| Why you should vote for legomymalfoy in the LJ Elections |
[29 May 2008|04:57pm] |
Short story: If you don't want ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jameth to win the LJ Elections, you should vote for legomymalfoy for your FIRST CHOICE, regardless of who else you vote for.
This is why I don't want jameth on the LJ board. Also this.
Why You Need to Vote, aka How an Instant Runoff Works
I should have posted this yesterday, but there were zillions of... never mind. Also, someone may have said this already. Probably has. I have not been able to keep up with fandom news to any reasonable extent for a couple of weeks now. Please bear with me if I repeat someone else.
That said...
5 hours left, folks. 5 hours to, at the very least, keep the jerks from winning. If you're a cynic who votes against, this is your day. Seize it.
Do not get complacent. Instant runoffs are tricky things, and the way the numbers are running right now, jameth may still win. Here's why:
If no candidate has more than 50% of the first-choice vote, an Instant Runoff is initiated. In an instant runoff, 50% of the vote is needed to win. The first person to reach 50% gets the spot, no matter what the field looked like before or after that point. If no one has 50% when the vote closes, candidates are eliminated and second (and third) choice votes are brought into play.
Candidates are eliminated by lowest votes first. This means that, right now, primitivepeople would go first, followed by twirlandswirl. As each candidate is struck, the folks who voted for that person have their second choice votes activated, then third choices, etc. Thus, the reason many minor candidates are starting to endorse bigger candidates - the bigger candidate can be the second choice, and will eventually claim the actual vote.
Problem: legomymalfoy is way ahead in the 1st choice, but jameth is far and away the leader (after rm) in the 2nd choice category. Problem: most of rm's supporters for 2nd place already chose legomymalfoy for 1st. Those votes will never get to rm; (s)he will be eliminated before that happens.
Frankly, I don't think we'll even get to that point. rm's in a distant 3rd place with 10% of the vote. Someone will almost certainly win long before elimination gets to that point. legomymalfoy cannot count on 2nd choice votes for this election. Even vichan may not be eliminated before a winner is chosen; currently, (s)he is in 4th place, if only by a handful of votes.
I know this sounds callous, guys, but the fact that we're throwing our weight (considerable as it is) behind 4 candidates (I count 5th place squeaky19 as a fandom candidate) means we're diluting our power. We are, in fact, sabotaging ourselves. The very popularity of our multiple candidates means they'll be eliminated last; their votes may not even get to the point of counting before jameth takes that crucial 50%.
What you need to do: If you voted 1st choice for rm, vichan, or squeaky19, please go back and change your vote. I know it sounds awful, but only about 800-1000 people need to do it to put this one in the bag. By all means, put these guys on your ballot somewhere; they deserve it. But make it 2nd or 3rd choice, not first.
When the choice is between someone I like not quite as much as someone else and, say, a person who has allowed and engaged in disturbing campaign practices and malignment of my community as a whole, I'm surprisingly okay with voting by the numbers.
5 hours left.
(Reposted from briar_pipe.)
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[29 Sep 2007|01:39pm] |
Tea Invitation
by Ibtisam Barakat
I write
for my heart
has become
a country
and I want
all people
to live in it.
I make space
by emptying
all corners
of fear.
I make peace
by making
a cup of tea
for my story
and yours.
A cup of tea
for our estranged
histories
that come from
one family
but to one another
do not speak.
Hot tea and mint.
I have meant
to invite you over
to my heart.
Do you like your tea
with sugar?
I miss having people over to play, as when I was a kid. Adults have each other over for dinner or "to talk" or "to hang out" (or to play video games, and I've never really been into video games.) Not that any of that is bad, per se, but additionally I would like to play. Do things that have no point, just for fun. Just to entertain ourselves.
It's Saturday. It's beautiful outside. Want to play?
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[29 Aug 2007|11:46am] |
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I like crazy tangles. I like making them. I like cleaning them up. But I don't like cleaning up the ones I make.
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| New Orleans report (1/16/07) |
[22 Jan 2007|09:44am] |
Hey y'all,
I'm writing to you from New Orleans. This is the end of my second week in the Crescent City and before that we were in Long Beach, Mississippi at Camp Coast Care (an Episcopalian volunteer camp.) I'm down here with a group of six other people, all of us from Marlboro College. The past couple weeks, our group has been split between Habitat for Humanity's Camp Hope site and the Common Ground Collective, but on Friday the ones who were at Camp Hope moved over to Common Ground. Habitat has been phasing out gutting recently and mostly works on building houses, whereas Common Ground does a lot of gutting (though they now have less than 100 homes left on their gutting list and are in the process of figuring out what to focus on now.) While we were at Habitat, we worked on the Musician's Village, a project building a neighborhood of Habitat homes for musicians and others in the Upper Ninth Ward. I ended up spending quite a bit of time at Common Ground as well though, including writing an article about a local book collective for their newspaper. We finally decided to move over here, and we'll probably be doing gutting for the rest of the week before we drive back to Marlboro. The work at Camp Coast Care was similar to Habitat - most (but definitely not all) of the clean-up is done and they're building houses. We were there over Christmas so we helped out with their presents-for-kids distribution project and had Christmas dinner at a trailer park where refugees from Waveland, Mississippi live.
Both at Habitat and Common Ground, we've heard some about what's been happening here. ( Read more... )
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[25 Nov 2006|07:04pm] |
Hello... it's been a good long time, hasn't it? I'm alive and at home in Vermont. I picked up a cold somewhere and I've been feeling crummy and sleeping lots. It's beautiful up here, I think it's the nicest stretch of weather we've had all month. No snow. I believe it's the end of hunting season - I saw about 10 hunters today (one group impudently parked in my driveway, but it turned out to be neighbors, so I told 'em it was cool.)
I don't have much to say really. I had a dream the other day about a man killing another man who was somewhat feminine and was wearing an orange scarf. He was trying to get him to do somthing and the man wouldn't cooperate, so he started beating him. And then the man's friends came later and the man who murdered him was talking to them and didn't want to say anything, but feeling very guilty. For once, I wasn't *actually* the murderer (I've had four or five dreams where I kill someone) but I sometimes was identifying with him and sometimes just watching the scene. Possibly I've been watching too many cop shows (well, only one actually - "due South." I think Canadian/American = my OTP.)
Then last night, I dreamed that it was there were two days of the semester left and I still had all my work to do because I'd been working on some other project all the time. That was a bit nerve-wracking b/c I am indeed behind on my work. But not (yet) that much!
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[21 Oct 2006|09:06pm] |
I am in a state of mmm'ing and beeping!
Also, I checked it out today and my chest looks smaller than it has recently. Pretty exciting.
Must go now and come to terms with a toothbrush. Adieu.
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| things... |
[08 Jun 2006|12:14am] |
I got to go to a nanotech lab today. At this particular lab, they're doing experiments to measure the toxicity of nanoparticles of cadmium/selenium. The smaller the nanoparticles, the greater the surface area ratio, and therefore the (sometimes) more toxic. So, they measure the toxicity by adding the metal nanoparticles to the agar on which they grow bacteria (they also test the toxicity of non-nano cadmium and selenium, which are also very toxic.) These nano-particles fluoresce, which is useful because it allows them to look at what parts of the cell the particles are getting into, and whether they're forming "aggregates" (meaning clumps, I think.) It was fascinating and now I need to go read about "quantum dots."
I also bought a ton of books online today. And because I like making lists...
True Selves : Understanding Transsexualism--For Families, Friends, Coworkers...
The Transsexual's Survival Guide II: To Transition & Beyond for Family, Friends, & Employers - for my grandmother and other family...
Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Fourth Edition - the textbook for the course I'm taking this summer
Radio Drama by Tim Crook for PLAN!!
Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook by Raven Kaldera
The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage not for me actually... and not like that either! it looks very pretty though. :-)
SSOTBME Revised - An Essay on Magic - because i needed $9 more to get free shipping and it apparently is "the best book to give to people if you want them to think you are smart and goofy, as opossed[sic] to stupid and psychotic" - and also perhaps a good thing to wave at people when they ask you about how you reconcile magick and science. So I may be waving it around a lot in the fall.
I'm getting thrown off the internet. More later!
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| going crazy, going crazy... |
[02 May 2006|03:50pm] |
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mood |
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 guilty |
] |
The stress is coming, I can feel it creeping up my spine, shortening my breaths.
I wish the people I need to email/call me back, would. I'm going nuts.
I have a performance this week, two exams next monday, a paper due asap, and a story to write for a ficathon. Oh, and a one-pager on the dance performance. The story is actually stressing me out more than anything. Wow, some random story is somehow more important to me than whether I do well in molecular biology? Hmm. But, of course, instead, I've been obsessing over website design. Highlight of the weekend was going to see the Tranny Road Show. I felt unreasonably uncomfortable though.
I haven't been this stressed out since... the end of last semester? I think.
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| LJ gets ads!!! |
[20 Apr 2006|12:19am] |
Wow, so this is interesting. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go look at the front page or read this. More background here from the founder.
Verry interesting... I don't know quite what to think. On the one hand, getting the benefits without shelling out $20 a year sounds pretty sweet. On the other... yuck, ads. I decided to test out the new Sponsored+ level. They look basically just like the Gmail text ads... I didn't see any pictures, on my journal at least. (ETA: There are banner ads at the bottom of profile pages.) The ads that showed up on my journal were for Creative Writing classes, Harry Potter paraphenalia, and food(!). So, probably all drawn from my interests list. I thought maybe they were screwing up my layout, but it actually looks like it's okay.
Actually, what concerns me more is all the drama that is likely going to come from this. azurelunatic has kindly written up a summary of some of the discussions so far. It's pretty amusing actually. Especially the part about the poll that found that the general response of LJ to the new policy is "PIKACHU!" Humor wins the day again. :-)
I can see that it's a pretty complex issue. Brad's post makes it sound like they're trying to extend the cool features to more people who maybe can't pay for them, on an opt-in/opt-out basis. Cool. Nice and egalitarian. But it does undercut the people with paid accounts, and it's not totally opt-out for free account-ers, either. So that's shitty. I really don't like the way it sets up a conflict-waiting-to-happen between sponsored+ users and free/opt-out users and paid account users.
I guess it comes back to that old question of, is this a community or a business? In point of fact, it's both and that makes it tricky.
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| injustice and torture at Guatanamo Bay -- listen to the show |
[16 Mar 2006|11:58am] |
Go listen to this.
Last week, This American Life did a report on the Guantanamo Bay prison and the US government's refusal to allow the prisoners - supposed terrorists - the protection of either the Geneva Conventions or Habeas Corpus (simply the obligation of the government to explain why a prisoner is being held.) It's really worth listening - it's like a page out of Catch-22, only worse. There's one prisoner who was arrested because he knew a man who was a suicide bomber - only the supposed suicide bomber is currently living, in Germany. The charges against prisoners are not even open to them, so when they have their "hearings" - in which they are not allowed actual lawyers, only "representatives" - they have no idea what they're defending against. Listen to the show and tell other people about it.
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| you know you're too tired when... |
[21 Feb 2006|09:10am] |
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Wow. So I'm going to take it that my showing up nine minutes late and ONE HOUR EARLY for my first class means I'm sleep-deprived. Though I knew that already... Okay, now going in search of fluid (my mouth tastes like death) and caffeine.
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| me=happy |
[01 Feb 2006|12:12pm] |
I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT TO SEE THE ENDOCRINOLOGIST IN APRIL!!!
endocrinologist=the doctor who giveth the testosterone.
APRIL!!!!!!!
HORMONES!!!!!!
SPRING=HORMONES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i am admittedly a bit giddy at the prospect of sticking needles full of manliness into my thighs.
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[31 Jan 2006|08:46pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 rejuvenated |
] |
| [ |
music |
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violent femmes - johnny |
] |
i have mastered the art of S1 customization. well, except for merging GlOBAL_HEADs and stuff. but, yay, shiny pretty links! RAWK.
If you stand on tiptoe, you'll be unsteady.
If you run with long strides you can't keep it up.
If you show off, no one will be impressed.
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| bruised and gleeful |
[25 Jan 2006|02:39pm] |
i am bruised EVERYWHERE... everywhere being my entire lower back, my right hip, my shoulders, and the *insides of my knees* (that's just weird!) from break-dancing last night, which was sweet! and now i get to brag about all my nasty bruises and sit/lie down gingerly... these are gonna hurt for a while.
i'm working on a new year's family card type thing for my mom. starting to get better with the "unsharp mask" feature down. i keep switching back and forth between photoshop (it's on some computers at school) and the GIMP, which i actually know somewhat how to use.
and i'm trying to make up a list of books to ILL and possibly use in a tutorial. i'm looking for interesting books on:
biochemistry
biogenesis (theories on the origins of life)
quantum dynamics
endocrinology (hormones)
gender
theater
acting and directing
science fiction
radio theater
cybernetics
and particularly connections/overlaps between any of the above (e.g. science fiction radio theater, gender and endocrinology, theater and science, biochemistry and cybernetics, etc.) any suggestions?
[re-edited for accuracy]
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| louder and funnier |
[22 Jan 2006|10:12pm] |
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music |
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daphne descends |
] |
i heard these awesome tuvan throat singers last night. the last two songs had me completely blissed-out with happiness. there was one guy who was introducing the songs and at the end of a song, he'd say "thank you, thank you very much," in this deep, elvis-like voice. my roommate and i were just discussing this and i decided that elvis (who obviously didn't die) went to tuva to learn throat singing and this guy is his son! obviously.
also, some random 'net slang defined:
"w00t" was originally an trunicated expression common among players of Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game for "Wow, loot!" Thus the term passed into the net-culture where it thrived in video game communities and lost its original meaning and is used simply as a term of excitement.
from the urban dictionary
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