Off the Cliff

No need to feel left out. Today I got my first 'Hey This is hard for me because I have never done anything like this.. but I have a huge crush on you' spam lj comment.

I'm puzzled as to the purpose of it all. They must assume that everyone has comments enabled, but do they really expect anyone to click on their link? Malice, stupidity, or both?

(My battery is expiring. Date and time stamp this morning were reset to 12 am Jan 1 1980, pre-internet prehistory. Also precaffeine, so I selected the wrong date.)

Oh yes, alright. Here we are, p.28 of Moon Over Soho, Peter talking of course:

And I would have been doing at least one of those things the next morning if I hadn't also been the last bleeding apprentice wizard in England.

Clearly the French publishers had reason. But since the end of the book alters the state that obtains at the beginning, I *still* think they could have called it something else.
( Useless lj-cut; reasons why within )

The odd thing about reading the Tiffany Aching books after a fast romp through the witches series is how much darker the former is than the latter. It's supposed to be YA (though the cover blurb about 'teen witch Tiffany' makes me cringe rather) and I suppose it is, in the way that YA always seems to deal with Problems. Dark things pop up in the witches series-- fairies and vampires and the like-- but Granny and Nanny snap their fingers at them. Granny and Nanny are there in Tiffany's world, but it's a much less genial or even safe place notwithstanding.

I suppose it's because Tiffany is the protagonist, and however unflappable she may be basically, she's still a witch growing into her powers and finding what prices must be paid. That side of witchcraft is a recurrent but secondary theme in the witches books-- Granny Weatherwax, basically; though I've often wondered what Nanny's story was, and what sacrifices she had to make, if any. With them, though, it's all a happened: choices made for better or for worse. With Tiffany it's happening, and it makes for pretty comfortless reading.
( And in other news )

ETA: Oh look. The cut parentheses are back. LJ moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.

Everybody's LJ will load but mine. Does this have anything to do with the guys who've been hacking into my files and putting malware there, in spite of unguessable passwords? Or the three Russian spam blogs that hit random tanbi entries on Sunday? Argh.

Oh, OK-- now incandescens' & petronia's LJs load, but none of my other friends'. Oh them wacky Russians, I suppose.

You can keep the subject line and drop-down menu if you change your LJ style. Trouble is I like my LJ style as it is. OTOH, incandescens also seems to use punquin elegant, and her comments pages remain (more or less) the same. The problem seems to be those of us who kept Xcolibur, the useful Xcolibur with its nice blue strip at the top. Posting from Xcolibur is as it ever was; commenting from Xcolibur limits one's options completely.

Somewhere in the bowels of those drop-down menues is a way to stop using Xcolibur: but I don't want to do that either.

Later: found it. And no, changing to vertical or whatever doesn't give me back my subject lines. Puzzley puzzle. Oh-- and if you unclick Xcolibur, the option vanishes. Argity argh.

(Err, lj, where's the preview button gone to?)

Though I'm not a huge fan of the Riverside series, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman seem to be very nice people, and I wish them very well and very happy, which they seem to be anyway. But when I read about their New York jaunts and con-going events, and when Riverside side-stories show up in people's charity auctions, I can't help a small wistful desire that Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett were doing it too, and blogging about it, and that it was Points gaiden I was bidding on.

Also I r slo. Always wondered about Coindarel's Dragons, that military outfit Philip was attached to at some point, and what it was. Took someone's typo to inform me that that's their version of dragoons.
( Thoughts obscurely inspired by the Dalai Lama )

No, sorry, Whoever, but The Cardinal's Blades series is not better than Temeraire. Novik has her problems, but she doesn't describe all her characters' clothes in detail, and not all her women are slender beautiful young things.

Also, why is lj logging me out and changing my posting screens? Silly buggers.

Other people's LJs will load. Mine will not. Mysteries of the universe.

Long story short:

LJ has created a new filter that is AUTOMATICALLY TURNED ON in ALL journals and communities, which screens comments that are made with 'suspicious links' ie links that are not on their safe whitelist, so pretty much the majority of the internet.

To turn it off: Go to your Settings, click on the Privacy tab, and half way down where it says Spam Protection uncheck the box next to "Comments containing a link to a non-whitelisted domain will be marked as spam and moved to a special section." This applies to both personal journal and communities and the opinion has to be manually changed in each one.

Oh LJ what you done now? Because now the user info is in the wrong place in Firefox as well as IE, at least when I look at comments. Post entry still has the top of the page where it should be: at the top. I hope this is a glitch and not a new piece of coding that screws those of us who cling to excolibur.

(Bright siding- with the top of the page now appearing under the entry, I can go back to using IE, because now the entries no longer scroll into the top of the page as they did before.)

There is now, in my mouth...

this sharp chain.

And it never comes out.

(Hallelujah. LJ's fonts are back to normal, and I may continue to waste time in other people's journals. Especially metaquotes.)

As far as I can see, LJ in IE wants to load every page twice. Or wants to load something that it never gets around to doing.

Interesting post about attitudinal accuracy in historical fiction. rachelmanija has an excellent parallel:( cut for same )

Some forgotten summer in the last decade I'd regularly sit at my computer and smell hamburgers barbecuing in the back yards beyond the window, and then feel compelled to bicycle over to the one restaurant that had reasonably priced hamburgers-- and glacier-slow service-- and have one myself. (Somehow I never realized that Pauper's across the street had them too; I assumed my choice was between Incredibly Slow Restaurant and By the Way's organic burgers with a schmeer of hummous on them, quote-unquote.) Not that any restaurant gives me the pickle relish I really want, which is why I want barbecued hamburgers, not restaurant ones.

Am smelling hamburgers now. But the whirligigs of time allow me no more than a bulgogi's serving of beef, which might come to a third of a burger, and no fries at all. Sic transit etc. Am a little sad about that. The By the Way burger was what I ate the evening of Sept 11, as a means of asserting to myself that fundamental things in my universe were still the same. However. What we left them, trains inherit/ Trains go on and we grow old.
( And speaking of trains )

Discussion around the great belly flop of the Last Failbender reveals these lovely links to What It Oughta Looked Like:

Storm Warriors 2
The original Storm Warriors

Must go cruise the DVD rental places. Brainless beautiful martial arts is exactly what I'm in the mood for, and not the scruples of the regicide of Hou as expressed in impenetrable diplomatic language.

(Lj's on-going glitches: entry tags won't auto-complete)

Does anyone have an extra dreamwidth invite? If you do, could you go over to paleaswater and mention it to her? The thanks of a grateful nation will be yours. A *small* nation, but grateful nonetheless. Her work blocks lj (boo hiss British banks) but not dreamwidth; and dw will cross-post to lj, and huzzah we'd get to hear from paleaswater again!

My heart....

My IE was hijacked by malware this evening. Got rid of it, finally, without going next door to borrow their computer to DL a program to a flashdrive to run on my own computer yadda yadda. Go to write this entry and a) LJ has changed itself around ('My Stuff'? Really?) and b) the Post an Entry page won't load in IE. If I hadn't read incandescens' post about LJ being weird otherwise, I'd be totally freaking. I'm still freaking a little. No one thinks of my poor poor nerves. (swoons onto sofa)

Finished Armor of Light in Sunday's sun. Not as much fun as the Astreiant books last March, and I missed having Tasty's restaurant as a backdrop to it this time round (sighs for the defunct Tasty's) but still alright. Also resonates a bit, which it didn't last time through.

One note especially clear in the resonance: Burleigh and Cecil. ( Who? say my American readers )

Any incentive I might have had to get a dreamwidth account was killed when I saw they kept the frogging nav bar. Worse than losers-- loosers.

Otherwise, there's a special disconnect that comes from reading smutty stories about the First Emperor's mother in Japanese. Somehow they come across as smuttier in Japanese than in English, but that may just be me.

JagNORmous hunter's moon near the horizon tonight. Lost half its size once in the sky, but still. Big. Big and SCAReeee.

The weekend was gorgeous. Clearest blue skies, softest warm sun, trees gold and red and purple. Went for a walk yesterday evening and kept saying 'Hasui. Hasui. All these Hasuis *everywhere*.' Yellow autumn trees against dark green ones. Bands of sunset clouds across an innocent blue sky. Dark tree branches against a salmon coloured background.

But I started collecting Hasui twenty years ago. How come it's only in the last five years that I've started seeing him all over the place?
( Broadband, is howcum )

I gather lj is being odder than usual. It doesn't swap my Doctor Who/ Sherlock Holmes icon for someone else's stick-men icon the way it did for flo_nelja. It *does* display that damn navigation bar on other people's journals even though I've told it not to.

Grah.

July is a break from the incessant allergies except when spring is late or cool or exceptionally rainy or early or hot or... well, July really isn't a break from the incessant allergies, OK? Nor am I the only one around with the Throat Tickle of Doom or the gucky lungs or the vanishing voice or the absolute inability to wake up completely ever and that's before antihistamines. Thus only a few scattered thorts. ( Ordered so as not to scatter too widely )

So why are all lj pages suddenly right-justified in IE and not in Mozilla? Not the full entries- just the first lj page.

I come home to find every entry at saiyuki has been replaced by a "you are about to view material which may not be suitable for minors" message asking people to verify their ages. Click on the Yes I am over 14 link and you get a 404 not found. 'Or you can update your user information' to give your birth year, something even mangaka don't do.

So, for the record, I was born in 1980. Which, for certain values of 'born', is quite true.

I. Er. I. Uh. It seems (looks at email again)---

---it seems that someone has bought me a permanent account.

A. Permanent. Account.

Someone. Bought. Me.

(blink blink mouth go fish-flap buh-buh-buh)

Someone bought me a permanent account.

(We may hope I never win the lottery, if this kind of short-circuiting is how I react to good news.)

That is just so cool. (starts getting welly in the eyes and sniffly in the nose.) I'm just- I'm all- ohh, let's do it in lj speak:

Thank you cool person who bought me a permanent account!!

(And if I still can't quite register the fact, the reason possibly is that my spam filter grabbed lj's email so I didn't see it until this evening. And still didn't believe it entirely until I went and looked at my user profile where, yes, it says I have a permanent account. I should probably use my OMG! Goujun icon, but calendar!Keiki actually looks more how I feel: which was probably not the artist's intention.)