LiveJournal: The First Decade
Just in time for holiday shopping, we're thrilled to announce the release of our ten-year anniversary anthology. Published by Blurb.com, the book showcases a decade of extraordinary talent drawn from LiveJournal users around the world. This must-read compilation features stories, memes, photos, comics, editorials, graphic content, and more, including:
-
Excerpts from Oh No They Didn't (a/k/a
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
ohnotheydidnt), the largest community on LiveJournal, covering celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and pop culture - A look at post-Katrina New Orleans from the journal of Poppy Z. Brite
- Gripping narratives, including a poignant reverie on a blind date
- Photography that spans the globe, ranging from old-fashioned Polaroids to underwater photography
- Mouthwatering dishes from food_porn
What began as a late-night inspiration back in Brad Fitzpatrick's college dorm in 1999 has grown to encompass nearly 25 million users worldwide, with journals and communities covering every conceivable hobby, passion, and topic. To get your copy, please visit the Blurb Bookstore. For updates and entries from book contributors, please join lj_turns10.
Tweaks and enhancements
- You can now ban a user from all of your communities and journals at once. To access this feature, hover over the person's userpic and choose Ban user everywhere from the drop-down menu.
- Follow LiveJournal on Twitter!
Give a little to help a lot!
In honor of National AIDS Awareness month, we've added a new charitable vgift. For each red ribbon you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine (we'll cover credit card fees). You can read more about IAVI at lj_cares. While we're on the subject, we raised $740 from our November fundraiser for Love Without Boundaries, which supports emergency healthcare and adoption of Chinese orphans. We thank you for helping us help others.
Photos of the week
We're back with more incredible pictures from our super-talented LiveJournal photographers. Congratulations to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ilya_gorokhov, who is the winner of our very first lj_photophile poll.
Curtains
Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay safe and snug out there!
Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...
Hey LJers,
I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)
Thanks,
- Location:Jumping out of a perfectly good plane
- Mood:
dirty - Music:Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction
- Mood:
optimistic
ME: Why does it get dark so early?
ME: Because you haven't written a to-do list, that's why!
But seriously: it starts getting dark around 3:30pm and the sun has set by 4:30pm. I am sick and sort of have cramps and wish I had a comfy couch on which to do my reading but there are NO COUCHES. Anywhere. Just my bed, but if I read on my bed I will sleep. Also, I have not written a to-do list. Or rather, I did right before Andy showed up, but now I've managed to lose it. Probably this means I won't do anything. Go figure.
Also, there is no water working in my flat so I cannot even make myself tea. Probably I will go to a cafe and try to find an armchair (a poor substitute for a couch) and do some actual reading.
Yeah. Right.
I don't know how this semester has flown by so fast...
[10-40] Chuck
[41] (500) Days of Summer
[42-46] Angels and Demons
[47-51] Pride and Prejudice
[52-53] Shakespeare In Love
[54-60] Practical Magic
[61-65] Joseph Gordon-Levitt
[66-101] Megan Fox
[102-114] Olivia Wilde
[115-126] Alexis Beldel
Here @
sexy_mood_music. The post will be public for 2 days, and after that, you NEED TO JOIN to see the post, but don't worry because EVERYONE GETS ACCEPTED! Please read the rules at the entry, and please leave any comments or feedback you have over there, too. Thank you! :)- Mood:
irritated
Tweaks and enhancements
- In order to improve site security, we've temporarily suspended the ability to change passwords for old email addresses that haven't been used for over six months. For further information and support, please visit our customer care page.
- We've launched a new mobile site with an enhanced UI at m.livejournal.com. View spotlights, post to your journal, read and post to friends pages, and more, no matter where you roam! Please let us know what you think, since this will eventually replace our existing mobile interface. You can update your mobile preferences on your account page.
- We've upgraded from Beacon to Facebook Connect to improve dual posting. If you've already signed up for Facebook Beacon, you're good to go. If you wish to update your Facebook Connect setting, visit Account Privacy settings and scroll down to the option labeled: "Send information about my updates to Facebook." You can choose Always or Ask each time. Remember to save (on the bottom left corner of the page). To learn more, check out FAQ 249. While we're on the subject, if you happen to be visiting that side of town, please join our Facebook fan page for a touch of home away from home.
- You'll now receive the Writer's Block Question of the Day in the body of email notifications. To sign up for Writer's Block notifications, visit writersblock and choose the Watch Community option. Next, update your Writer's Block notification settings by checking the box to the right of "Someone posts a new entry to writersblock."
- Paid and permanent users can now view, add, and edit Notes of commenters. Notes will appear beside the username of comment posters (instead of stars) on S1-themed comment pages.
Send some lovin' thanks to your friends with our holiday vgifts!
Photos of the week
We're so delighted with the immense talent of our growing, global lj_photophile community that we've decided to introduce a poll. Each week, we'll choose a half-dozen photos (based on user comments and staff feedback) and ask you to select a photo of the week. The winning photo will be announced in the next newsletter. If possible, please limit photo size to 350x350 to ensure that images display properly on friends pages. We want to thank you again (and again!) for sharing your passion.
Check out this week's photo poll and more fantastic user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
Thanks for joining us. To our American friends, have a fantastic Thanksgiving. To all of our international neighbors, we'll eat a little extra for you!
Actresses: Lauren Graham.
Movies: Titanic (1997), Disney's Pocahontas, Sex And The City, Miss Congeniality, Disney's Hercules, Carry On Spying.
Music: Spice Girls, Alanis Morissette.
Television: Friends, Frasier, Gilmore Girls.
TEASE:
You can view all the icons HERE @
notasweicons- feel free to join the community!- Mood:
okay - Music:hello - eminem
We have the most comprehensive gallery on the net, a huge screencaps archive a press room
and everything you need to know about Stars Hollow and its citizen.
We are waiting for you and you? What are you waiting for? JOIN US !
It would be a stretch to say that being there was like being in another world (anyplace that has a McDonald’s is obviously Earth — other planets would likely have more sense), but it was definitely like being on another continent. That fact hit home before the airplane even landed; when I looked below me as we began our descent, instead of streets, towns, and city lights, there was red dirt, green fields, sunlight reflecting off thin streams of water used for irrigation, and slate-blue mountains in the hazy distance.
We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel — yes, not a hostel, a legitimate hotel, complete with TVs in the rooms, our own showers that we didn’t have to pay extra for, and continental breakfast each morning. The exchange rate being what it is (roughly 7 Moroccan dirhams to an American dollar), we could afford a little more class than usual. The taxi ride was an entertaining ordeal in itself: there being, apparently, no such thing as traffic police in Marrakesh, the five of us plus our driver managed to fit (along with our hand baggage) inside a car only designed to seat five. I was probably the smallest person there. Four girls shared the back seat — I didn’t even notice if the car was equipped with seatbelts, but I’m inclined to think they didn’t even bother.
Although Marrakesh is pretty touristy in its own right — and the government is doing a lot to promote that aspect of it — it has its rough edges, especially if you’re a white female. We weren’t there during the normal tourist season, so except in the marketplace, we ran into very few tourists on the streets. We weren’t actively hassled (except by vendors trying to sell us things, who referred to one or more of the girls at some time or another as “Hannah Montana” and “the Spice Girls”; we also got asked if we were looking for fish and chips, and whether we were on facebook) but something just seemed different. It wasn’t until one of my friends pointed it out that I saw practically no women (tourists excluded) in the city. There was the odd woman (some in full wrists-to-ankles covering, plus head scarf) doing her shopping at the local market, or speeding along the street on a bicycle/motorcycle hybrid (there are both pedals and a motor; these were surprisingly common), but even they disappeared when the sun went down. Outside the tourist center of the walled city of Morocco, 95% of the people I saw in restaurants were men. I hadn’t realized the kind of inherent menace there is in that until this trip. I was never hassled (and I’m also very good at ignoring what people say and just walking by — the ability to navigate Sproul Plaza at lunchtime without being inundated with flyers and appeals apparently has uses outside of Berkeley), but on the first day especially, something felt a little not right.
This being said, as soon as I had a map in my hand and a general feel for the city’s arrangement (as well as the promise of vigilance from the one male member of our group, God bless him), the feeling went away pretty quickly — and in a way it was something I’d been prepared for, having done enough googling on the subject to get an idea of how conservatively to dress. (Despite approximately 80 degree weather, I spent my time in jeans and t-shirts.)
I am now going to admit to something that, in any other city, would feel like a bit of a cop-out. You know those big red sightseeing buses? Well, there’s one that runs in Marrakesh, and my friends and I took it. It was a great way to figure out where everything was in relation to everything else without having to get lost on the way, and a great way not to walk around in the heat but still get a feel for the place.
My favorite part of being in Marrakesh was visiting the marketplace they’re famous for. I’ve seen its name transliterated in about a billion different ways, but the back of one of the postcards I bought calls it “Jamaa El Fna,” as do the signs in Marrakesh itself, so that’s the one I’m going with. You can get lost in there — in fact, my friends and I almost did. They sell everything imaginable — leather goods, home herbal remedies, ceramics, dried fruit and nuts, scarves, jewelry, live chickens, pig’s heads (freshly removed from the pigs in question) — and you are expected to bargain with them for what you buy. I came home with a hand-made leather purse with an intricate openwork design on the front flap which cost me the equivalent of $25. Other things that came home with my friends included dried apricots, carved and inlaid wooden boxes, and small ornamental daggers.
The market by night is radically different from the market by day. Around the time the sun begins to set, stalls and canopies start appearing in the plaza in front of the market, and soon enough there are a hundred little tent-restaurants ready and willing to serve you everything from traditional Moroccan food to french fries. We ate at one of these restaurants on our last night (ours was #89, I think — the menus are all basically the same, and they use their stall numbers as differentiation). I had kebabs, couscous, really good bread — and, it must be said, really good french fries. Apparently, they’re universal.
The last day of our stay, we took an excursion through some of the Berber villages situated in the High Atlas Mountains. Along with other tourists, we got in a great big van driven by a local tour guide who navigated the windy mountain roads and explained the scenery that rolled past as we gained altitude. In concept the trip was pretty touristy — the van stopped in several locations so that we could get out and snap the obligatory photos — but behind the tourist motivation were vestiges (small, but there) of a more authentic Moroccan experience. To some of the “natives,” we were obviously a way to make money through the sale of traditional arts and crafts. But to some of them we were just a blip on the radar, a small disturbance in a daily routine that (for them) probably hasn’t changed too much over the last few decades. It’s probable that a lot of them had never even been as far from home as Marrakesh.
That day, we ate lunch in a small former hotel, high up in the mountains, which served a very traditional multi-course Marrakeshi meal: bread, salad, vegetable tagine, roasted chicken, finished off with a small glass of mint tea, something Morocco’s known for (and which lives up to the hype — but granted, I was a mint tea fan to begin with).
There are some places that you go to once, just to say that you’ve been there, and to know for yourself what that means. And there are some places you go to and know you’ll come back to. While preparing for this trip, I sort of suspected that Marrakesh would fall under the first category, but after having been, I’m not so sure. There are, of course, plenty of places I plan to go to for a first time before I make a return trip to Marrakesh (or even to Morocco), but in some future where I am obscenely wealthy and can travel wherever and whenever I like, I can see myself ending up back there — even if only to share the experience of the place with a different set of people.
The update on my Reading Week trip is going to be split in two, not just because I visited two cities and countries (and continents!) but also because I don't quite have the time to sit and write out the whole thing at once! But right now I have just about enough time to write about the three nights and two full days I spent in Barcelona. (I haven't managed to upload my pictures yet, but my photographer friend Drew who was with me on the trip has his up; you can view them here.)
One of the first things that I liked about the trip was that the four years I spent studying Spanish in high school suddenly seemed much more useful. Despite the fact that Barcelona is the center of the Catalan region, which has its own peculiar dialogue (called Catalan) which is about as different from Spanish as Italian is, it's still in Spain so everyone speaks Spanish in addition to Catalan and I was impressively able to make myself understood. Also, the street signs are (sometimes) in both languages.
I'm not usually all that into pure architecture -- I appreciate buildings that have a history as well as a beautiful facade -- but my favorite things about Barcelona were purely architectural and 90% Gaudi (Cliffs Notes version: he was an architect associated with the movement known as modernisme and built a lot of really awesome stuff that makes me think of a cross between early Disney fairytales and Dr. Seuss). Saturday, our first full day in Barcelona, was spent visiting the two coolest Gaudi sites in Barcelona: the Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell.
Sagrada Familia is a giant unfinished cathedral that rears unexpectedly out of the heart of the Eixample section of Barcelona. It's massive, intricate, and still under construction. Gaudi spent the last years of his life working on this masterpiece, knowing that he wouldn't be alive to see it completed; since his death, other architects and artists have contributed to different aspects of its current design (Gaudi did leave behind some plans, but apparently a lot of them were destroyed or lost during the Spanish Civil War). It's a little schizophrenic as a result, but no less beautiful. The interior is still very stark, with most of the design work having been done on the exterior, but the two facades which are complete (only one of which was completed by Gaudi) are stunning. I personally favored the facade that wasn't designed by Gaudi because its style is a lot more sparse; there's a lot going on still, but it's mostly going on in one color, at least, and with a lot fewer random elements.
When we were there, you couldn't see half of the church's interior because they were doing construction work on it, and overall the interior is (as I said before) not that impressive. But it's worth it to pay to go in because only from the inside can you take the elevator (or stairs) to the top of one of the church's towers. We did, and I had another Eiffel Tower-esque experience (albeit at a much decreased height) in which all of a sudden the church was a lot taller than it had seemed from the ground -- and it seems pretty damn tall when you're standing at the base of it, feeling like one of the towers ought to fall over any minute now! This is why I like climbing things: it gives you a completely different idea of how tall things really are.
After Sagrada Familia we went to Parc Guell, which was originally meant to be a posh housing development outside of central Barcelona...however, it was far enough from Las Ramblas (the main boulevard) that no one wanted to live there when Gaudi began it! (Ironically, now some of the most expensive Barcelona real estate is near Parc Guell.) The result is a large park sort of in the middle of the city, with a few instances of classic Gaudi design. The gatehouses at the entrance to the park look like literal gingerbread houses; there is a terrace at the top lined with mosaic benches ergonomically designed for comfortable lounging. (We took advantage of this.) We spent a couple of hours just wandering the park before heading back to central Barcelona and Las Ramblas for dinner.
Barcelona is the #1 city for pickpocketing, and most of it occurs on or near Las Ramblas, the busiest pedestrian corridor in the city. My friends and I escaped unscathed, but I can understand why so many people lose their wallets there: we weren't there during tourist season and the place was still pretty busy, especially on a weekend night. The actual street which cars can drive on is separated by a giant meridian which is a pedestrian zone, full of stalls selling wares, street performers, living statues, tourist traps, and outdoor dining for the many tapas restaurants lining either side of the street. We ate at one of those restaurants (albeit at the inside portion) two of the three nights we spent in the city. I cared less about the tapas and more about the fabulous chicken paella. Somehow, neither I nor any of my friends ever managed to get a picture of all the food -- possibly because we were too busy eating it!
Sunday, we spent the morning in the Picasso Museum (mostly his earlier stuff -- more mature works are at the Prado in Madrid, I think -- but still well worth the admission fee), the afternoon strolling Las Ramblas, and the late afternoon/evening making our way to Montjuic, something larger than a hill but smaller than a mountain atop which rests a fortified castle looking out over Barcelona's harbor. The view of the city from there rivaled the view from Parc Guell (and there was a castle!). Apparently, Franco took over the place during the Spanish Civil War and made it into a stronghouse. It's not a very castle-y castle in the medieval (or even gothic) architectural sense, just a place on top of a hill with a lot of guns around it so that you'd be an idiot to try to storm it. But it had a clear view of the ocean -- the first time I've seen the sea since leaving California! I do miss saltwater, apparently.
We turned in pretty early because we had to catch a bus back to the airport the next morning to continue our journey to Marrakesh. (Stay tuned!)
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news :: theljstaff : LiveJournal Major Notes: LiveJournal: The First Decade, AIDS vgift fundraiser, LJ_Photophile poll! [+146] - transientrain : (no subject) [+0]
- lj_maintenance :: mhwest : MogileFS Maintenance [+111]
- gilmore_girls :: yaoibatman : Help Please [+7]
- readingredhead : (no subject) [+1]
- gilmore_girls :: _stand__still_ : (no subject) [+0]
- gilmore_girls :: library_of_sex : ALEXIS ICONS [+0]
- gilmore_girls :: coffeebeanqueen : Help! [+7]
- news :: theljstaff : LiveJournal Major Notes: Security, Mobile, Facebook, Writer's Block, and Notes [+158]
- gilmore_girls :: thatlldopig : Because you didn't say goodbye. [+0]
- gilmore_girls :: peculiargroove : Icon postage [+0]
- gilmore_girls :: cinzia81 : Gilmore Girls Italia [+2]
- gilmore_girls :: mbytof : question to everyone [+11]
- readingredhead : Marrakesh // somewhere I have never traveled [+0]
- readingredhead : Barcelona // oh my god a dragon! [+0]