Blogging, Blagging and Buggery.

State of mind: jumbled
Current soundtrack: Black Jack songs on loop (Anyone got Tak Matsumoto's BJ theme? The Miracles of Life one?)

Let me tell you, Intartoobs, this week bordered precariously on Terrible, No-Good and Downrightdisastrous. The New Media projects unexpectedly turned belly-up and group leader took a big blow. Natural 20, critical hit, elemental weakness and all that. D: But trees will prevail! Trees will grow!

Despite having kept odd hours for the past few weeks, and having a good chance of having 25% of my holiday eaten by...well, SOMETHING I'll tell y'all about soon...I spent 20 minutes scrubbing the bejesus out of my stinky hair this morning and another using far too much soap. I am clean, and I am *at this moment* very happy. 24 hours ago I was incredibly annoyed. 48 hours ago I was unconscious.

---

It seems I moved out of Livejournal at about the right time. After Strikethrough '07, we now have Blackout(?) '07.

To summarise, two artists got banhammered!!! banned for life over at LJ for one offense. One. The reasons, depending on who you ask, range from the pernicious peddling of pedo porn pics to lack of 'artistic merit'. And, sneaky sneaky, LJ/SixApart did this juust before a fandom convention.

Were this any other fandom, the backlash might not have been so bad, but they picked on Harry Potter.

And lo, the drama flooded the intertubes. The angry responses lay down with the civil ones. Cat macros spammed the news page. Comments reached the (maximum) FIVE THOUUUUUSAND. But it didn't stop there. The bones users are currently picking with LJ include:

• The immense length of time between incident and announcement of 'resolution'. (5 days!)
• Refusal to clarify, in writing, the changes to the TOS (read: refusal to update TOS page)
• Changing the 'strikethrough' of a banned LJ-username to something bolded and linkless. The action is seen not only as confusing, but also as a way of robbing the user of their 'Strikethrough' battlecry. :S
• The perceived double standards in censorship. Nazi communities? Can't do anything. Racist communities? Sorry, not our business. Pro-anorexia? Nope. Gay buttsex pictures? ZOMG BANBANDIEDIEDIE!
• The asshattery/stupidity of two staff members: burr86, for posting in a snarky humor comm but refusing/failing to address the concerns raised in 4000-odd comments at the LJ news community, and coffeechica , for insisting that yes, she knows what anorexia is: simply 'an aspiration to be thin'. Way to go! Where would you like that failcake decorated with failsprinkles and failcherries?

Does the outcry go on? It's hard to say, but I bet you the next news or lj_biz post is going to be maxed out with comments too. I've seen very few banners, or calls for themesongs and suchlike. But this happened THREE MONTHS after Strikethrough in almost identical circumstances. Big-name users/comms deleted on the sly, just before a large event (Memorial Day/HP convention), failing to take into account the size of the LJ community and the outcry that would result. As it is, one of my closest LJ buddies has made the leap to another journal site, although he admits the interface is foreign to him now. If I hadn't jumped to Blogger beforehand, I might just have followed him.

People are angry. People will leave. Communities talk (it's already up on Digg that LJ supports pro-ana). Customers will go to other places. 6A will learn it is not wise to poke the sleeping dragons - particularly as the dragons render fictional erotica and pay them shiny money.

One day, I wish to teach Consumer Behaviour—simply because I want to pick up a textbook, tell the students to turn to the pre-chapter case study on Six Apart and Livejournal, and say 'You see this, guys? THIS WAS REAL. I saw how some of it went down.'

恭喜発財！

State of mind: sleepy
Current soundtrack: The ceiling fan

To all the wonderful people on my miniscule leadership: Happy Chinese New Year!



As most of y'all know - it's the year of the pig! I'm a bit confused as to WHAT pig it is, though - I seem to recall 2007 being the year of the Fire Pig (charsiew jokes abound) but CCTV and some friends insist it is the year of the METAL Pig. @_@ In any case, I'm finally off on break, the new clothes have been bought (including the obligatory red garments for the first day) and the food! O, the food!


Only one of my favourite sweets in the world - nien ko, or nien gao. However you spell it, it's a confection of molasses rolled in grated coconut. The idea is that you give it to the stovegod (and I am the only one amused by the fact that in Japanese it is the Koujin [荒神]*) and when he goes up to report to Big Boss Jade Emperor in Heaven, he'll have his lips stuck together or only be able to say sweet things.

It's also very good fried. Mmmmmmm.


This is what dinner looks like at my gran's on the first day of CNY...after everyone's done with it :D There's about enough for 11-12 people.


Tau yu prawns! These tiger prawns cooked in soya sauce aren't exactly the famous hee hee har har** dish, but what the hey, they do. And are super tasty. Thanks, grandma.


Joo hoo char is a mix of cuttlefish, turnips and shiitake mushrooms, all fried nicely together and eaten with rice or in little packages of lettuce (sang choy sounds like 'live and prosper' - please no Spock jokes). It's my favourite dish in the entire universe (mostly because of them thar turnips) but it's highly labour-intensive and my grandmother's getting a bit too old to prepare it this year...so my uncle made it. It tasted very strongly of fat, for some reason. This is one of those dishes I want to learn how to make before chow-ing off somewhere overseas.


And what's CNY dinner without a nice sweet mandarin orange afterwards, hm? P:

As for how it's going with work - well, things could have been worse, and could have been better. :/ Multimedia Production project threw up on me--but that was my fault. WHY it's my fault, I'm still trying to figure out. Next time read the gorram brief, genius Motion Graphics went all right, given the circumstances. We got the Hue Visualab team to come and critique our work presentations, but I didn't get much of anything beyond technical tips. This usually means in my book it was really bad, or so very mediocre nothing could be said. I AM, however, quite pleased with the fact I did manage to put together a whole new one for submission. It even rendered...fairly...smoothly. Consumer Behaviour went very well, what with our group's 'dramatic' presentation. JL, Cons, James, Yen, go you! :D

Suffice it to say that I'm slowly coming back to life and I owe my friend Lynn about two pots of tea. We met up earlier today--but more on that, and other teeny issues later! Sleep is a rare commodity in design!

*Convoluted Ninja Manual joke. Might be better to just pretend you get this one. ;)
** Hee hee har har is a prawn (har) dish which, for obvious reasons, is supposed to bring you happiness.

Note to self:

State of mind: fascinated
Current soundtrack: SAMURAI 7 playlist

...Read foodie blogs before I go to bed more often. Came back from classes* last night and checked the Blogs of Note to find Passionate Eater and, through there, Chocablog. The result was rather a lot of time wasted, but some very nice dreams about Samurai 7 and Saiyuki. Katsu and Gojyo, in particular. I haven't had Saiyuki dreams for three years.

A quick note here - I am a huge sucker for the ancient East and its legends. Feudal Japan, Monkey/Journey To The West, element cycles, the four/five guardian beasts...mention them or pay tribute, and I'm hooked. The only exception is Fushigi Yuugi/Curious Play. You can only hear Miaka and Tamahome ping-pong each other's names back and forth so often, and without being too spoilerish...healing!sex?!

It seems a fair bit of my time is getting pimped out for my beloved college recently. Spent last weekend at the Star Education Fair giving out pamphlets and promoting the courses. Highlights of those two days included:

• The two lovebirds who took a pamphlet without letting go of each other's hands.
• Super Motivated Lassie who wanted to know about certification as an interior designer in Malaysia ("Um...tell you what, come down to campus, call this number and see if you can meet the ID head..."). It got me so curious I had to phone my buddy Lammy after the whole thing just to see if there WAS such an organisation that certified interior designers. (We now both think it's PAM.)
• The lovely spunky couple who wanted to come in with their kids, too. I say heck, you're never too old for art. :D
• The stern-looking gentleman who came asking about facilities catering for the deaf. He lives in Subang, just near our campus, but we couldn't really help him. LKW has lecturers who know ASL, but would you like to drive to Cyberjaya and back every day? I kind of felt for him.
• The dude who came to enquire about Multimedia Design with the T-shirt that said HTML stood for How To Meet Ladies. (This was a fun session, I managed to joke all the way through it with his group.)

Thursday sees me talking to the fresh meat—I mean, new students, coming in for orientation. I've been a bit hesitant about doing this the past few terms, since the juniors one term below us have a really good kit and presentation going. We were kind of just there to shake the new students up and be class clowns, which is only tolerable up to a point. This time they say they want to bring in the 'stars', so that would be me, Chrys and Steph. T.

...Stars, srsly? I don't feel that starrish. There are lots of people in class who are more kengchow (skilled) than I am, although I do fairly well for myself. I guess now it just means that my kengchowness has to spread from my presentation skills into my design sense, as well!

*Which brings me to another point. I'm looking for Consumer Behaviour. 10th edition (Blackwell R.D., Engel, J.F., Miniard P.W. 2006, Thomson South-Western). Does anyone know where I can get a copy in the P.J. area?