Speaker For The Diodes - March 17th, 2008

03:31 am - Why Does LJ Hate Faeries? Does SUP Disapprove Of The Faerie Festivals?

Just a drive-by post because Saturday took a lot out of me and then a migraine late Sunday took what was left.

I know I've got various friends interested in Faeries of various sorts and in various ways. Interestingly, LiveJournal does not deem them a fit subject to display in the list of "popular interests". Along with other alarming censorship ah, image-sanitizing-to-not-spook-advertisers choices. Note that my guess as to motive is nothing more than a guess. I'll read the rest of the entry I linked to, and other discussion of this matter, when my head hurts less.

Those of you reading this on InsaneJournal, DeadJournal, CommieJournal, JournalFen, CrazyLife, Blurty, Scribbld, or GreatestJournal may snicker and point, growl, or look on your LJ-using friends with pity, as you deem appropriate. Those of you reading this on LiveJournal ... well I'll make up my mind what to do about this after my headache passes, but I encourage you all to ponder what it implies about SUP / LJ Inc. and their relationship with us, the users.

05:34 am - QotD

"If it is possible to summarize the findings of the satellite program in any intelligible way, two statements may suffice: the studies revealed the extent of the earth's influence in space, and at the same time they showed just how little we understood of the environment of the earth." -- Vanguard, A History [NASA SP-4202], by Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask (quote appears in chapter 14)

[The oldest artificial satellite still in orbit was launched fifty years ago today. (The three satellites launched earlier have fallen.)]

05:09 pm - Brief Status Update

Still wrecked from Saturday. (The gig just made me really tired and sore of wrist; the lifting and carrying I did in Bowie afterward and then unloading stuff at my house that night put me in a whole 'nuther level of pain.) Standing and walking are not easy right now. My attendance at 3LF rehearsal tonight is possible (if the tramadol suddenly starts working better than it has the last thirty six hours) but extremely unlikely.    :-(    I'll try to write something interesting this evening to compensate for not being where I really ought to be, if I can prop myself in a typing position long enough, but I'm not counting on managing that, either.

06:39 pm - A Silliness and a Seriousness

Hmm. I scored eight out of ten on the Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer quiz. But I guessed a lot.

Apparently, a few hours ago, LJ removed the filter that p revented certain popular interests (faeries, depression, sex, bondage, etc.) from being listed in the most popular interests on LJ page. As of the last time I looked (about half an hour ago) there was no word from LJ about why the filter was implemented or apologizing for it. At this moment it looks as though they did something they hoped nobody would notice (again!) and then quietly tried to undo it once they got caught, hoping that the noise being raised about it would die down. (I do not expect that perception to change, but I include the qualifier just in case SUP/LJ manages to handle this any better than they've done in the past.)

rydra_wong asked for an explanation that preferably "doesn't make it look like you think fandom, LGBT people, and people with mental illnesses are an embarrassment to your fine journaling service."</i> But that just makes me wonder in response: if that is the reason, is it better to get the politically savvy spin (assuming they can make the spin believable for a change) or to just get the hatred/embarassment/whatever out in the open at last so we can stop playing this game of "That makes you look like you hate ____!" "Oh no, we didn't mean it that way ... we hear your complaints and will do better next time for sure!" "But Bullwinkle, that trick never works!" -- and proceed on to the step where each of us can stop being polite about it and proceed to unambiguous, unhesitant actions?

Of course, what I really hope for is that it turns out to have been mere incompetence and SUP turns out to be capable of learning from its mistakes, but neither of those currently looks likely. And the probability of an unlikely thing times the probability of another unlikely thing yields an extremely unlikely combination-of-things.

09:08 pm - Donning My Tinfoil Hat

Hmm. The censorious filtering of the most-popular-interests page on LiveJournal was implemented 2008-03-06 and reverted this afternoon. So the question that suggests to me is, was there an especially important presentation to advertisers and/or investors between 6 March and 17 March? Was it so quietly and quickly undone once it was discovered because they realized what a big error it was, or because it had already served its purpose? If the fudged data were shown to people being asked to make business decisions based on how it made the LJ user population look, are those people getting email apologizing for having been given false information?