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Introduction (aka about this journal)
Hello and welcome. This is, fairly obviously, my online journal / blog / whathaveyou. Come, put up your metaphorical webtravelling shoes; won't you have a read for a while?

I also, like 11 million other people, play World of Warcraft. My main characters are:

  • Shukeralle, unguilded level 80 night elf druid (server: Aggramar)
  • Donda, level 72 tauren druid, also on Aggramar. Is in the "Hordes of Hell" giuld.
  • ...and an army of alts

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Mar. 25th, 2008 @ 04:32 pm Steve is still catching up, part the millionth; and, other stuff too
Tags: , ,
SUP, Livejournal's current owner, is a Russian company.

I did not know that.

SUP is run by Jews.

I didn't know that either.

(In fact, I knew very very little about Livejournal's owners...)

It turns out that the boycott last Friday was originally inflamed by anti-Semitic interests.

I really wish I had known that earlier.

Sources: this post by [info]chopchica and this post by [info]technosage.

In short:

  • While the Latest Livejournal Brouhaha is annoying and another example of shoddy corporate communications, it may also be due to a cultural divide.
  • Thanks to that cultural divide, the boycott probably didn't achieve very much.
  • The boycott was a lot more sinister than it originally appeared.
  • Question everything.
  • Steve is very behind the times. (But what else is new?)

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And no, I didn't boycott LJ. I was just lazy. But what else is new?

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In other Steve-is-behind-the-times news, I finally went back to Resident Evil Zero. I bought this and started it ages ago, but due to various things I never finished it. Not this time. I restarted and powered through it over Easter.

Woot!

Now, on to Resident Evil 4!

But perhaps I should take a bit of a break from the ResEvil games first... just not for four years this time.

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I shall avoid my usual Easter comment and instead fill in another one:

A belated Happy Easter to all, no matter your religious convictions (or lack of them).

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Something that I usually wonder about (but not this year) is where the name Easter came from. I used to think, a few years back, that it came from the goddess Ishtar. This turned out to be very wrong - ultimately the name comes from the Old English word / term "Eostremonat", meaning "Month of Eostre." But what does Eostre mean? Who or what was it? Perhaps it was a god or goddess of some sort?

I am very lazy and haven't bothered following up. Maybe I'll find out one of these years.
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Mar. 20th, 2008 @ 10:06 am The latest LJ brouhaha
Current Mood: blah
Tags:
I am fantastically late in finding things out.

Which is to say that I have today seen this thing about Livejournal's Evil Overlords no longer providing free Basic accounts. Or somesuch. Instead, the only accounts that are now available are the Plus Accounts (which are free, but have ads), and Paid.

To protest this, there is this one day strike happening. Participate if you feel like it. Due to a rather hilarious accident of timing, the strike occurs on and around Good Friday, and a lot of people probably wouldn't post on Good Friday anyway.

Given how inconsistent I am with posting to Livejournal, I'll probably end up participating in the strike by default.

As you might have worked out by now, I'm pretty laid-back about all this. Why? I have several thoughts on this, which I'll delimit in a dot-point list because I doit-point lists.

  • It's not like we're suddenly being asked to pay money to use LJ. Plus accounts are free, you just have to put up with ads being displayed on them. Other free blogging services show ads. In fact, a very large majority of free webservices - webmail, webcomic hosting, image hosting, free webpage hosting - display ads. LJ's free Basic accounts were an anomaly in the current Web landscape. (Webscape?)
  • Livejournal *does* need to make money, in order to pay salaries and bandwidth and other technology costs. Perhaps the old system just wasn't working well enough anymore.
  • Admittedly, Livejournal survived for long enough without this change, *and* their news post is has an air of, "we're a business and will leverage your product for our best interests LiveJournal's continued development. Oh, and by the way, we've already made this change." A very big point against them for that.


I am still annoyed with Livejournal. I remember back when I started this Livejournal, back in 2000 or so, because everyone else had one. LJ felt a lot more like a community, and operated more on a donations-style system - if you liked LJ and their service, then you gave them money for a Paid Account, or a Permanent Account if it was offered.

LJ isn't like that anymore.
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Jun. 25th, 2005 @ 11:34 pm More LJ fiddling / and movie reviews
Tags: , ,
If you are just viewing this in a Friends view, then have a quick look at my main journal page. I have done a bit more customisation of this beast; it now has an introduction, complete with links to my various categories/tags.

This journal might actually be presentable one day. In the meantime, it gets slight improvements from month to month.

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And now, movies!

( Mr and Mrs Smith, and Batman Begins )

There wasn't very much in the movie trailers that really grabbed my attention, only the one for The Island. The concept of a group of people being held in a fake world really grabbed my attention, and I wondered where the movie would go with it. Then the trailer devolved to car chases, things blowing up, and the Intrepid Heroes dangling over immense heights. I lost a bit of interest after that, but I might go see it.

There were also other trailers, of course, but I can barely remember what they were for. They were that uninspiring. The two I can remember were for for Stealth (as soon as they mentioned a fully AI fighter jet, I guessed it would be going rogue) and Monster-In-Law (I instantly wrote it off as a Jennifer Lopez chick-flick).

Oh, that's right, there was the Fantastic Four trailer as well. (Surprisingly, *not* tonight, when I saw Batman Begins.) To which I say, meh. Just based on the trailer, I imagine this will not be a huge step forwards for the superhero action movie genre. But still, it has Dr. Doom. That may help the movie a bit. Or it might not. The movie is likely to make him just a generic villain.
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Jun. 23rd, 2005 @ 05:33 pm (no subject)
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: blessed silence
Tags:
Well, while waiting around for the timesheet software to start behaving itself (because it has to be complete for the month tomorrow and EVERYONE IN THE COMPANY IS HITTING IT right now), AND because it's past 5:00 pm, I decided to take advantage of LJ's new tag system.

My past 30 entries or so have now been tagged with various things. I may have gone slightly overboard. Still, it's been an interesting exercise.
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May. 11th, 2005 @ 11:41 pm The on-going saga of Steve's PC; that, and a usage of money to ensure continued iconage
Tags: ,
I was able, in short order, to establish that the likely culprit of my latest PC woes was just one of the two hard disks. It was an IBM Fireball 45GB hard disk, a type of hard disk known for being unreliable. Considering that it was making clicking noises and my PC was unable to detect it, I surmised it had finally jumped from being unreliable to being dead. The only logical course was to disconnect it from the PC and switch on. Which I did so.

The PC was able to detect the remaining hard disk; this is good!

Windows 2000 is having just as much trouble as ever booting up; this is very annoying.

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Oh yes, and my LJ paid account was due to expire very soon. I have paid for another year. It's not *that* much money. Though I'm not using nearly the number of icons that I can. One of these days...
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