In other news:

• I've brought out this old icon in honour of disgraced pastor Ted Haggard, who was all ready to make a comeback (as it were) until fresh revelations emerged recently. I've mentioned him before, but somehow neglected to mention that Ted Haggard is Completely Heterosexual (Roy Zimmerman = Tom Lehrer for the Naughties).
  
  
• I've been contributing to some threads over at Unreasonable Faith, the blog of Daniel Florien, an ex-Christian. Daniel asks other ex-Christians whether believing was a complete waste of time (you can see my answer). He's also posted about the Ehrman/Williams discussion on Premier Christian Radio, which I've mentioned previously, so I stuck my oar in. There are a few Christians with a strong inner conviction that the Bible is inerrant on there, so I responded to one of them.
  
  
• There's a meme doing the rounds on LJ where you get very angry about something called "cultural appropriation", or get very angry about people getting angry about it. The threads I've seen have largely involved the sort of people who use the word triggering to mean "a bit upsetting" (see also Monstrous Vegiment), so I've stayed out of it. However, livredor linked to an interesting post by nextian about the Jewish attitude to Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, which reminded me a bit of Karen Armstrong's take on it in The Bible: the biography. livredor also has some discussion on her LJ.
  
  
• scribb1e and I watched Maverick last night. I somehow managed to miss it in 1994. It was funny, in a gentle sort of way.
  

As readers of news will know, LiveJournal is in the process of electing representatives from among its users, to sit on the LiveJournal advisory board, alongside various e-luminaries.

( Who I think you should vote for )

Regardless of whether you agree with me, if you've moaned about what 6Apart and SUP have done over the last few years, please read the candidates' manifestos and vote, and encourage others to do the same. If you have already voted, note that it is possible to change your vote until the election closes, on 29th May.

There's a new LiveJournal meme doing the rounds, where you make a post about what you think of theferrett's Open Source Boob Project. All the cool kids are doing it, so I thought I'd join in. Here's a compendium of comments I've been making elsewhere.

I agree with springheel_jack's point that this is all about geekery. theferrett has been here before, expressing similar sentiments about how it would be easier if you could just tell women you wanted to do them.

The dance that most heterosexual courtship rituals involve is (what? all my courtship rituals have involved dancing) at least partly about face saving if it goes wrong, but also about not scaring off the woman, who is physically smaller and weaker, on average, and probably has reason to fear the sort of man who would ask direct questions of the sort theferrett talks about. Some geeks do dispense with some of the dance, and that can work for them when they're dealing with other geeks.

theferrett wants to dispense with more of the dance than most people are comfortable with. He had a nice time at the convention, which is fair enough. It also seems that the original thing was instigated by women who are happy to defend it. His mistake is to think that experience can be generalised and codified into a "project", and his other mistake is writing about it on LJ, especially in the style he used.

I'm becoming a big fan of synecdochic, whose postings on the drama itself and how not to be That Guy are excellent.

DEEP THOUGHT:
If I might make an observation…

MAJIKTHISE:
We’ll go on strike!

VROOMFONDEL:
That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands.

DEEP THOUGHT:
Who will that inconvenience?

MAJIKTHISE:
Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!

I'd like to remind them that as a trusted radio personality, I can be helpful in rounding up fanficcers to toil in their underground salt mines.

Yes, the Russians bought LiveJournal. Either it's a plot, which has been planned for over a year by the oligarchs, to destroy the free speech of the large number of Russian LJ users; or perhaps it's just that Six Apart got fed up of all the complaints.

Theories abound: some people blame the sale plans for recent attempts to clean-up LJ, like the Strikethrough debacle and the recent introduction of the "denounce" button on everyone's journal. (hairyears has a good posting on the latter, by the way, arguing that it's an entirely sensible move on LJ's part to prevent them from being sued by right-wing nutjobs).

Other good sources: Metafilter has some discussion, Encyclopedia Dramatica has some links to the stupidest responses so far, and vladmuthafucka records the thoughts of Putin himself.

I'll stick around and see what happens, at least. ljdump runs every night here, just in case, but it's far more likely that I'd use it to recover from some technical failure at LJ than to recover from a censored journal.

Oh my. The feminist bloggers have taken on the Internet Hate Machine known as Anonymous. Encyclopedia Dramatica (very NSFW and extremely offensive, don't blame me if you get fired) has the scoop on the post which might have been from Biting Beaver that started it all, as well as the on-going aftermath.

Some of the commenters on the feminist blogs get it, and actually tell them what's going on and how to weather the raids (ilyka, or Holly in this thread). Luckily for Anonymous, the rest of the commenters either ignore them or jump on them and accuse them of misogyny, while beginning the countdown which will end in them reaching Defcon 1 and launching the e-lawyers against the Patriarchy. Hint: the only winning move is not to play.

It's like the Internet perfect storm. Who brought popcorn?

In their latest spasm of incompetence in the on-going Strikethrough 2007 drama, LiveJournal's admins have clarified that they were just kidding about that all that free speech and community stuff for long enough to get the last batch of permanent accounts sold.

Countdown to Harry Potter spoilers being posted in that thread: in 10... 9... 8...

ETA: Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. Youtube and Google win again. I think I slightly prefer Harry Potter and the Brokeback Goblet, myself. Both spoiler free.

Shock news tonight, as Livejournal administrators delivered a stairwell noncebashing, leaving many fanfic journals braindead and quadraspazzed on a life-glug (script here). LJ's abuse team don't seem to have realised that such excesses are unacceptable in the modern police service. There are persistent reports that journals for survivors of rape and incest were also deleted, but I've seen no real confirmation of this.

A group of hicks from the USA appear to have provoked this, dealing out street justice in between engaging in car chases with a fat sheriff; driving a car with the doors welded shut, a Confederate flag on the blogrollroof, and a horn that plays Dixieland. Some day the mountain might get 'em, but, alas, it seems the law never will.

This is, perhaps, a timely reminder that sites like LJ are businesses (LJ may have started as a hobbyist site, but has not been one since the 6Apart takeover, at the very latest). They are not your friends. They will defend your free speech exactly as far as it profits them to do so, and they're certainly not prepared to undertake legal battles on your behalf. bubble_blunder has a realistic assessment of the likely outcomes of this latest LJ drama.

There are tools which will back-up your journals and comments, and you can configure LJ to email you your own comments on other people's journals. It seems wise to make use of these facilities if you value your journal's contents at all.

LJ are doing their usual headless-chicken imitation when faced with a crisis. They've made no public statement on this business, perhaps hoping that word of it won't spread outside the Snape/Hermione fan-fiction writers. While I've no interest in slash, and I appreciate LJ's right to avoid legal liability, their handling of their users once again sucks.

Edited to add: The CEO of 6Apart apologised. Best comment thread in the responses.

LiveJournal have improved the site's email notification stuff, so that you can register an interest in any thread or posting and get email (or just a message to your message centre) when someone posts a comment on it. You can also register an interest in a particular user's postings, and in various other stuff. Currently this is only available to paid and permanent account holders, but I think LJ are rolling out something a bit less good to everyone else soon (looks like free users will be restricted in how many things they can subscribe to).

This system has been carefully designed to only tell you about stuff that you can see anyway. They've also thought about the situation where you forget to select the right option and make a public post something which you meant to be locked: the notification email doesn't contain the text of the entry, so you've got some grace about locking it. The new system is a very nice feature, something that makes LJ a much more useful place to have a discussion, since you can now easily monitor interesting posts once they've disappeared off your friends page. I'd thought about building something like this into LJ New Comments, but now I don't have to. So that's good.

Despite this, there are countless whinging lamers posting to the announcement saying that this feature is going to aid internet stalking (because an internet stalker isn't obsessive enough to keep hitting refresh on a thread, or to use a free service or browser extension which will tell you when a web page changes). People who believe in security through obscurity are silly. You always assume that the bad guys are as clever as you are (or cleverer, in the case of the complainers).

LJ are also talking about extending the notification system so that soon you'll have the option getting notifications using LJ Talk, LiveJournal's instant messaging service. If you didn't know LJ had an IM service, now you do. It'll talk to any program which uses the standard Jabber protocol. I'm using Adium, Windows users might like Gaim (both of these support other protocols like MSN Messenger and AIM, so you don't need to keep multiple IM programs running). By default, your buddies on the chat service are your LJ friends. Say hello if you see me on there.

Mindful of the recent LJ drama about breastfeeding icons, I propose we take LiveJournal's codebase (which is open source) and start a site where it is compulsory to display breasts in your default icon. That'll show the Patriarchy! Start using those tools to back up your livejournal now, because titsorleave.com will be live soon.

Another controversial LJ Abuse policy which people are complaining about is that LJ don't care about comments made in journals which are actually RSS feeds of blogs off-site, because no-one owns the journal. There's one LJ user whose life's purpose appears to be to post the word "BOOBIES!!" as a comment to every single entry on popular feeds. apod, a feed of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, also has the_duke, who always posts "I've been there" in response to all the pretty pictures of galaxies and suchlike. The other day, he got the best reply evar.

It would be possible to adapt the web 2.0 technology^TM used by my LJ New Comments script so that you could killfile comments from particular users, I suppose, but I think there's little motivation to do so while the trolls' immaturity is less objectionable than the complainants' huge sense of entitlement.