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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
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claire_writes
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Yellow butterflies, yellow butterflies, yellow butterflies fly around Mauricio Babilonia when he is falling in love in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I haven't updated this journal in what feels like a zillion years. Kevin passed away from a heart attack last week. I searched his name on Google and it popped up in a livejournal community about Boston. Fragments and scintillas of Kevin are still swarming in my lungs like a beehive and each time I breathe heavily one of them escapes.
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poesian
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¿Quieres leer este post en español?
I went and saw the band Yeasayer on Wednesday night. They were originally playing in a small bar-or-so venue, but ended up in something slightly bigger -- a place called Sala Caracol (The Snail Room), which was actually pretty great. It's just a no-frills concert venue, like maybe the Troc in Philly, but a bit smaller?
When I got there, Hush Hush was playing. Hush Hush is this ridiculous singer guy and his recorded music and backup vocals, or such was as it was when I saw him. He danced (quite well) and sang, and honestly while I'm not a huge fan of his myspace selections (they're not bad, either), I enjoyed him live quite a bit. (His myspace was a bitch to find. Try googling "Hush Hush".) His songs are sexy and silly, and he danced wearing a black suit jacket, a tie, etc. -- the full get up. As he went on, he removed his coat, his tie, his shirt, ending bearded and shirtless. I'm not sure why musicians like to take off their shirts -- besides it just being hot as hell up on a stage -- but he managed to do it rather endearingly.
During his set, I finagled my way towards the front of the crowd, getting within the first six rows or so; a space I like. After he finished singing, I started talking with three American girls standing near me. They were nice; two of them were studying abroad and the other was visiting. We didn't really talk about anything meaningful, but it was still nice to chat. (I also saw Mateo and Ashley's French roommate and her boyfriend, which was funny.) We worked our way forward slightly, talked a bit more, and then Yeasayer came out, around 22:00.
They played a set which was between an hour and an hour and a half long; it was plenty long enough, all in all. It was amazing. This is the second concert I've ever gone to alone (the first being Xiu Xiu, a few years ago), and I guess since I'm going alone because I like the band enough that I don't care, both have been wonderful experiences. Yeasayer's live set was at least as good as I'd been led to expect. The lead singer was wearing this amazing one-piece suit (they exist?!), and the guitarist/back-up vocalist was in a one-piece camo outfit, but honestly they could've been wearing whatever so long as they brought the same energy to their performance.
I was worried at first, since they looked sort of tired, but they definitely found the energy to put on an amazing show; they played most (all, actually, I think?) of the songs from their recently released album, Odd Blood. It's a dancier and more accessible set of recordings than their previous release, 2007's All Hour Cymbals. Both albums are pretty eclectic in terms of their offerings; Yeasayer is regularly compared to a number of artists (I'll leave you to find other reviews); I'd add in some odd names probably. I definitely recommend listening to some of their music; the selections on MySpace are all great, and I really like their two live songs from Les Concerts a Emporter, although to be fair in general La Blogotheque has great taste and does really good videos. This was their first show in Madrid, and they seemed genuinely excited about it; they'll be playing at Primavera Sound in May, too, so I'll get to see them again.
In any case, I found myself dancing in the venue, my coat over my arm, laughing with people I didn't know, singing along when I knew the words, wishing I knew the words, drinking a beer, squeezing out of the crowd to run to the bathroom and following some random girl back through the crowd to my place, dancing some more. They ended the set with "Ambling Alp," which is their single of the moment, I guess, and was a lot of fun to get to dance with in a group of people all smiling. And then they came back for an encore, and ended their show with the absolutely gorgeous song "Red Cave," or at least I think so. I know they played it. Then again, who's reading this and's gonna contradict me?
"Red Cave" is actually an awesome song. The lyrics of it, or some of the most repeated lyrics, are these: "Mary's house in the hollow of the white hazel rapid whirlpool and the church of the red cave." Which is just an English translation of the name of a village in Wales. I like this a lot, for some reason. Nonetheless, I don't know that they actually played it last.
I actually awoke this morning with "2080," another song from their older album, stuck in my head, and at this point I'd actually say they played that one last, although like I said my memory's blurred and I don't know song names that well anyway. "2080" is an awesome song, but the lyrics are ridiculous and pretty incomprehensible when you're listening.
They also have a song called "Mondegreen", which is kind of funny when you consider that their lyrics are all more or less incomprehensible. Anyway, awesome fun. Hurrah!
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
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news
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We're going to keep this short and sweet (Frank and birthday vgifts will be back next week). You've probably seen the updates to our main menu. Don't be alarmed. You'll find everything you need, just in slightly shifted format. Just so you know, we based these changes on input from both experienced and new users who were not familiar with LiveJournal. Our goal was to reduce barriers to usability and make LiveJournal more accessible and easy to navigate. Please note that this is a work in progress. We welcome your detailed suggestions in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) feedback. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve your LiveJournal experience.
We've updated the global navigation menu:
Here's a quick breakdown of what you'll find where:
- Scrapbook can now be found under Profile (thanks for your feedback, btw), along with Settings, Stats, and Edit Profile.
- You'll find all the tools you need to post and update entries under Journal, which includes posting and editing entries, managing comments and tags, and customizing your journal's style.
- Friends contains all of your friend settings, from filtering your Friends page to adding, removing, and finding new and existing friends on LiveJournal.
- Under Communities, you'll find links to manage your communities, accept community invites, and create new communities.
- Explore includes search features, RSS feeds, Question of the Day, and FRNK radio.
- Under Shop, you'll find links to upgrade or give a paid account, buy virtual gifts, purchase LiveJournal merchandise (like T-shirts), and view your payment history.
LiveJournal Mobile update:
We've enhanced LiveJournal's mobile site to improve usability and load times. We've made more of LiveJournal's features accessible via mobile, including posting comments, uploading photos, reading and commenting on friends' posts, finding and messaging friends, and more. We look forward to reviewing your feedback and recommendations for future improvements.
Other important changes:
- You can lock comments to prevent further commenting on a post, while leaving existing comments visible.
- We replaced the "Tell a friend" link with a new "Share This" widget that lets you share LiveJournal posts on other social media sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
- We changed some of the icons on entries (you can hover over the icons to view descriptions).
- You'll see a Tag count on your Tag management page.
- You'll now see the 10 most recent vgifts on your profile page. To remove vgifts, left-click on the vgift and choose whether you want to remove the vgift from your profile or delete it entirely.
- We've added options to help you control receipt of vgifts, which you'll find in My Stuff under Edit Profile. You can now enable vgifts from friends or everyone and disable anonymous vgifts.
We've got your fix:
- UPDATE: Rolling several updates into one listing here -- 1) Scrapbook should be back and working again. 2) The problem with the Update Journal page in IE6 and IE7 should be fixed now. 3) The problem with the userpic add-on package pricing has been fixed and refunds issued to anyone who was overcharged while the erroneous prices were in place.
- Non-conforming images will now be automatically resized for custom mood themes.
- Line breaks no longer count as two characters against your entry's character limit.
- We fixed a bug on the Manage Tags page so you can clear all tags and add new tags.
- We corrected the UI for the update.bml page so it displays properly in IE8.
Thanks again for joining us. Frank and company will be back next week!
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Comments: Read 657 or Add Your Own.
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poesian
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Ingredients
1 medium eggplant, cubed
1/2 onion (or small onion), diced
2 or 3 cloves of garlic, diced
1 package of tofu, pressed over towels to remove the water if not very dry, and then cubed
10-or-so [white button] mushrooms
1/3 cup shredded coconut
1/3 cup cream
hot sauce of some sort (I used leftover adobo from canned chipotle peppers); you could also use indian spices like cumin and turmeric, or cayenne
(olive) oil
salt and pepper
corn starch
rice (or noodles, I suppose)
Directions
0. Cook rice, if using.
1. Heat the oil, and add the onion. After a minute or two, add the cubes of eggplant. Cook on medium, adding oil as necessary (a few tablespoons may be needed; eggplant loves the stuff), and stirring every few minutes, until eggplant glistens and is done; it may take a while. When it nears done, add the garlic. (Add it earlier if you're not a garlic fan.)
2. Toss the tofu in some corn starch (a few spoonfuls is fine) and black pepper to coat.
3. In a separate pan, heat a tablespoon of oil on medium or medium-high. When hot, add the tofu. Cook, tossing occasionally, until it crisps and browns. It will take less time than the eggplant.
4. Add the cream, hot sauce, and mushrooms to the eggplant. (If you like, you could also sautee the mushrooms separately as well. It would taste better, but involves three things cooking at once.) Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms are hot. Add the coconut. Add the tofu.
5. Serve over rice. Delicious!
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poesian
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I found, a while back, Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage, which is an awesome list of tons of common errors people make in usage. Every so often I want to look something up and I end up there; it's listed high on google searches so some of you may have run across it before.
In any case, I was looking over his page on non-errors this evening, and I came across two things that I was interested to find. This particular page is filled with usages that others often cite as wrong, but which Brians says are pretty standard, at least in American English. For example: split infinitives, which aren't wrong despite so many people disliking them; ending sentences with prepositions; the pronunciation of the word forte. There are two that interested me because they are about things that often bother me when people do them, but I've never had someone to point to in the past.
1. The phrase "feeling bad". To quote this page: '"I feel bad" is standard English, as in "This t-shirt smells bad" (not [emphasis mine] "badly"). "I feel badly" is an incorrect hyper-correction by people who think they know better . . . People who are happy can correctly say they feel good, but if they say they feel well, we know they mean to say they’re healthy.'
My reasoning has always been two-fold on this: first off, it sounds weird to say "feel[s] badly." More logically, however: An adverb ("badly") modifies a verb; to say "I feel badly" would be to imply that the way you felt was not being done well. As in, "I feel badly" -- "I'm not very good at feeling." Similarly, a shirt can't smell badly -- it can't smell at all. It might smell bad. It can't smell grossly, either. Just gross. "Well" is a little more complicated -- it can function as an adjective as well as an adverb. This blog post from a few years back highlights the questions -- why do people do this? Is it hypercorrection? I think it is. So saying "I feel well" is fine (implying as it does that you're healthy), but you probably don't "feel badly."
2. Healthy vs. healthful. Again, the quote: 'Logic and tradition are on the side of those who make this distinction, but I’m afraid phrases like "part of a healthy breakfast" have become so widespread that they are rarely perceived as erroneous except by the hyper-correct. On a related though slightly different subject, it is interesting to note that in English adjectives connected to sensations in the perceiver of an object or event are often transferred to the object or event itself. In the 19th century it was not uncommon to refer, for instance, to a "grateful shower of rain," and we still say "a gloomy landscape," "a cheerful sight" and "a happy coincidence."'
Mostly I just like the examples of emotions being transfered to an event, but I'm also glad to see that he's of the mind that while technically best to refer to food as healthful and people as healthy, it's pretty much fine to refer to both as healthy.
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
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escuincla
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I have become engulfed with sadness, anger, disbelief and hopelessness. Everyone around me is pointing their grubby little fingers like a modern day witch hunt. Everyone is lying to protect their own asses. She thinks she knows exactly who I am and how I feel. How can one possibly know me when we've drifted so far apart. I can't remember a time when I felt genuine closeness towards her. She says to stop crying. It took me years to learn how to cry. To let out all the mixed up emotions that I just can't explain.
In two weeks, maybe less, I can breath freely. She thinks I'm miserable over-all, I'm starting to see that much of it comes from the living situation I've allowed myself to get into.
NO MORE ROOMATES. Especially ones who let their boyfriends live rent free.
No more judgement. I am who I am. She just doesn't like it.
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poesian
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So I challenge you, knowing me, to think of the answer to this riddle:
What is one of the most difficult things for me in terms of connecting with (men) here in Madrid?
There are a number of good answers. And I'm interested to hear what you would answer for me. But I have one that I run into surprisingly often, beyond the simple problem of language: I don't like football. (Which is to say, soccer.) It's this gigantic field of conversation that I'm entirely cut off from -- I don't know the players, nor the teams, nor who's good nor who's bad. I don't really care for watching it. I don't really enjoy the culture. I remember reading, in an NYT Magazine article about people with Williams Syndrome, about how some woman with the disorder had learned all about a sport so she could discuss it with people. I'm not there, where I need or want to do that. I never will be. But I do recognize that I miss out on something because I'm not into it. I would probably be able to make friends with dudes a lot more easily on the basis of this alone -- it's just something that's easy to bring up. Bonding over a love for weird movies is a lot harder.
(The quote from the Dobbs article is from a part where one of the women's mothers is talking: "Nicki has always especially loved to talk to men. And in the last few years, by chance, she figured out how to do it. She reads the sports section in the paper, and she watches baseball and football on TV, and she has learned enough about this stuff that she can talk to any man about what the 49ers or the Giants are up to. My husband gets annoyed when I say this, but I don't mean it badly: men typically have that superficial kind of conversation, you know -- weather and sports. And Nicki can do it. She knows what team won last night and where the standings are. It's only so deep. But she can do it. And she can talk a good long while with most men about it.")
Which is, fine, a weird comparison to make, perhaps. But I think it's also an interesting one, because it hits on the necessity to immediately come upon a conversation topic with someone when you're not literally forced into each other's company. Football is loads more simple than film, music, or . . . I dunno. What would I want to talk about, anyway? Maybe seven or eight years ago I had this supremely uncomfortable conversation with a friend, wherein I first really recognized that I was missing out on something by not caring about sports -- that by not being interested, I missed out on this superficial level of communication that somehow walks the line towards meaningful, despite its mass appeal. To be fair, I get the same problems with not being interested in television -- that just comes up more rarely here. It's a lot easier when you're working together with someone, or traveling -- but a lot more difficult when you're not terribly extroverted, nor can you easily hit upon a topic on which to connect. (Another good one, according to some social psychology studies, is agreeing on something you dislike. I like this fact.)
Relatedly, I've been climbing about once a week, every Thursday. And I have yet to really talk to anyone at the climbing gym. Climbers are notoriously friendly, and so I find myself wondering whether I'm unapproachable-looking. I also think that sooner or later I'm going to have to be un-shy. Shyness is a personal trait that also fits into this conversation, as seems clear. Especially since at a climbing gym, say, football is a lot less likely to come up than at a traditional exercise gymnasium. Much more likely to talk about random shit, or about climbing in general. I'd doubtless have spoken to people before, even given my being shy, but for the fact that I'm also nervous about my Spanish, and have trouble getting a read on people's relationships. At climbing gyms, people tend to say hi to people they only vaguely know -- in the gyms I've been to in the States, I've always ended up knowing random people.
For example, I see a few of the same men every time I'm at the gym. We've even started to say hello. But I can't bring myself to say more than that one word to them. It doesn't help that they're better climbers than me -- I really should be going in twice a week if I want to get better -- but obviously that doesn't matter so much. It's not even that hard. It's just that recurring reminder of my not being able to be friendly. I'll overcome it. Or not. I know what to do. I just need to actually do it.
The weird part is that it's not really fear of rejection. Anyone I have talked to, however briefly, has been friendly. There's just some invisible barrier that's unbreachable. We'll see.
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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news
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| We're finishing up a few odds and ends before our next major release. Our mighty Ops guys continue to slay spambots and balance load times on a highwire without a safety net (which is kind of tough dressed in full ninja gear). Down on solid ground, we're celebrating this week's virtual birthday party with a warm toast to pants. If you can rearrange the letters of your favorite city, state, and/or country (feel free to combine these elements) to spell one of Frank's favorite treats (e.g., pants, wire, paper, etc.), he'll send you over a can of whipped cream to top it all off (provided you return the empty can for his midnight snack)! And, with that, let the word scrambling commence!
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Stuff you should know:
- We're still working on the delayed/missing notifications issue. Sorry, we're frustrated too. We'll keep you posted.
- Last week, we became aware that a recently-implemented script was overwriting affiliate referral fees for some of our users. Once we confirmed this, our Ops team quickly removed the script. Please be aware that, while we may beta-test other affiliate scripts down the line, we will take greater measures to ensure that no existing user-referral arrangements are impacted in any way.
- While we plan to stick to a weekly news schedule, if we have a release in between regular newsletters, we'll post here to keep you informed. You can also check lj_releases for current release information.
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To our paid users, we send squirrels in love!
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If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free Squirrels in love vgifts through Monday, March 15th at 4pm, PST! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 squirrels displayed until they've scurried off to their new homes. Please send only one vgift at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each vgift you send. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and select 'Do not disable' from the drop-down menu. Have fun!
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Help is on the way!
| We're pleased to announce the winner of our first charitable vgift poll, Doctors without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, which provides critical medical care to under-served populations around the world. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of the proceeds we raise from the sale of this vgift (we'll cover credit card fees). We invite you to start recommending nonprofits for our next fundraising drive at ljnewscontests. We'll take suggestions through the month and post a poll in the news during the first week of April to let you choose the recipient. We thank you, again, for your passion and generosity. |  |
We've crowned a header
Congratulations to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ohterlus for submitting the winning header, which will go live next week and keep us leafy through mid-April! You can submit designs for our next header contest at ljnewscontests now until March 31st. We'll post a poll in the news to let you decide which header will sit at the top of LiveJournal from mid-April to mid-May. All artistic interpretations are welcome. The winner will get a $25 LiveJournal gift certificate. All other contributors will receive $5 gift certificates. Our heartfelt appreciation for sharing your talent and creativity! |
For this week's winning photo and more adventures with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut! ( Read more... )
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
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