{look upon my works, ye mighty}

Brad, creator of livejournal, is leaving for Google because and SixApart might be looking for a buyer for their company.

You know, this actually might be why there hasn't been any response to the general outcry about the journal deletions, strikethrough being replaced by bold, etc. I mean, yes, fandom is making a huge stink but the creator of the site leaving is kind of bigger and definitely worse PR, overall. If everyone's too busy dealing with that to deal with fandom, then I can understand that -- though that still doesn't explain the idiotic comment screening or the fact that three of the four charities that got donations from the Permanent Account sale had ties to a Six Apart investor.

I don't think that I can start backing up my journal until I'm at uni, since it requires installing stuff, but here is a guide on how to do it. It'll let you transfer all your old entries to another journal, without having to do it by hand, which is incredibly time-saving. brown_betty also has another useful entry on backing up LJ memories. In my case, I'm just going to go through them by hand and stick them up on my delicious account, I think.

At the same time, you can use Semagic to update multiple journals at once so as to maintain a nominal presence on LJ and test the waters of the other journaling sites.

If you want to keep up with people that are moving off LJ, try FeedReader for RSS purposes.

Edit: brad has his own post about it, wherein he says that it's not SixApart's fault that he's bored and some other things.

So I'm maybe not the biggest music fan on my flist (abrandnewboom and fairly_grimm could probably duke it out for that title), but even I couldn't not go to the Donauinselfest, aka the Donau Fest. I was actually going to show up at 3PM today to see my cousin play with her band (Dinalie, the younger sister of the cousin that had her graduation ceremony yesterday that I attended), but she got moved up to 2:10 so they performed while I was still en route, unfortunately, so I went home to catch some rest instead since I'd been at a sleepover last night as well and am rather tuckered out.

Instead, I'll be heading over to meet Numa at 7PM at Kagran, and then we'll head over to the D-Fest.

If anyone feels like telling me what to see, click here. It's the website for the Donau Fest, in English, and sorted out by island since it'll have a lot of different stages in different places. *still tinkering with her outfit for tonight*

Oh, and in totally unrelated news, Brazil has some ads out that are causing quite a bit of discussion about whether it's sizeist or not. The comm is kissmyass_cosmo, and it's dedicated to fighting the beauty myth and pointing out ways in which the culture around us tries to force women to have negative self-esteem.

Do not clean pierced ears with mint dental floss.

I realize that might sound obvious to some of you, but if you're a college student who recently got her ears pierced, thinks one of them is too swollen to use cotton swabs on and really wants to make sure it's clean, you might have the brainwave of using dental floss to try to clean behind the earring.

Take it from me, it's a bad idea. Your ear won't drop off, but it will sting like crazy. Though maybe cotton thread would work if you soak it in disinfectant first.

Aren't you glad I'm here to find out stuff the hard way so that you won't have to?

Latest rape statistics, courtesy of Amnesty International.

Here's a breakdown of the stats. Pay especial attention to the one that states that getting drunk makes it your fault for getting raped.

Devrushka decides to send an e-mail to her male friends for raising awareness about how rape really is a crime and not just a bit of fun that got out of hand. And how it makes no sense to blame the victim.

After all, you refer to rape in the passive tense. You don't say "someone raped her", you say "she was raped".

Women unite, take back the night. And remember that 88% of all rapes are committed by someone you know, not a stranger in an alleyway.

To end this entry on a stronger, more empowering note, check out Sars talking about a war against women. Like Xeney said, "when a woman walks the street at night, she's carrying her most valuable asset with her, the one that everyone wants to steal, like a guy leaving the house with one leg in a cast and a VCR tucked under his arm."

Know why I love Sars so much? She's angry, and not afraid to say so. She understands what it's like to feel helpless, and frustrated, to have it all swirl in your stomach and block your throat, not letting you even scream because it hurts that much to know you can hate so much without having any way to bury your pain. She doesn't care if she comes off as unsympathetic; she doesn't care if she comes off as hostile. She just wants to get her point across, like below:

"Please understand that I have felt that fury, a fury made even more powerful by my own powerlessness, a fury that I have to eat, a fury that won't make anything better for me unless I use it to defend myself, which I might not do successfully, which just feeds the fury until it tickles the back of my throat. Good girls do not daydream about planting a size-nine go-go boot in a man's solar plexus, but good girls get raped and beaten up all the time. So do bad girls. It just isn't fair."