| Peter ruminates, not entirely coherently, on writing. |
[09 Jan 2010|12:50am] |
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mood |
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thirsty, about to go to bed |
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music |
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insects around |
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I quite often look at myself, and (even though I'm nowhere near where I want to be or who I want to be) think "Man, myself from the past would be so happy with myself in the present."
I'm not a great writer, but I've got a decent understanding of narrative structure, and I can put together a piece that is (hopefully) both funny and character-based and narratively sound.
The other night, I had to put together a scene for audition, for a character called "The Doctor". (no relation to Doctor Who.) It needed to be funny (stand-alone funny, which is much harder than funny-in-context), give the doctor some funny lines, but also keep the doctor character high-status, which is one of the main things we're looking for.
It was 3am, I'd been writing and organising auditions all day, so when I wrote it, I genuinely couldn't tell if it was funny. I called it a night, and the next morning emailed it through to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) poxy_report , who assured me that it was indeed amusing enough to send out. (I was still too close to the piece.)
I'm not saying I'm Steven Moffat or anything like that, but myself of 4+ years ago would have looked at my current self and been in awe that I could pull a scene like that out of nowhere on such short notice. It's the only audition piece that isn't actually going to be in the final product, which a few people have said is disappointing.
I've now talked about it far too much for it to be amusing in any way, but if you're interested, here's the Doctor Audition scene. Gavin is playing the character "Tom", and he has not yet done a reading of it that hasn't made me laugh.
( Audition scene )
I like being me. That's basically what I'm trying to say here.
(I also quite like the scene, though I'm glad it's not going to be in the final piece. Any audition scene, you hear so much that it loses all meaning. The other 3 scenes are going to be annoying to film/edit, just because we've heard them again and again and again and again...)
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| Final Reminder |
[08 Jan 2010|10:50am] |
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You have around one day left to get your icons for Week 248 in. So far we have 5 beautiful entries and I'd love to see more. :)
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[08 Jan 2010|01:07pm] |
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mood |
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 ecstatic |
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music |
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Cradle of Filth - Funeral in Carpathia |
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OMG. Best videos ever, even if the audio's pretty shit. From the Christmas Metal Symphony... Cristina Scabbia and Simone Simons performing Heaven's a Lie together, and Cristina performing Metallica's Nothing Else Matters. OTPFANGASM.
( Christmas Metal Symphony )
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| State of the Goat 2009 |
[07 Jan 2010|01:10pm] |
It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.
Stuff you liked
- Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
- We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more sifting through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
- Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
- Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
- After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
- Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.
You got your fix
- We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
- In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. Please note that this still needs more tweaking, and we are working on the one-minute cut-off issue. For more info on voice posting, read here.
- At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.
Paid features you enjoyed
- In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
- This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
- When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
- How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted.
We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.
Mixed reviews
- The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
- This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
- We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
- We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.
Missing Inaction
- We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.
Stumbling points
- Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
- A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
- That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.
Full steam ahead!
As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!
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| fic: fire upon the walls of Gaza |
[07 Jan 2010|03:57pm] |
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music |
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Morningside - Sara Bareilles |
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Title: fire upon the walls of Gaza
Rating: PG
Category: Josh, Josh/Donna
Spoilers: Gaza
Word Count: 303
Author's Notes: For shutterbug_12 at ww_stockings. This is my first shot at writing anything Josh/Donna even though I loved them from the minute I first started watching The West Wing a few years ago. I know it's short, but any feedback or comments you have would be much appreciated :)
So I will send fire upon the wall of Gaza
And it will consume her citadels.
Amos 1: 7
( in his head, there are sirens )
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| 4th post is the charm ;) |
[07 Jan 2010|11:01pm] |
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mood |
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 sleepy |
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If I'm this exhausted before 11pm tonight, I hardly even dare to guess how tired I'm going to be after tomorrow. After Saturday. Egads, and Sunday (when we might come home with a kitten eeeee oooooh eeeeee!!!!)
This whole week has been a rollarcoaster of exhausted before midnight due to emotions running on hyperdrive. Manic emotions, tearful emotions, hysterical emotions, they've all made a showing.
And as much as I've enjoyed swinging between nostalgia, of like everything I've come near to that has emotional sentimentality of any value, and the laughter that comes from one that can't even remember when there was a day that happened without some blemish to bollocks it up, I'll be good when I can return to that quiet calm I had earlier in today. There will be a house that I belong in standing around me, all my belongings in the same house, DVDs and books sitting on shelves, in a lounge room when I can watch anything I want any time I want (at least for the first couple of weeks). You know, the small things that most everyone takes for granted.
I think of those things and I think that I will never complain again to live a life of simple contentment. We'll see ;)
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[07 Jan 2010|07:32pm] |
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mood |
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 pleased |
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Awesome night at karaoke last night. The DJ was clearly aware that he had a Metal crowd for the evening, as he was playing some quite reasonable music in between actual karaoke songs. Beautiful performances by Darclady, Lisa, Shane and Mike. I got up and did quite a few songs myself, being:
Iron Maiden - The Trooper
HIM - Rip Out the Wings of a Butterfly
Queensryche - I Don't Believe in Love
Shakespeare's Sister - Stay (Duet with Darclady in the style of Cradle of Filth's cover)
Metallica - The Unforgiven
Nine Inch Nails - Only
Actually got a lot of (serious) kudos on my singing too, which was unexpected but welcome. Personally, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I'm a good performer, not necessarily a good singer, but maybe I had an "on" night...
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| sidebar banners |
[06 Jan 2010|10:03pm] |
I made a bunch of sidebar banners
4 Bones
1 Chuck
1 Dr. Horrible
4 Gilmore Girls
4 Glee
2 Harry Potter
1 HIMYM
3 Kristen Bell
3 Merlin
2 The Office
4 Sanctuary
2 Smallville
4 Stargate: Atlantis
8 Stargate: SG-1
3 Zachary Quinto (with others)
1 Zooey Deschanel
teasers:
  
dancing with myself
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| And then.... |
[07 Jan 2010|02:26pm] |
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mood |
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 amused |
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FERGIE gets off the phone.
FERGIE: I have good news and bad news.
ME: *looks worried* Oookay...?
FERGIE: The good news is settlement is definitely tomorrow!
ME: ..... And the bad news?
FERGIE: There is a fee to redraw the money from the house.
ME: .......
......
ME: And that's when I kicked him, Your Honour.
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| Just one of those days I want to record... |
[07 Jan 2010|01:48pm] |
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mood |
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 quiet win |
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So. Uh. I just need a moment. A moment to take in the magnimity of what we've just done.
It hasn't... it hasn't sunk in yet. Months of waiting, this morning of bouncing, an hour of seriousness sitting in a mortgage office signing lots (and believe me, this pile of papers was lots) of papers.
Haven't been able to get back to the bouncy fun since then, but I'm not sad either, so it's win.
It's crazy. I'm sitting here (now clothed) and staring at the screen and waiting for the penny to drop and spin around on its side with a definitive 'eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee' sound squeeing from it. No such penny has arrived. Shall have to notify penny authority to inform them that one of their number is missing in action.
But I still have my sense of humor. Win.
Just quiet win. For everyone who helps us move, I'm sure they're going to be sad they missed this part, cause it's almost certain to be the only quiet time I'm likely to experience until the move is done and we are well into next week. I smile when I think forward to that.
But for right now, it's just quiet.
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| Hi, I'm not sexist |
[07 Jan 2010|01:44pm] |
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mood |
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 angry |
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I just got this message sent to me on Facebook (ignore the Pirate English, that's due to my language settings):
Regaarrding: Fun for cancer awareness
"Some fun is going on.... just write the colour of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY women, no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a colour in their status... Haha"
You know...first of all, I fail to see how this is going to spread the wings of any awareness, but that isn't the point of my issue here. It says 'send this message only to women, no men'. Uhm...if the point of it is to spread breast cancer awareness, SHOULDN'T WE SPREAD THE AWARENESS THAT MEN CAN GET IT TOO?!?!
*headdesk repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly*
I know it's rare, but that, again, ISN'T MY POINT. I found a website from Australia which says Breast cancer is uncommon in men, accounting for less than 1% of all breast cancers. In Australia in 2001, a total of 95 men were diagnosed with breast cancer. Breast cancer in men occurs more commonly in those aged 50 years and older.
Even so, how many of those 95 men would even have KNOWN it was possible? They probably thought "Uh...isn't this a woman's disease?" If we're 'spreading awareness' we shouldn't be so sexist about it. Things like this are supposed to be silly and cute, but they piss me off.
Awareness shouldn't cut off 50% of the population, geniuses.
(Also, I am sick AGAIN but this is the fault of the meds. Bloody things.)
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| First Look at "Your Highness" |
[06 Jan 2010|07:27pm] |
Danny McBride has killed as a supporting character in movies like Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express, but this year he’ll get his first shot at playing lead in a big-budget comedy. It’s a medieval movie called Your Highness and it casts McBride as a drunken, deadbeat stoner knight forced to rescue a fair maiden. Wonder what Danny McBride will look like in a suit of armor? Then here’s your answer.
Below is your first look at McBride and his co-star James Franco in Your Highness. Despite the era, Danny has managed to keep the mullet and Franco… looks as stoned as ever. That’s Zooey Deschanel on the back of Franco’s horse and not pictured but also in the movie is Natalie Portman.
source
They have a bigger version of the picture here.
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| OH HAI YOU GUISE. |
[07 Jan 2010|03:25am] |
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mood |
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 crazy |
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I'm in Melbourne airport on my lappy with Lewi and I am using the wireless. HOW EXCITING.
(Quite.)
Wireless is smexy.
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| Another hemisphere of happy |
[07 Jan 2010|09:33am] |
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mood |
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so happy |
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music |
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Keep Holding On - Glee soundtrack |
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It seems I'm ready to vibrate into another hemisphere of happy. I could barely keep myself still last night with all the happy.
Highlight of last night = somebody seeing a blonde four year old on my lap and wondering how he'd missed that, 6 months ago, I had a 4 year old child.
Obvious answer = "Oh yeah, he spends a lot of time with his father." What, did he think the child got his blonde hair from me and psuedonym777?
I then handed said 4 year old to isabelle_tea, his real parent.
Highlight of today = HOUSE SETTLEMENT!!!!!!!! I really think I'm going to pee my pants from all this happy. The fact that I'm sitting naked on the bed as I type this has no bearing on that statement.
The biggest critisism I got over the last year was that I didn't quite get pain. Like I wasn't able to support people going through shit from a place of experience. And look, experiences are all different, but pain is pain, and I've had my fill of pain in the recent months. For the first time in my admittedly charmed life, I fully appreciate what the world is like when things just don't fall into place everywhere. And it's shit. I'll never try to say differently. And sometimes it's almost impossible to even look up, let alone stand, when that pile of shit piles upon you. I've been unable to expect that anything more than just more shit is going to pile down on me if I get my hopes up that things are going to get better. I've had an unbelievably shit time, doubting myself, doubting we're ever going to get into the house, doubting my ability to get good marks at uni, doubting my abilities to be a good friend...
To friends who have been awesomely supportive through several months, I might add. I love you all. Those four words can't cover exactly how I'm feeling when the happy tears well around my eyes as I write the words down.
And I really didn't think that when we got to this point, I'd be able to feel that everything up to this point was worth it. But the point of the last 6 months seems like it's coming clear. And that's an unbelievable cop out, I know. But it's true for me. I'm just..... completely happy.
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| Reminder |
[06 Jan 2010|05:56pm] |
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All entries for Week 248 are due by 10 PM EST, this Friday, January 8th. :)
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