Always the last to know these things

[trinityvixen]

There's a boycott? God, I'm clueless. You get a permanent account and suddenly you don't notice the plight of the common LJ-er.

Also, HOW WILL I SURVIVE WITHOUT LJ FOR A FULL DAY!?

I guess I will participate in the boycott, even though I don't realistically see that this will change fuck all. I sort of figure this day was coming since LJ rolled out the better-and-worse than Basic accounts with the ads. At the time, I didn't see the point since I didn't have any need for thirty billion icons so why have the ad-ridden one? Man, that shit was old when I had a geocities account. Geocities!!

Sigh. I guess it doesn't really matter. What the hell do I even have to post? I've spent much of the past week playing Dead Rising. I'm working on achievements after properly finishing the game and hoping to level my slow ass up. Goddamn Ecks-box and its goddamned achievements. This is just ASKING me to obsessively play games until I have them all. It happened with Carcassone and I don't even like that game that much! I played Hexic until my eyeballs ached! And now I'm literally running down zombies for hours. I ought to put a book on tape on my iPod and just listen to it because it's not exactly thrilling work.

But my goddamned completionist whore side won't let me not. I draw the line at rescuing everyone, though. Fuck that shit. The survivors who aren't me and the hot chick I'm angling to bone can go hang on the meathooks in the psychotic butcher's shop. They're annoying, needy, and alarmingly stupid. (They see zombies and are like, "Ooh, cool, I'll run right through them! They'll never expect that!") One of them actually led a mutiny out of the secure zone because his fat ass wanted more food. Fucker. Have fun being 'et.

Hilarious unlocked scene after completing the game, though:

Frank has the zombie! I'm laughing so hard I can't see over this. I completed the game, but I'm still in the mall (my ride didn't happen). The hot chick breaks the news to him after he wakes up (having fainted because of the zombie, apparently). The funniest thing is that she's totally stumped as to how it could have happened. No, seriously. Frank is shocked, too. "OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO TURN INTO A ZOMBIE? HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED!? IT'S NOT LIKE I GOT BIT A HUNDRED TIMES EACH DAY I'VE BEEN STUCK IN THIS GODDAMNED MALL OR ANYTHING. AND THEN THERE WERE THE ZOM-BEES THAT KEPT PELTING ME WITH THEIR LARVAE (WHICH ARE NOW APPARENTLY IN MY BLOOD), BUT I'M SURE THAT WAS JUST A COINCIDENCE."

I laughed, I cried, I wanted to whup my character upside the head. The roommate got a kick out of me telling her there were zom-bees. Yes, that's right: zom-bees. Crazy, infectious insects that give you the zombie or something. I officially replace the bees from The X-Files, the cockroaches from Night of the Creeps, and any of those horrifying bugs that made me afraid to leave Manhattan as the worst bugs ever in favor of zom-bees. THEY ARE BEES THAT GIVE YOU THE ZOMBIE. Someone with my phobia cannot take this. I'm already revising my personal zombie survival plan to account for zom-bees. Great, like I needed MORE work. I'm already having to work on learning to ride motorcycles and drive armored cars in addition to ever firing a gun, and now this. Fuck!

Comments

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Midnight to midnight GMT?? A boycott is hard enough without requiring arithmetic....

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Oh shit, I just assumed EST would be fine. So, er, I can check LJ and post until 2 am, but I'm banned from it until 2 am on Saturday? CONFUSING.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

I believe it'd be 8pm tonight until 8pm tomorrow night. (GMT is ahead of us, normally by 5 hours, but only 4 since we're on DST and they're not.)

Not that it seems like a terribly useful action. "We're mad, so we're going to lighten the load on your servers! Take that!"

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Ooo, good point. Obviously, the rest of us should upload and download big picture files like crazy to pick up the slack.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a plan. I got about thirty icons I could start with, I'm sure.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Shit, I got CMT and GMT mixed up. I totally am going to break this trying not to. Gawd.

Like I said, I still don't see that this will do jack shit.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

CMT is not a time zone, it's country music television. :P

You are correct, however, that it likely won't do jack shit. I'll probably ignore it myself, but I'll probably also be too busy tinkering with my new home-made firewall (UPS delivers the parts tomorrow, and we're off work) to be checking LJ much anyway.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

All right, now I'm frickin' confused all to shit. Central Mountain Time isn't one of those damn zones? Am I mixing it up with something?

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're mixing Central time and Mountain time. Man, you really do hate flyover country, huh? :P

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

HAAAAAAATE.

I mean, yes, you're right. There are TWO things that exist for me between New York and California: Chicago and the Rockies. Otherwise, it's dead to me.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

hehehe. FWIW, Chicago is in the Central time zone and the Rockies are in the Mountain time zone.

To paraphrase Jean-Luc Picard..."THERE ARE FOUR TIME ZONES!" Well, in the continental US, anyway.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

hhhWhat? There are FOUR TIME ZONES? CRAZY TALK.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not really paying attention to the boycott. I've got a permanent account and am not budging until such time as the majority of fandom moves.

Plus, they just added this "expand" feature to long comment threads, which I've wished for many a time.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That automatically opens the thread? Oh, that's useful.

I honestly don't see what the problem is. They restored the deleted terms when people bitched. The journals that fought for it got un-striked back when that happened. Yeah, ads suck, but the majority of non-LJ sites that house anything fandom wants to look at has ads (including the friggin' official pages for shows/movies/anything). And it's STILL better than MySpace. So what's the dealy-o?

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

I can understand some users feeling betrayed, but it's a business and they can't give everything away for free. For a while you couldn't even sign up unless someone invited you. I suspect if I ever gave up LJ I just wouldn't blog (or at least I'd blog less) and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Also, those things in Night of the Creeps were slugs.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I had to be invited to lj! I remember those days...

Also, it strikes me as funny that the strike is Good Friday, a day when a) a lot of people don't have work, which would mean less blogging anyway, and b) many people might feel inclined not to blog out of respect for the religious holiday.

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

Good point! They should do it on a Monday.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Oh man, me too! viridian was always more popular on LJ than I, and she scrounged one up for me when I was going to Australia. I get nostalgic about such stupid stuff, but that, and my needing an invite for Gmail are up there with the weepies in my memory.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Right, my bad. They looked like roaches in my memory, which has only about a two-second segment that I saw of it when I was too young to appreciate how silly such things were. I have never gone back, so yeah, you say slugs, I believe you.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

THEY ARE BEES THAT GIVE YOU THE ZOMBIE.

Is that what those bees you were scrambling to pick up and use were? Or were those some sort of anti-zom-bees?

Regarding the LJ boycott, I'm reminded of the "Great American Gas-out" email that circulates every year or so.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Indeed, what I was catching and throwing and smashing were queen zom-bees. Somehow, smash the queen, kill the larvae infecting all the zombies in the immediate area. But first you have to kill her host.

As for the LJ boycott, solidarity-schmarity, this is just silly.

[slackwench.livejournal.com]

I don't really have anything to say except that I'm pretty sure you'll like this movie more than I will. Yes, it's zombie related.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

See, I already saw that when it was Return of the Living Dead 3 where it was the girl brought back to life by the boyfriend. Same difference.

Also, "Boy Eats Girl" has a different connotation than just zombie movie...

[mobiuswolf.livejournal.com]

I'd say you're not the last to know since I just found out about this boycott thing from your post.

I agree, Zom-bees are very terrifying.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Aww, Alucard puppy!

I just keep thinking about those fictional works where EVERYTHING turns zombie. Forget that, man. That's GAME OVER.

[deltagrl.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I toyed with fire clicking on the bug link. And as it took forever to load, I realized the slowness was a blessing in disguise, and if I wanted to get my bug-phobic ass out of my house today I hells better not read it! Only saw a pic of the ant-like thingy, but just don't want to know. eeeesh

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

I know, and I wish I did not. Because there are bugs that ACTUALLY EXIST that are too big for my brain to accept are real and they like kill everything. How mammals have held on this long, I don't even know.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

The thing is, it's really pretty stupid to participate in this boycott. For one, if you've already got a permanent account, you're not seeing the ads in the first place, so reading or not reading isn't taking anything away from LJ.

Also, LJ already WANTS fandom gone, and they're largely the ones who are protesting.

Also, uh, LJ apologized today.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also, for a lot of lj's behavior lately, I think the old adage "never blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence" is fitting.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think they're also being self-defeating by going after fandom. If it doesn't settle here, it will elsewhere, and then where would LJ be?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's good they want fandom gone, or that they'd take hostile measures towards any member of their community in a "You're not welcome" gesture. But I agree with ivy03--it doesn't seem like that was the case. And, if it was, they've surely learned their lesson and stepped back from it.