Fire in the Hole

Eurovision Song Contest, same procedure as every year. And... I don't get it. Why Sweden? Why? What was so special or great about that song that it won? I can't even remember the melody or lyrics and only barely the title ("Euphoria"... and I don't really get that, either. There was nothing euphoric about it, that much I remember...). What. I don't even. What?

Iceland, I would have understood. Their song wasn't such a bombshell as last year (I still can't stop listening to that song) but after one or two times of listening to it it had a lot of appeal and was certainly more special than Sweden. Also, it sounded a lot like Runrig. Maybe that helped, too...

Turkey, I would have understood, too and I would have loved that. There was so much joy in that song and you could see that the guy singing it had a lot of fun. It was so great just watching him and listening to him sing that song.

Russia, oh Russia. Your babushki... wouldn't that have been cool? Wouldn't it have been great if six grannies from Russia won the biggest entertainment event worldwide? I mean... that would have been almost greater than Lordy winning in their year. Maybe even greater than Lordy.

Cyprus, hell, even that would have been better than Sweden. I actually recognized that song, unlike the Swedish song. Can anyone of you remember the Swedish melody here? Because, as mentioned above, I can't for the life of me.

Ourselves, of course... even that was better. Actually, Roman Lob gave a hell of a performance and eighth place is to be respected as a very good result. He gave everything and he got rewarded for it and uh... I'd like to thank all countries that awarded him points :D

Anyway, the two countries I would have liked to win didn't even make it to the finals. Either Latvia (their song was the most meta song I ever heard, in a way... I mean, it's a song for the Eurovision Song Contest about a song for the Eurovision Song Contest...) or the Netherlands (because a girl with a guitar and in Native American dressup never sounded so good, and I'm sure the Native American getup had some meaning... oh, well, actually, I know the meaning of it. Huh.), that would have been awesome because both were songs with character and just a little... extra something. Which is why I'll embed both videos under the cut.

( Two REALLY good ESC songs )

Or how I got around reading Twilight and was punished for it, after all. Yes, I finally finished Mocking Jay.

Okay, okay, before we go on: this is going to be riddled with spoilers for The Hunger Games and lot of bad language. If you want to stay away from either of them, this is not the post you're looking for *waves you along

For everyone else... let's jump right in.

( First book rant in forever. )

PS.: On the plus side, heitidei found a cinema in Berlin that shows The Avengers in 2D! Yay heitidei!

The office of German Bundespräsident (President) is not half as powerful as that of the American, French or Russian President. It's mostly a ceremonial office and laws have to be signed by the President to become valid. I have only ever heard of exactly one President who refused to sign a law until it was changed (Horst Köhler, if I remember it correctly. Input, anyone?) so that's mostly ceremonial, too.

( You, sir, are Not My President, and this is why. )

Let's do this, guys. Let's tell the EU Parliament what we think about making ISPs the democratically non-legitimated police and judges of the interwebs rolled into one. Let's tell them how much our freedom of speech matters to us and what we think about denying developing countries affordable medication (because yes, that's part of ACTA, too). Let's sign those:

Just say no to ACTA campaign by access

ACTA petition by AVAAZ.org

Let's tell them how sick we are of old white men who print out their e-mails trying to reign the internet.

Okay. I think the LJ people really lost it now. Apparently, according to this article, us longtime users are worth shit to LJ. They don't care about us, the people who've been paying their goddamn salaries with our fucking money for years and years because... I don't even know why. Why are we of no interest to you, LJ people? Whatever did we do? Whose asinine idea was it to actually say that out loud and then fucking share that article proudly to all your now seriously pissed off longterm users? I can't believe anyone would be so dumb as to do any of that, and here you are doing all of it.

So, how about we all tell theljstaff what we think about their big coup here? Let's give them a reminder that we are actually capable of reading and understanding when someone is trying to bullshit us (or, as in LJ's case, being a goddamn idiot openly). They said they like freedom of speech. Let's give 'em a piece of that.

And now I'll go back to channel my ever growing aggressiveness towards LJ into writing Brad Colbert and Laura Cadman. Thank God for Generation Kill and SGA.

WHAT THE FUCKING HELL HAPPENED AT DELICIOUS? All the tag bundles are gone and all my carefully organized tags are in disarray and I don't even see all of them anymore and I think I'm going to cry now. Can we please start a "Give us back the old delicious!" campaign. Because I want it back. I WANT IT BACK SO HARD!

You know, I was so happy to get my new Dell. So very, very happy. Because it meant I could finally continue writing the big bang story. I happily started installing my standard stuff and transferring data back from the NAS and started writing again and all that... but something struck me as odd when listening to music. It seemed as if something volume was fluctuating. And then suddenly I got some crackling and I thought "Shit, hardware failure."

Then I tried a youtube video and everything was fine. Went back to the mediaplayer who started refusing to play any files. Okay, downloaded different mediaplayer, same issue. Tranferred music files to the NAS, tried to play them, got the same issue. Tried to play music filed from a DVD, got the same issue. So I was all "Damn, media player is missing some codecs. How do I get the right codecs?"

Then I started listening to music on last.fm and guess what just happened? Exactly. The left speaker lost volume again suddenly and the fluctuating started again and I think I might start to cry now. I just want a working computer, goddammit and I believe I will not be able to account for anything if they tell me to set up my system again when I call the support hotline tomorrow. I think I'll just tell them I did that and be fucking done with it. WHAT'S SO HARD ABOUT SENDING ME A WORKING LAPTOP YOU IDIOTS GODDAMMIT!

Today, I had a quite frankly frightening and most of all aggravating conversation with a friend, ancient_leah, about writing and reviews. To get it right from the beginning, it wasn't leah who was aggravating me, it was the fact that apparently, good authors like her get so little appreciation in German fandom that they (or in that case, her) are seriously contemplating to go on hiatus and consider to simply stop publishing and maybe even writing.


( This is me and my White Knight complex calling out to you... )

PS: Is it just me or did LJ really change the layout of the WYSIWYG menu? And where were all the extra breaks coming from suddenly? *iz confused

Ha! 12,555 words which means I'm now at seven finished chapters and that I've written a little over the half of the required word count for het_bigbang. I honestly didn't even think I'd get this far so phew, maybe this is actually doable. If I stop pushing my word count for other stories and start actually churning out words and words and words for the Big Bang. But, me being me, I just discovered another issue that I keep having with the story. I start to get the ugly feeling that Evan Lorne is way, way, way OOC in this one and I'm starting to panic again and can please someone have a look at it? Not beta it, just look it over, see if he strikes them as OOC and if they can find what's actually causing that anxiety over him being OOC. Someone? Please?Anyone? PLEASE?

*runs around in panicked circles like a headless chicken

So.

Now that we all made our (justified) anger known... there's an apology from shahar81 and I thought it would only be fair to translate it as well maybe without comment, since, if I'm not mistaken, some of the commenters were English speaking.

( I really TRIED not to comment on it, I SWEAR! )

On a side note: arielen posted an older article (she said it's from1998) on sexual orientation in fantasy that's a little outdated but still well worth reading, seeing as it's well-phrased and logical. Unfortunately, it's in German and a trifle too long to translate (but take it from me, it really is much more logical than... that other thing). Sorry, guys :S