I’ve been meaning to make some more multi-character icons for a while. Then today LJ announced that you can buy 5 more userpic spaces for £1.20 for a year and all of a sudden I can have three more and don’t have to find two to take out. And can carry on using one.

So I now have six icons with three characters of the same name on. There aren’t any bonus points for being able to name them all – not least because I don’t think there’s anyone reading this that will know which series all of these characters come from. And if you’re looking at this on DW they have an extra field on the icons page that will tell you all the surnames of the people pictured.

But I felt the need to display the set: Read more…

I’m going for a theme with my LJ icons. Also, it makes them multi-use. I did one a while ago with Harry Sullivan, Harry Pearce and Harry Potter:

Now I’ve done Jack Meadows, Jack O’Neill and Jack Harkness:

and Sam Carter, Sam Gamgee and Sam Beckett:

My week off means posting more often, now that I have nothing better to do apart from watch tennis. And do all the other things I need to get done this week (Yuletide, Ch secret santa, baking, Rotaract stuff…).

I got to thinking last night about how people use their journals/blogs mostly because I keep coming across people who use it completely different to me.

Personally, I post everything in my blog (which is so much better to post to than the LJ/DW interface) and have a plug-in that crossposts to Livejournal and Dreamwidth, so people who want to read on those sites rather than by RSS feed can do so. On the extremely rare occasion I post something I don’t want the whole world to see (which is usually a rant about something/something specific and I don’t want them to happen upon it), then I password protect it on my blog and friends lock it on my LJ and DW. Anyone can ask for the password and if you look back in my blog carefully enough (or use the search, it’s pretty good) you can find the password.

When it comes to reading, I read everything, no matter what site it’s on, by RSS Feed. It means I don’t see LJ cuts and I can mark things as unread if I haven’t got time to read them at the moment. Or I can mark things as read without reading them if I know I’m not interested or know I’m not going to get time to read. I also don’t have to try and remember where I got to, like you do on the LJ friends page.

My LJ friends list is a copy of all the people I’m reading by RSS Feed. If I stop reading I take them off and if I start reading I add them on. I never use filters because I personally feel like that’s lying to people about whether you’re reading them or not. I sort of expect other people to do the same thing – so if they have me friended then they’re reading me, and it annoys me when they defriend me the minute I defriend them – it feels as if they’re too much of a coward to take me off their list before I do.

Dreamwidth is a bit different because on that one I allow access to everyone that has friended me on LJ but i haven’t friended back. That way they can see my friends entries, but I’m not reading their journal, and they know I’m not. I am subscribed to a few people on DW that I’m not on LJ because they’re the ones I’m occasionally interested in reading and I read my DW list on the site every few days ish. Course, that system falls down rather a lot because a lot of people have accounts at DW but aren’t posting there.

To conclude: My LJ friends list is nothing more than a reading list and the word friend is a misnomer.

So, how do you use yours?*

*I know it’s not Easter, but I haven’t had a Cadbury’s Creme Egg since 2004 and I don’t watch adverts

I’ve been playing around on the blog front.

On my blog you can now comment using just your OpenID. It would have worked a year ago if I’d only known the plugin to show you a preview of your comment was interfering with it…

Also, I’m using a new crossposter. The big advantage of this one is that if I create a password protected post here, it posts it on LJ as a friends locked post. Which is what I always wished the crossposter would do, so that’s handy. You’ll notice on LJ that the header has changed and now become a footer. Exciting, ay?

Since Dreamwidth made it from closed to open beta the other day (at least from my perspective) I now have an account there: paranoidangel. The crossposter posts simultaneously to both LJ and DW, so I now have three backups of my blog.

When I finally wade into RSS Bandit and the 1157 unread feeds I had in there this morning (some of which I’ve read in Google Reader, to be fair) I might well take some people off my LJ friends list, since that is merely a list of who I am reading and I suspect I will find that I will just mark some of those as read without reading them.

But it’s ok because there are other ways of reading my very rare protected posts – which I only really want to hide from random people who’ve surfed in randomly. Either you can ask me the password and read it on the blog (or search the blog to find it). Or read it on DW. What I plan to do there is give access to anyone who wishes it – basically if you subscribe to my DW journal, I’ll give you access. But if you friend my LJ, I will only friend you back if I’m reading your LJ. Clear as mud?

I also have a second DW account (which I did pay about £2 for but there’s really nothing a paid account does that a free one doesn’t – the same can be said of LJ). This one is paranoidangel42 and is purely for talking about RP things. So people reading my blog/LJ/DW who aren’t interested aren’t bored by it and I can have RP-related emails in the right email account. No really, that is important.

I know I have a load of comments to reply to and posts to read and people to subscribe to on DW, it’s just going to take me a little while to catch up – feel free to subscribe to me and save me the effort

Well, I mentioned it to selenay936 at Redemption and she went “Yes, please”. Only using more words.

So I have created a copy of my fanfic blog on LJ at pa_fic. I can’t crosspost the old entries without a lot of effort, so the entries got back as far as… today. All the rest of my fanfic is on my fanfic blog. I want to say “I hope you appreciate it because it took me ages” but I can’t because that was mostly due to me not reading the instructions and therefore putting the wrong information in the boxes.

I am crap at announcing on here when I’ve posted something new – I usually just bung it on the relevant LJ comms and relevant archive, but now it doesn’t matter. If you want to know when I’ve posted a new fic you can just follow my fanfic LJ. Which is a community, but that’s so I don’t have to login to edit any of it. Hopefully it’ll email me if someone comments – for some reason LJ seems to have stopped emailing me if someone comments to an entry I’ve made in a community…

Also, I have changed my default icon for the first time in… two years maybe? I like LJ icons being like avatars, so I change my default rarely and rarely use others. This one is me-specific without being fandom specific and if I was in the habit of using management speak I’d say I’d streamlined my online self, since that’s the same avatar I have on Twitter and Facebook. But since I speak proper, I couldn’t possibly say that.

I’m very amused at people on LJ flailing about, assuming the site is going to be shut down, just because some people got made redundant. Funnily enough, it’s a recession, that’s the sort of thing that tends to happen in recessions – the news is full of it (or was before there was Gaza and cold and lack of trains).

LJ’s so successful that it’s unlikely to go under any time soon and if it did there’d be more warning than that, I imagine. M&S closing down some stores was more interesting news on the same lines, although in retrospect not a surprise given that people are trying to shop more cheaply.

My blog and LJ are both automatically backed up. The blog’s backed up to a Gmail account every week and since I never delete any emails, just archive them, I have every comment anyone’s ever posted too, in the unlikely instance I ever remember that any exist.

I realised, a while ago, that I’ve been doing that volunteering thing in Doctor Who fandom. I reckon I’ve inherited it from dad, but I can’t get involved in something without volunteering. It’s why I’ve done every exec post in my Rotaract club, am on my third year on District and am on the National Conference organising committee. I did it in LOTR fandom when I was an admin at HASA. Now in DW I’ve run a ficathon and was an editor for the Sarah Jane newsletter.

I’ve also reached a point where I just don’t like DW fandom any more. As a whole I mean. I’m quite happy with my little corner(s), but the rest I just can’t be doing with any more. So I’ve now stopped doing everything, apart from reading and writing.

While I was taking relevant comms off my LJ friends list, I had a bit of a sort out of the whole thing. I have managed to get my friends list down to 42. I took off a whole load that I’m either just not reading or haven’t updated for a long time (mostly the latter, I have to say).

Because the term friends in LJ is so loaded, I just want to repeat that my friends list is a copy of the LJs I am reading in RSS Feeds. I have people on there that aren’t friends and people that are friends that aren’t on there. Anyone not on my friends list isn’t missing out on my friends locked posts because I very rarely make any, and when I do I’ll put them on my blog too, which you can ask me for a registration on, and you can use your LJ ID for that.

And while I’m here I want to plead to the people who only say what they’re posting about in the LJ cut text and nowhere outside of it – please can you put something in the text of the post or the heading to say what you’re talking about? Otherwise I have no idea because I don’t see LJ cuts in RSS Feeds, and it also means that the page where you write comments doesn’t say either.

I have a bit of a dilemma, caused by LJ and its mislabelling of ‘friends list’. If only Dreamwidth was out already.

Basically, my friends list on LJ is a copy of the journals and communities I’m reading in my RSS Feed Reader. So I have friends that are not on my friends list and people that are on my friends list that aren’t friends. Which makes the name of it rather a misnomer.

But, people friend me and I feel like I should friend them back, even if their LJ doesn’t look like it contains anything I want to read. And I also friend people and then find that actually, I’m not reading their LJ. It seems a bit funny to friend someone and then unfriend them again not much later.

But it also seems really deceitful to friend people without reading them. Because putting someone on your friends list is pretty much a statement that you’re reading this person.

To make it worse, a lot of people in TR put stuff related to the RP under friends lock in their personal LJs. I don’t like to ask them to friend me, because if they wanted to read my LJ then you’d think they would friend me anyway. And I don’t want to be on their friendslist with the knowledge that they’re not reading it.

I did think about having two LJs, one which had the people I’m reading friended and one with the people I would friend whether I want to read them or not. But I think that would confuse other people. And not be particularly helpful either.

In theory it shouldn’t be a problem because when I write a friends locked post I planned to copy it into my blog as a protected post, which anyone I allow can read it – and anyone that’s friended me that I haven’t friended back will certainly be allowed. As well as people without LJs.

It’s just that, well, I feel bad about not friending people back, mostly.

I have just added a few people to my friends list – mostly people from TR or names I’ve seen often in various places. Friend back, don’t friend back, I don’t mind. As far as I’m concerned, my LJ friends list is a copy of my RSS Feeds and is just a reading list.

I’m really disliking hayfever season. It’s not helped by spending last night in a Barn in a field that was open. I’m currently on medicine, nose spray, eye drops and the maximum dose of my inhaler, but for the past week I haven’t been able to lie around in bed after I wake up because I just can’t breathe. It does go away a bit during the day, to come back in the evening, but I’m really looking forward to the end of the hayfever season.

I’m really looking forward to Wimbledon now, after the taster that was the Stella Artois semis and finals this weekend. Especially today’s between Djokovic and Nadal, which was such a good match. The question is whether any of them can beat Federer, who won in Halle.

After having it on my rental list for months, Amazon have finally sent me the first DVD of Sapphire and Steel. I’ve had it for a week now and have so far watched none of it. All TV except Doctor Who has finished, but I keep not being in for that and then just don’t get round to putting the telly on.

I had such a long list of things to do this weekend that I wrote them down. Then got all the more urgent things done yesterday, but I still have to clean, spring clean, make bread and do some Rotaract stuff. Today I don’t seem to have managed much at all.

After the big, long post the other day about roleplaying, I have almost decided to drop Gene and Ian in favour of spending time on Harry & Jo and other non-rp things. Almost.

Although I haven’t started any of them yet, I am still taking fic requests. I am already feeling guilty about not thinking about them and refusing to let myself write anything else, so it’s sort of working.

It’s quite amusing really, how much I find LJ useless in many ways. They keep doing announcements with new features and I am yet to see a single one I’d use. In the case of editing comments I hate it because I keep getting multiple comment notifications, and since I’ve yet to see a difference in them, I only read the first (and original) one. Which means that anyone who’s taken the effort to edit their comment is totally lost on me.

Even if I had a paid account, I wouldn’t edit my comments, I’d delete them and paste them back in. Because that way no one else except those with notifications turned on can see that you’ve done anything. Notifications in LJ’s inbox (the link to which, incidentally, is handily hidden across the top) just say deleted, and gmail updates the comment so you only see the final thing. Much better all round, I reckon.

If I could just get OpenID working with my blog, then add in other plugins, no one would be commenting on my LJ because it would all link back here and be much more user friendly and spam-free. Although every time I write an entry now I think about how much I need to sort out my categories and tags, but it’ll have to wait till the Christmas holidays.

Last night was our Retro Birthday Party. We played Musical Chairs, Pass the Parcel, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Wink Murder and What’s the Time Mr Wolf? As well as having a paper aeroplane competition and a colouring competition. And proper party food including jelly and ice cream. I even made some blue jelly – it was entirely academic what flavour it was because it tasted of blue (as proved by my A Level Human Biology group – jelly tastes of the colour, not the flavour).

It was slightly nerve wracking, as always, with whether we had enough people and whether they’d take part and enjoy themselves or whether there was the right amount of food. But everyone said they enjoyed it, which is good.

I actually got round to putting some insoles into my roller skates this morning. They’re old, so the insoles in there are looking a bit tatty. I used to skate quite a bit when I was little, so I was expecting it to be easy. No. I did get the hang of it again by the time I’d been to Waitrose to the bottle bank and back. But some of the surfaces are really hard to skate on – lots of leaves and holes lead to nearly falling over. So I think that next time I’ll walk to the tennis courts and skate round them instead.

This evening I finally got round to sorting out my LJ friends list. Since I added a whole load of people recently, and I keep adding communities too, the people have been in three folders in RSS Bandit, as I don’t like them going off the bottom. So I took off anyone I wasn’t reading (and some by accident that I decided was fate and I couldn’t be bothered to put back), thereby reducing the number of people on the list from 105 to 72. I still need to play about a bit, I think, but that’s a distinct improvement.

Reading my RSS Feeds this last week there are some that make me think I am not on the same planet as most of the rest of the population, in that there are major dramas that have gone on that I didn’t think anything of at all.

Like, people avoiding LJ/the internet until they’d read Harry Potter. Whereas when I took a break from reading it I read my RSS Feeds. I just didn’t read the ones that had spoilers in them – I either marked them as read without reading, or left them unread to read until I’d read it.

And then people are running round like chickens with their heads cut off about LJ going down for an evening. I only noticed because I thought I wasn’t tired when I got in, so turned my computer on. By the time I got there I was, but it was fine before I went out and was fine in the morning. I’ve known websites down far longer than that. So why is one such a big deal? Do people not visit any other website? Do they not have real lives?

You know that thing where you read really good fanfic and then just can’t write any of your own because it can never be as good? I had that last night but with my own. I went and read an old one of mine (well, not that old) and apart from a few bits I thought I could have changed, I mostly didn’t think I could do any writing last night because how could I possibly write anything even vaguely that good again? So I had planned to do some beta’ing but I procrastinated and read something else of mine. Which was older and loads of bits that needed working on. So I went and wrote 2000 words before I got too tired and went to bed to listen to my neighbour’s TV.

In what can only be described as a minor miracle, I have fitted all my stuff into my suitcase. Although I realised later that I have packed my travel alarm clock somewhere. But it could be anywhere. So Saturday morning I will probably be getting up with the aid of a phone call from the hotel, unless it turns out to be somewhere easy to get to.

Watching Doctor Who and Confidential when I get back is going to be fun as I can’t tell what time they’ll be on three Saturdays from now, so I have taped them both for three hours. So I should definitely get them in there somewhere. But my fast forwarding options are 2x, 4x, 6x and skip 3 mins, 1 min, 30 secs. It would be so much easier if the BBC had started up their player then I needn’t have bothered taping anything.

This is my last post before I go – it is not too late to donate money though!

(it would be so nice if LJ would just accept this rather than making me go back and edit it before the crossposter works properly)

(oh, how much can that title be misconstrued?)

I got a comment spam on LJ and decided to forestall the inevitable. So if you want to comment now you need an LJ account and need to be logged into it. If you don’t have one, then you can comment on the blog as long as you can answer a simple maths question.

Having watched four First Doctor stories, I really like Ian. And I’ve discovered there’s a story where they go to the French Revolution, which I definitely have to see. My next amazon DVD is The Aztecs, which is apparently where Barbara is great, so I am looking forward to that.

I have also started posting Doctor Who: The Soap Opera: The Sequel (yes, it’s a sillier title than the original) on sarahjane_fic with a new chapter daily.

And a meme, stolen from a few people:
Name a character and I’ll tell you three (or more) facts about them from my own personal pseudo-canon.

I see LJ has gone back to the boring blue *sigh*. The pink was far better. And didn’t clash with the pink dalek. Although, I can now read the link to get to the message centre! It’s not hidden behind the menu links any more.

I’ve been good with on the writing front today. I wrote something for AU Harry for RS prompts for Alcohol if by write you mean torture, and I do.

Then I finally finished off the first draft of the first chapter of Doctor Who: The Soap Opera: The Sequel (aka a title with lots of colons). I kept worrying that I didn’t have enough plot and I wasn’t sure where to end it. Then I realised that the only reason I couldn’t see the ending was because I’d accidentally gone past it. Then I worked through my notes and fitted it into chapters and it came to 15. The Soap Opera was only 11, before SJA. So I think it’s fairly safe to say I have enough plot.

I actually have a weekend free for once! So I’m going to watch Lewis nearly-live (so I can skip the adverts), clean the house properly and not just the bits I can see, go shopping (on the bus), sort out my doorbell (upstairs’ wireless network (unsecured, incidentally but with too low a signal for me to use it much) is interfering with it), put up some posters maybe given that I’ve been here two months now, make some CDs, do my backing up, and copy some CDs. My computer has thrown a wobbler over the latter for no discernable reason, so I’ve brought my work laptop home to use instead. It’s a lot lighter than mine too.

Somewhere in there the remix assignments will come out, so I’ll be busy reading those, and catching up with my other reading. And I’m trying to see if I can have the first chapter of the soap sequel for hhertzof when she gets back on Sunday.

I scared myself earlier by the realisation that the weekend after this one is Redemption (I looked at the program earlier and I might need to clone myself, probably more than once, so I’m refusing to look at it too closely), then the weekend after that I’ve kept free for doing pre-America stuff because I’m going the Wednesday after that. How did that get so close so fast?

If you’re reading this on LJ because you found out I added you, it’s because I’ve been on a random friend-adding spree. So you’re probably on sarahjane_fic, posted to the DW friending meme, on relativespace, or you know Ann.

So add me back, or don’t add me back, I don’t mind and you don’t have to feel obligated.

(This is assuming LJ lets me post this since it’s decided to ban me. *kicks LJ*)

I keep forgetting to say that I’ve posted the latest chapter to my prebaby fic: Doctor Who: The Soap Opera, Chapter 2: Doing the Deed, in which Sarah dithers about whether to go through with the abortion and Harry is no help at all.

My pico project is now at 1359 words, which is pretty good, and my SG ficathon is on draft 2. It’s 2000 words and not likely to go longer than that. It doesn’t help that the characters don’t want to do what I want them to. I’m also trying to discover how risque I can go. At the moment it might just about be PG-13, so we’ll see.

I forgot to say that yesterday I popped into the charity shop and found someone has obviously been getting rid of their Chalet School books because another 50p got me two books, each of which are two books in one. So once I’ve read all the ones I have sitting around here I’ll have read the first fourteen. And I think Joey will have left by then, which is quite weird to think about.

If you’re reading this in LJ you’ll see I have a new default icon of Spooks, which fileg made for me. After this one’s been aired a bit I’ll change my default to the other Spooks one she made, which is just as fantastic.

I discovered how to get a screencap – take a photo. So, I can now prove Caroline John was in The Bill in 1985: Read more…

I’ve just discovered that LJ now has the Kubrick layout, which is pretty cool, although not quite as nice as the WP one. The new styles on LJ are annoying me though, because:

• you can’t change the text size on any of them, and most are too small, so I spend half my time on LJ pressing control+
• the 3 column variations of Expressive break in ie
• you can’t have parent and child categories

This weekend I might try and get to grips with widgets on WP, which I’ve been meaning to do since they released them.

This weekend’s been a bit mad. After not making it to a Rotaract dinner on Friday night because of work I was still going to have a Rotaract meeting on Saturday morning. Except that it was cancelled because the other person had to work!

This morning I was happy because I managed to sleep in till 9am. Which doesn’t sound like much but I did keep waking up at 8am and it was getting to 7am and earlier, even if I didn’t have to get up. I was still in bed when my driving instructor phoned to bring my lesson forward – so it was just as well I stayed late at work Friday instead of going in Sunday morning before my lesson.

Last night I changed my LJ to Plus on the basis that I can’t see any adverts. It took me a while originally to work out that it was because the Adblock extension was getting rid of them. So I looked at the new Expression layouts and they’re very nice. Apart from the breaking in IE part. And having to change everything with CSS rather than selecting options. Plus I decided when it comes to reading my friends list when I’m away then I like the one I have now just fine. And the tags list doesn’t work properly because I have parent and children categories and the only way to find anything by tags is to go to my WP blog and look that way. Not least because there are more posts and they’re all categorised.

I managed to spend £13 in a second hand bookshop where most of the books are 80p. It’s one of my driving challenges to drive to Hay-on-Wye and shop till I drop (the books). The boot of my car is TARDIS-like so I’ll be able to fit plenty in.

One of the books I bought was Sex Tips for Girls – written in 1983 and American. It’s written very much tongue-in-cheek but mostly I bought it because it fell open on the section on manners:
Read more…

OK, this is quite cool, although I have no idea what some of them are supposed to represent (and there are LJ-specific links in there so I had to fiddle so it would work).

Read more…