The Other Sandy

LJ just sent me a notice that my paid account is expiring. It gave me a bit of a nostalgic pang, but LJ isn't what it once was. I don't post there anymore and I only remember to check my flist once or twice a month. It's certainly not worth paying an annual fee for.

But you know what hit me harder? I'm about to lose all my extra icons. I'm one of those people who had 100+ icons and had one for every mood, occasion, or fandom. My icons were carefully chosen to be a commentary on each post and comment. And now most of them are going to be gone.

I suppose it doesn't really matter. It's not like anyone is going to be reading eight year old comment threads I participated in at this late date. But dammit, I miss having an arsenal of icons at my disposal.

I've been going through the Dreamwidth posts that I imported from LJ looking for import fails (any video I embedded in LJ didn't survive the move to Dreamwidth is one issue I've found), and it's been fun reading some old episode discussions. It's also been fun reading my predictions on how a story arc would go to see how right or wrong I turned out to be. Then tonight I found this in a reaction post I wrote for the Supernatural ep "Hammer of the Gods":

Matt Frewer as Pestilence? You have no idea how happy this makes me! The only Canadian actors I have left on my wish list now are Nicholas Lea, Chris Potter, and Gordon Michael Woolvett. Every other Canadian actor I've ever wanted to see on the show has already appeared.

I wrote this as a joke on April 22, 2010. It took a few more seasons, but I did get Nicholas Lea and Gord (twice!). Supernatural has been renewed for another season. Can we get Chris Potter's agent on the phone?

My LJ is five years old today! In honor of the occasion, here's a special state of the LJ meme:

# Number of journal entries: 976 (including this one)

# Number of people on your friends list: 55

# Person who introduced you to LJ: viridian5, although it took me something like 8 years to get one after she did

# Still friends with this person: As much as you can be friends with someone you've never met in RL ;-)

# How many people have you introduced to LJ: 1 ::waves at bit_boy:: Not that he ever posts to it

# List everyone on your friends list who you have met in person: agt_spooky, ant3ka, asyouleft, awfulhorrid, bit_boy, bookwurm, gonturan, jennetj, kb9vcn, kroki_refur, loves_bitch, oxbastetxo, queeberquabbler, samazon13, seesmooshrun, smallwaldo, thefannishwaldo, wilde_moon, wraithfodder, and zazreil

# Total LJers met: 20 (technically 19, since 2 of these people are the same person)

# 5 people on LiveJournal that you have known the longest: I'm only going with 3, since they tend to blow away the competition. I've known bookwurm for about 28 years, kb9vcn for about 23 years, and bit_boy for about 19 years or so

# Anyone on LJ you can't stand: Not at the moment

# Name one person on your friends list you would most like to meet: Probably viridian5 because she's the person I've known the longest online without ever having met

# Ever ban someone from commenting in your journal: Just spammers

# Number of comments: Posted: 3,968 / Received: 3,697

# Biggest pet peeve about LJ: The way they periodically take away a useful feature that works to replace it with a useless feature that no one wants, then insult the users for not falling all over themselves in gratitude

# Do you feel close to most of the people on your friends list: Yes, mostly because I've met about 1/3 of my flist in person

# How many journals on LiveJournal do you have: Just this one

# Communities I currently own/maintain: None, although I do maintain the Hawaii Five-0 page over at newbieguide

My LJ is one year old today, so here's an LJ-related meme.

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# Number of journal entries: 302 (including this one)

# Number of people on your friends list: 30

# Person who introduced you to LJ: viridian5, although it took me something like 8 years to get one after she did

# Still friends with this person: As much as you can be friends with someone you've never met in RL ;-)

# How many people have you introduced to LJ: 2 ::waves at bit_boy and auntbop::

# List everyone on your friends list who you have met in person: awfulhorrid, bit_boy, bookwurm, jennetj, jensenrick, kroki_refur, mikasteelelell, mrwhat, smallwaldo, thefannishwaldo, and wraithfodder

# Total LJers met: 11 (technically 10, since 2 of these people are the same person)

# 5 people on LiveJournal that you have known the longest: I'm only going with 3, since they tend to blow away the competition. I've known bookwurm for about 24 years, mrwhat for about 19 years, and bit_boy for about 15 years or so

# Anyone on LJ you can't stand: Yes, but they're not on my flist and I tend to ignore them whenever possible

# Name one person on your friends list you would most like to meet: Probably viridian5 because she's the person I've known the longest online without ever having met

# Ever ban someone from commenting in your journal: No, my LJ has been remarkably wank free (thank you, flist)

# Number of comments: Posted: 717, Received: 689 (I had no idea I'd commented that much)

# Biggest pet peeve about LJ: No hit counter--there's no way to tell if anyone is reading unless they leave a comment, which not everyone does

# Do you feel close to most of the people on your friends list: Yes-ish. It's hard for me to feel close to people I've never met, but I care about them and enjoy reading their posts

# How many journals on LiveJournal do you have: Just this one

# Communities I currently own/maintain: None

I just got my first ever spam comment (on a post I made back in July). I know how to delete comments, but I'm pretty sure I've seen some people mention there's a way to block certain IP addresses from commenting in order to prevent this kind of thing from becoming a problem. Does anybody know how to do that?

Do any of you know how to embed a widget on an LJ page? I found one for Supernatural and I'd like to pimp the show a bit because it doesn't get nearly the ratings it deserves, but when I copy/pasted in the embed code and saved, nothing showed up on my page except the URL that appears below the image, not the image itself.

This is just a test to see how easy or hard it is to post to my LJ from my iPAQ. If this works, I'll be able to blog Kazcon using my PDA and the con hotel's WI-FI.

Welcome to Dr. Terror's House of Pancakes. This LJ is under construction, so please bear with me while I try to figure out how stuff works and what I want the page to look like. Real content is on the way.