I have been productive this morning! Any time I want to do something counterproductive to my goals, I ask myself "What Would Neal Caffrey Do?" and then choose to be productive instead.

It is possibly necessary to note that I have not conned anyone or stolen or forged anything. The Neal in my head is the one who's learning the canon and other details he will need, because I constantly wonder when and where he learned so much so well. It doesn't, to me, match the backstory we have for him.

(Surely someone has made a comprehensive list of all of the literary, art, and other cultural references in the show, right? I still need to find/refind/acquire one for Beauty and the Beast.)

Mostly this has nothing at all to do with White Collar but rather is simply a tool to get out of my current rut. Whatever works, right?

(source: The Mountain Goats - All Hail West Texas, "Fault Lines")

I'm reorganizing a few things in life right now, so for the moment my archive is access/friends-locked, and I'm for the moment I'm changing all access to reciprocal (I give you the same access you give me). If I made a mistake or you'll miss my inane comments or want to share opinions on any topic from asphalt to zebras, comments on and set to screened.

i turn 32 in two days. 32 seems impossibly old to me, yet i perpetually feel maybe 26 years old. maybe 24, even. does everyone my age and older walk around feeling stuck in their 20's forever? is that the height of our maturity?

i've been reading a lot and watching some movies, too for the 50/50 challenge (http://www.fiftyfifty.me)
we adopted a new cat. she's weird but we like her.
i've been working on some cool projects like this, this and this.
i went to new york and loved it all over again.
soon, i'm leaving for RI, where i'll be speaking at this event.

but mostly, just thinking about turning 32 and what a weird year it's been.

I am writing in reply to an opinion piece published in your paper recently which culminated with:

They have come for the trade-unionists; what is to stop them from coming for me?

The writer of this piece is ghoulishly appropriating the struggles of trade-unionists to glorify his own life. Of course nobody is going to come for him, he's in such a position of power and privilege that he can be safely writing pseudonymous pieces in popular papers such as yours. The plight of the trade-unionists is tragic, but it is their plight. His slippery-slope argument, that somehow someone else will be come for next, is absurd.

There seems to be some sort of implication that what has been done to the trade-unionists is not limited in its impact to the trade-unionists, but this is plainly false. Has anyone come for him yet? He can publicly laud himself for his victimhood when someone does, but to spin tails of some nebulous fear of a harm that has not been directed at him would seem part of some grandiose fantasy of martyrdom on his part, which he wishes to reap the benefits of without paying the costs. If he's so concerned about the trade-unionists, why doesn't he become one, and get in line for the purges that way, instead of suggesting that the purges will with time make their way to him?

He speaks from a position of comfort, and I have to assume disingenuously. What does he think? That some focused malevolence uses purges of one group in part to warn off or silence the others. How ridiculous! Next he will be suggesting that when people are targeted for violence and, yes, even political purges, it is not that they as individuals are being oppressed, punished or disappeared, but that the entire group itself suffers from those actions. We know that some trade-unionists have been come for, but there are clearly some out there who have not.

His categorical statements are plain falsehoods, and his attempt to spin some fiction in which he, too, is a target, just further down the list, is not only offensive to those who have been targeted, but to those who would be higher up this supposed list. Why is he so important that he speaks out about his eventual fate, rather than the presumably much more immediate one that some others will face? Because there are no others, there is no list. There is no grand plan, and these purges are a message to no one, but are purely functions of what has happened to individuals. If these people have been purged rightly, then why should we stand with them? If, and this is a big if, they are being targeted for political or ideological reasons, to consolidate power or for whatever other reason, then we should stand with them, and not attempt to make their fate about us.

the kids in our neighborhood have a playground view that's pretty great.


it's summer! a week and a half ago, it was winter. now it's summer! we have the windows open, the birds are singing, and the sky is bluuuuuue.

glorious.

May 23, 2012 - The official LiveJournal Release 92 has been deployed. Here’s what you’ll find in this latest site update:

NEW

• Particularly long comment threads now collapse with the alert “...and [#] more comments.” Just click on that alert to see the rest of the comments. Here’s what this looks like:


• Notification emails now hide any content that was already placed inside an lj-cut instead of displaying the entire entry.


• Social Capital is now displayed for all communities on the profile page.


• You can now embed the Spotify player into your journal or community style.


• Personal userheads are now available for purchase. A personal userhead is of your own design and is unique to you, unavailable to anyone else. Purchase as many personal userheads as you like; each costs 5,000 LJ FunBux™, and is good for five years. Learn more.

BUGS, FIXED

• Scheduled entries should no longer return errors or double-post.


• Domain mapping should no longer force redirection to the LiveJournal login page.


• The format=light URL modifier works on entry pages again.


• Comment notification emails will send even if the entry has a poll.


• The "Music" section on the edit entries page will let you delete the entire text field.


• The help link next to “Do not add to friends pages and RSS” on the update page now links to the correct FAQ.


• The list of journals and communities added by default for new users has changed to news and lj_releases for non-Cyrillic users.


• Missing navigation items in the Classic journal style have re-appeared.


• Notifications about expiring add-ons will now have correct subject lines.


• The bold/italic/strikethrough buttons in the site default commenting scheme should no longer cause cursor positioning problems in Chrome.


• The Calendar feature will now update properly when you edit an entry and change its date.

PLANNED PARENTHOOD: HELP WITH A VGIFT!
Join us in standing up for reproductive health and education. Through the end of the month, you can send a specially designed Planned Parenthood vgift to your LiveJournal friends to help support this cause. (And if you need someone to send it to frank is always happy to receive gifts!). There are three variations for you to choose from ($1, $5 and $10), but they’d all look good on your profile. Thank you for your support! Learn more.

- The LiveJournal Team

Release #92 is live!

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A few weeks ago we officially announced the plan to overhaul Scrapbook, LiveJournal’s exclusive photo-hosting feature for Plus, Paid and Perm accounts. Today we’re letting you know that the new Scrapbook will release early next week; in anticipation, we want to give you a bit more information on some additional changes that have been made. The newest additions to the FAQ are under the cut; the original FAQ about the new Scrapbook is in the previous post.

( Read more... )

May 21, 2012: Three weeks ago we officially announced the plan to overhaul Scrapbook, LiveJournal’s exclusive photo-hosting feature for Plus, Paid and Perm accounts. Today we’re letting you know that the new Scrapbook will release this week; in anticipation, we want to give you a bit more information on some additional changes that have been made. The newest additions to the FAQ are under the cut; the original FAQ about the new Scrapbook is in the previous news post.

( Read more... )

Part of me doesn't want to like Common Law (it bothers me the way it works so hard to appeal the slash fanbase but goes out of the way to reinforce the protagonists' heterosexuality), but I admit I laughed rather a lot at Friday's episode.

And Michael Ealy is really very very very pretty.

I keep forgetting to test whether the USB ports on my laptop work or not; of the two USB devices I use, one is completely non-functional and the other is semi-functional, so it's a challenge to tell if the problem is the port or the device. If the USB ports don't work, there's no actual reason to buy a new wireless adapter for it. I'm going to go test that now. Then I'm going to curl up in bed and wonder when I became a morning person.

If anyone feels like crossing some fingers, I could use some crossed ones; I need work to both approve my FMLA application and medical accommodation request. (Also on the agenda for this week: start the job hunt, so tragically derailed by health whatnot, and figure out how to eliminate stress. Possibly the answer to the latter is to laugh at how absurd that goal is.)

(source: Common Law 1x02 - "Ride Along", Kenny Fisher)