justira

I have finally officially put in my two weeks' notice. I am OUT of here. God, my life.

Did you know that finding health insurance out in the private market sucks? WELL IT DOES.

What I expect is two weeks of frantic closing-up-shop activity, followed by at least a week (more likely two) or absolute depressive crash, and then somewhere around my birthday I expect to start having a life again and like. Maybe having fun. Or something.

Thank you everyone for your support during this shit time. See you on the other side, I hope!

holy flippin' fuck but WHAT is with this incredible tendency of health insurance people to be SO DAMN UNWILLING to tell you WHAT their coverage would be before you actually sign up with them?

what the holy jesus is that even on about

SMASH ALL THE THINGS

Well. Here we finally are I guess. I have a diagnosis and a scrip for pills and we're gonna start treatment and hopefully I will feel less like shit.

For background information: my grandmother is a selfish, abusive person. She was my caretaker for large chunks of my childhood and abused me emotionally my whole life, just as she abused my mother (who abused me in turn, surprise!) and abuses my little sisters whenever she's around them. She is simply toxic to everyone around her. I have recently (just a month or so ago) resolved to avoid any further contact with her if possible and informed my parents of this, with exceptions if they need me to deal with her for short times so that she does not make their lives miserable lashing out about me. My birthday was yesterday; hers was the day before that. I didn't send her anything.

Today, I received this email from her (original in Russian):

Dear Ira!

Happy birthday, and I wish you a life lived happily and carefree
by the principle of "no one owes anyone anything".
Why remember about anyone? It interferes with life.

Best wishes!

[Full initials]

P.S. I sent this yesterday but it bounced, wrong address.

=|

I know I should probably not be too upset, but I have to admit I don't feel that great either. I can't decide whether or not to engage :(

So I am like pretty terrible at talking about myself or my life or my projects; when I'm not posting art or fic this place tends to go pretty dead. And while I really should give a life update (guess what, MORE COMPUTERS DIED, I am becoming AMAZED I really am), I have something WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY WOES to talk about!


Here is the deal! The OTW and the AO3 (one of the OTW's projects) both rock super hard. Like! Guys! GUYS. YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. CHECK THESE THINGS OUT:

• DMCA EXCEPTION FOR VIDDERS. DMCA EXCEPTION FOR VIDDERS. DMCA EXCEPTION FOR VIDDERS. Guys! The OTW helped secure a DMCA Exception for Vidders and continues to keep us updated on DMCA issues. This is IMMENSELY EXCITING and I am so proud and as a fledgling baby vidder I am pretty much going to explode of joy (and I swear I will post my first vid(s) soon, I SWEAR, I'M SORRY GUYS I AM JUST SO BUSY AND LIFE-PLAGUED fff)



• The tagging system on the AO3? Is basically the best thing ever. To a compulsive organizer like me, it is basically heaven. It is this amazing balance between organization and preservation of fannish diversity and is the first of its kind to my knowledge and basically I could roll in it forever AND GUESS WHAT I DO ROLL IN IT because I am a tag wrangler (if a somewhat dead one ffff my life) and tag wrangling is basically THE BEST THING EVER. YOU SHOULD TRY IT. I'M NOT KIDDING.



• So I wanted to upload a bunch of art posts to AO3? First of all, I love that you can DO that. The AO3 is multimedia-oriented and I love it; we're working hard on our multimedia posting interface and we have the Vidding Roadmap (which everyone should go roll in immediately) and basically by the time the archive is fully formed it will meet all my fanwork archiving needs and I am a known medium omnivore. HEARTS.
  
  BUT SECOND OF ALL I wanted to upload a bunch of my art posts to AO3? (They don't offer image hosting (...yet!) but art is welcome and can be tagged with the Arts freeform tag.) And I was like UGH I HAVE SO MUCH ART THIS IS GOING TO TAKE FOREVER.
  
  And I went to the importer.
  
  And I dumped a bunch of URLs in it, of my art posts on Dreamwidth?
  
  AND HOLY WOW. SUDDENLY ART! Gosh it was so easy; I NEARLY CRIED. Guys I seriously nearly cried. YOU SHOULD ALL EXPERIENCE THIS JOY.



• Most importantly?
  
  The people are amazing.
  
  I have met so many INCREDIBLE people through the OTW, with so many different skills and areas of interest. There's something for pretty much any skillset who wants to volunteer, and the diversity it's produced has been! Frankly it has been amazing. I have learned so much from these people; I am not kidding when I say my horizons have been broadened by the experience of working with and around them.
  
  And guys, that is seriously something. That is magic. This sharing of knowledge and passions and selves?
  
  Yes.

This is an amazing group of people with great goals. And right now — right now! — they are having their membership drive (Oct 18-25) and also elections! IT IS SUPER EXCITING TIMES. The drive even comes with a matching donor so you can make your money count twice (SO MUCH EXCITE). And have a say in the direction the OTW will take by voting! And it's time to recruit for next year's committees! Look at all of these committees and the awesome things they do!

BASICALLY NOW IS THE TIME.

Anything you can give — a small donation, your time as a volunteer, your consideration and vote as a member — is incredibly valuable and appreciated. Thank you — thank you all — for making fandom such an amazing place to be. If fandom were not so incredible, I would not have loved it enough to devote so much of my time to fannish projects — projects that include the OTW. I want to thank you all for this part of my life, and I invite you to share in it, like I invite you to share in my stories and my art: this, the OTW, is a fanwork, and I am privileged to collaborate on it with the amazing people who are, have been, and will be working on it.

Thank you.

So, I've developed yet another fandom with yet another relationship that NO ONE will ever write about and that nobody even draws. This is pretty distressing, seeing as this is the case in ALL MY FANDOMS EVER AFKJLSDGJSFDIBGMCVNW$EOGTH@#QJWJSGKALGNSDIGN.

Ahem.

I promise this post has something to do with high school coming in handy.

The fandom, by the way, is Tales of Symphonia. Which was supposed to be, you know. A pretty large/active fandom. This was a total lie.

The relationship is, uh. Very spoilery. And, surprisingly (knowing me), not gay. I just like the general relationship between the two. Who, uh, happen to be Kratos and Lloyd. Now, Kratos is supposed to be the most popular character in the game, and Lloyd is not as annoying as some main RPG heroes can be (I liked him!).

But is there fic?

No.

Is there art?

NO.

There isn't even art.

Desperate for some nice fluffy art, I've been searching EVERYWHERE. Deviantart, y!Gallery, Elfwood, Sheezyart, Fanart Central, Japanese sites. Finally, during today's lunch break at work, I gave up and googled it -- and got some results! Most of them, however, seemed to be reposts of images from other sites on a French blog.

I waffled around a little bit, and then decided to pull out my dusty French, shake it out, and take it for a walk.

I managed to explain my situation and ask where the blogger got those pictures. And I think I even did so passably well.

Ha! I wish I'd been looking for gay porn. Then I could truthfully say that the first time I ever used French since I took it in high school was to ask for gay porn. Damn.

PS: If any of y'all on my flist happen to know where I can find quality ToS fanworks OF ANY KIND, please make with the spilling. Oh pretty, pretty please. I'll, uh! Draw you things! Gimme?

OH MY GOD.

Okay, WARNING: public display of elitism, arrogance, and self-aggrandisement ahead.

( YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. )

Professional web development firms, by the way, is the reason behind one of the projects I've been working on for a while, which is provisionally entitled PAEAN -- Professional Artistic and Electronic Assistance for Nonprofits. It's a non-profit organization I've been developing for a couple years now that does web design (and other artistic or technology-related) work for other charitable organizations for free. GOOD work. Standards-based, accessibility-checked. With a solid sense of aesthetics. I think that if you're doing good charitable work, you should NOT have to pay out the ass for some incompetent, profiteering company to build you a site that will crash next year. If you're helping orphans in Rwanda, I don't think you should get scammed and scalped like that. If you're helping lost kittens get adopted, I think solid web sites should be handed to you on a goddamn silver platter. And that's what I'm trying to do.

To those of you who think this is trivial, that web design (though I do mroe than design, as I've outlined above) doesn't matter, let me tell you that you're wrong. On the Internet and elsewhere, design matters a lot. It's a HUGE part of whether something is AT ALL USABLE. And the sad thing about a lot of nonprofits' websites is that they're really bad, really ugly, and really hard to use, both for people trying to make use of the charities' resources and for the charities themselves. I think this is awful, and I'm trying to change it.

Likewise, I am now officially appalled at the really ridiculous state of web development in the branch of the government I work for. And now that I've been put on this committee, I'm going to try and change that. I've got the power to do something amazing and fantastic here, and by God I am going to try to use it.

Oh, and a disclaimer. I don't want to dictate the internets or design any more than I want to dictate the various fandoms I've taken an interest and started newsletters, communities, and other projects in. There are subjective parts, yes, like what's pretty or ugly design. Some things, however, are simply the way the web is heading, led by brilliant people and industry champions, and that's the direction sites should be heading. You know, the future. Not being left behind in the internet morass of the mid-late nineties.

And by the way, I don't think that what I do -- all that stuff about being familiar with all aspects of web development -- is something that's extraordinary about me, nor that it should be. I finally thought of that analogy. It's like building a house. If you're building a house, you should have at least a passing familiarity with the principles of construction, architecture, design, basic accessibility, and physics. You should probably also know about or know where to go for information/contract work on electronics, plumbing, landscaping, and other particulars. You need to also know the building codes and other such regulations in your area. Well, the SAME THING applies to web design. You're building a home for yourself/others on the internet. These are things I WOULD THINK that any decent, self-respecting web developer should be familiar with -- design, coding, how servers and back-side stuff works, usability, accesbiility, specifications for the languages they work in. This shouldn't be something special -- this should be standard knowledge! I think that what I do and know is somewhere near the bare minimum of what a web developer should do. Apparently, I am alone in this belief.

God.

Okay, I rarely go off like this. But I was pretty damn pissed there.

For once, I also won't be checking over this before I post it (highly unusual for me -- usually I go through a draft or two), so I apologize profusely for any mistakes.

Replace "trees" with "Internet Explorer" and you got it about right.

Those of you who don't get the reference are lame, by the way.

Regardless! I am soon to explode with wrath at Microsoft. See, I program for a living. Currently this invloves less programming and more web design, but I still work with languages and getting programs to cooperate. Currently, I am trying to get a piece of JavaScript/DOM Scripting to work in IE.

See, the funny thing is, I wouldn't need to be tearing my hair out about this shit if IE were a goddamn proper browser in the first place. It has one thing going for it: its extremely forgiving nature in the way of whether you can write HTML correctly (goddammit it's not even that hard) made it possible for millions more people to make webpages.

The thing is, those webpages don't work in any other browsers. You know. The ones who PROCESS THE GODDAMN CODE CORRECTLY.

But IE is the most popular browser, right? So what if the way it processes web languages isn't the way that the W3C recommends and all other browsers adhere to? Majority rules, right?

Well, okay, that train of thought is going in the same direction as this article, which advocates phonetic spelling. The thing is, everyone spells differently. So what if the majority of Americans can't spell the language they speak? We need standards, or else that nice thing we call SHARED LITERACY will go away rather quickly.

Same thing here. It was nice of IE to help the Internet boom along and all, but now it has to deal with the fact that if it parsed code in a sane manner, all those websites it fostered would break =D

For responsible web developers, this means that we usually need to give our "special" browser friend a hand.

In this case, IE is being a complete ass. I had to invent a medium-length Javascript workaround for something that in Safari or Firefox can be accomplished with one line of css:

li:hover {display: block;}

There. Done.

However, I have been trying to get IE to accomplish the same result for the past... four? four or five hours.

( Geekery, for those who care )

Anyway. IE makes my life difficult. Again.

*grumps*

EDIT: OH MY GOD I FINALLY DID IT.

FIVE FUCKING HOURS LATER I have FINALLY MADE IT WORK.

OH MY GOD MICROSOFT I HATE YOU.

I'm going home and drawing some gay porn now. Take THAT, Bill Gates!

Yes. Grocery store, on the way out, one of those little "Don't buy smokes/drinks for kids" posters caught my eye. What I actually noticed was this line:

"It's not just wrong, it's illegal."

Something about that really bugged me on the way to the car, but I think I've figured it out.

It's that I think it should go like this:

"It's not just illegal, it's wrong."

Because, well... I try explain. It feels like sentences like that are structured along the lines of "it's not just bad, it's VERY BAD." Like the second bit is supposed to have more impact than the first.

Well, I'm sorry, legality has much less meaning to me than morality.

I mean, jesus. In many (most, yeah?) places it's illegal to marry someone of your gender, even though I think that's just dandy morally. You love someone? Want to start a family with them, or just have your union acknowledged socially and legally? Rock on.

On the other hand, so many things that huge companies get away with are quite legal and also quite wrong.

So, really, I'm not very persuaded by the first version. But the second would at least make me stop and think. You know, it might be illegal (whatever it is), but that second part would make me stop and think. Evaluate for myself. Do I believe it's also wrong? Cause if I decide that it is wrong, then I won't do it, illegal or no.

The only problem is if I decide it's not wrong. Then the illegality deterrent will weaken. But at least I'll have formed my own fucking opinion of the matter. Cause the first way of phrasing it leaves much less room for your opinion -- they think it's a given that it's wrong.

Meanwhile, I was apparently tired, cause I slept all day, for 14 hours. Now to catch up on the work I missed. Dammit.

I went to the hookah bar today. I wrote and edited for four hours.

On the drive home, I rolled all the windows down, put the sunroof back, turned the radio all the way up, and belted Belinda Carlisle's Heaven is a Place on Earth.

It was fantastic.

I took the longest route home so I could stay on the freeway longer, bellowing along to the local mix station. When they stopped playing things I liked, I switched over and blasted classical instead.

And now, I think I shall go for a jog to exorcise exercise away that stubborn belly fat =D