Mistress Darkness

We are starting this years InsaneJournal holiday sale. From now until the end of the day Friday, November 27 we are going to be holding a sale on Self-Committed[paid] accounts and Extra Userpics.

The prices are be as follows

Self-Committed[paid]
1 Month -> $5
6 Month -> $15 $10
12 Month -> $25 $18

Extra Userpicx
6 Month -> $10 $5
12 Month -> $20 $15

Then on Friday November 27th from 8am until 4pm (Eastern US time) we will be running a very special sale on Permanently Insane accounts.

1) For anyone looking to buy a laptop or netbook, you may be interested in the results of this study which indicated Asus and Toshiba are the most reliable models, but that regardless of brand, 1 in 3 laptops fails to last 3 years. I wish they'd also done a study on desktops which are presumably less vulnerable to accidents. Aside from the fact that these expensive purchases are exceedingly unreliable, what most made me blanch was the idea of the monumental amount of waste being generated by so many short-lived machines.

2) In more optimistic news, health care costs may go down if successful vaccines are developed, and apparently there are a lot of major ones in the pipeline.

"Among other possible vaccines out in the coming years: herpes simplex, rheumatoid arthritis and a better seasonal influenza vaccine. A malaria vaccine -- a development that would revolutionize public health around the globe if successful -- could be on the market in the next several years."

3) When looking at the tags being used so far at the AO3, I got the immediate mental image of the classic comedy/tragedy masks (Angst! Humor!). However, I was also quite struck by how many stories are apparently carrying the humor tag – far, far more than for some other stories we commonly see like an AU or crossover. It's not that we rarely see funny stories in fandoms, but I rarely see stories advertised as such (whereas, by comparison, people label their stuff "crackfic" quite often). So I just thought I'd throw the question out there: what percentage of what you read or write would you consider to be a humor story?

It's exciting to see contributions surging into the Archive of Our Own now that open beta has begun. I have hopes for the archive being a one-stop, highly searchable site for all kinds of fan content. LJ and its clones may be really good blogging/interaction sites but they're lousy for actually finding things. And unlike the Buffyverse, SPN fandom is not rife with archives.

Speaking of one-stop shops for fannish content, in case others weren't aware of it, Clicker.com is a search engine for finding places to see TV content online. Just type in the show you want to see and it'll show what episodes are available and where. You can also create playlists.

I was boggled today when I read this article about men, women and power at work. Funny how the entire thing is written to demonstrate how men are merely well meaning but baffled and women are always at fault for creating problems at work. Case in point:

"“Men often seem to think (heroically) that they should be masters at the conversation–that they should know the ‘right’ things to say.” His advice to men and women: “Be more curious about each other and their experiences."

It's heroic to be self-centered and domineering in a conversation! Who knew?

"Meanwhile, women’s tendency to be super-serious (as men perceive them, at least) compounds the workplace dysfunction. “Women can make anything a chore,” a former Microsoft executive told me. “They’re too serious and don’t seem to understand that work is a game.”"

It's wrong to be serious about serious matters! Now there's a rather fitting explanation for why our economy's in the state it's in. I look forward to the way men will turn unemployment into a game.
( Read more... )

With thanks to silverjackal... Tip Of The Day: Don't use a shovel to try to move a possum, kiddies.

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And please follow the link to click my MagiStream eggs (since they don't provide proper embed coding for LiveJournal)?

http://magistream.com/user/prairiecrow

(Yeah, another clickables game. Just what I need. YAY!)

I thought this blog post did a good job of explaining in comparative numbers how much more risky our unemployment situation is today versus the last time it was this high, which was in 1982. ( Read more... )

I thought the most interesting aspect of this CNN article on class differences in social networking sites were the figures on Facebook use. I'm rather amazed that college age kids make up only 10% of Facebook users, with three times as many users 35-49. What surprises me even more is that even at MySpace they only make up 15% of users. It's already not news that Twitter use has gone backwards in age, with use spreading down to younger users rather than up. But I'm surprised so few young adults are utilizing any of the major social networking sites. What are they doing online? And I wonder if one could consider YouTube a social networking site?

Lastly, with news of Dollhouse's cancellation, this news bit seems a bit ironic, in that FOX is following Joss' lead on creating original web content. But what stood out to me is how it sounds like they want to create their own version of fan content:

""We have a very active music consumer within MySpace Music, so it's not inconceivable that we would look to create a piece of content that resonates with a music audience that would be broadened for ubiquity across the web," Mr. Levinsohn said. "We would try to leverage the audience we have with gamers or sports fans on other sports fans on other properties in the same way. What's unique here is we're storytellers, and we can create content for any genre -- there are brands that make sense for any genre, too."

Of course, the actual point is to produce product placement vehicles (and who knew someone had a job in order to do this in comics?)

Yesterday I went to a lecture on "Media Life: A Life Lived in Media" by Mark Deuze after having heard an interview he did regarding his new book. I found the interview rather more informative but there were some interesting tidbits in the lecture. (You can access his slides here.)

The speaker's previous book was about people who work in the media industries, and how there is now a shift to creating content about content. What we once called marketing is now considered a form of content creation itself, as it is used to push attention to other content. That book explored the frustration of people who had gone into these industries to tell their own stories, only to find themselves instead promoting the work of others.

With the new book he is looking past changes for those working in the media to what the general public is going through. He has turned this into a philosophical question about media as an environment that we live in rather than something external that we access or utilize through tools. ( Read more... )

But before I get to that, just a shout out to Mad Men's finale. Now that's the way to close a season, where your plot points and character development all dovetail into a satisfying resolution. It should be interesting to see where this goes next.

Although it's been pointed out before that fan viewing habits (especially of the shows they are fannish about) tend to be atypical of general viewing habits, it has so far been the average viewer who has been driving TV ratings, with their live viewing being considered the important measurement due to their intake of commercials. Now a new study suggests that even though Mr. and Mrs. Passive Viewer will continue to be the most important market to capture, the DVR will help broadcasters do it. ( Read more... )

"What's that screaming sound I hear?"
"The NaNo site is down, my dear!"

... and 157,425 authors suddenly have to go cold turkey. Including yours truly. WAH!

(On the plus side, I wrote almost 2500 words today. On the minus side, my laptop won't connect to the Internet to let me email myself the document so that I can have a copy on the more modern machines in the household. WAH redux!)

We have created an official FaceBook page that will be used to mirror our twitter account for status updated etc. This is yet another great offsite location to let everyone know what is going on when we have any kind of downtime

Become a fan of InsaneJournal at http://www.facebook.com/pages/InsaneJournal so you can get our status updates added to your feed.

And just as a reminder, here is the official IJ twitter account http://twitter.com/insanejournal