Words are inadequate

I just went over to Dreamwidth to see if something that's always irritated me about LJ (having to wade through communities and feeds when I'm setting up custom friends groups) was a problem there as well, or if they'd solved it.

It turns out that as part of the utterly reasonable change from "friends" to "subscriptions" and "access," they've also split filters into "reading filters" and "access filters." And, naturally, only actual users show up in the "access filters" section.

I love it when problems solve themselves.

Anyway. Between DW's introduction of tag merging, the full-text journal search, and the automatic cut expander (truly a thing of beauty: in DW, cut tags now have a little arrow next to them, and you can click the arrow to display the cut content without navigating away from your reading page), and LJ's trashing of their home page, I'm even more of a fan of DW. I've already moved imported the contents of jazzfish_media into DW, and gone through and tagged them all as well. That was a remarkably painless process. From now on I'll be cross-posting medialog entries at DW and here, behind a cut so that they aren't inflicted on the people who chose not to follow the medialog. This will make for a good trial run for crossposting in general.

At this point, I'm waiting on three things before completely jumping ship: the ability to read flocked LJ posts from DW (required); photo hosting (just barely shy of required); and a client for the Device (optional). There's a strong possibility that all three of these things will be available by the end of summer.

jadelennox has put together a great post on why DW isn't all or nothing. Of particular interest: it's trivially easy for LJ users to log in to their OpenID accounts on DW, and I plan on recreating my existing flist and security groups using everyone's OpenID anyway. (Which may automatically set up OpenID accounts for you all anyway; I'm not quite clear on how that will work.) I've also got a handful of invite codes available should you want to create your own DW account. (In theory, someday there will be the option to merge comments made under your OpenID with your DW account.)

ETA: jadelennox also linked to coffeeandink's How to move from LJ to DW in six easy steps, which I should really include here since seeing that link go by was one of the several things that prompted me to make this post.

I plan to keep DW as my main journal, and use LJ to stay in contact with the large number of non-DW readers. So I'll be cross-posting to LJ. I'd prefer to keep all comments on DW; I expect the additional hassle of having to log in over there (and lose your userpics) will cut down even further on comments. What I can do is crosspost entries, leave comments active on the LJ side, and regularly import the comments from LJ. This, of course, means more work for me, so I'd rather not do it. Hence, a poll!

[Poll #1588628]

Fascinating:

The people of southern Louisiana. . . consider their culture unique, inherently interesting, and more fun than that of fellow Southerners who live in the Bible Belt north of Alexandria, Louisiana, and across northern Mississippi and Alabama. Their cultural and linguistic affinities run east and west along the Gulf of Mexico, and Northern Louisiana might as well be a separate state. This divide shows up in the pronounciation of the state name, with northern Louisiana favoring four syllables beginning [luz-] and southern Louisiana favoring five syllables beginning [luiz-].

--Connie Eble, "The Englishes of southern Louisiana." Available in "English in the Southern United States," eds. Nagle and Sanders.

(Pop, who insisted that "it wasn't named for Louise," was from Jones, which is about three miles from the Arkansas border.)

[Poll #1458385]

Ran two miles on Monday morning despite not having been out running in two weeks, which I figured meant I was in decent shape. Today, struggled to get through one, and after a bit of cooldown made it most of a second. I am saddened to report that They're right when They say it's not the heat, it's the humidity. 90% is nobody's friend even if it's 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe Friday will go better.

I'm not sure exactly what happened this time. Perhaps it was the scary mold in uilos's air conditioning. I bummed around her apartment all Satyrday morning feeling slightly achey, and took tylenol at around noon. We wandered about 'til sixish, when we met jonny_law for dinner. The achey had begun to come back in force by then. I figured I'd be alright through the movie, though. If it had been half an hour shorter, or less blisteringly cold in the theatre, I might have been, too. I managed to get home okay and proceeded to go into indecisive mode. (Except for taking my temperature, on which I insisted. 102.3.) An unpleasantly fever-sweaty evening followed. It had mostly broken by around 5:30, and by the time I got back to my own place at noon the only remaining symptoms were a slight stuffiness in my nose and a very faint wooziness.

I suspect this means my immune system is improving. Its response time is, at least. Not as good as it was in high school, when I consistently got sick once a year for about two days, but we're getting there.

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Moorenko's is, in fact, far away, as we discovered when we tried to walk there on Satyrday. (Map) And I cannot guarantee parking near Moorenko's to facilitate driving there, getting ice cream, and driving back. So, those of you interested in ice cream and movie tomorrow night, talk to me!
[Poll #997564]

So thanks to elf and my mad internetsearching skills I discover that Dar Williams is playing at the Birchmere on the fifteenth and sixteenth of November. Inconveniently enough that's a Wednesday and Thursday, but it's still doable. Anyone else interested / have a preference for which day?

Also: my apartment has been in a state of about ninety percent set up for the past month, if not longer. I hereby declare it to be Close Enough To Done. Thus, on the evening of the 18th of November, I'll be having a Gathering. Games shall be played, food shall be eaten, drinks shall be drunk provided you bring them. (Or you can partake of my water, orange juice, and weak Tang.) I figure we'll get started around twoish (or whenever people show up), try to eat around six or seven (or whenever people get hungry), and I'll kick people out, oh, sometime.

[Poll #856939]

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After a little over six months of sometimes-running I have made it to the end of week five. I can now run for twenty minutes without stopping to walk. (Although the past several times I was doing fifteen minutes at a stretch.) I'd be happier about this if it weren't trying to get too cold to run at seven in the morning, thus sending me into running hibernation for several months, since I have no easily accessible gym. Forty is about right for running, provided the sun's out at least some of the time and the wind's not too bad. Less than that I'd prefer not to deal with.

But, you know, progress, and all that. Go me. Life carries on.