solarbird | Entries tagged with news events

Since it’s been announced, I can confirm: I have accepted an invitation to be Toastmaster at Conflikt 9, January 29-31, 2016. It’s my first GoH position at any convention, and as I’ve been saying, I am confused but honoured to have been selected and I will do my best to be a good one.

Conflikt Chair Jen Kilmer asked me to pick my personal Toast title, as is tradition; previous officeholders have been Toastmistresses, Toastmaster both standard and burnt, and Toastmonsters; I have chosen Toastmuppet. Expect inordinate amounts of Kermitflail, starting right now:

The release concert on Sunday was pretty much amazing, at least from our end. We never did manage to have a rehearsal with everyone at once, but it didn’t seem to hurt us too badly on stage. A lot of people stayed through Sunday afternoon to hear us, and I cannot thank all of you enough for that.

And hoo, I will never complain about setup time for other bands again. Okay, well, I will. But not as much. We took over an hour, and that was as simplified as I could make it, and with all the advance material I could hand over handed over, and nobody screwing around.

And, of course, once again, thanks to everyone: Alexander James Adams (drums, vocals, backing fiddle), Paul Campbell (hammer dulcimer), Jeri Lynn Cornish (cello, bones, chorus), Angela Korra’ti (flute, readings), Leannan Sidhe (vocals), Skellington (lead fiddle), Betsy Tinney (drums), and S.J. Tucker (bass, chorus). It would quite literally have been impossible without you.

OH at #Conflikt8 "was everyone on stage either a Pixie or a Criminal?" @solarbirdy @ConfliktFrog @TrickyPixieBand

— SJ Tucker (@s00j) February 2, 2015

Highlights of the convention – hoo, I dunno, it’s hard to pick. Alec’s show was great, and not in that “as always” way, there was something extra in the energy that night. Having the rest of Tricky Pixie on for a few songs probably didn’t hurt anything. The PDX Broadsides won Saturday’s concert set, no doubt – they’re much better live than in their older recordings. (I haven’t heard the new album yet tho’ – I only heard old demos.) ~~I’m so glad I’m having them in for nwcMUSIC this year. Oh wait, that’s still technically embargoed, lol.~~ Regardless, they’re really good live. And Stringapalooza’s set on Sunday was the tightest thing I’ve ever heard at a convention, they were amazing.

I stayed through the near-very-end of the dead dog/smoked salmon; I like leaving while there are one or two holdouts still holding out, so I don’t feel like it’s really over even though it is. And there were two, and a couple of others who were just there to listen, at around 1am Monday morning, so I packed out before they could change their minds. Sunday night is particularly good as far as I’m concerned, because I’ll do any damn thing, and that includes the relevant-for-20-minutes-thanks-a-lot-guys Doctor Who song I wrote in 2013* and have performed live never, a cappella DEVO tracks, and pretty much anything anyone asks me for, rehearsed or not. I will just do the thing. And it’s great.

Also, this happened – thanks Tom!

S00j wrote a really relevant post about Conflikt and Filk in general, particularly as its position in the geek hierarchy, and you should go read it. She touches quite directly on some of the things I’m trying to address indirectly through the way I feature filk as the founding pillar of geekmusic, and the way I talk about the punk nature of their hands-on/DIY aesthetic, and the participatory culture foundation underlying all of that.

Definitely worth reading. Give it a little thought.

*: it was pretty good, too.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Current Mood: surprised
Current Music: kracken bay | leannan sidhe

AAAAAAAAAAAA

seanan_mcguire won the Campbell! Go Seanan! Go Seanan! And Girl Genius won a Hugo! AAAAAAAAA!!

And China Miéville! Yay! And Moon, which I adored, and Clarkesworld, which I'll take over a dozen copies of Asimov's.

Really, overall, this was a pretty fuckin' good weekend for things what don't suck.

Current Mood: happy

Relayed from

stealthcello:

[A]n auction currently being held on LiveJournal to help save Fae Hollow [can be found] at save_fae_hollow.

Items for bid are listed on that page; for photos, scroll down. To bid, just comment with your bid after the item you want. There are some beautiful items being offered, including custom cloaks, jewellery, and some great services as well, including the intriguing "Dancing Photographers" and the tasty "Vegan Treats". (Note: I am not involved with the auction, which is being run by some of Alec's Indiana-area fans; I'm just boosting the signal.)

Bidding closes on June 30, and there aren't very many bids yet -- so hop on over and bid to help save Fae Hollow (and get some cool stuff)!

If you'd like to make a simple donation (as opposed to, or in addition to, an auction bid) to help save Fae Hollow, go here: http://faerietaleminstrel.com/inside/

For more info about what's up with Fae Hollow, see the AlexanderFans Livejournal at alexanderfans.

Not much time left on this, so go now. See also here. I have it on good authority that they actually have a shot at catching this particular Hail Mary pass, so if you're thinking it's futile, well, think again. There are some people with the dosh out there.

I'm not involved with the auction directly either, but am similarly relaying news.

Current Mood: busy

An award to the AP for stating the obvious: AP IMPACT: US drug war has met none of its goals. No shit. On the other hand, it has cost around US$1T, militarised the police force, hammered away property rights, and screwed millions of people, so if you're unkind and suggest that the real goal was increasing government power, then, well, mission accomplished! But in terms of stated goals, it's a complete failure. That's not really disputable.

Get this defence of the drug war from former U.S. drug czar John P. Walters:

"To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven't made any difference is ridiculous," Walters said. "It destroys everything we've done. It's saying all the people involved in law enforcement, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's work is misguided."

Um, yeah. That is what it's saying. That's exactly what it's saying. Well spotted! And why is it saying that? Because it's true.

Current Mood: sleepy

Anonymous and Pirate Bay are helping protesters in Iran get around firewalls and other information-blocking activities by the government. The portal website is Anonymous Iran. They're going to need all the help they can get; Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said to sit down and accept the fake election results and shut up, or we'll crush you like the "Zionist" filth you are.

Lots and lots and lots more at Sullivan's website.

Current Mood: busy

From

zarq, this Fox News moment:

(what gave them the excuse)

Current Mood: appalled, but not surprised.

I've posted about this before, but maybe they actually have this working at range now. We'll see in 2009 in India, at least. These guys have been promising cars based on this compressed-air engine in the two-year timeframe for over a decade, but this is the first time I've seen a one-year timeframe announcement for actual production of a vehicle, even in test quantities.

Current Music: From The Air | Laurie Anderson

Raw Story is reporting that Rep. Kucinich's Resolution to Impeach President Bush has gained a co-sponsour.

I strongly suggest contacting your Representatives to encourage them to add themselves as co-sponsours. I also actively request people link to my original post, here:

http://solarbird.livejournal.com/654198.html

...to try to at least in part counteract the continuing de facto media blackout of this story.

Current Mood: busy

cedarseed is blogging about the Hez uprising in Beruit, her home town. Wish her luck.

As everyone knows, there are lots and lots and lots of houses in various stages of foreclosure, particularly in places like California. In California, a lot of those houses have swimming pools, which are now neglected, which is to say, stagnant, which is to say terrifying West Nile virus-carrying mosquito breeding pits.

See credit use. See credit use soar in March. Soar, credit use, soar! Well, at least we know how consumer spending was less down than expected. At least the reserves failure has stopped getting actively worse, with the banking system only at -US$127B or so in reserves default, which is actually an improvement.

But CMBX spreads have started spiking up again in all categories, and the ABX markets are uniformly down. (All that is bad.) Professor Roubini says that things are not fundamentally improving, and the Fed is getting desperate. His track record as of late has been unfortunately very good, so pay attention. He also has a piece on car loans and car loan funds going south, which, you'll note, the Fed is now taking as collateral! Yay! By which I mean ARG OMG DIAF.

In completely unrelated but better news, impressive data recovery lets a physics experiment lost on Columbia be analysed and published, and EA has backed off from the worst of of their latest round of ~~hating their customers~~ "anti-priracy" protections, but I'm still amused by the comic.

Current Mood: sleepy

The Washington Post reported yesterday that US border agents are routinely searching laptop, cell phone, and other electronic-media data and making copies. At least one person who is part of a class-action lawsuit against this has had laptops taken and never returned. And no, US citizens are not in any way exempt.

The US government is trying to claim that this is the same as searching briefcases, except, of course, that the point of that traditionally was to look for contraband items such as firearms, bombs, and smuggled goods; reading and making photocopies of your business documents have not, for example, been part of that deal. But now, apparently, it is.

In response, several companies have now set up "blank laptop" travel programmes, so that people are carrying dataless laptops around, accessing the data they need later via the internet, preferring the risk of hacking to the risk of the border crossing. Some companies have created policies that cell phones, similarly, must be blanked before entering or leaving the United States.

The damage this does to the ability of companies operating in the US to do business should, of course, be taken as read.

Current Mood: sleepy

Euphemisms being created: Racists devise new code word: "Canadian." Yes, really.

Euphemisms being ignored in favour of reality: the Asia Times writes about "US-style torture" spreading to Thailand.

Euphemisms as a business model: I thought the idea was dumb - cutting up movies to remove "offensive" content for Mormons and "social conservatives" - but I didn't see the harm, and if customers wanted their movies cut up like that and the proprietors weren't making bootleg copies, I figured, hey, leave 'em alone, what's the problem? I kinda had some sympathy for these guys. Oh, look, here's the problem: turns out that the "FlixClub" people doing this? They were also busy soliciting 14 year olds for sexual favours and filming them for kiddie pr0n. Bastards.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: What Is The Secret | James Lileks

(Scroll to the bottom for the banking system stuff. I saw that as I was typing this up and didn't want to rewrite the whole thing.)

I finally have a new music icon. The dumb thing is that it's from a quiz graphic that's been sitting on my desktop for months. HELLO! I also thought about using my old Gojira-plays-the-jaw-harp drawing and that's kinda funny and jokey and stuff, but I don't feel really very jokey about this, so I didn't.

I guess that's enough talk about music that this gets a music tag, too. Okay. Yay, new icon. ^_^ Also, hum, a couple of new bits of song yesterday, one not well attached to anything, one clearly part of another song I'd already partly gotten started, so that's good. I have some hard problems I've been trying to solve with some songs so I haven't been doing much new work; I think I need to make time for both, and hopefully the new material will in spire me on how to solve the difficult problems in these other songs.

I'm wholly in support of eastside rail on the existing tracks that the Port of Seattle is buying. The sooner, the better. Here's a story in the Woodinville paper about it; over here is the website of the main citizen group trying to get it going. (Anybody know if there's anything bad I should know about this group?) Don't get me wrong; I want a paved bike trail in that right-of-way, too. It can and should be done. But I want the rail line first; I don't want those rails pulled up.

Bisexuality in women is not a "phase" on the way to lesbianism. I mean, I have some large degree of no shit sherlock, but, well, it's one of those things that keeps coming up.

Here are three articles dealing with oil supplies. 1: Indonesia can't be considered an oil exporter anymore, which is no shock to anyone who follows this. It also pretty much lays to rest the idea that if they got back up to, say, 1.3Mbpd, they'd be an exporter again. First, that's real unlikely; second, they wouldn't be without big changes in domestic consumption. 2: The head of French oil company Total says that oil production is at or near peak. Conventional oil, it's worth pointing out, has not yet regained May 2005 production levels. And 3: I am not fond of the Financial Sense website and do not endorse their content in general - stupid gold bugs, I don't care what Bill Fleckstein is going on about, the idea of a new gold standard is still dumb - but this interview with Matthew Simmons (Twilight in the Desert, which I've referenced elsewhere) is somewhat informative to those who have not been following this situation. As a side note, I was not particularly aware he was aware of some of the (underfunded, as he notes) water projects such as cool-water hydrothermal, but apparently he is.

Mr. Bush seems to want to make sure somebody bombs Iran before he leaves office, telling the Israeli government that he doesn't believe the National Intelligence Estimate report on Iran. Slate's Fred Kaplan says, "In decades past, the CIA has often lost credibility as a result of its own failures and scandals. Now President Bush is splashing doubt not just on the CIA, but on all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, simply because their judgments are out of synch with his policies." Well, what else is new? It follows the Chief Executive's personal Jesus or it's worthless. Is this news?

The stock markets are, by any normal measure, oversold - in the short-term sense, not in the this-bear-market-is-over sense, 'cause it's not - and this decline is due for a significant snapback upwards. But people - even the biggest bears I know - are getting worried, partly because today was kind of a lot, partly because we're overdue for a bounce (or "snapback rally"), but also because of a tradable volatility index future (VIX), which has over the last few months built something called a bearish triangle, and just broke sharply out of it - up, which is to say more volatility, which is bearish. Accordingly, damn near everyone is expecting some sort of "surprise" action tomorrow. I worry that the expectations are so tightly built in that if people get an action beyond what they expect - something that doesn't surprise them positively even with expectations things could get really nasty going into the long weekend.

The last time the market was disappointed with a rate cut, we had a day like today. That was the quarter-point back in December.

Or, you know, everything could be fine and the market could close even or start the snapback rally. Who knows? I got my 401(K) funds the hell out of this market in December, and moved into treasuries, because a 3.6% (...or less...) return, while crappy, beats the hell out of the -30% to -50% you can expect in a serious bear market. And since then I've just been watching the economy keep sending more trains to the site of the train wreck - honestly, I didn't think the CDO markets could set new lows, but oh look, some of them are! And the CMBXes - commercial equivalents - are too. (On those charts, up is bad.)

...or... oh crap. oh crap. I saw this just as I was typing out this entry. Remember how I posted a few weeks ago about how banks, in aggregate, were only meeting reserves requirements because of loans from the Feds? To the tune of $30B in loans? They just updated the numbers with preliminarys for 16 January (that's what the (p) means):

AGGREGATE RESERVES OF DEPOSITORY INSTITUTIONS AND THE MONETARY BASE
Not adjusted for changes in reserve requirements(1) 
Not seasonally adjusted
Millions of dollars

[...]

Date total nonborrowed required
2008-Jan. 16(p) 39989 -1387 38278

Um. That's not real good. Um. Banks are now meeting reserves requirements entirely via loans from the Fed. Not with help; entirely. Without those loans the entire banking system, net, is in reserves default. Not just failing to meet reserves requirements; reserves negative. Wow. That's neat. ETA: Historical data shows previous occurrences of anything like this have happened never in the range of data available online, which goes back to 1959.

Current Mood: nervous
Current Music: Farewell, Farewell | Alexander James Adams

Courtesy Brad Setser at RGE Monitor, here's a short and eminently readable paper on the credit crisis (PDF file) by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University and the University of Maryland, respectively. It does rather persuasively display that the model best describing the current situation is a deflationary model. Brad's excerpts and discussion are also worth reading.

Glenn Greenwald's five or six most recent posts continue his disassembly of the role of the useless fawners otherwise known as a political press corps. Just below those, he's culled out a few examples of the racist language already being bandied about a bit against Senator Obama, in preparation for the possibility that he wins the Democratic nomination.

One of the things that has angered me so much about the GOP's hard swing not just to fundamentalism but authoritarianism of all sorts is that they've made all sorts of paranoid lefty conspiracy no-longer-bullshit theories actually come true - turning the US into a surveillance-and-torture state, just for example. But that apparently wasn't good enough; they've also had to go validate the fucking tinhat crowd. Dear readers, I introduce the Plunge Protection Team, now pretty much official, tho' not by that name. Thanks, guys - now the whole world is your crappy conspiracy thriller novel, and I hate you for it.

Talking of hate, only the serious kind, the group that Holocaust-revisionist Scott Lively and Kirkland fundamentalist leader Ken Hutcherson helped get established in the US from Latvia and Russia, "Watchmen on the Walls," gets a short writeup in the Christian Science Monitor, related to a murder trial in California. They sadly downplay the revisionism, and don't note Mr. Lively's latest book, which accuses queers of being a secret force behind nearly every evil in the history of civilisation - a Protocols of the Elders of Queerdom, more or less.

Meanwhile, on a related topic, dogemperor has some juicy quotes from Faith and Freedom Network's Joe Fuiten, wherein Rev. Fuiten claims that the United States has always been a fundamentalist religious state (tho' not in those exact words, of course), and calls people supporting secular government "illegal aliens." And you know how they feel about those.

dogemperor's post here also has a variety of other material worth reading.

(I suppose those two entries make this as close to a Cultural Warfare Update as I've done in a while, doesn't it? I guess I can throw this entry that tag, too.)

Finally, here's a good bit of rant about the political frustrations felt by many.

Current Mood: busy

Seattle's fireworks hung after the initial run up the needle.

This is not how to start a year.

ETA FAIL: lulz

Current Location: seattle, washington

If you saw my post on trading volume weirdness earlier today (specifically before the ETAs) you might check it again, I've done some more digging. I'm also throwing questions out and about other places to see if anyone else knows what's going on, or if the data is even valid.

But in the meantime, have a flower picture. ^_^

Remember Spring

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Green Eyed Sue (Wendy III) | Tricky Pixie

ETA: The data is right, but is incomplete data. See below.

Okay, so, historically, most of oil traded for US consumption is not traded directly on the NYMEX; that's the spot market and while it does set the price, it's not the bulk of the oil - it's the tradable oil, and it's about 3%-5% of US consumption overall, which is to say, under 1M barrels/day.

That's historically, anyway. Check out trading volume over the last month and a half:

From Marketwatch.com's graphing tools

That's original except for my highlighter-coloured adds (two arrows, some obvious text). The last day's volume on that chart is actually higher than shown in this view, the chart isn't complete for today yet, because volume data lags a bit.

We're seeing trading volumes that exceed total US consumption and continuing trading volumes twenty times normal in the face of rising prices. Now I can think of several things this could mean, from day-traders swapping the same 1M barrels back and forth and back and forth (maybe this is one of the places those liquidity injections have gone) to demand destruction from contracted-delivery cancellation freeing more oil for the trading pits (but not that much, sorry - and particularly not in the face of rising prices) to China moving in to buy oil off the US spot market directly (in which case, where's that oil coming from? US inventories have been falling sharply but not that sharply) to significantly more dire interpretations. But really I just don't know.

But unless this data is wrong, something is going on. A one-day error showing a massive volume pop I'd attribute to data error. But I can't do that for this many days in a row. So... what the hell?

ETA: Since I've had a few people raise the "it's just the end of the year" response (two in IM, one below): please note that this is a two-year chart. This isn't normal end-of-year trading. For that, look at the tiny bip at the end of November '06 in this chart for comparison. That's how far down the rest of this chart has been compressed by this year's data. If the data presented here is correct, this is very, very different.

ETA 2: Y'know what's even weirder? Nobody else seems to chart this. At least, not the places I use, and not the places I found in Google that I can get to without being a subscriber. That means I can't validate (or invalidate) these numbers. It also means some other things. See comments (linked) below for details.

ETA 3: I got explorative with their URL parametre passing and was able to get data back to mid-2005, but no further. Nothing like this showed up EOY 2005, either - not even the little bump you get showing up EOY 2006. But that's throwing my own parametres at their graphing software so while I'm reasonably sure given everything that it's right, I'm less confident. Also, 26 December volume numbers are still being reported as 5 Mb, which is still crazytalk high, but if final is also a dramatic comedown from the previous month or so, which makes me ask okay, why? Is somebody on vacation, or is somebody done setting something up?

ETA 4: This does not entirely jibe with what I have read previously (including yesterday), but that could have been wrong or I could have misunderstood before. However, according to a commenter over on The Oil Drum, Marketwatch's charting, while accurate, only shows contracts expiring in a single month, which is to say in this case February, which makes their numbers look very strange. You have to have tools they don't offer to make volume numbers across all months appear in a chart. (And since theirs are the only tools I have that show it at all...) They also say that spot-market volume has gone up dramatically in recent times, but not anything like this chart would have you believe. The part that doesn't line up is that I've read (from multiple sources) that the vast majority of actual pricing follows the NYMEX but is not actually traded on the NYMEX - that's where I get that 3% to 5% number - so if these are the actual volumes on a monthly basis, that implies that most oil has actively moved to this market.

Current Mood: confused

Citibank is taking $49B in SIV assets onto its balance sheets, which is to say, "as opposed to their $87B face value. This is in response to being downgraded by Moody's. These are not the "subprime" rated, and is a 44% face loss. That's huge, and brings their ability to maintain capital requirements into doubt. For them to be doing this, it must be the least bad option available to them. On the other hand, at least we might know now. That's good.

Honestly, the biggest reason I'm not in the deflationary spiral camp - and by the way, deflationary spirals are really bad, much worse than ordinary recessions or even inflationary recessions - is because I don't know how that's going to interact with oil and other energy prices. Sure, you can talk about demand destruction all you want, but the reality is that light sweet crude production hasn't exceeded November 2005 numbers since, even at $95/barrel. If the only factor was the dollar collapse, you'd be looking at $25-30 or so, all else equal. Add $20 more for political concerns. The other $50+ is coming from somewhere, and it's not a booming manufacturing sector. (The guy who invented the term stagflation is coming down on the side of, well, stagflation. Really bad stagflation.)

No one should ever listen to the current Pope on matters of world peace again, given that he declared that birth control, same-sex marriage, and abortion rights are "obstacles" to world peace on the same scale as nuclear proliferation. Note that this is the charitable reading; the hostile reading would be "give us what we want or we'll make sure there's no peace until we get it." Mmmm, holy war. However, I prefer to think he's just an ass.

Now that Governor Huckabee is gaining real ground in the GOP nominating process, we're getting a lot more looks into his record. And oh, he does hate the queers, saying in 1992 that "homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk"; he's not afraid to go after Mitt Romney on FREAKY MORMON ZOMG grounds - and as several people have said, hey, you built a sectarian party, this is the kind of crap you get. Oh, and by the way, "The governor regards 1968 as the dawning of 'the age of the birth-control pill, free love, gay sex, the drug culture and reckless disregard for standards.'" So I guess he's with the Pope, then, in the h8-on for birth control. And queers. But that goes without saying.

And the government of Iraq is moving to take firearms away from all policewomen in the country, disarming every women member of the police force, because "Females are taken care of by men in this country. They are not out there being police officers."

Policewomen say the decree also will leave them unable to protect themselves at work or off duty. Scores of police employees, both officers and administrative workers, have been killed by insurgents. Men and women have traditionally been allowed to carry their Glock pistols with them after hours for security.

"We are considered policewomen. We face kidnapping. We could be assassinated. If anyone knew where we worked, of course they would try to do something to us," said a 27-year-old interviewed Sunday.

"How can I be a policewoman without a weapon?" she asked incredulously as three female colleagues nodded in agreement.

And in torture state news:

Nobel-laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu finds that American defense of detention-without-trial a "huge blot on a democracy," asking, "Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government"? Personally, I think that after you've gotten done quoting the Nazis, South Africa's white-only government looks a little bit like a step up.

I'm sleepy so I'm not going to break this all out, but here are two entries on American torture: this one on the use of torture at Abu Ghraib, and this one on what torture really is. It is, of course, about compliance, about getting people to say what you want them to say, independent of whether it is the truth. Torture and truth have nothing to do with each other.

Current Mood: sleepy

The economic case for 6A selling to SUP is pretty clear:

Russian use (active accounts, site visits, both in thousands, from here, the Russian-language news and support LJ):

Global use (a different figure - posts per time period, 85% non-Russian, but still indicative of direction) since 6A took over and started pissing everyone off (same source):

So there you are. Seems pretty obvious to me. SUP has a real opportunity here if they take it. Mind you, the very next post is someone asking if there's an easy way to delete all comments they've made across LJ as part of deleting their account.

Current Music: Wendy on Board (Wendy I) | Tricky Pixie

SUP, a Russian company owned by a former Yeltsin crony, has bought Livejournal. No, really. No, REALLY. ETA: NO. REALLY. THIS REALLY HAPPENED. THIS IS NOT IRONY OR PARODY. Here're a selected bunch of initial reactions pulled mostly out of the English-language announcement post on

news:

Some English-language Russian argument over the possible badness of this here, particularly "I am a Russian user, luckily residing in the US. I have over a thousand friends, most of them in Russia. There is a sheer panic in the Russian LiveJournal community. People are contemplating mass exodus. This used to be one of the last free speech platforms for the Russians. Now the halcyon days are definitely over." (I don't know about the entire userbase, but his friendslist is certainly worried, and several are setting up accounts on places like GreatestJournal.)

The first person here is all Yay! Russia! and the respondent is, "Yeah, but for my two cents, Putin still sucks."

More Russian expatriate reaction in English here.

ladylightning asks about new Russian 'hate speech' laws are going to find their way down the chain.

as_p laughs (Xexe) and says in English DON'T PANIC, most of the rest of the Russian is a joke about a "big red button" that I don't understand.

georgedollie reports that a lot of Russian users were fleeing once SUP started managing LJ in Russia a year or so ago. A respondand links to here, here, and the Washington Post. Keep in mind that in Russia, Livejournal is not a second-tier player; that line about "blogosphere" in Russian being a shortened form of the Russian version of the word "Livejournal;" the Russian governmental oligarchy has a clear interest in taking control over the Russian internet opinion space. So.

dkmnow has a lot of links about SUP and the like here.

turkeyphant points to a critical Wired article about SUP. That's here. There are responses from one Russian LJ user in this chain.

marta is going around telling everyone again that "LiveJournal, Inc. is an American company based in California and is subject to California and US law. The servers will stay in San Francisco and the privacy policies won't change."

8irt provides convenient transliterations for LOL, OMG, and other important net words.

A couple of Russian-language speakers are going on here about this, and are kind of amused at all the kerfluffle to some degree but

oxyd does note that the political community НБП was suspended shortly before the election. My checking shows that an NBP community (same thing, in Roman) has been deleted and purged, but the community ru_nbp still exists, and is specifically political - lots of discussion of election monitoring and charges of fraud. (I think it's a different community but I don't know.) Apparently there have been various efforts to throw off community moderators and such. And reportedly a lot of people have been (are?) leaving now that SUP owns Livejournal, Inc. outright.

So. Yeah. I recommend LJ Archive as a backup utility, it's easy and fast. Even if you don't do anything, or have to do anything, it's nice to have.

ETA: The Russian LJ News press release on

sup_ru is pretty similar, tho' there, you have people tying the timing of unveiling of the "flag" button with the elections instead of, um, I lose track of what.

ETA3:

penguin_yuh tells me that he doesn't see why everybody is running around spazzing and says that everything will be fine.

Current Mood: confused
Current Music: Catch My Fall | Billy Idol

The only problem as far as I'm concerned is that it's not sooner. (They're starting one new one a year.)

Ferry District votes for Kenmore-to-Seattle runs
By Joshua Adam Hicks
Staff Writer
Kenmore Reporter
November 28, 2007

http://www.kenmore-reporter.com/jumpstory.html?story=news1&pubdate=11/28/2007

The King County Ferry District voted Nov. 13 to enact a new work plan that will provide passenger ferry services between Kenmore and Seattle by 2011.

Four other routes are slated to appear on Lake Washington, and operation of the existing Vashion Island and West Seattle lines will continue as part of the program.

Current Mood: YAY!
Current Music: OddJob's Pressing Engagement | John Barry

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solarbird

Crime and the Forces of Evil

April 2019

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ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん: Solarbird Makes Noises

cheers, love - the cavalry's queer!

Entries tagged with news events

gates and orphans

In more news of awesome

Fundraiser in progress

AP: "US drug war has met none of its goals"

Anonymous and Pirate Bay team up to help Iranian protests

Today's Moment of Ass

106mpg subcompact

Raw Story reports impeachment motion gains a cosponsour

mostly economics, but not all

Laptop, cellphone, iPod data - all fair game for copying at borders

Euphemisms

Except for Fed loans, the entire banking system is in reserves default! (was gonna be music stuff)

Today's Reading List

FAIL start for 2008

I'm goin' to bed, but

This ain't normal

Instead of the baseball steroid scandal, here are the news items I noticed today...

The economic case for 6A selling to SUP

SUP, a Russian company, buys Livejournal

OMG AWESOME

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April 2019

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