Y'all know those disgusting transphobic radical feminists I rant about periodically?

This time they've stunned even me.

They started a blog called http://belledame222.wordpress.com/

Why is this important? Because Belledame222 is the name of an online friend of mine who, as I and a few others do, engages their bullshit.

They made an entire blog simply to mock her. It's as if they called their blog "TrinityVA" and filled it with rantings to make me look bad.

I... damn. I may be a kinky bastard with an incredible temper who has difficulty not poking at the fail, but that's just... wow.

Twittering as jackwilliambell.

• 08:54 The Leonids are coming! bit.ly/388PvX #
• 11:07 'Significant Amount' of Water Found on Moon: bit.ly/4pbWFy #
• 12:32 "Do you ever wonder if we're still human?" I focused sensors past her, into the event horizon. "I used to. Now I know we're not" #twitstory #
• 12:37 Grayvar stumbled to my cell door. "The Orcs have breached the wall!" I moved another improvised game piece and smiled. "I know." #twitstory #
• 15:33 @daviddlevine You can *always* use more cowbell! jackwilliambell.livejournal.com/214523.html #
• 15:39 It came together at that moment. His mistakes. The things she said. The climb up. The moon over the bay. Life. He jumped anyway. #twitstory #

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Last night's tweets;

Wooden eggs think numbly of Orson Welles.
Some dry substances greatly fear water.
The melted world slug beside Kraken gels.
A fountain pen gestates the big blotter.

Feeling exceptionally awful to-day. Some sites say depression and anxiety are symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, so maybe the fact that I'm so depressed and anxious is a good sign. I think I only got around five hours of sleep thanks to the nausea and worry.

I actually managed to buy some health insurance online through Blue Shield of California, but my coverage doesn't start until the first of December. I don't know if I can last until then. What'll happen if I can't? I guess maybe I'll go to the emergency room or something. That's a healthcare system failure, U.S. government.

Not having the easiest time concentrating right now. I think maybe I'll see if a movie can raise my spirits, though this thing has mainly put me in a mood for Cronenberg movies.

Be kind to each other, people.

Here are a couple new videos--the first is from a couple nights ago, the second was last night. A spider for the first time in a long time. The music's from the Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack, one of the many versions of "Fly Me to the Moon", this one called "Losing the Object of One's Affection."

Grab a latte and find your comfy chair, Keltish is coming to YOUR house.

SUNDAY, November 15th, 2009
Keltish Online in Second Life at The Blarney Stone Pub in the original "Dublin" sim
3:00PM - 4:00PM EST (12:00 noon - 1:00PM SLT)

For information on SL location and how to listen to us through winamp or some other listening software, check out the Keltish Kalendar at our website.

The new Venia's Travels is online. I wrote the script while on antibiotics and in the middle of caffeine withdrawals. The first half came to me in a dream.

It looks like I'm totally giving up coffee and tea and probably alcohol. I haven't had caffeine in days, and it'd been pretty minimal amounts for weeks. I haven't had alcohol in almost a month. But it's going to be weird--I've only been drinking alcohol for around three years, but I've been a coffee lover since high school. This sucks. I guess I'll be getting apple cider at Starbucks now, at least until my body decides it doesn't want that, either.

I think I'm past the withdrawals now, but I'm pretty sure I'm less of an alert person this way. Maybe man was not meant to aspire to coffee, and like Icarus, my wings have been burnt. No wonder Apollo always seems so jittery.

At least I got around eight hours sleep to-day. But this whimsical sickness of mine has taken a new form, now just constant nausea. I don't throw up, I just have a sour feeling in my gut, along with an occasional pinching sensation in my side. My current theory is that I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is the closest thing to matching all my symptoms, but I really don't know. I'm mainly just crossing my fingers and knocking on wood and so on. I'm still trying to figure out what to eat--I had a craving for sunnyside up eggs and yoghurt last night, so I went to Denny's and had some. I listened to some old veterans talking in the next booth about Westerns. And I thought to myself, they're okay, right? They're much older than me and they pulled through. Surely I can do it too. Maybe I worry too much, I don't know. But my imagination tends make broad leaps when I don't have information--I mean, I don't convince myself of things I don't know, but if there's a possibility of something really bad, I can't stop gnawing on it. I guess the fact that I usually feel like karma should be kicking my ass at any moment doesn't help, either.

I've drawn and inked a page to-day, and I should have the new Venia's Travels chapter done on time. But I think, after this, I'm going to have to put the comic on a brief hiatus until things settle down or I find out they're not going to. I still need to deal with my car, too.

Since I've been going by the original broadcast order of Buffy and Angel, I'm currently watching the middle of a four episode block of Buffy. I watched the season premiere of season seven last night. Obviously lots of echoes of the first seasons, with the return to high school and the cameos by all the previous season villains. Sort of reminds me of Return of the Jedi going back to Tatooine, though the music and camera work are starting to take on a decided Lord of the Rings influence more than anything else.

Twitter Sonnet #80

Black liquorice should ever avail us.
My stomach is confused by an apple.
Digestion is watched by a backwards bust.
There are always marble men to grapple.
Excessively damp wounds cry out for salt.
Summer ghosts steal many different dishes.
Repetition makes useless an assault.
Review the sad normalcy of wishes.
A man lived to a hundred at Denny's.
As did a dim ash nomad in a yurt.
Messages come through century pennies.
Society broadly accepts yoghurt.
The green air is warm with ghoulish trouble.
Dice hail pelt the foggy plastic bubble.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

So San Jose/Santa Clara County/Silicon Valley is now the inaugural Partner City of the new Council for the Parliament of the World's Religions Partner City Network. We join the legacy cities - Chicago, Cape Town, Barcelona & Melbourne - who have hosted Parliaments themselves.

Supervisor Cortese, Mayor Reed and an Assembly member who named I didn't catch were present (the former two spoke). Supervisor Cortese and his wife have been very involved in the Carry the Vision, peace movement and I am sure were instrumental in this work as well. Bill & Jean Lesher came down from Berkeley and Bill spoke on behalf of the CPWR. There was a very good turn-out of local interfaith folks, probably 40-50 attendees. Perhaps 15 stood up when the "who is going to the Parliament" question was posed.

There will be a post-Parliament event, a Silicon Valley Partner City "Initial Public Offering" an invitation to build upon and vision for the future at the de Saissette Museum at Santa Clara University on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 6-8pm. [The start of PantheaCon but I will have to go to it.]

I'm exhausted and my shoulder hurts. Rabbi Dana reached forward and patted it to acknowledge that I was there. Ouch! I managed to smile back at him, I know he couldn't see the sling from where he was sitting, but owwwwww! Nap time!

I just realized that December 21, 2012 is not the day the world will end.

It's the day President-Elect Palin will announce that Douglas Feith will be the Secretary of State in her administration and John Yoo will be the Attorney General.

IOW, it's the day we'll wish the world had ended.

Kes: Via The Art of Darkness blog; if you wait through the quiet bit the next video will cue up
http://www.shadowmanor.com/blog/?p=5159

Twittering as jackwilliambell.

• 10:30 This thread on Slashdot about Google's Go language is the very definition of why I quit reading Slashdot: bit.ly/e3i4i #
• 16:57 @dj_ir0ngruve I think the real problem boils down to: we geeks won the culture wars, but lost control of the revolution to the PHP kiddies. #

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So I have three small holes in my shoulder. I wasn't supposed to take the bandage off until tomorrow morning but the adhesive was itching and being quite painful. They missed my tattoo, yay. (Dr. Chen had said he would try.)

Today I was more out of it than yesterday even, I think the anaesthesia protected me some. Today it hurt more. I'm counting down to my next meds. Although I do think the anaethesia made me itch. Or maybe I just itch because my body is confused by all the pain.

Oh okay, TMI.

Besides lying around and sleeping, I finished reading Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling. My father had recommended it to me because one of the post-apocolyptic communities in it is led by a Wiccan High Priestess (a Georgian as it happens). I thought it was an interesting idea and a pretty good read. I also watched the first 4-1/2 episodes of Buffy. And did a short photoshoot in SL with Scarlotti in the wonderful peacock coat from Blakopal (with me in some of my peacock stuff from various vendors, including Blakopal).

Tomorrow I intend to go downtown for the gala for San Jose becoming a partner city with the Council for the Parliament of the World's Religions. Kurt is giving me a lift and I will take a taxi home. I couldn't possibly drive (a) because I am basically one-handed and (b) taking vicoden every 4 hours. But hopefully I can manage to shower (waterproof bandages ftw), get dressed (though I'm a bit worried about that) and be coherent. Typing is showing me how impaired I am. This is hard work!

So I think I shall stop for now

Last night's tweets;

Excessively damp wounds cry out for salt.
Summer ghosts steal many different dishes.
Repetition makes useless an assault.
Review the sad normalcy of wishes.

So far, to-day's the least sick I've felt in days. Instead of a globe in my stomach, I just feel a bit nauseous. I don't know what's going on inside me exactly, or what the right things to eat are. I thought I was safe with unsalted split pea soup, but it was bad.

I'm out of it to-day because I didn't get enough sleep, this time because I woke up hungry. I'm so tired of this guessing game, I have too much shit on my plate.

Lately, my nightly Buffy/Angel viewing has been the only thing to get my mind off my various worries. I watched the season finale of Buffy's season sixth last night. I really liked the route of character development Willow took in turning "evil"--it's the point of despair where you say, "fuck everything." It was drawn out a bit much, though. Anya was weirdly misused--it's established she can teleport, but she doesn't do so when she can see Willow's about to hit her. And why didn't anyone think to make a wish to the vengeance demon?

I was sorry to see Dollhouse was cancelled to-day. I guess everyone saw it coming. If I were Joss Whedon, I'd concentrate on making cheap web or cable series, or go to writing comics full time. He's obviously no longer in a place to write about righteous heroes vanquishing clear evil and having teenage romances, and anything other than that clearly won't sell to network television audiences. Battlestar Galactica was a cheap cable series, but some might say that's still an exception, being a popular and sometimes morally ambiguous Sci-Fi series. But one has to remember that things were pretty clear cut in the beginning, with good Adama versus evil Cylons.

I think most people suspect, deep down, that things aren't as black and white as they seem to like to think, but I think most people need those stories to sneak up on them.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

When your neighbors have been having a band practice for the past hour, the purpose of which you can only suppose is to advertise their existence as the least musically-talented band ever tot he entire world, because they insist on amplifying their practice at 11, and you realize that you have spent the last ten minutes thinking that, if you were a werewolf, you could knock on the front door and when someone answered the door dash inside and rip out everyone's jugular with your fangs, all the while howling your rage and sense of release to the world until finally you were done and it was silent and you could go back to your nice quiet aerye, bathed in still-hot human blood but happy.

I just got home from the art supply store. I bought a bunch of purple pastels, because I only had one and I want to do more Transformers fan art and that kind of messes with making good fan art of Decepticons ;-) but wow, pastels are expensive.

I'm trying to figure out which Transformers to draw next. I'm torn between drawing Cyclonus and trying to do something complicated that isn't a portrait. I kind of want to do the latter, but I'm wondering if I should find bigger paper first. The thing about pastels is that they make really fat lines, so it's hard to make something very detailed on small paper.

I also forgot to mention here that I've started putting my fan art on my deviantART, which I didn't used to use for anything but have had for a long time. If you want to see it, it's over here: trinityva.deviantart.com/

I also copied my fanfiction over at my new dreamwidth. I don't know whether I'll put it all there, but I actually really like having a clean space for it. Is it easy for people who don't have dreamwidth accounts to comment over there?

The fanfiction is here: stainless.dreamwidth.org/

A central listing of all the fics can be found here: stainless.dreamwidth.org/685.html

Posted to the NCAM announcement list

The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH (NCAM) has written guidelines for content providers who would like to create accessible iTunes U media via captions, subtitles and audio descriptions. This guidelines document provides step-by-step documentation on creating fully accessible media, including:

- Closed captions and audio descriptions that the user can turn on or off as needed.
- Open subtitles and descriptions that are available to everyone watching or listening.
- Closed subtitles for adding multiple language tracks to video files.
- Accessible PDFs.

Also included with the guidelines are links to eight video and audio clips that illustrate the various forms of accessible media discussed in the document. Using these guidelines, iTunes U content providers can create content that all people can learn from including people with vision and
hearing loss.

To access the Creating Accessible iTunes U Content guidelines document and related media, see Creating Accessible iTunes U Content on Apple's iTunes site,
<http://deimos3.apple.com/webobjects/core.woa/browse/wgbh.org.2010579900>.

About NCAM and WGBH
The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH is a research, development and advocacy entity that works to make existing and emerging technologies accessible to all audiences. NCAM is part of the Media Access Group at WGBH, which also includes The Caption Center (est. 1972), and Descriptive Video Service® (est. 1990). For more
information, visit http://access.wgbh.org.

WGBH Boston is America's preeminent public broadcasting producer, the source of fully one-third of PBS's prime-time lineup, along with some of public television's best-known lifestyle shows and children's programs and many public radio favorites. For more information, visit http://www.wgbh.org.

1. I just downloaded the free Kindle for PC
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311
and it installed fine but a final window comes up for registering the program, and that step seems to be totally inaccessible, with no links I can locate with a screen reader.
Have other people had a better experience?

And speaking of the Kindle and access:
2. A couple of universities have rejected using the Kindle for textbook use until Amazon improves the accessibility
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jEvsVQEnfo1Y-ibxGgcsCqTzjOJwD9BT4BD81

By RACHEL METZ (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon's Kindle can read books aloud, but if you're blind it can be difficult to turn that function on without help. Now two universities say they will shun the device until Amazon changes the setup.

And two more links to articles which reflect the state of accessible education at the university level

3. University's disabled population increasing: Students worry about lack of support staff.

http://www.diamondbackonline.com/news/university-s-disabled-population-increasing-1.863397
block quote start
The number of students with disabilities at [U of Maryland] has increased 18 percent over two years, echoing a nation-wide trend, but disabled students worry they may not have sufficient support on the campus.

Enrollment among disabled students nationally jumped 49 percent from 2000 to 2008, compared with a 27 percent increase in total students, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Despite the increases here and nationally, the campus’ Disability Support Services only has four counselors to advocate for and help more than 1,400 students. Of the four, two are part-time graduate students, and one exclusively advises those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.

4. Higher Education and Disability: Education Needs a Coordinated Approach to Improve Its Assistance to Schools in Supporting Students

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-33
Summary

Research suggests that more students with disabilities are pursuing higher education than in years past, and recent legislative changes, such as those in the Higher Education Opportunity Act and Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, have the potential to increase the number and diversity of this population. GAO was asked to examine (1) what is known about the population of postsecondary students with disabilities; (2) how postsecondary schools are supporting students with disabilities; (3) what challenges, if any, schools face in supporting these students; and (4) how the Department of Education is assisting schools in supporting these students. [...]

a fabulous essay by Hal Duncan on whether vampires can really be interpreted as gay
http://www.bscreview.com/2009/11/notes-from-new-sodom-on-blood-bad-boys-and-bottoms/
Vampires have pretty much bored me since the '90s, and now I think I have some insight as to why. Also, I found some parts of this roll-on-the-floor funny.