everything but the girl

No, I didn't do NanoWriMo or even NaBloPoMo, but someone on my flist asked yesterday whether there was anything we would want to change in the HP books, now that it's all said and done. And of course, I'm sure everyone has things - big and little, world-changing and world-tweaking - that they would have done differently; I'm curious as to what y'all would have changed or expanded upon.

For me, there are tiny tweaks - to the way Hedwig died, to some aspects of Tonks' characterization, to Draco's hairline in the Epilogue - but I wouldn't want to change anything significantly. There is, however, one thing that I've always wanted, and had really weirdly hoped to see in the film even though it wasn't in the books - a soul-less Barty Crouch stuck in a corner somewhere.

So finally, I wrote the one-paragraph drop-in drabble that I would've loved to see in Deathly Hallows (and am considering trying to organize it as a Challenge in the new year):

Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Characters: Barty Crouch, Jr.
Summary: A 100-word drop-in to Deathly Hallows that would've changed nothing, but would look really good on screen.

Harry was surprised to see a blank-eyed Barty Crouch, Jr. standing like a cloak-rack off by the wall nearest the Slytherin table. There were four hats piled on his head, three cloaks on each arm and a massive bag at his feet. The Death Eaters seemed to be using him to hold their stuff while they battled Hogwarts' defenders. How many years ago had Sirius told Harry that wizards could live without a soul, but Harry had never expected to see the aftereffects of a Dementor attack in the Great Hall. Someone, Harry thought fleetingly, must be feeding him regularly.

---

In other news? OMGOMG NASA is having a presser on Thursday regarding a major astrobiology discovery!?!? Gawker thinks that they may be announcing a discovery of bacteria on one of Saturn's moons!!!! How soon til we get ONTD_Aliens? Internet crash and twitter failwhale in about 51 hours, clearly.

Well, midafternoon for those of you in the UK and "Saturday" for those very far to the east.

In case you missed it yesterday, lj_biz announced that the code/process for deeming an LJ or individual posts on an LJ as "explicit adult content" or "adult concepts" - the former will block those under 18 from seeing it, and the latter will block those under 14. Yes, I think this could be abused and create a climate of concern and fear, etc., but I don't have a huge problem with it because in a lot of ways, it's similar to the way friendslock works. And it's done by you, or by a community mod, and if you're over 18 it won't impact what you can see as long as you have your birth-year in your profile settings.

I have a bigger problem with the "flagging" process, which allows other people to "flag" content on your LJ for Various Things They May Have A Problem With - and my problem is basically that this is something that can be so so so easily abused, and if LJ takes the tack with these things that ffn did - where you can get your content deleted or your account removed because of one complaint that doesn't get investigated (and yes, I understand that ffn doesn't do that anymore but they supposedly have in the past), that's bad. If 100 complaints from brand new accounts at the same IP or anon IPs come in, I hope LJ treats those as noise-without-signal - but also, given that it's relatively easy to talk one's friends into raising a hue and cry over something, even a large number of complaints about something need to be fully investigated - this is going to be usable for legitimate reasons, but it is also another way of taking a grudge over something to a new level, and that's making me uncomfortable. I want to see what happens with how LJ deals with flagged complaints, in other words. But hopefully it will work the same way as abuse complaints - which do also have the ability to be misused, but...

ETA: It seems that LJ will not allow accounts that are under a month old to flag posts at all, which is a good thing. There is still potential for abuse, but making a thousand new accounts so you can go on a reporting spree that evening isn't one of them. /ETA

One difference between these flags and abuse complaints is that generally, complaints to Abuse have been public - if you have a problem with something, anyone can see it, at least initially, when it's posted to Abuse. Will flags be done the same way? Is there a discussion of this anywhere in the 2000+ comments on the biz post?

In much better internet news, GMail now has Group Chats and more emoticons! Yay, Google, for giving people what we want, and trying to be Not Evil!

In other words, Google - 1.0; LJ - 0.023! (LJ gets one tenth of a point back for blocking accounts that are under a month old from Flagging Stuff)


I also learned last week that in posts to a community, if the community is set to allow anyone to edit tags, even if comments are turned off and the comm is set to moderate, the community members can edit the tags. I wasn't sure what to do with that knowledge, and I refrained from being Evil in the tags even though I sorta wanted to be, but I thought people other than me should know this. Especially because I think that there's no IP tracking at this point on tag-editing. Dear LJ, this is probably a hole, no?

It seems that a combination of a change to gmail and a new version of Firefox are making gmail, well, not work in Firefox today - and non-Firefox users are having issues too.

Luckily, affectingly noticed a tiny link at the top of the gmail page to allow you to use the "older version" - I clicked on it, and everything works perfectly, squee.

Also, remember how I mentioned giving up the sidekick for the Sprint Mogul? It's not working as well as I'd hoped, so the full switch may not be happening. If only I had a way to back up my email on a sidekick, I would keep it forever....

Sigh.

Oh my.

I didn't know Doomsday was airing tonight.

: grabs tissues