting. I do not look forward to do that for the rest of the drawbles, let alone all the entries showing rat pictures, and scans, and what not. Gah. It's not that I'd be that thrilled to pay them again as if nothing had happened, but I could have read another SGA Big Bang novel in this time, you know? And at least this part led to some vague improvement in that more of my art shows on my site, editing to relink most other other content won't do anything of the sort. *feels conflicted* Maybe I should consider letting posts just break...

Anyway, I feel like drawing monsters, which I haven't done in a while, so if anyone's interested and maybe wants a monster drawing, you could prompt me with a description or some features. I do somewhat cute monsters better than truly scary ones, but I can try to be scary.

I think I need to move the art I host on LJ's Scrapbook (mostly the drawbles and my rat photos) elsewhere, so that it won't cause me any trouble to let my paid account here expire. Because seriously, the latest suspensions of the HP fan artists ponderosa121 and elaboration are just incomprehensible to me. Both artists have posted elsewhere that their art in question wasn't even chan, ponderosa121 about the Snape/Harry art here and elaboration about her Fred/George piece here.


And while I've seen the posts mentioning that WB might have complained to LJ and demanded that material removed, as a result of that I'd expect one of these DMCA notices as LJs response to copyright violations, giving the offender opportunity to remove the stuff either permanently or until they sort it out if they decide to fight the allegation, but not an immediate permanent suspension of all of the user's accounts without any warning, which is what seems to have happened if the posts from the artists describe correctly how they found their LJ suspended for art they posted to pornish_pixies, and those suspensions also included their non-fandom and RPG journals, so I guess it would be a good idea for any fans owning RL journals to keep those under a seperate email contact to have at least a chance they might escape suspension if the fandom journal is.

ETA: I guess that would mean moving the Wizard drawing book scans too, which kind of sucks, since some of those entries are so widely linked and prominent in google search results that they are bound to generate far more traffic than any of my other stuff. Also, I now actually looked and I have about 370 images in my LJ Scrapbook (sadly all non-porn *g*), most of them posted/linked from somewhere, often from more than one place even, so that would mean editing a lot of broken images and links should I really choose not to throw more money at 6A. What a hassle.

Does anyone know of any tutorials or pointers or something on how to make banner images made from several elements look not lame?

I have been thinking about maybe switching to one of those "expressive" LJ blog-style layouts, but if I do I'd like to have my own custom banner. I thought it might look nice if I'd use some of the pencil drawings I made for my icons and combine them into a banner, but all my attempts look lame, kind of like those atrocious c&p wallpapers made up from several screencaps, where you can see that someone just pasted some random images onto a background.

I've seen a couple of posts on my f-list saying that connecting the recent suspensions to "freedom of speech" issues was misguided, basically because LJ is a private entity and can regulate their service as they see fit. But see, for me the issue isn't that I'm unclear about the strict meaning of "censorship" (i.e. done by governments not private companies) and that these provisions for "free speech" in their various local forms are mainly intended to protect you from being thrown into jail for expressing something, not to actually help you distribute it to someone. I mean, in pre-internet days nobody was obligated to let you use their printing press or later on their copy shop for, say, publishing your porn either. Or let you onto their radio station or whatever. Which is why I'm not that bothered from a mere publishing perspective, that isn't really any different than pre-internet.

But the electronic sites are also social spaces and are replacing in a way physical gatherings by people. Only those take place in virtual spaces that are privately owned (often by companies, though certainly there are a few alternatives or non-profits offering their own infrastructure) and I worry about the implications of that. If all "public" spaces for gathering and for speech are vanishing (and even gatherings that formerly also took place in a different kind of private space, say a pub, are now more easily controlled through the internet features of social sites), that is either vanishing directly, because e.g. yet another piece of public street with stores became a "private shopping mall" entirely rather than remaining public (and seriously around here they for example privatized the plaza in front of the central station so now you can't sit there anymore if you look poor or something but are accosted and removed by scary private security guards who personally bother and intimidate me far more than a few drunk punks and drug dealers loitering there before ever did), or indirectly because people move into virtual gathering and communication spaces that are private infrastructure to begin with, well once that move is complete the "free speech" you are allowed when you gather with others in principle is kind of inconsequential if all (or at least most) infrastructure is commercially owned on some level, and on the cautious and conservative side to avoid trouble and not loose business or advertisers or whatever.

So I do think how well (or badly) private companies handle these issues is connected to free speech on a practical level, even if on a formalistic level it is not.

Like many others I've also resorted to hierarchical tagging (i.e. the "category: subcategory" kind of tag like "recs: sga") to circumvent LJ's stupid and deficient tag implementation that lacks a logical AND and is limited to display only a hundred entries per tag. And I've seen tag lists in the side bar ordered in a list style, like in the recsrainbow LJ, but somehow I can't find a tutorial that tells me how I can display my tags like that in my sidebar rather than as a cloud. I tried finding it in s2howto, but I didn't see a tutorial for such an indented tag list there. Does anyone have a link to a tutorial explaining what I need to do? I assume I'll need to paste something in my customization layer, but without a tutorial that is like figuring out a programming language with all the functions and such, and that seems undue effort for such a modest stylistic modification, since it's not like I want to create an entirely new style.

I have disabled anonymous commenting in my LJ, because the spam just got too annoying recently. The number of spam comments was up to several per day rather than one or two per month, whereas legitimate anonymous comments were a rather rare thing, so I decided to restrict comments to registered users in my LJ. Sorry!

Do other people have problems with the tracking function? For a couple of LJs from authors whose fic I read, but am not interested in their other entries, and who also tag their fiction, I chose in the tracking options to get a notification when an entry with certain tags is posted to their LJ. Which seemed like a very convenient alternative to friending when my interest in the LJ is limited to the fiction. And for some LJs that seems to work like I intended, but at least with one author I just don't get a notification, even though the entry that has been added has the relevant tags. I don't get it. Can LJ owners choose not to be trackable or something? or other ideas why it might not work?

Since I frequently ranted in the past about LJ's implementation of tags, it is no secret that I still stuck with just general tags, i.e. "comics", "recs", "tv", "continuity" etc., in the hope that eventually LJ will fix their tags so that I can display "comics+recs" or "comics+continuity" the way other sites using tags allow (and maybe even "comics-batverse" one day) without having to create a hierarchy with subcategories myself.

However I've been waiting for quite a while now, and it doesn't look like they are about to implement that any time soon. Meanwhile, some of my general tags have over a hundred entries and can't even be fully displayed with their moronic interface. (Curse you LJ!)

So, should I cave and subdivide my tags tags containing predefined subcategories, i.e. create additional tags like "comics recs", "fanfic recs", "book recs", "comics squee", "comics scans" etc., to break up the tags with many entries?

Poll #860874 Reorganizing my tags -- a worthwhile procrastination method?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Should RatCreature cave and create subdivided tags that would be superfluous in a sane tag implementation?

Watching the ep today somehow the plot seemed very fitting ( spoilers )

Are these dots supposed to be an eyepatch in the tiny LJ user icons? WTF?

Not that this rant is something new, but every time LJ prettifies something or introduces a new feature I'm wondering why they don't fix the functionality they already have. For example, I really like tags, but not only does their tag management interface suck so much that not even the simplest operations are possible(*), let alone something like a decent bulk editing feature to assign tags to posts, but you still can't even use a logical AND with the tags and the missing NOT is also aggravating.(**)

And it's all made worse by the display limitations that don't allow you to go back further than 100 entries. I already have tags that appear more often, and some that come close, because I have some very general tags. That is because when they introduced them, I expected that eventually they would work like tags, i.e. that I wouldn't have to do systematic or hierarchical categorizations because users would just be able to choose tag combinations, e.g. "comics+reviews" or "comics+fanart", so that I wouldn't need to worry whether it made more sense to have a "reviews > comics" and "fanart > comics" or "comics > reviews" and "comics > fanart" organization (respectively a mimicry of that by tags with subcategories as some people use on LJ to compensate for LJ's suckage), and if I ever reviewed other people's fanart it would be able to fit too. I'm pretty sure that is one of the essential points of tags, yet still LJs tags don't work like that.

(*) I had mistyped my "dc" tag as "dcu" a couple of times (a result of the tag labelling interface sucking too), and just now wanted to merge the two into "dc", but here isn't a merge function and renaming "dcu" into the already existing "dc" didn't work either. I ended up relabeling by hand.
(**) I hate that about de.licio.us too, how hard can it be to allow a NOT when you already have an AND? Other bookmarking sites have one after all.

I haven't updated my recs in a long time, however the task to convert the rec folder in my bookmarks to actual recs is getting more and more daunting as time goes on. Since I'm actually somewhat attached to my AU recs page despite all of that, I decided that manageable baby steps are the only way to go, so for now I have fixed the broken links in the existing recs -- at least those a link checking utility showed (linkrot sucks!) -- and added a tiny number of new recs, seven in total, three Batverse, two HP, and two SW. Seven down and not quite ten times as many to go... Well, at least it's a little bit of progress.

I also signed up for a fandom challenge for the very first time. I committed to draw Harry as a platypus animagus for Nimori's Animagus Challenge. When I saw a platypus on the list I just couldn't resist, because while these don't look that vicious they actually have venom and according to the wikipedia: "The male platypus has venomous ankle spurs, used in vicious territorial battles and fights over mates. The poison is not normally lethal to humans but produces excruciating pain and swelling that lasts for several months. The pain is so excruciating that the victim is rendered almost helpless." So while it looks silly it still would be a useful form for him to fight Voldemort and the Death Eaters with what sounds like Cruciatus venom. Besides, since apparently that venom also is only produced during the mating season , the opportunities for crackfic scenarios for Platypus!Harry would be endless too: I mean, obviously it's vital that his animagus form has its best weapon available, and since humans at least don't have fixed mating seasons Harry could have to have sex for The Cause... BTW, last time I looked platypus was still open to claim for fic. *g*

I also found this cool explanation in lj_style how one can turn the simple tag list into a tag cloud with different font sizes depending on how frequently a tag is used. I tried this so now the view of my tags displays as a cloud, not a list. (works only for paid LJs)

Finally, I looked at a ton of Batgirl interpretations because of the recent Batgirl meme. (There's a list in this entry. It's over three hundred by now.)

In my recent poll on icon ideas the Kill-Kill-Kill!RatCreature icon came out on top, so following popular demand (well okay, three votes compared to two for bouncing Tigger!RatCreature and one for grim Robin!RatCreature, so maybe "popular" may be stretching it a bit... *grin*), I now present my 41st icon:


I can't stress enough how supremely dorky it feels to pose in your bedroom with a large stick in front of a digital camera set on autotimer, because you just can't get the position and foreshortening of your avatar's arms and hands for your axe-murderer icon right and are trying to get photo references. Still worse however is, that even if you got a halfway decent pose in a photo (not easy, btw, when you have to find a secure place for the camera that also allows you to position yourself in the few seconds the timer gives you so that your whole body really is in the picture) all that won't help you. Because, surprise, surprise, your cartoon avatar looks rather different from you, for example it has this huge nose that extends into the space where your arms were in your reference pose, also it doesn't actually has proper shoulders, joints or proportions like you do.

Perhaps I ought to look at modeling clay, to create miniature 3D avatars with the right features (not that I am any good at creating tiny clay models *snort*), however being lazy I settled instead merely for one of the slightly less crappy attempts I had produced after far too many sketches, both complete and partial, of my alter ego holding an axe, regardless of its remaining problems.

Well, at least by the end I was in the right mindset for the "kill! kill! kill!" icon, so that's something I guess.

Other random things that pop into my head when I look at this icon: What is it with those truly awful non-standard LJ community symbols?! You know, the tiny picture indicating a community in front of an LJ name that's normally like this: , however for some inexplicable reason there apparently exists an option to change it into a randomly colored and/or pulsating/blinking thing, or other garish, tiny pictures that people think symbolize their community better. ::shudder::

In general I like and appreciate the tag feature. It certainly makes it easier to catch up with just specific posts after a longer absence, if someone uses them, and is easier than using the memory function, if I want to read all posts related to a tag, not just one specific post. What puzzles me however is, how some people use tags consisting of several words with spaces inbetween, and those don't work for me, no matter which journal I try to click on one of those. When experimenting with tags in my LJ I also noticed that there is no problem creating and assigning such tags, but they won't work afterwards. The tag will link to an URL of the type ".../tag/word1+word2" and I get an error page "Sorry, one or more specified tags do not exist." Is this a temporary bug and these multiple word tags did work at some point? Is it just me and they work for other people? Or have people who assign these tags just never tried to use them, and are unaware of the tags malfunctioning?