Sam's L33t Journal

In response to recent news of the transfer of control of LiveJournal operations to SUP Media and Terms of Service changes that clarify LiveJournal users are expected to comply with Russian censorship laws, I've migrated my journal to Dreamwidth. I plan to cross-post to LiveJournal for now. I've cancelled automatic payments for my LiveJournal pro account.

I've long been reluctant to leave LJ over one management decision or the other, and I'd still guess that these changes most likely won't have much effect on English-language LJ users. But I really don't want to lose access to my old posts, so better to be proactive about it. And I think my internet presence is already too split, so I may say farewell to LJ before too long. We'll see.

Climbing from Thursday:
Fingers in a Blender (v2-, failed)
Epic Journey (v0, passed)
SECAM (v0, failed)
(Unnamed Orange) (v0+, failed)
Short Stack (5.8, failed)

Also, I changed my mood theme to a Zero Punctuation one on a whim.

I've turned off anonymous comments again (this time due to comments like these). I'm well aware that I'm a horrible person, but I'm under too much stress to deal with this right now.

Man, I really hate myself sometimes. Everytime I meet a new group of people, I just manage to screw things up...

Anonymous comments have been disabled for now. One of the IES students is spending quite a bit of time leaving disparaging comments on my journal. You'd think he'd have better things to do, but apparently not...

To the poster of the anonymous comments in question: I'd appreciate if we could talk about this in person. If we could find some way to tolerate eachother, that would be a lot better than the current state of affairs where we both annoy the living hell out of one another. I'm content to just avoid you, but we can't help having some of the same classes.

I felt very fidgety today, but at least that was better than yesterday. (Despite the icon for this post, I didn't have an excessive amount of caffeine... well, not more excessive than usual, at any rate. Also, yes, I did get more icons; I'm a sucker for wasting money on the internet.) Work was all right, anime club was good, DDR afterwards was totally awesome.

A quick poll. A lot of my journal posts lately have just been rambling, without much of a focus. Since my blog is read (presumably) by other people, I was wondering what sort of posts you all want to read:

[Poll #546818]If you have other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

A few links to share:

First, one on the natural gas peak in North America. According to Exxon (and this is from a while ago), this has already passed. (If you've heard politicians fussing about liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals, this is why.)

Second, two on the Shrub. One talks about his recent endorsement of Intelligent Design. On a related note, the second talks about how Bush thinks.

On a funny note, I found this response to the Intelligent Design story, suggesting that our existance would be better explained by the existance of a creator that is just plain dumb. (Although, to give credit where credit is due, that idea isn't new.)


I'm all for teaching DUH
in America's schools!

Well, my family arrives in town tomorrow. I don't know if I'll be online within the next few days (although I'll try to be on some), but I'll be off all of next week, as I'll be at Sandy Island Camp (I've gone there every year, except last year, since I was two).

A few more links to share:

One on Zarqari. Apparently, we don't want to leave Iraq to terrorists like him. On the other hand, apparently the administration could have taken him out before the Iraq war, but they let him get away. Now why would they have done that?

Scientists raise the dead. Muah! (Seriously, it's about cryogenic suspension, but I'm adding the "zombies" tag to this entry anyway.)

Finally, on the subject of everyone's favorite "scientific" non-theory, all praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

I meant to write yesterday, but I ended up not having time. At any rate, this cold sucks and I'm back to being buried by work again.

Some Oliners were playing a game of Mafia and the game concluded on Sunday, so that's back to normal too, although it was rather amusing to see everyone running around acting paranoid.

Also on Sunday, I got my hair cut by one of the other students (a burly man named Hans). You don't notice how much you appreciate not having hair hanging into your eyes until your hair is hanging into your eyes... But that's taken care of. W00t!

So, on to my topic. What do you guys think of all the ruckus surrounding Frienditto?

What it is:
1. You can use it to anonymously archive someone's public journal post.
2. You can use it to anonymously archive someone else's private post. To do this you must give them your LJ username and password. (The entry can be viewed by anyone on Frienditto.
3. Frienditto was used by LJ Drama to archive drama-causing posts.

Concerns:
1. That Frienditto violates copyright laws and privacy (not that people couldn't do that before, but Frienditto made it easier to do anonymously; also, that's not always the case (it would be perfectly legal to archive posts from my journal in that manner, for instance, as I licensed it on a whim)).
2. That Frienditto could be stealing usernames and passwords.

Recently, the site was vandalized and has subsequently been suffering from bandwidth trouble (the site is currently inactive). Also, an LJ community, ditto_cops, has been monitoring the situation with Frienditto. What do you people think?

(On an entirely unrelated note, I feel that I need to link to this excellent post.)

I was checking out LJ Drama and I encountered goldenplate, a truly excellent specimen of Trollus Anonymous. Take a look, but don't feed it. What causes a human to become a troll, I wonder... and why does this individual possess such exceptional strength and vigor?

Edit: Added link to specific LJ Drama post.

I'm done with work for the semester! W00t!

(Also, for all the HP fans out there, I have this cryptic bit of news. The door is open.)

...
(And I have new userpics!)