Life goes on
I'm trying to keep myself busy, sort of; Mum's cremation is likely to be on either Thursday or Monday, I have time off work as required and tomorrow's job is to get Meg into the country at no notice. Thank you all for your comments to the last (Friends-only) post; I don't really feel up to looking at them right now, which does seem to be a terribly ungrateful thing of me to say, but I appreciate them all the same, and I'm glad that they're there for me to look at when I do feel like facing things a little less avoidantly.
0) Happy ever-so-slightly-belated birthdays to thespianpythia, glissando and chocaholic7. Many happy returns of the day, hopefully not quite too late to be festive.
1) We've had international competitions in chessboxing, now there's international competition in chessdarts - a hybrid team event between pairs of a chess player and a darts player. It may speak volumes about the esteem in which chess and darts are held that the championship could attract darts players including Raymond van Barneveld and Andy Fordham, both of whom have won the version of the darts world championship not monopolised by Phil "The Power" Taylor, but only chess players like Sergei Tiviakov (world #77) and Alexandra Kosteniuk (lady world #8). This is inherently inferior to chessboxing; the old British game show Bullseye has shown what larks are to be had from non-darts-players playing darts so I think it's not beyond the realms of ridicule to require a single player to engage in both disciplines.
2) From beingjdc, http://www.moral-politics.com/ is a political quiz more interesting than most I've seen - for instance, all the ones overtly determining your economic left-right preference and your social libertarian-authoritarian preference. It comes from the standpoint that your preferences concerning Moral Order, defining your ideal view of the world in terms of whether non-conformance or conformance to established moral order should be advantaged, and Moral Rules, defining the rules you think are most appropriate to achieving your ideal moral order in terms of whether individual initiatives should be rewarded over collective initiatives. These do not quite translate exactly to otherwise popular left-right-authoritarian-libertarian theory, but bear some similarities.
In any case, I scored -5.5 on the Moral Order axis and 4 on the Moral Rules axis, suggesting that I strongly do not believe that particular notions of race, species, gender and lifestyle have moral authority over other notions, and that I moderately strongly believe that society should primarily reward actions that benefit society as a whole first (and individual members eventually) over reward actions that benefits each member first (and society eventually). This apparently makes me a pretty strong socialist and likely to support environmental movements and the Green Party. Hmm-m-m-m. More provocative than most, but in a good way.
3) I made the mistake of browsing ljreviewz, a will-the-clique-vote-you-in? LJ reviewing community. As seems frequent, they don't seem very generous towards potential applicants; it seems to be more a chance for an established clique to demonstrate free snark. However, compared to other similar communities I've seen, at least they're generous enough to give guidelines as to what they think makes Cool LJ.
I don't care what they think. I care what you think, regarding your opinion and barometer of cool far more highly than I could theirs. So, resident House of Lords of LJ, I solicit your opinions as to what makes cool or uncool LJ through the medium of the anonymised tickybox.
The law of the excluded middle is most firmly applied here and you get neither "don't know" nor "Other (see comments)" options; if you find yourself dithering "well, it's possible to do it in cool ways, and it's possible to do it in uncool ways" for any of these categories, I urge you to find the hypothetical median typical example to cross your Friends list and proscribe the category to be Fonz or Fondue accordingly. There is to be no stigma about declaring either all or none of the options cool, nor to be the only person to think that something is cool; there is no inherently cool breadth for your notion of coolness.
Poll Coolj
0) Happy ever-so-slightly-belated birthdays to thespianpythia, glissando and chocaholic7. Many happy returns of the day, hopefully not quite too late to be festive.
1) We've had international competitions in chessboxing, now there's international competition in chessdarts - a hybrid team event between pairs of a chess player and a darts player. It may speak volumes about the esteem in which chess and darts are held that the championship could attract darts players including Raymond van Barneveld and Andy Fordham, both of whom have won the version of the darts world championship not monopolised by Phil "The Power" Taylor, but only chess players like Sergei Tiviakov (world #77) and Alexandra Kosteniuk (lady world #8). This is inherently inferior to chessboxing; the old British game show Bullseye has shown what larks are to be had from non-darts-players playing darts so I think it's not beyond the realms of ridicule to require a single player to engage in both disciplines.
2) From beingjdc, http://www.moral-politics.com/ is a political quiz more interesting than most I've seen - for instance, all the ones overtly determining your economic left-right preference and your social libertarian-authoritarian preference. It comes from the standpoint that your preferences concerning Moral Order, defining your ideal view of the world in terms of whether non-conformance or conformance to established moral order should be advantaged, and Moral Rules, defining the rules you think are most appropriate to achieving your ideal moral order in terms of whether individual initiatives should be rewarded over collective initiatives. These do not quite translate exactly to otherwise popular left-right-authoritarian-libertarian theory, but bear some similarities.
In any case, I scored -5.5 on the Moral Order axis and 4 on the Moral Rules axis, suggesting that I strongly do not believe that particular notions of race, species, gender and lifestyle have moral authority over other notions, and that I moderately strongly believe that society should primarily reward actions that benefit society as a whole first (and individual members eventually) over reward actions that benefits each member first (and society eventually). This apparently makes me a pretty strong socialist and likely to support environmental movements and the Green Party. Hmm-m-m-m. More provocative than most, but in a good way.
3) I made the mistake of browsing ljreviewz, a will-the-clique-vote-you-in? LJ reviewing community. As seems frequent, they don't seem very generous towards potential applicants; it seems to be more a chance for an established clique to demonstrate free snark. However, compared to other similar communities I've seen, at least they're generous enough to give guidelines as to what they think makes Cool LJ.
I don't care what they think. I care what you think, regarding your opinion and barometer of cool far more highly than I could theirs. So, resident House of Lords of LJ, I solicit your opinions as to what makes cool or uncool LJ through the medium of the anonymised tickybox.
The law of the excluded middle is most firmly applied here and you get neither "don't know" nor "Other (see comments)" options; if you find yourself dithering "well, it's possible to do it in cool ways, and it's possible to do it in uncool ways" for any of these categories, I urge you to find the hypothetical median typical example to cross your Friends list and proscribe the category to be Fonz or Fondue accordingly. There is to be no stigma about declaring either all or none of the options cool, nor to be the only person to think that something is cool; there is no inherently cool breadth for your notion of coolness.
Poll Coolj