wubwub

"colby's clubhouse" was a kids' show that aired in the 80s-90s that basically taught kids bible verses by way of a talking computer. and skateboarding.

everything is terrible apparently found some clips from it. i figured i'd post them here, as they are a miracle of awesome acting, quality writing and the kind of technological understanding that only the 90s could give us.

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 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 pouring 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. 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!

Hey, hawkwing_lb-- you were right. You (and feorag, and katallen, and autopope, and charlieallery, and mevennen, and brisingamen, and peake, and fjm, and silme, and--well, all y'all) are in fact freezing your ass off because you seem to be missing your major warm-water current.

It's in Greenland for the winter. If this keeps up, my sneaky Viking realtor ancestors with their misleading advertising may turn out to have been merely prophetic.

2010, and why I will not be attending many conventions this year. My deadline dance:

"The Unicorn Evils" -- immediately, more or less

The White City and attendant chapbook: March 15
Grail: April 15
"Spell 81a": April 15

"Uniform": June 15

A Reckoning of Men: July 1
untitled noir objective stuntwriting thingy: July 1
untitled vampire thingy: July 1

"Ligature": July 15

The Steles of the Sky: November 2

---

No fixed deadline:

space opera thingy
"The Romance"
Karen Memory
Smile
Singularity Rent novel

Just got back from a nice long and relaxing break... whether it was relaxing because of, or in spite of the fact that I could not get online, I don't know.

In any case... a little community relevant Fail appeared at Failblog.


http://failblog.org/2010/01/06/field-trip-fail/

-= Me

Brushed! Giant ridiculous dog! Now with samurai topknots!

This is such a Stephen Reyes song.




I'm serenaded by a chorus of a thousand burning cigarettes
You've been taking chances, mama
While I've been placing bets
So tell it to the ashes, they know we served
It may be good for the soul but it's hard on the nerves

The very thing that drives you, can drive you insane
Got a head full of thought crimes and a number with no name
Got an eleventh hour Jesus and a mouth full of blame
A casket lined with silver dollars and a number with no name

There's nowhere to run
I've got no one to tell
My face has become a mask and I'm not wearing it well
For five days straight
I've been breathing fire
Don't have room on my body
For another scar

The very thing that drives you, can drive you insane
Got a head full of thought crimes and a number with no name
Got an eleventh hour Jesus and a mouth full of blame
A casket lined with silver dollars and a number with no name

Aliete de Bodard (aliettedb), Campbell Award nominee and all-around hoopy frood, is doing a really interesting series of historical posts about the setting of her new fantasy series, Obsidian and Blood. (I have read the first book, Servant of the Underworld, and it was good. Bloody, but good.)

For your delectation:

1) The Valley of Mexico

2) Tenochtitlan

3) The Sacred Precinct

She has, to all appearances, done her research. ;-)


I have eaten cottage cheese (how come I never remember how much I like cottage cheese until I buy it because it's on sale?) and am about to make tea. Then I will go watch TV and think about Grail (I am confident in my deadline, even though it's only three months off. This worries me a little. Can I possibly be becoming innured to the damned things?) and brush the dog for a while, before resuming my Editorial Functions for truepenny.

Poor dog, he doesn't know about this yet.

Climbing tonight. And guacamole tacos for lunch, about which I am already ridiculously excited. I really like guacamole tacos.

Americans: Remember Prop 8?

CA is getting sued over it, and Focus on the Family is trying to get the trial held SECRETLY. If they're ashamed of the crap they're unleashing, that's their problem. Sign the petition in here to ensure press is allowed in. Boost the signal however you can; this IS NOT OVER. We don't have to let these people run our country, and we certainly don't have to let them do it away from public oversight.

Keori has details.

A funny thing happened on the way to the--

no, wait, that's not how the story goes.

At some point in the past couple of years, I've lost control of my stories. I mean, not--not like I had no control over them when I started writing, and just did things in any way I could because I didn't have the toolkit to choose how I was going to try to accomplish any given task. It was all brute force and ignorance, and not a lot of technique.

No, I still remember how to write. I still have all the tools in my toolkit, and I know how to use them. It's not the writing I've lost control of.

It's the stories. They've gotten... well, all the tidy has come out of them, and some of the calculation, and some of the rigid adherence to structure. They feel kind of wobbly and loose and ambiguous in my head. It's been scaring me, because I've been getting this sense that what I'm writing these days is not just not under control, but not controllable at all. Like there's bottom down there I can't see.

But based on the reactions I'm getting to them, that's working out okay somehow.

See, I used to know what the structures did, what they were there for, what work every piece did and how it affected the balance of the whole. I was a watchmaker. I had figured out how to build these machines and I could speed them up or slow them down. They didn't control time, but they were excellent devices for measuring it, quantifying it, making it observable and maybe even comprehensible.

And then suddenly I couldn't do that anymore, couldn't make those approximations that make something incredibly complex and contradictory more easily apprehensible.

I was panicky about it. I felt like they were all wrong. They were broken; they weren't working.

And then I started looking at some of the stuff other people are saying about my newer stories--"The Horrid Glory of Its Wings," "Sonny Liston takes the Fall," etc--and I realized something. They were working. They were working in ways I couldn't explain or quantify or set out on the dust cloth on the desk and move around with tweezers. They were working in messing, organic ways. These were not machines: these were organisms.

You don't own an organism. You negotiate with it.

These days the damned things are less like fine-geared pocketwatches and more like TARDISes--full of mysterious clankings and familiar spirits. Quite possibly possessed, a little bit random and out of control, never quite doing what I expect when I expect it. But actually in tune with something nexpressible about the nature of time, rather than just measuring each second ticking past.

And bigger on the inside than on the outside.

They seem to have taken on a life of their own.

That's really nifty.

I guess I have to start thinking of them as partners rather than tools now. That should be interesting.

Can you find the cat in this picture?



Apparently, the Presumptuous Cat approves of the new addition to our nest. In other news, the Fearless Kitten met his first snow:



and the depredations of the smouse continue:



Now that's hubris. He also made a raid on my walnuts, the little bastard. Our cats are lazy layabout goldbricks.

I, on the other paw, am made of virtue. Today I went to the gym and the bakery, adhered to The Discipline, spent the entire remainder of the day working on a critique for stillsostrange (Why yes, I do have the draft of The Bone Palace, and why yes, it is made of awesome.), and then took the garbage out and came upstairs and made my bed and cleaned my bedroom. With my girly new pink-and-purple wool blanket.

The downstairs is a pile, the office is a pit, the Christmas tree needs to come down, the bathroom is all but invisible under the mildew, and the kitchen is an indistinguishable heap of winter coats and surface clutter... but my bedroom is clean!

And now I am going to finish reading Amanda's manuscript. I was going to watch Mythbusters and Hustle tonight, but this is better.

Hey, they're just trying to be Christ-like and how can they do that without at least giving the impression of being persecuted?

Yes, it seems that the American Christian Anti-Defamation Commission have decided to make an annual 'victim list' of all the things they think are done specifically to undermine Christianity in America. In 2008 apparently Obama was bashing Christians by simply being one. Here's the list for 2009. (They work backwards and so will I.):

( Read more... )