beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

You know the suggested tumblr rule of 'don't tag your hate'?
I'm getting really tired of half the posts in the john barrowman tag there
especially the ones saying someone would be a great replacement for john barrowman.

... do they not think or are they on purpose yelling that at everyone who followed john barrowman?

*sigh*



(half of posts that are not girl picture spam. there is so much undressed lady spam. that is such a bad tag for that.)

I have been thinking about how and why people use computers, livejournal, dreamwidth.

There was a short story I read from ages before the internet was a Thing that was about a student learning computers, and one of the assignments was to go through old old data and sort it. Don't remember where the story was or many details or I'd reference it better. But. The student saw that in the early days of computing it was all numbers, accounts, business, science, practical stuff you'd need a computer to get done.

Then humans started being human with computers.

And eventually it was all kinds of EVERYthing in there, like recordings of your partner to prove they snore that turned out to get used every night they were away.

So I was thinking, the internet very swiftly has been for all kinds of EVERYthing
but
lately I have been seeing less of it.
( Read more... )

I dont think we use online quite the way we used to. Not just we here dreamwidth, we here humans. The way the computers are set up focuses attention for you, will you nil you, and I think we started going quiet in several ways, not being focused on.



But I also personally went quiet for ordinary reasons of doomscrolling, falling out of fandoms, and not really having new opinions.

... sometimes I disagree with earlier me, sometimes a show developed in directions that dumped me right out of it, but the baseline stuff about gender and sexuality and disability feels rather like having the same grumble for twenty five years, because whatever progress we make, there's still grumble to be had. And it hasnt got any more interesting to say it.

All the reasons I fell out with my degree topic, cultural studies, also get in the way of interacting with media texts.

Tricky.



So I take this thought for a wander for a whole bunch of minutes, and then at the end I get the impulse to friends lock it, because anxious.


I kind of miss posting multiple times a day and having a little chat going in the background.

Hello humans, we are human, let's be human!

Let friendship thrive.



I'm going to have to find new ways to try that.

ASDA keep making themselves less useful, which is Very Annoying.
At this point there is one (1) product I want that I can only get at ASDA
but they won't deliver it to me
I have to go to the Superstore in Norwich.
So I was going to click and collect it
went and reserved a slot
found my entire basket was now unavailable
including the one (1) thing.
ugh.
... then it asked me when I wanted it delivered.
... so then I tried AGAIN to reserve a click and collect slot
and magically many things were back!

But my basket was empty because they'd been unavailable a minute ago.

And my Favourites section is empty. I do not know why.
I have Favorited the one (1) thing.


But with only one item it's not worth clicking to collect
so I tried to unreserve
but that isn't possible.

sucks to be them I guess.

but then I tried to sign out and they make it so difficult. I had to get the mouse out to go through multiple menus to find the option. And then instead of just flipping signing me out it asks Are You Sure and you have to click yet more.

I am in fact sure and I do not want to shop at ASDA at this time
because they keep getting rid of my food and are down to... you know by now.

So.

That was my day.



... Amy's Kitchen vegetarian burgers do not currently seem worth all this fuss.

... they are good though, especially with marmite.




oh well.

Internet Movie Firearms Database

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/The_Avengers_%282012%29

Also Thor
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Thor
Which identifies the gun Barton nearly uses as Remington 700PSS
which was pretty much what I thought after more poking around than I'd need if I remembered this site more.

SHIELD agents standard sidearm is a Smith & Wesson M&P , which is great for fics set since 2005, but before that it needs to be something else.

I've been on this site before for Stargate but forgot it for this. Well, I know a lot more about some sorts of guns from a couple of websites of unknown reliability. And since I knew nothing, a lot more is still not a lot, but, no knowledge is wasted.

(I have such a headache right now)

SHIELD Strike teams, and Ward and Coulson in some eps, use the M4A1. That redirects to M16s, which have been around plenty long enough for current purposes.

Sniper rifles, Remington Mk. 13 Mod 5 also comes up.

But Ward uses at least three different sniper rifles in season 1, and May gives Skye a different different one in season 2, so there's at least 5 sniper rifles on the bus and I think it's safe to say that snipers are super picky. Meaning I can justify any choice of weapon as today's special best.

However what there aren't are a whole hell of a lot of SHIELD specific weapons. Which makes sense, because they'd have to make them all. The ICER guns have apparently been props in another series, which in-universe could be fun xover times.

There are some custom whatsits though, including in Coulson's possession, so if I want to say SHIELD did something up special, so it can be.

I don't have to though, for anything after 2005.

... my fic starts in the early/mid 90s and I now need to make a logical guess or find other data.

While all dates of US Army equipment are pretty easy to find, SHIELD uses police weapons. 700PSS stands for Police Sharp Shooter. Same with their sidearms. Very similar, obviously, but there's a lot of different police and I can't find a site right now that lines them all up on a timeline.

Says something about the kind of org they think of SHIELD as being. Descended from the SSR and WWII it may be, but law enforcement it kind of sort of is.

http://www.magicalomaha.com/BlankJournals.htm selling http://oberondesign.com/journal-covers.html
Journal covers with embossed designs. Really wonderful looking things.
Though I don't think they do the same on vegan fake leather, and real leather is not my favourite thing.

The thing I use the 'zap colors' button for the single most often? Not pink on purple, green on blue, or any of those obvious eye waterers. Grey on grey. Or sometimes grey on white. Anything where someone has looked at a perfectly good black and white page and decided to turn the contrast down with their html or style sheet rather than their very own monitor contrast button.

Black text, white background. Leave people to customise on their own. Make pretty colors around the edges where we don't need to read.

I know I'm grumping and I know I used to do all sorts of 'pretty' things with text and background that don't fit my current rule*, but I know I also used to be able to read them easier. Now I have more learnings and more grump.


(*I know I also have pages on my current DW site style that don't have a white background, but that's personal incompetence, not a design choice.)

I read thru metafandom a thingy about calling stories that focus on two gay-identified men in a relationship as “M/M,” rather than “gay fiction,”
It had a point. I read the point. I'm not sure that specific objection proves the point.

Fanfic uses headers. There's a line that fits in the subject line, and there's a bunch of lines in a post that describe the story. Headers are often standardised. Within fandom as a whole they vary vastly, but with particular lists or comms they tend to follow a pattern. The idea of them is to tell you what's in the story so you can see if you want to read it.

M/M is header data, often in the one-line bit that goes in the subject line. Stories can be M/M, M/F, F/F. You could call that gay, het, lesbian. But stories can also be M/M/M, and that too would be gay, but you'd lose data to label it that way. And it can also be M/M/F or M/F/F or M/M/M/F/F or, you know, all those others. It's a scaleable labelling convention. As such it is very handy.

And it's not quite broken by needing more initials for genders, as long as someone notes somewhere what E or H or O or whatever stands for in the context.

Mostly though I see stories with Name/Othername labels instead of M/M. Unless it's Canon/Original, where mostly you'll get Jack/M rather than Jack/some dude you never heard of.


All that up there is not to do with the point the other thing was having. It's just got it's own point, with nice handy logic.

One of the reasons I like fanfic is the header labelling system, with logic. Trying to dig through a couple thousand books I inherited and figure out what's in them just from the backs of the books... oh so not easy. Same with trying to buy stuff at Amazon. Adding headers for print books would simple things up rather.


... huh, now there's a project ...

am playing with etymonline.com
making latiny words purple and OE words blue

start of poem is mostly blue
end is mostly purple

cool


but lots more words to fiddle with.



neat potential computer program: does the color coding for you. Can't be that hard. As computers go.


The blue-to-purple change stayed true, I think. If I'm using it right.
I hate trying out new stuff in public...

... now I tried to post my conclusions to Blackboard, with clever thinky stuff.
The post does not seem to be there.
Bugger.

This would also explain why hardly anyone posts there.


I sulk and go back to bed.

Teh Internets look quite different when I haven't got the accessibility overrides stamped all over them.

And frequently less legible, which is the problem.
The temptation to style=mine the whole world is very high; even if it reduces the pretty, it also reduces the headaches.

The meaning of life is a million dollar question. Let’s make it easier to answer by narrowing it down, and figure out the meaning of your life. What will your epitaph be?

... Okay. So *that* sounds like fun. Great way to start a stressful year: Write own epitaph!

... anyone got any suggestions?

( Read more... )

Now I'm totally sidetracked. Tell a goth to go think up epitaphs? Hello to the research!
Wiki about Epitaphs has a few interesting ones.
But the Epitaph Browser looks to take up quite some time.


Johnny Yeast
Ruidoso, New Mexico

Here lies
Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising

Is there a news feed that only does good news?
I get the odd news already, and that is often fun, but includes like strange deaths and stuff.
On days when the regular headlines are all war and famine and general horsemen type doominess, I'd quite like to have a bunch of stories like "baby born successfully with no problems" and "people still alive in a lot of the world".
I realise that kind of stuff doesn't often get called news, but it is stuff that happens to people and is new every day, so it is news.
But I can't find a thing to make nice headlines for me.

The BBC website has lots of bits for download that were not in the episodes or confidentials. But lacks mostly bits that were on the TV.
I actually find that a bit annoying. I mean I get what they're aiming for, added value, website to be something that TV can't give you, but... Is a bit hard to get the whole story. I mean you have to hunt for things, and realise that the things with similar sounding labels to things you've already seen are not the same as on TV.
And also, the website stuff is, mostly, a bit lame. Because TV gets the best bits. Which I understand, they are a TV channel.
But it just ends up a bit annoying. You have to hunt, and then mostly its rubbish.

Also, realplayer. Nasty squishy sound, tiny pictures. Quick download, yeah, but where's the high quality option?


So anyways, not brilliant yet.



I'm going to shop for a new TV soon. I feel vaguely like I should wait until computer=TV+phone+everythingelse, but it has been theoretically possible to get my computer plugged in to my TV for years and I just never got around to figuring out how.

And also, my TV goes green and purple down the sides. Which is not helpful.

So a new TV I shall buy.