Acting the goat
Mercury is in superior conjunction tonight. As good an excuse to post as any.
As of this morning, I have a fourth LJ account, purely for testing layouts and other available site features.
Naturally, I wanted dragons in the name, and apparently, so do many people. I was a little surprised at how many variations of obscurely dragon-related names were taken.
Given that it was a testing account and all, I kind of wanted to call it either
alphadraconis/alpha_draconis or betadraconis/beta_draconis. Both taken, underscores and all.
thuban and rastaban, Arabic names for those stars, also gone.
loremipsum, highly appropriate for filler text, ditto.
draconigena, a very nifty Latin word meaning “sprung from dragon's teeth” and referring to the mythical Cadmus sowing soldiers, also gone.
I finally settled on delta_draconis, with underscore, since someone else is using deltadraconis for their roleplaying.
It's most fitting, considering that this is my fourth LJ account and ∂ is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. Not to mention that the traditional Arabic name for ∂ Draconis is al-tais/altais, meaning “the goat”. And considering that LJ's mascot is Frank…
And speaking of LJ mascots, the default icon on their theljstaff account really looks more like a “drama llama” than a goat. But then it seems quite in keeping with their attitude and policies.
One day I will write up the ways in which LJ enables its users to stalkity stalk stalk each other and have messy confusing interactions which end badly due to LJ's unclear terminology and shoddy infrastructure as well as how to circumvent the intrusive automatic notification subscriptions.
Why on earth anyone would ever want to know that someone else just uploaded a new userpic is beyond me, aside from the aforementioned stalking thing. It's not like that many people have a habit of uploading especially clever icons on a regular basis, and if they did, you'd likely eventually see them in their posts and comments anyway.
Honestly, I'd be highly tempted to keep reloading and deleting a small batch of icons over and over again just to drive anyone who actually used that function crazy.
As for notifications of new posts in a journal, I'd either post things locked and unlock so that it never showed up, or post unlocked and then switch the settings so that it was no longer accessible, just out of pure perversity.
The real problem here is a lack of reciprocity.
I'll admit, I'd find it all much less needlessly invasive if people could see who was subscribing to what in their journals, in terms of numbers, if not by name.
It would serve as a sort of primitive feedback device, enabling someone to realize, “Well, I've got 2 subscribed to ‘oh god I hate my crappy day job’ and 45 to ‘pictures of my cat in homemade costumes’. Clearly I should make more costumes for my cat.”
I suppose that one-sidedness epitomizes the core of any LJ relationship, whether it be between the company and its users, or its users and … its other users.
As of this morning, I have a fourth LJ account, purely for testing layouts and other available site features.
Naturally, I wanted dragons in the name, and apparently, so do many people. I was a little surprised at how many variations of obscurely dragon-related names were taken.
Given that it was a testing account and all, I kind of wanted to call it either
alphadraconis/alpha_draconis or betadraconis/beta_draconis. Both taken, underscores and all.
thuban and rastaban, Arabic names for those stars, also gone.
loremipsum, highly appropriate for filler text, ditto.
draconigena, a very nifty Latin word meaning “sprung from dragon's teeth” and referring to the mythical Cadmus sowing soldiers, also gone.
I finally settled on delta_draconis, with underscore, since someone else is using deltadraconis for their roleplaying.
It's most fitting, considering that this is my fourth LJ account and ∂ is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. Not to mention that the traditional Arabic name for ∂ Draconis is al-tais/altais, meaning “the goat”. And considering that LJ's mascot is Frank…
And speaking of LJ mascots, the default icon on their theljstaff account really looks more like a “drama llama” than a goat. But then it seems quite in keeping with their attitude and policies.
One day I will write up the ways in which LJ enables its users to stalkity stalk stalk each other and have messy confusing interactions which end badly due to LJ's unclear terminology and shoddy infrastructure as well as how to circumvent the intrusive automatic notification subscriptions.
Why on earth anyone would ever want to know that someone else just uploaded a new userpic is beyond me, aside from the aforementioned stalking thing. It's not like that many people have a habit of uploading especially clever icons on a regular basis, and if they did, you'd likely eventually see them in their posts and comments anyway.
Honestly, I'd be highly tempted to keep reloading and deleting a small batch of icons over and over again just to drive anyone who actually used that function crazy.
As for notifications of new posts in a journal, I'd either post things locked and unlock so that it never showed up, or post unlocked and then switch the settings so that it was no longer accessible, just out of pure perversity.
The real problem here is a lack of reciprocity.
I'll admit, I'd find it all much less needlessly invasive if people could see who was subscribing to what in their journals, in terms of numbers, if not by name.
It would serve as a sort of primitive feedback device, enabling someone to realize, “Well, I've got 2 subscribed to ‘oh god I hate my crappy day job’ and 45 to ‘pictures of my cat in homemade costumes’. Clearly I should make more costumes for my cat.”
I suppose that one-sidedness epitomizes the core of any LJ relationship, whether it be between the company and its users, or its users and … its other users.