deird1: Dawn glaring at Buffy, with text "Dawn Summers demands an explanation for this bullshit" (Dawn bullshit)
I don't use Facebook very much, but one thing that has been helpful is that I could get group notifications from them.

So:
- my choir updates their group page with regular info on rehearsals/concerts/etc
- my roleplaying group regularly post to figure out when we can meet next
...and so on.

This is great, but only because it means I'm guaranteed to get a notification whenever anything happens.


So, what did Facebook just do?

*sighs*

"You were receiving all notifications from these groups, but we've updated this to only show highlights!"


...with an air of "Isn't this convenient? Aren't I helpful, to figure this out for you?"



Facebook, no. You are never helpful, and every time you try to be, you only make things worse.


Not wanting to miss out on unimportant updates like, for instance, my friends wanting to know if they can roleplay at my house this evening, I changed it back. Which took FOUR DIFFERENT WEBPAGES before I could change them all.


Not. Happy. Jan.
deird1: Buffy and the rocket launcher, with text "best present ever" (Buffy rocket launcher)
So frustrated with Paypal right now.

the saga )
The Moral Of Our Tale?

Paypal are the devil. And less willing to help than Cthulhu.
deird1: Anya looking stern (Anya glasses)
I asked one of the team engineers to check whether a technical term was written correctly. He huffed, rolled his eyes slightly, and demanded "Who's questioning it?"

Why, good sir, I am questioning it. It is my bounden duty, as company editor, to question every half-formed piece of drivel that crosses my desk; to tear it to shreds and reconstruct it in a way that makes sense; to challenge every fact, every phrasing; to correct, to change, to disrupt - so that when your document reaches its final destination, and your now-flowing prose delights their every sense, our clients will not, even for a moment, question it.
deird1: a chibi of Lady Catherine from P&P, with text "I am most seriously displeased" (Lady Catherine displeased)
So, I've been enjoying the ridiculously cheap books one can buy through iBooks. And, two days ago, I got the first book in a series.

Today, I went back to get the second book.

...and, sometime during those two days, Apple decided to stop offering that book series to Australians. The whole series; the first book is listed on my laptop as having been purchased, but it informs me sternly that it's "not available in the Australian store". (Thankfully it's still on my iPad.)


This annoys me for a number of reasons:
1) My purchases are being restricted to Australia.
2) I'm not even in Australia.
3) I'm pretty sure this means they're price-fixing so that, once again, Aussies get far more expensive prices than the rest of the world.
4) Why remove a series you were already selling?
5) Why offer me a series in the first place if you're going to remove it?
6) What the hell???

GRRR.
deird1: Dawn glaring at Buffy, with text "Dawn Summers demands an explanation for this bullshit" (Dawn bullshit)
While I have indeed ranted about this before, I feel the urge again. Bear with me.


I am currently reading John Rogers' blog, where he discusses, at length, what it was like to make Leverage. He also, at regular intervals, tells off his overseas fans for torrenting episodes from America.

And then, he says things like this:
The history of the "Zanzibar Marketplace", a criminal clearinghouse, is quite interesting, but you're going to have to buy the DVD to hear us discuss it.


Allow me to explain why this gets my goat.

1) I actually own the dvds. All five seasons – because, after all, Leverage is one of my favourite shows, and I want to watch it lots, and I have a private rule that if I have a legal way to pay for something I'm going to watch more than once, I should pay for it.
2) I cannot listen to the dvd commentary he's referencing, because it's only on the Region 1 dvds.

In fact, as a fan who would really like to listen to the commentaries and really loves supporting the people who make my nice shows, I would have to:
- buy a second set of Region 1 dvds via Amazon, hoping desperately that they'll actually sell it to me (because Amazon won't sell some things to Australians no matter how hard we beg)
or:
- torrent it

We get our dvds:
- late (cf: everything, ever)
- if at all (cf: Early Edition, another show I'd love to check out)
- with half of the special features missing (cf: BtVS, and the Seth Green commentary)

We get our tv:
- late (by which I mean years)
- or by piracy

THESE ARE OUR ONLY OPTIONS.

I have no legal way to watch half the stuff you guys watch. Ever. Because I live overseas. And, while I will happily spend money on watching things, if there is no way possible that I can ever give you my money, I'm going to go "screw it", and pirate it. Want me to stop, John Rogers? Give me the chance to buy the damn thing.
deird1: Dawn glaring at Buffy, with text "Dawn Summers demands an explanation for this bullshit" (Dawn bullshit)
How to move house (the easy way)

1) Buy a house.
2) Settle on a date for getting the new house.
3) Decide on a moving date.
4) Call up all your friends, and ask if they have cardboard boxes for your move.
5) While you're at it, ask how many of them are free to help you move.
6) Organise for a moving truck.
7) Organise for utilities to be turned on, the day you get the house.
8) Block out a date on the calendar with MOVING DAY written in big red letters, and plan your life around it.
9) Move.



How to move house (the annoying-as-all-get-out way)

1) Buy a house.
2) Settle on a date for getting the new house (say... the 13th).
3) Decide on a moving date (say... the 14th).
4) Call up all your friends, and ask if they have cardboard boxes for your move.
5) While you're at it, ask how many of them are free to help you move.
6) Organise for a moving truck.
7) Organise for utilities to be turned on, the day you get the house.
8) Block out a date on the calendar with MOVING DAY written in big red letters, and plan your life around it.
9) Get a phonecall telling you that, actually, the people currently in your new house aren't able to move until the 16th.
10) Redo steps 2, 3, and 5 through 8 ALL OVER AGAIN.
deird1: Dawn glaring at Buffy, with text "Dawn Summers demands an explanation for this bullshit" (Dawn bullshit)
...and, once again, someone out there in the blogosphere is declaring that using a pseudonym is "cowardly" and means you have issues.

*rolls eyes to infinity*


Dear Universe,

Should I behave like an arse in internetville, you may want to publish my name far and wide to shame me into submission. If this happens, you'll basically have one of three options, depending on which name you've got hold of.

1) My professional name.

Googling my professional name will uncover my Linked In account, and very little else. At which point, you may be able to track down my past employers (good luck: I can't manage to track down most of them), and informed them in horrified tones that I have been misbehaving on the internet. To which they will respond: "...so?"

2) My legal name.

If you google my legal name, you will be directed to a franchise of beauty specialists in the USA. I won't come up at all.

If you happen to know a whole bunch of extra details about my life, you may be able to track down the real me. However:
a) the only way you could find out those details is by knowing my screenname and checking out this blog;
b) the only people you could contact after this detective work would be my family - who read my blog, and already know most of the ways I'm likely to misbehave on the internet.

3) My screenname.

This would be Deird, deird1, St Deird, or other variations thereof.

I use this name at: LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Slacktivist, Love Joy Feminism, Rachel Held Evans, Ship of Fools, Snark Squad, Making Light, Tumblr, Ravelry, AO3, Whedonesque, Hoyden About Town, Vimeo, and everywhere Disqus is in operation. If you know my screenname, you have the power to ruin my life.


Cowardly? Cowardly would be hiding behind one of my RL names. Using my pseudonym puts my entire online reputation at risk – and that's the gutsy option.

frell that

Jul. 20th, 2012 08:11 am
deird1: Buffy looking annoyed, with text "I'm a bitch. Ask me how." (Buffy bitch)
Pro-tip: If you don't want people to discuss your traumatic past when defending their favourite television character, don't write about your traumatic past in your episode review.

Also: If the characters in question are a super-strong woman who has recently been resurrected and a 200-year-old vampire with a thing for blonde women who want to kill him, then maybe, just maybe, their situation will not be directly analogous to "generic woman" and "generic man" in the same situation? Possibly?

Plus: Listening to what people say is a good thing! Especially before you ban them for saying something they never actually said!




*sighs*

And I'm out.
deird1: Illyria looking like Fred, with text "Fred doesn't live here anymore" (Illyria not anymore)
I HATE WORD. WITH A FIERY VENGEANCE. IT IS DESPICABLE AND MUST BE OBLITERATED. DIE WORD DIE.


I changed the spacing of one line - and it changed the font too.

Then I changed the font back - and it DELETED EVERY SINGLE BULLET POINT in the document!!!!

WHAT THE HELL.



*plots revenge*
deird1: Faith in Buffy's body, beating someone up, with text "Buffy has to do this" (Faith as Buffy)
Dear Evil Corporate Guys Who Wish To Be Facebook,

Imagine, if you will, that you are hugely into balsa wood model camels. Because... camels! Made of balsa wood! Woo!

You are so into these balsa wood camels, that you decide to make a permanent display of camels for everyone to enjoy: your friends, your nodding acquaintances, random tourists, lonely orphan children with no shoes who will suddenly realise that they too can dream of balsa wood modelling... everyone. They will see your camel display and be INSPIRED. And have a fun day out for the whole family, filled with camel-themed delights.

So, you spend months, every single evening for MONTHS making those intricate little model camels, and stressing about them, and posing them, and accidentally breaking them and crying, and fixing them up again, and going to bed exhausted, and setting up the perfect display just like you've always dreamed... and you paint the display room, set it all up, put flowers and streamers all over it, and make fancy little brochures telling people all about it.

...and then I come in, look around, shrug, and calmly burn the whole place to the ground.


THAT IS WHAT YOU HAVE JUST DONE TO ME.


I spent months, MONTHS of my life, months I CANNOT GET BACK putting together the absolute best fic archive for [livejournal.com profile] still_grrr that I could possibly devise. I came up with thousands of tags, sorted entries by length, season, character, pairing, theme, style, and shoe size. I spent days organising tag bundles for each category. I made it completely possible to search the community for all the Cordelia/Giles mpreg season 5 genderswap PG-rated drabble darkfics you could want - and if that was what you wanted, that was exactly what you'd get, that specifically.

I poured SO MUCH time and effort into the bloody thing.

And now you, O Evil Delicious Owners, have revamped your site without a second thought, and destroyed the whole thing.


My tag bundles are gone.
The network is gone.
The pairing tags are gone.
The tag list is gone.
The multi-tag searches are gone.

The whole thing, in fact, is destroyed.


Somewhere in your evil clutches, Delicious Guys, are eight months of my life that I'd really like back. Could you please find them, dust them off, and return them so that I can devote them to windsurfing or learning Hindi, rather than spending them trying to finish a project that now turns out to have been pointless? Ta.
deird1: Buffy looking annoyed, with text "I'm a bitch. Ask me how." (Buffy bitch)
I read an article by Donald Miller, and now I want to hit things.


It was a two-part article, which can basically be summarised as follows:
Part 1 - "Girls! Stop being sluts and then you'll have a great love story!"
Part 2 - "Men! Get a good career, man-up, find a girl, and write her love story for her!"

(No, I am not exaggerating. At all.)


While there are a number of things I could rant about in this - such as repeated uses of "slutty", dividing people into "girls" and "men", and the implication that women should be valued entirely by how much sex they haven't had - the bit that is actually annoying me the most is this:
Be willing to suffer: What this means for you is that your love story needs to have a lot of lonely crying in it. Believe it or not, there will come a day when a man will fall madly in love with you and you will have the honor of sitting down with him one special night to explain that, while you weren’t perfect, you turned down plenty of guys and and cried yourself to sleep hoping somebody would come around and treat you with respect. He will be honored by this, and he will love you and feel humbled. If he doesn’t have the same story, he will feel intensely convicted and unworthy. You’ll really be giving him the foundation he needs to love your heart.


Uh-huh. Apparently, what makes me a desirable wife is having spent night after night sobbing into my pillow, wishing to be loved, until that glorious day when the man of my dreams strode in to take charge and write my love story, at which point I flung myself into his arms, weeping uncontrollably, and clutched at his manly arms, begging, "Never ever leave me! You will fulfil my every dream! YOU ARE THE ONE I'VE WAITED FOR!", eyes still reddened from the long sorrowful evenings of huddling into my quilt and wishing that the man who would bring my life meaning would hurry up and bring it already...

Call me crazy, but I'd think that having a fulfilling life regardless of my single status (in which writing music, learning languages, performing in plays, helping friends, going to barbecues, and babysitting nephews will be regular occurences) is much more attractive than making the highlight of my week crying myself to sleep. And even if it isn't more attractive, I'd rather do it anyway, because it's much more fun.



Dear Donald Miller,
You suck.
Sincerely, Me.
(PS - Before you decide to give the world pompous advice on the perfect marriage, maybe you'd like to wait until you've actually gotten married? Just an idea.)
deird1: Buffy looking annoyed, with text "I'm a bitch. Ask me how." (Buffy bitch)
Mez: Hi, can I book my car in for a service?
Mechanic Guy: Sure. Can I get your name, details, etc?
Mez: *gives details*
MG: Okay. What service do you want?
Mez: Um... I'm not sure I understand.
MG: What service do you want?
Mez: What do you mean?
MG: I mean... what service do you want?
Mez: I'm sorry, but I really don't understand what you're asking me. Could you explain what you want to know?
MG: Well - what service do you want?
Mez: *headdesks*


Dear Mechanic Guy,
I'm sure you were asking a very simple question. And I must have been frustrating to deal with. But...
1) yes, I really am that clueless.
2) I am not deaf.

STOP REPEATING THE EXACT SAME WORDS WHEN I'M ASKING YOU TO EXPLAIN. I CAN HEAR THE WORDS. TELL ME WHAT THEY MEAN.


Sometimes it would be nice if I could just smite people.

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deird1: Fred looking pretty and thoughful (Default)
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