Rat Creature's Journal

Does anyone else have trouble with the Cascade Library site? I wanted to check something for fanlore and it didn't load right.

Right now for me sometimes pages load with the proper content, but sometimes some kind of weird spam site loads, with annoying links and I assume malicious Javascript. (I have NoScript on, and linux tends to have vulnerabilities different from Windows which is most commonly targeted by website hacks, so I don't know what it does to other computers.) Has skeeter63.org been hacked? I have the same problem with all the site's there, that sometimes they load okay and sometimes this crap loads. It might not be a good idea to go there right now if you don't have NoScript and adequate precautions enabled, but I'm wondering what is up with the domain.

As the Archive of Our Own is doing performance testing of the new servers, I was doing random searches, but this reminded me why I normally don't do this. I saw explicit Joseph Ratzinger RPS. Yikes. Just when I thought I couldn't be surprised anymore.

As I was on the bus this evening I saw someone reading a tabloid newspaper. I could only make out the headline which was "Wahlkampf mit dem Kanzler-Busen" (in English: "election campaign with the chancellor-boobs"). I have since tried to find out what this was about, and apparently a (female) candidate of the Christian Democrats in Berlin has a campaign poster with herself in a deep neckline dress and a photograph of the chancellor Merkel (from some opera visit) also in an evening dress showing cleavage, and put onto that the slogan "we have more to offer".

It is supposed to be some sort of comment on the image of the Christian Democrats as a party of stuffy, old guys but show that that is wrong. Or something. And now some of her party compatriots are outraged, also she didn't coordinate with the chancellor and her campaign, who didn't authorize using photos of her in an evening dress.

So much WTF. But-- reading this I found that it actually gets even better -- for some values of "better" -- that is in the same district some other candidate is using an ass shot of herself in tight jeans that also shows off a (temporary) tattoo she has above her ass saying "socialist", kind of in the style of randomly tattooed urban fantasy heroine covers I guess (note that it is not a smear campaign, like it would be in the US, she is the candidate of a socialist party and you can see this here) and another party, the Greens (though not in that aforementioned boob district) has a rather appalling poster which shows a black woman's ass grabbed by white hands (also looking female) with the slogan "the only reason to vote black" (which here is the color of the Christian Democrats) (picture not worksafe for US viewers, I suspect).

I know I have ranted about the usage of "Spock Prime" in the narrative and dialog just a few days ago, but since then I've come across this far more often. Like every day I see stories doing this. More than one. It occurs even in stories that I found on rec lists, not through random, at-your-own-risk browsing. (In case you're wondering, musesfool recced this offender.) Just, WTF? This is getting out of hand if you can't even trust recs to protect you.

Please tell me that some fan somewhere has written a Greasemonkey script or something to do word replacements on the fly in your browser to fix epithets, and I can adapt this to replace every "Spock Prime" with "Ambassador Spock".

ETA: Thanks to the awesome gnatkip I have now indeed found a script that will do this word replacement for me. Greasemonkey to the rescue.

I dreamed seperis was a non-humanoid alien, just doing undercover pre-first contact research on the internet on humans. There were a bunch of really cool details about her planet that I remembered right after waking up but I've unfortunately already forgotten now. Also I think she was stuck in some bureacratic snafu preventing to go ahead with the project, hence the years of not revealing the alien part...

This goes to show that rabbits can be vicious, dangerous animals: Video of a rabbit attacking a snake and chasing it up a tree

The WTF? bit of trivia was that the band KISS put some of their blood into the ink of their promo comic (published by Marvel) from the 1970s as a gimmick. I guess whatever sells, but still. Even if this resulted in merely trace amounts per comic considering the amount of ink used to print a whole comic edition -- just eww.

Well, I guess it's still better than historical anatomy books bound in human skin, but seriously, I find the idea of any print media containing bits of human just off-putting.

You know, dreaming about LJ activity is bad enough, but now with fanlore fannish wiki-editing is featuring in my dreams too (though at least the dream also had a wacky action-adventure plot with some convoluted villain plan). This is getting kind of pathetic. I'm not even that active there.

But maybe I'm not alone at least?

I have a poll on LJ asking about wiki-fied dreams. (I can't post polls on IJ.)

What the frell did photobucket do to their image upload? It's been a few months since I last uploaded a photo to my account, but I never had a problem, though their flash(?)-thingy for bulk uploading never worked for me. But now I click on the upload button, and a small window with the title bar "select files" pops up, but I don't actually see anything in the window, just some wildly flickering movement, and then my browser crashes.

What is wrong with these people? Why did they have to break their site?

Are there other ways to upload to photobucket, like FF extensions or something, that don't use the website? Or do I just have to stop using their site entirely?

ETA: After looking at their help I found a way to use the old uploader, which I would have clicked had the link to it been visible in the box at my screen resolution and font size, but it was not, but cut off by the box frame and thus hidden. FAIL, photobucket, FAIL.

It's the cover of the current issue of the Italian politics magazine Internazionale covering the US election. Though I guess Obama/McCain slashers (and if there are any? kind of disturbing btw) would get a kick out of this. I don't actually speak Italian, so I have no idea why they have a cover illustration with an Obama/McCain kiss, I just saw this on an image blog.

So I was browsing the CNN news site and stumbled upon some minor headline in a sidebar which read "Students find naked images in German textbook", and made me curious as to what exactly was so outrageous, because you don't find that many naked humans outside of biology and art textbooks in my experience, and sometimes art appears as illustration elsewhere, but overall not so much.

Anyway, I wondered whether it was a statue or art or maybe they had photographed a park and overlooked someone sunbathing in the background, but it turns out they were all atwitter over the photo of a newsstand in which you could make out a magazine cover showing some breasts. What a sad state of affairs if that reduces Texan teenagers to giggles... They probably need to be careful to avoid all language exchange programs as well as holidays or they might die from shock.

When I was in eighth grade or so it took educational hand outs on sex positions and diagrams about male/female arousal curves to reduce us to a giggling mess.

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.

( spoilers for Criminal Minds 3x13 )

I had some part in a surreal hobby theater production that had really ugly home-made amateurish set designs, and for some inexplicable reason my part involved no speaking, but some kind of weird acrobatics where I was hanging upside down from some sort of rope harness, and was lowered onto someone else (a child, I think?). And then it went wrong and I squished them or injured them or something, because I was too heavy. WTF, subconscious? Maybe it's the ubiquitous Weight Watchers campaign ads plastered everywhere right now. Though afaik those have yet to feature fat people in weird acrobatics arrangements squishing squishing innocent children...

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.