(cross-posted to hard_of_hearing)

So I rented the movie Up off of Netflix. Came in the day it was released in stores. Stick the disc into my player...

No closed captions.

Flick through the subtitle menu on the DVD player...

No subtitles either.

Apparently, as I'm gathering from some Twitter searches, Disney (who handles the distribution of Pixar's movies) released a special bare-bones version of the DVD to major rental businesses— Netflix, Redbox, and Blockbuster are all confirmed— that not only lacks the bonus shorts from the retail DVD, but even lacks the closed-captioning. Which is, y'know, half the reason I rented the DVD in the first place rather than going to see it at the dollar theater.

FAIL, Disney. EPIC FAIL.

I'm going to be checking to see if my local indie rental store has a retail copy of the DVD; I've got confirmation that that version, at least, is captioned.

Seriously, Disney? What were you thinking?!

Watching a guildmate finish up the Drakuru quests and the part when Lich King shows up I have a geek moment.

Me: GET HIM!
Hubby: ....e.e
Me: *after a moment* That was your plan, Ray? 'Get him'?

I now have to do this when we fight his Whineness for realz.

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

- Oscar Wilde, Irish writer

Going from this: To this:
Made in Photoshop
Translateable?: Nope
PSD: Yes :)

Here @ pinky_place

I first heard about this book series on PI due to the endless posts about it in the Friends and RP forums. The annoyance that so many people would post about this was tempered by the fact that I refuse to judge a series before I actually read it. (For example, Twilight, which I actually half-enjoyed. SHH.)

My pre-conceived notions were that so many kids read these books because they contained cats. Cats that talk.

Which is fine. I often consider myself as being at the borders of the 'furry fandom,' since I enjoy the artwork and the like. It's why I had some interest in the book in the first place, actually. That, and the fact that the author's name was Erin. I came to find, though, that the author's name is not actually Erin. But I will get into that in a little while. The point is that I ended up purchasing the first and second books. The first just to read it, and the second, just in case I liked the first.

The story behind this series is a lot like the story behind Pokemon. Cats get together and fight for no reason at all. To summarize the first book, 'Rusty,' a pet cat with a good life, longs for the forest. And, as luck would have it, the forest longs for him, too. ThunderClan, which is a clan of cats that sounds as if it has really bad gas issues, wants him in their ranks. This is despite the fact that it is unprecedented - in fact, it's never been done before - to accept a pet cat into the clan. Rather than do the logical thing and refer to these pet cats as pet cats, they are referred to as kittypets throughout the book, as if this is some sort of insult.

( Read More! )

Title: Wand and Dagger
Author: batsutousai
Beta: tsuki_no_suzu
Rating: PG-13?
Pairings: undecided, but most likely some form of SLASH
Warnings: OCs, OoC
Summary: The war is coming too quickly for comfort and Harry wonders if it isn't time for him to find a school that will actually teach him what he needs to learn to defeat Voldemort.

Disclaim Her: I wonder if it would be cheating to count this chapter as part of my NaNo word count?


( Chapter Five - The Patronus )

Previous Chapter: Socialising
Next Chapter:

I'm listening to an audio book of "Drawing Lessons", by Tracy Mack. Some time in the long distant past I'm sure I read the book - I don't remember when, but a lot of the story rings bells for me.

But right now, the odd part isn't that I only half remember the story, from a long time ago. The odd part is that the main character is Rory, and her friend is dating a guy called Dean.

It also reminds me more than a little of Donna Jo Napoli's "Changing Tunes".

Gilmore Girls, anyone?

So, got Bolvar dropped off in Odenton to be picked up for cremation. I have Lennier's urn still in his box right in front of me...going to be weird sliding Bolvar's next to him. Esp. considering I /got/ Bolvar to get me out of a rut when /Lennier/ died.

I might call them back and ask how much the roman urns are, lol. Transfer all the kitties to little metal boxes.

Last night was rough. I got comfortable, then heard the jingling of kitty collar bells. Without thinking too much, I sat up and started patting the bed. Just as I was about to start calling out his name, it dawned on me what I was doing. See, Bolvar /always/ followed me to bed and would curl up at my head or on my neck and sleep with me. If I didn't beckon him on my own, he'd usually come into bed within 5-10 minutes of my getting into bed. Ended up breaking down so badly I woke Jon up from a dead sleep. Feel bad about that.

Thought about getting an autopsy done, because I really can't fathom why a barely year old cat would go hide himself away and die, but our pocket really can't afford the fact it'd have to be up front (the Cremation people send an invoice so it's easier for us to do that). All I can think of is he had a defect and just didn't show any signs of it until it was too late. IDK. I miss my kitty.

And none of the others are 'pick up and cuddle' cats. Curse them. e.e

Hey guys! Want some new icons of Strong Bad? 'Cause I made a bunch for my recent icon post.

Teasers:

001	002	003

You can find the rest HERE @ hyperpiggieicon. Hope you like them!

Is anyone here from or around Eugene?

How is the Deaf community out there?

I'm thinking about applying to grad school at University of Oregon and was wondering about interpreters and other good info

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

(Sometime after hoping that someone will roll a seven in Catan so that fox has to lose half her cards, for I which I was told a cat would be tossed on my face at night when it came true. Come back to IRC to find people discussing Dragon Age.)

[22:28] <Link> and my character in this playthrough is chick
[22:28] <Animal> leniana is, you can get her into a four way it seems.
[22:28] <Link> Peroruru: no, she literally won't be a lesbian/bi
[22:28] <Link> the only woman that won't be apparently
[22:28] <Peroruru> i thought everyone in the game was bi
[22:28] <Link> everyone except morrigan
[22:29] <@seawaffle> morrigan would be the one i would expect to be
[22:28] <Peroruru> i thought everyone in the game was bi
[22:29] <@seawaffle> morrigan would be the one i would expect to be
[22:29] <Peroruru> i wonder why they have the bi/gay stuff in DA but not ME
[22:29] <@seawaffle> i always hate romance options in games, they're always terrible
[22:30] <Peroruru> waffo's romance options irl and in games always falls through
[22:30] <Link> seawaffle: well yeah, it's tacked on in Bioware games
[22:30] <Link> nah, Bioware romance is boring
[22:30] <bringerofcats> waffo cheating on foxatee with a computer character
[22:30] <foxatee> ...
[22:31] <@dreamshade> hey, what can waffo do
[22:31] <@dreamshade> the computer character is level 23, but his wife is only level 14
[22:31] <foxatee> a wet cat on you, dean
[22:31] <@dreamshade> :D

So, realizing I hadn't seen Bolvar in about a day, lead to searching all ove rthe house.

This time, there's not a happy ending.

I don't know why, he wasn't showing any real signs of being sick or anyhthing, but we found him up in the boy's bottom bunk dead.

He was barely a year old.

Let me say a good thing about Champions Online - it doesn't take long for the character to feel like "yours." When you play WoW, and you say, "I'm gonna be one of those protection paladins that can take on big groups at once," you really can't even pretend to be that kind of a guy until around level 30. When I play CO and I say, "I wanna play a punch/kick kinda guy but with ki powers that strike multiple targets," well, by level 10, I have punch/kick stuff, I have an electric storm that I can fire up to kill everything around me, and I have little psi dots that I can shoot out at everybody. So I feel less like I'm grinding up to something cool later and more like I'm doing something cool right now.

Let me say a bad thing about Champions Online - the re-spec ability kinda sucks. The idea is that you have an "undo" button, where you pay 5s to remove the last ability you took, then 7s for the one before that, then 10s for the one before that. Which is nice if there's just one thing you want to redo from recent stuff, but if you actually want to redo something you took early on, there's a very good chance you can't afford to spend money on each separate ability on a rising scale. So at level 10, rather than messing around just trying things out, I'm reading CO forums trying to find out what abilities are decent to have late game because I get the sense that if I take something bad at early levels then I'll never get rid of it.

Also, any new MMO that gets created has to give you the option to skip right to level 5 if you're tired of playing tutorial areas, like CO does. And any new MMO must have Super Jumping, which is the most wonderful travel power ever.


Watching the Encore Network at the plasma clinic is usually an exercise in terrible cinema to begin with, but today they had Rambo III on. Since you may be like me and have no idea what this movie was like, it turned out to involve Rambo invading Afghanistan during the days of Russian invasion. The ending scene of which has a hundred AK-wielding Afghanis on horseback charging in to rescue Rambo from a battalion of Russian tanks and firepower. A terrible movie that portrayed those backwater "holy warriors" as honorable freedom fighters being spurred to victory by a white man with ripping pecs and a heavy burden, as the only one could charge in to save them, except viewing that in the context of the current Afghanistan conflict. Ugh.


Woman writes a blog article criticizing "Men's Rights" groups as basically enablers of domestic violence. Members of men's rights groups raid the comments and don't do a good job of making men look better in the process. Marriage is a fucked-up thing.


For fans of the Heavy selling Kaboom that was posted earlier, don't miss the Scout selling the Slap Chop.

New character - I don't know if the player is new, but they're over at WH - be nice if folks who can travel, do travel, and RP with her.
( Here )

Dear stabbing, horrific pain behind my left eye:

Please go away.

Love,
Management

Did not get enough sleep, but because of the above when mom and Evie decided ten am was good for me to be awake by, proved unable to fall back to sleep and ignore them. Taking painkillers, ingesting caffeine, scheduling nap for later, for sure.

• 02:28 Dear universe: fairly sure I just had creepy anonymous phone sex with a stranger, assuming it was on of my friends having me on, #
• 02:29 Now I feel gross and kind of violated. There is not enough hot water in the world. #
• 02:31 Ps: I am very bad at it. I giggle because it is absurd. STILL. OMG. AUGH. #
• 02:33 Never answering a private number call again. #
• 02:41 ... I am sure there is something worse than this feeling. Will let you know if I find it. This is the icing on today's cupcake of fail. #

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This picture says two things to me. First, it says that there is a depressed lady out there who is way more talented with her art than she lets on. The details on this thing are fantastic. The second thing it says is that I should maybe not send gifts to people which could show up in the hands of a nightmare-inducing elf smiling at me from the back of the thank-you note. o_0

Yesterday:

09:45 On train between Birmingham and Cardiff, just went past the Bourneville factory. Mmm, chocolate.

10:08 It isn't easy to take a photo of a polar-bear-shaped cloud from a moving train.

10:52 In Wales, just gone under the Severn bridge. Sang the national anthem in my head.

10:52 And oh look, it's raining in Wales.

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When all else fails ( go with psychic ninjas )

• 06:08 @queenofzan I seem to be having the SAME PROBLEM i don't even know. #

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What is up with really strange slogans lately? Colon Cancer Canada: We're Behind Your Behind.

Seriously?!

Title: The Creators
Author: batsutousai
Beta: The amazing, the beautiful, tsuki_no_suzu!
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Susan/Neville, Draco/Ron, Hermione/Bill, Harry/NO ONE, DAMNIT!
Warnings: Mentions of child-abuse, anti-Muggle sentiments, mentions of murder and rape, anti-Dumbledore
Summary: 'When their Creators return, their world shall be remade.' Four children hold the fate of the Wizarding World in their un-tried hands.

Disclaim Her: So, the only problem with the kids solving these problems so quickly, is that there's nothing else for them to do during the rest of the year.

A/N: There were a number of questions about Tom being unable to kill Harry. YES, Tom can hurt him, even going so far as to bring him near to death, but the ritual Sal did keeps Harry from dying from any wounds dealt to him by an Heir. (So, if Tom were to wound Harry enough that he would die from one more hit, and someone that isn't Tom were to deliver that hit, Harry would die.)
Also, just because he CAN'T die, doesn't mean he wants to get hit with any curses; Harry's not a masochist. And surviving the Killing Curse hurts.


( Fallen Star )

Previous Chapter: Tomorrow Will Come
Next Chapter: A Dream Comes True When It Will

Anyone hear about T-Mobile going down? I hope Microsoft will find another service provider for the sidekicks.

Title: Broken
Author: batsutousai
Beta: tsuki_no_suzu & magickmaker17
Rating: T
Pairings: HPLV, others
Warnings: Dumbledore bashing
Summary: Dumbledore knew before Harry Potter came to Hogwarts what he needed the boy to do, and he knew exactly how to make him do it. A twist on the normal manipulative!Dumbledore story.

Disclaim Her: Hmmmm... Kinda forgot about this yesterday. Sorry.


( Chapter Six - The Light )

Previous Chapter: The Wedding
Next Chapter: The Dark