matthias_wave

My muse list has been updated to take account of what muses currently have DW journals (they're at the top). I need to update the LJ section of it sometime, but it may just end up with that section getting deleted if all my games move off of LJ.

Also, last chance to ask me to move a specific muse over and have it honored immediately! Others will have to wait on account of DW going back to needing invite codes.

This is crossposted to LJ for those of my friends who haven't made the move and/or don't have me friended on DW.

Not going to go on at length about the recent shenanigans with LJ. You can probably see thoughts analogous to mine on the matter in any of a kajillion posts that've gone up recently, or any of the comments (which must be approaching 20,000 in total by now) put up on the various news and release posts related to r88. Some of the comments on the latter actually are mine, as are the three feedback submissions, one technical support request, and one suggestion submission that have been sent in to LJ.

I'm just going to contribute two things if there's anyone on my flist that hasn't seen them:
This post regarding what igrick thinks of all of us English-speaking users (because we're all Americans, of course)
and this one about why everyone's complaining the new layout gives them headaches.

That said, I'm leaving. Not as much because of the changes themselves as because of LJ's handling of them and its position as the end a downward spiral regarding its treatment of its users. Any continued presence I have on LJ is going to be for the benefit of RPs I'm in that don't move; my personal journal, as little as it gets used, will be moving over to Dreamwidth. I'm matthias_wave there, too, so anyone else hopping over there, feel free to add me! All the old stuff here's getting imported over there if there's anything you can't bear to lose for some reason (not that I'm deleting this; it's not as if anyone else is likely to want this journal name).

... That's more length than I'd planned on, but oh well. Thanks for putting up with me, friends! Hope to see you again later!

I'm... not really sure how to feel right now.

I've just given my mother permission to donate my cello to the high school in Joplin - the town that got hit really badly with a tornado last spring. They lost all their instruments in the storm.

On the one hand, I'm not really likely to ever play it again. I don't have the time management skills to arrange to play it now in college, and I honestly don't really think I have the motivation to do so after I graduate. The kids in Joplin will definitely get more use out of it than I do.

On the other, well... I've played the cello since fifth grade, and I've had that cello since... god, I think since eighth or ninth grade. All through high school, definitely - ever since I got tall enough to play a full-sized cello. We rented it pretty much until we'd paid enough to buy it outright, and it's gotten fixed up a lot over time, to the point that I think half the parts of the instrument were ones we got replaced - new bridge, new endpin, new fingerboard, bunch of cracks closed up. I think we may even have replaced the soundpost at one point. It's gone from a crappy rental cello to a really good instrument. And, well, I've had it for a long time.

I only really started to enjoy music once I got the chance to make it; I know I enjoyed it a lot better than I ever really did any sort of visual art. A lot of my friends in high school were ones I knew through orchestra.

I think it started out as a school cello, so I guess it's really only fitting that it ends up as one again. So long, Woody. Hopefully you'll make the kids in Joplin as happy as you've made me.

Okay, this is beginning to annoy me. Since around one o'clock this afternoon - maybe longer, but that was the first chance I've had to get on line since early morning yesterday (yeah, I stay up way too late) - I've been having problems with three sites:

1) LJ itself - most pages seem to take somewhere between ten minutes and half an hour to load completely. It seems to stall out on the ads. A couple pages load at the normal rate, though - I've only seen it in two communities so far (dramadramaduck and kingdomdressing)
2) Plurk completely refuses to load.
3) Some pages on Neopets also take ages to load.

Now, for a while, I had this problem where Plurk and LJ would occasionally do this, but that a) went away if I quit and restarted Firefox; b) didn't happen at all in Safari; and c) stopped happening once I fixed the thing that was preventing me from upgrading Firefox. So far I've tried restarting Firefox - no luck. Switching over to Safari didn't work either. Nor did restarting the whole computer. The fact that it's three different sites makes me hesitate to blame it on the sites themselves, especially Neopets (which has never done this before even when this happened normally), but the other options are either my computer or the dorm's internet connection, and I'm slightly mystified as to why either of those would have screwed up in the time I was offline.

Has this been happening for anyone else?

Hokay, massive stuff post - have been back at college and busy recently.

( Part 1: Love for my CS 125 lecturerCollapse )

( Part 2: LARP troublesCollapse )

( Part 3: Dieses gottverdammte Wetter!Collapse )

Final note: I really think it's rather inconsiderate of them to have the Super Bowl on my birthday.

As of about a month ago, Voyager 1 was about 115.25 AU or about two thousandths of a light-year from Earth. Two days ago, it was announced that it had entered the heliosheath, passing the boundary where the solar wind from the sun slows to a stop. It is now only about four years from being officially in interstellar space. As one article put it, "the wind is now no longer at Voyager's back" - and as hitchhiker said, we're "tapping the eggshell."

These last couple days have actually been pretty good.

( Cut because I can't shut upCollapse )

Would someone care to explain to me how making fully half of a quiz concern a topic from a full year ago (hence a different course in the department), applied in a nearly completely non-intuitive manner, that has absolutely nothing to do with the topics the quiz ostensibly covers, seems to be a good idea?

How a solar sail works. Very quantum-mechanics-y. Except for the bit where it requires dredging up an equation that hasn't been used since physics 211 (a full year ago - I'm now in physics 214) and applying it in a way never even hinted at in either course. And at no point did this have anything to do with the topics we've covered in the course this week (which is what the quiz was supposed to be about). The only idea that came close to touching on the course we're in was using a laser to provide momentum, which is a basic subject covered weeks ago now and is only tangentially relevant to the process of solving the problem.

The Tea Party movement has apparently reached new levels of stupid. The Oregon branch appropriated Anonymous' slogan (the general name for the near-hivemind that trollers originating from the /b/ boards on 4chan sometimes show). Unchanged. And then Anonymous spammed their Facebook page until they took down the slogan and had to blank out their wall completely.

As I remarked (it should be at the very end of the comments at time of posting, somewhere on page 4):

Re: the "How could they do this?" comments - I'm assuming sabotage. Someone suggested the slogan without explaining what it meant.

Of course, that doesn't address the fact that the slogan has absolutely nothing to do with the Tea Party, or how they apparently failed to notice that Anonymous is capitalized. Or the fact that, as someone pointed out, Legion (capitalized) was the name of a group of demons. That were exorcised and put into pigs. Which immediately drowned themselves.

On second thought, that's a great name for them, considering what they've just done XD

Apparently roleplaying games will take over your life. I mean, most everyone who reads this has heard me babbling about the Changeling game I'm in at least a little, but this one wasn't intentional.

Especially since I don't think Changeling normally has random encounters.

Anyway, I was at the bookstore (actually at the bank, which is inside the bookstore for reasons I suspect benefit the store) when I ran into one of the other players - whom I'll call "Fox" here, because her character more or less is. Well, I say ran into - apparently she saw me come in, but I didn't hear her calling.

So what did she do? She snuck up behind me and addressed my character in her character's voice. Given that Fox's voice has a definite dangerous undercurrent to it, you can imagine my reaction to hearing it purring "Hello Dark-eyes" in my ear. Namely that it scared the crap out of me - I think I may have stepped on her foot, but if I did she didn't say anything about it.

We had a pleasant conversation while I waited for one of the tellers at the bank to be free (in which I informed her I couldn't be at game because I was spending Easter at home), but it was just the start that was weird. And about gave me a heart attack.