Can't resist the (ahem) holiday icon.

I hate having all-day headaches from hormones. Added work drama does not help matters (none of it is particularly poised to suck me in, but I ended up staying late to deal with it because teenagers are stupid, stupid creatures sometimes). And I have meetings all tomorrow morning so heaven knows how all that's going to play out. I also need to do chores around the apartment and start packing (yay for book boxes!). And all my instincts want me to be a slug all weekend since it's my first weekend without class.

I pretty much aced the grad class, btw. I'm beginning to think that the insane writing program I was involved in during undergrad has given me an unfair advantage in grad school. And then I cackle because I rock so hard.

Downside is that grades won't be available on transcripts until December when the regular semester ends, which means reimbursement paperwork will have to wait 'til then. Nuts.

I am taking the plunge and posting pictures of myself on the internet. In my Flickr of all places!



It's a year old since I have very few actual pics of myself, let alone ones that turned out fabulous. I'm usually behind the camera annoying the crap out of everyone.

On the other hand, I got rid of my Facebook a couple of days ago. I made it back when Facebook first started and was limited to people on college campuses, went through the obligatory rush of friending and joining groups, and then proceeded to ignore the thing for years since I had other things to do besides yawp around on Facebook. And then I deleted it since I couldn't remember who half the people I friended even were and most of the people I did know hadn't updated in a couple of years either.

I am considering creating a brand new account and going from there, just because it appears to be a pretty big shiny deal these days, but we'll see. I'd rather whine about my life in my journal most of the time like I did back when I was a stupid young thing. (Though admittedly, I didn't even start online journaling until I started college, so I managed to skip most of the worst of the Teenaged Angst phase.)

Anyone else on Facebook and actually use it? I could use some of the down-low.

Also: the floor at work is killing my feet. Man what a difference being on the ground floor makes!

I'm finding the discussion at the latest TOS Testcase Update kind of amusing, in an "and you've been online how long?!" sort of way.

To sum up: the DW Abuse Team can't do much of anything if someone decides to take trolling off the site. Even if said troll is also present on DW. And no, they're not going to suspend/ban a troll on DW if they're trolling you off the site. One of the people whose test case apparently provoked the post then shows up going on about how it's unfair that they're getting trolled, that their locked post showed up on Other Site X, and that denise should totes ban the suspected troll from DW for trolling.

Dude, this sort of thing would happen every other week on LJ at least.

You have to remember Rule One of the Internet in cases like this. Stuff you put on the internet, even locked stuff, has to be stuff you're OK with the world knowing about. Cripes, even e-mails, which are a hell of a lot more secure than journal/blog posts are, get leaked and spread around and ZOMG misquoted all the time right up to including the Big Shiny TV News. You have to be prepared for the eventuality of anything you put out into a semipublic space like the interbutt getting out there and shared with people, totes without your original consent.

It might be a dick move to do something like that, but it's still 100% legal for someone to repost a locked entry or do any of the other zillion asinine things trolls do to get peoples' goats up. And no, it should not be the responsibility of the site owners/abuse team/whatever to jump into the middle of your interpersonal dispute and start hitting people with the banhammer.

Does online harassment happen? A better question would be whether to ask if poo stinks. Of course it does. And I would be the first to tell someone who thought they were being harassed to log everything and call the cops. Multiple times if need be. Notice that crying to the site administrator is not something I recommend? Why? Because you need to shut that shit down and you need to do it fast, and cutting off one avenue usually won't stop a dedicated harasser, that's why. Restraining order greater than banhammer any day.

Open Beta on DW starts on Thursday. I'll be getting myself a paid account.. maybe a paid premium if I'm feeling particularly reckless. If anyone wants invite codes, they better ping me so I know who to pass the goods to.

They're calling for people to test the importer function to make sure the multiple-journal function is working... but I don't wanna use the importer. I half got involved in the whole DW thing to get myself a fresh start since I've been dragging around one bit of baggage or another across two journaling sites.

I might change my mind, though. I'll have to go through and take a look at it more closely.

It's not helped since I'm not 100% sure at the moment what to do with my fiction/fanfiction. I'm mostly ambivalent about whether or not to archive them separately from the rest of my journal-- on the one hand, it means I don't have to worry about fanbrats jumping in and following me around all stalkery on my normal entries. On the other, I like having everything in one place and I am not particularly thrilled with the idea of diluting my "branding" on the interbutt at this late date. As I've said in earlier posts, I've been Kittykat for about a freaking decade. I played around with different internet handles before that, but most of my actual participation in fandom has been with that tag. (I've been mucking about the tubes since I was 12. No joke. I remember when AOL was the biggest internet provider, everyone used Netscape because Internet Explorer did not exist, and you had to pay by the hour for access time. We rejoiced in my parents' house when the local phone company started offering interbutt at a local number and a flat rate per month.)

I'll probably think about it a while longer before I decide on anything. The importer is probably clogged at the moment anyway.

On another note.. today was probably not the smartest day to arrange my schedule so I'd be trooping up and down long flights of steps. Weather's getting ready for a major change and my ankle's been gimpy since last night. And I get to tromp around on long flights of steps tomorrow, too. D:

I had breakfast for dinner. I will be good and not blog my dinner, though really ankle pain and dinner were the two most interesting parts of my day. Oh, and I paid my rent and peeped at the office staff to take a look at the air conditioner. Just to make sure it's all in working order, especially since the way it's mounted it looks like it's just barely in the slot in my wall, which is, as they say, a Bad Thing. I just hope the Obligatory Cat doesn't trip the workmen if they show up while I'm at work. He's a little too friendly sometimes, and his coloring makes him very hard to see.

The Obligatory Cat actually has a real name, btw. It's Gregory. Which is not nearly as impressive, especially because he's named after Gregory Edgeworth the video game character and not any actual, important Gregories. He's black and has gold eyes and I have a few pictures of him but none that I care to show off right now.

When I opened my e-mail this evening, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a Dreamwidth invite code! So I have set up my happy and wonderful account at the same username as always-- teh_kittykat.

What do you want? I've been Kittykat on the interbutt since I was sixteen. Almost a decade is quite a long time to have a username. Never mind if it's one of the most popular usernames among female interbutt users who don't exist. That's why I added that cynical little "teh" to the beginning when I was twenty-ish.

Good lord, that last sentence makes me feel old sometimes. God, I remember the days when Geocities actually hosted websites and didn't suck. I used to have a Geocities site. It was about the Power Rangers. I taught myself HTML and coded it myself and I seem to recall an eye-searingly green background as part of the color scheme.

Right now I'm going to make nifty use of the automatic crosspost feature on DW to continue posting at IJ, but comments will be off at IJ. I don't want to try and follow three simultaneous conversations. I'll pimp around the invite codes if/when they become available to me, or you can use OpenId to comment and/or make yourself a cool friendslist at DW. If you register your e-mail with your OpenId, I can even give you access to my locked posts on DW, which is kind of cool for people who don't feel like keeping a zillion journals but don't mind reading several friends pages. (Heaven knows I got used to following four flists pretty fast. LJ, IJ, JF, and DW. Wow.)

In other news, this last weekend was pretty fun. The Girl and I ended up watching lots of Mythbusters (I got hold of the "Big Blasts" collection, so it was mostly explosions!) and got most excellent burgers at Five Guys. I was still restless on Sunday, so I drove down to Towson to trawl the mall and meet The Girl for more Five Guys and Mythbusters.

I gave in to temptation and got myself a DSi. It's blue. I traded in a handful of DS games that I was bored with and got about twenty bucks off the DSi, which wasn't bad. I'm keeping my old DS since I still want to be able to play my GBA games, but based on a lot of the tech reviews for the DSi, I wanted to get myself in on the ground floor with the new system. Now I just need to find my USB WiFi thing for it so I can update the system files and get that Wario game they were talking about in the reviews. (Okay, so I guess it's not really an impulse buy if you've been researching and considering for about a month? I kinda wanted the DSi when I first heard about it...)

I even got myself a copy of Gardening Mama at an earlier video game run, so I've got a cool new game to play as well. Considering my addictions to both Chibi-Robo Park Patrol and Cooking Mama, the interbutt might never see me again once I actually get around to starting to play it.

The weekend was also time for summer clothes shopping. I got myself some shirts from J!NX and The Girl dragged me into Nordstrom's to look at sandals. I found a nice pair and got them, though we gave the poor lady ahead of us in line cravings for Five Guys when we were discussing dinner plans. The Girl got candy at Trader Joe's, which we went into since neither of us had ever been there and it was right by the mall. If we weren't planning on looking around Towson a bit more, I would have totally picked up a couple things there-- everything is organic and fair trade, and the prices are actually reasonable compared to something like Whole Foods. Plus, they had this green juice stuff that I kind of wanted to get out of sheer morbid curiosity, but avoided since we were still walking around and I was already stuck carrying a big bag o' stuff from the mall.

Whee, commercialism ho!

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