Rat Creature's Journal

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.

First I'm missing comment notifications and the site was dreadfully slow earlier today, and now their pages fail to load for me at all. Is anyone else having trouble or is it just me? I was in the middle of following a link to some fic. *grump*

grumpy poll @ my LJ -- auto-post feature: threat or menace?

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 there 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.