Rat Creature's Journal

When people link to their journal posts containing stories or art, some link not the "plain" entry, but to the "reply mode" version, i.e. you get an URL with "?mode=reply" at the end, a comment form below, and don't see any previous comments. Also, and that is the main reason why I hate the practice, the title of the browser window will be "Post Comment" rather than the subject line of the entry, which commonly is the LJ name plus the title of the work. I get the idea behind linking to the reply form-- people think it encourages comments to have the comment field right there, but the downside is, one, that if you open links in tabs (like when you click several potentially interesting links on your f-list while scrolling down) you can't see in your tab what you have open to easily click the tab to pick it to read, and two, even more annoying for me, if you bookmark the page you won't get the subject line as link text but will have to edit that link text line manually, and edit the URL manually to get the plain one, though that is quicker as you just have to delete a bit.

I bookmark almost every story I finish reading and tag them. Normally I can highlight the summary, click the bookmark button and get the right link text (provided the author didn't put "yay! fic" or something random in their fanfic subject line, which is another annoyance) plus the highlighted summary as description, and just add the tags, whereas with the reply mode link, I highlight the summary, click the bookmark button, then get the wrong link text, have to edit the URL to get a plain bookmark, click back to the window itself to copy the subject line, click back to the tagging dialog, delete the "Post Comment" link text and paste in the right subject. So it is two clicks, two deletions and one c&p action more effort, which, unless the story or art was very nice, puts me in a frame of mind to skip the commenting this was meant to encourage.

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?

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.

...but am I the only one who's somewhat put off by the whole terminology that Sweet Charity thing uses? The way they use "ho" in their slogans and frequently refer to participants as "hos", I mean. I've seen the charity auction linked on my f-list quite often, so even though I don't intend to participate I checked out the site, and their "I want to be a Charity Ho!" and so on really rubs me the wrong way.

I get that it's supposed to be a play on selling our talents to a bidder, or funny, or maybe clever for merging the old madonna-whore polarity into one "charity ho", or whatever, and that fandom appropriated related terms before, like in "pimping a fandom", which somehow doesn't bother me as much though, but still.

My stupid rats chewed on the cable on my wacom tablet, and it now won't work anymore. Unfortunately the cable is fixed to the tablet, so I can't just use a new USB cable, also with the many finicky small cables making up the cable I can't just fix it myself like I could with a power cord. I tried reconnecting the strands, but didn't manage to get it working again. :(

Why can't they make standard cable insulation bitter with some added chemical rather than letting it remain sweet as it is now? Surely it's not just pet rodents who love the taste of cable better than many actual food stuffs, that has to be a problem in buildings and such at least sometimes.

Argh. I guess my yuletart entry will have to be completely traditional media, because there's no way I can afford a new tablet right now, not even a cheap one like mine was, not least because of the same destructive rodents' vet bills. Gah, I haven't inked or colored on paper in ages.

In slightly better news, when the vet removed the remaining stitches from Krümel's eye on Monday he said it healed quite well. There's still a hematoma in his eye that'll have to heal, and he still has to take an antibiotic daily and eyedrops several times a day, but the chances are better now that he will be able to keep his eye. I have to come for another check in a week, or rather it ought to have been a week from Monday, but that's in the middle of Christmas, so I'm going to take him on the first day after, i.e. the 27th. Meanwhile Krümel seems mostly okay, though for some reason he keeps that eye squinted almost closed most of the time, but from what I can see of it, it doesn't look worse or infected, so I figure it's just because it's still healing or something, and hope for the best.

I haven't seen any new issues of newuniversal (written by Warren Ellis, art by Salvador Larroca) in the last couple of solicitations, which led me to believe that it may have been a miniseries rather than an ongoing one as I thought, but then I actually read the first six issues-- I had read the first issue when it came out, but it seemed very much a comic that is better read in larger chunks, so I waited-- and it turns out that it isn't, not even the end of a clear arc, #6 just stops with a "to be continued..." So does anyone know what's up with the series? Is it on hiatus? Cancelled?

It would kind of suck if the series stopped prematurely. While it isn't exactly an awesome comic, it's not awful either, and I'm quite enjoying it so far. The story isn't original (not even in the "new twist on old idea" way), which isn't surprising since I understand it is some kind of remake of a short-lived old Marvel alternate universe (that I had never heard about) or something like that. Basically it's just an "superpowers emerge because of mysterious event, what happens next?" setup, with some mythology stuff abut the nature of those superpowers and their trigger (the "White Event") thrown in, and the art isn't memorable either (though not awful or anything), but I'd still like to see the rest. It may have taken a bit, but after six issues I'm now actually somewhat interested in the characters and the plot.

On a somewhat random and ranty note: why is Marvel so fond of pasting "new" in their titles anyway? Like, there's "New Avengers", "New X-Men", "New Excalibur", "New Warriors"... far more than DC does. I find it annoying, and it makes collecting series a pain because you first have "Team Blah" then it changes to "New Team Blah" for a bit, then it either goes back to "Team Blah" directly or first to "Fabulous Team Blah" if they feel inspired before it reverts to "Team Blah" again, possibly with messed up numbers, and if you try to figure out in which order the story lines were published a while later, you need several hours of web research to untangle the mess. Not to mention that you risk getting the wrong comics when you try to get them via mail order, because you didn't realize that the website actually offered "The Fabulous New Team Blah" (say the Volume 2 incarnation of Team Blah) when you wanted that issue of "The New Fabulous Team Blah" (say the Volume 4 incarnation of the same). Does this actually help immediate sales? I mean these restarts are just as likely to give me an excuse to drop a series from my pull list and not add the new one if I'd been already following it, as to add it when I didn't, it really depends on the artists and writers, and well the inertia of having a a comic on my list and being completist about it goes actually a long way to stick with a series through a run by a team I dislike, whereas name changes give me an easy out. And like I said, retrospectively they get really confusing fast.