DeathBoy - They Keep On Coming

did not expect them
and still they came
hit the dancefloor running
barely got away

never look behind you
wasting moments while they gain
get inside and slam the door
try to tranquilise the pain

you'll realise that you're undone
with demons having all the fun
there are monsters grinning outwards from
the space behind your eyes

Impossible, now, to console
Tell yourself you're in control
the dissonance demands
a very special sacrifice

I really do not give
a single mother-loving fuck
if you approve or disapprove
well, I've got something you can suck

And now there's only just one drug
that's still effective to me
and I've got only one vein left
remaining open to receive

Once more unto the bleach, dear friends
Shave your head and make amends
A little makeup, we can shake-up
Tell your dealer to hit me hard

We've rode the comedown to the end
we've seen more life than you can comprehend
Hold your fucking head up high
Tonight, baby, we're all superstars

When the beasts are getting close
and they're scratching at the door
you stop and lick your wounds
I tell them "give me fucking more"

They call us "out of control"
but we were never more alive
they break a fingernail
Use ours to hold onto our lives

Once more unto the bleach, dear friends
Shave your head and make amends
A little makeup, we can shake-up
Tell your dealer to hit me hard

We've rode the comedown to the end
we've seen more life than you can comprehend
Hold your fucking head up high
Tonight, baby, we're all superstars

There's no point in running
'cos the demons keep on coming
hand-grenades and heart-attacks
they've got their hooks inside your back

When your vision fills with cracks
when you wake up, it's all black
you know there is no going back
and all the future's broken glass

We can get there if we try
Bleeding, glistening and blind
and if we fall and if we fail
I'd sooner fight than fucking die

Today, I shall mostly be rocking my "bedraggled wolverine" look.

oh yeah. the mess behind me is what the weather's done to our garden and gazebo.

My hair was a minor casualty.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

I'm about to go out, take Corben out for a kick around the park (whether it's me, him or the ball that gets mostly kicked is as yet undecided) and say "bollocks" to dieting for a little bit and buy me and Corben some ice-cream.

I shall then spend the afternoon watching Blue's Clues, which is some of the best TV in the entire universe, and when corben goes, listen to lots of comedy while getting my dayjob sorted.

Thankyou and sorry to lots of people for being worried about me.

To anyone who would criticise or chastise me: I have the equivalent of a part time job with my nipper and a high-pressure, intellectually exhausting main job, neither of which I can, or do shirk.

If you see me spack out, drunk at 5am it's because I get up at 8am, look after the bairn till 3pm, get some food, start my dayjob at 4pm, then invariably have to work until 10pm (or, as it was yesterday, 11:30pm). Then, I get to choose between doing something for MYSELF or sleep.

And yes, I drink, yes, this is often counter-productive, and yes, I work on that.

There are only so many things a person can keep together and I'm stretched too far, with very little support, so from time to time, I fall to pieces. The worst this invariably gets is my having a drink and getting fucking angry or upset about things on the interwebs. Boo hoo.

I think that's a perfectly rational response to a frankly unreasonable universe. I have a lot on my plate, I deal as best I can and most of the time I win but sometimes I do not.

On that note, it's very much time for ice-cream, because today needs turning round.

hello universe.

no, i'm not dead.

nor has my attitude changed, but i'm remarkably resilient to nihilism.

should get that tattoed on my balls, actually.

anyways.

you don't have to phone the morgue, i'm still abusing livestock.

xx

end of line.

Born from my recent interaction with humans that I hoped to adore and who, typically have many more things to do each day than me, I have returned to a very singular opnion of the world.

There is no point in being here.

In the short term, I'm going to think about whether or not it's more morally correct to leave Corben alone, to avoid exposing him to my own massively toxic mind-set, to genuinely attempt to kill everyone I've ever met, or to continue to be a drone-creature/wage-slave.

I think he'll survive, and I genuinely see nothing worth holding onto in life.

That'll fucking learn you.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

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.

The Dude would be spinning in his grave...

[via make]

The bookings diary looks like Antarctica.

Planning a party or social gathering this weekend/saturday? Talk to me, I'll make you an offer you can't refuse!

Murdoch announces plan to cut off nose

In an exclusive interview with one of his employees, Rupert Murdoch announced that it was time to draw a line in the sand in his constant battle to frustrate freeloading consumers by scheduling extensive rhinoplasty.

[read more]

[in relation to this]

IT IS WITH SOME CONSIDERABLE FUCKING PLEASURE

THAT I JUST BOUGHT SOME FUCKING SIZE 36 JEANS

AND FIT INTO THEM WITH MILES TO SPARE.
Almost tried some 34s, but didn't want to spoil my jubilation

This is as opposed to the horrifying size 38 that I had been for the last three or four fucking YEARS, and which sickened and disgusted me to realise I had become. This monstrous waist and circumstance led to my having to spend the intervening time like a kind of fucking sartorial leper, hobbling from shop to shop, buying jeans because they HAD some size 38s, not because I liked those particular jeans, begging shop assistants to just kill me and put me out of my trouserial misery.

Yes, indeed, ladies, gentlemen and sexual man-leopards from the planet Zorbon Prime (with your high-bandwidth, testicular internet connections) - there is now, very tangibly, slightly fucking less of me to love.

If you ask very, very nicely, you may lick me.

LICK ME.

LICK ME NOW.

Frustration is:

When your super-cheap, super-convenient USB and VGA KVM switch FINALLY arrives on the slow-boat from hong-kong, realising that you don't have a spare VGA lead.

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU...

Probably need to get this Hellraiser fixation out of my system sooner rather than later.

I just opened my LJ client to find the unposted phrase:

What's your pleasure, sir?

If I didn't know that it was ME that left that there for ME, having been too drunk, beligerent or just plain weird to not actually post it, I might be quite spooked.

Don't appear to have set my desktop to THE BOX, so that's a winner.

3 movies down, 4 to go, I think.

sixwordstories
Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.

dailyfoodie
Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.

augh!

Any Objective-C coders lend me a hand?

All of my static arrays get warns as being not used (they're all used, trust me).

I think it's a scoping issue, that they're defined in the C-like context, not belonging to any Objective-C object, then referred to within Objective-C classes, but as they're not touched in the context they were created in, they somehow get flagged as unused.

It's not fatal, but it's making a fucking mess of my output window, with hundreds of unnecessary warn lines.

Anyone got a clue?

Yours,

Little Scotty Codepants (33 1/3)

Today's fun webcomic find from IRC:



John and John

It's crude and crass and takes a while to get funny, but has given me a few real belly laughs :)

Quite similar to the often excellent explosm in places.

syndicated at: johnandjohn

Finished watching Hellraiser III, it was excellently crap :) I love things that reek of the 90s. You could tell from the awful font at the very start that you were about to watch some Quality.

Also, this evening, I bought iSequence for the iPod Touch (/iPhone), made a little tune on it in about 20 mins. It's good fun! Another ace toy to make musical sketches with, which I can develop into full songs later.

DeathBoy - Hypnobeat (sketch)

As I say, this was less than a half hour's noodling, uses 5 channels (the app only has 5!), and just 4 patterns, with me riding the volume levels to give it a bit of song texture / bring elements in and out.


(not my video, but a good demo)

The built in soft synth sounds are good, lots of decent lead synths, pads, basslines, etc, and some meaty drum kit noises.

In terms of sequencing, it resembles a tracker with a horizontal time graph.

So yar. Pleasant ending to a basically shit day, thanks to new software toys and awful horror movies.

Just waiting up to see if kirsten appears before I go to bed.

I shall read the next Polity book by Neal Asher, as I just finished the 1st one, Prador Moon, and quite enjoyed it.

Night night, ballbags!

You go to a Morrissey gig and you throw a bottle at a 50 year old man who was taken off stage with a heart problem just the other week.

And then you boo the fact that he stops the show.

ah, Liverpool, how I love thee.