B is for Boycott

(It was going to be about Booze, but so many people on my f-list are talking about the boycott I decided I'm going to be a lemming today.)

I'm a paid user. I pay to support a service I use frequently, just as I buy CDs by bands after I've downloaded all their music and decide I like what they do. I believe in contributing financially to the things that I use whenever I can so that they can continue to do the thing that I like.

And in this case, what I like is reading posts. Posts written by people I like, people I care about, people I couldn't give two shits about but who have interesting things to say, and people who I honestly can't remember why they are on my f-list in the first place but I've kind of gotten used to following how their lives unfold. Compared to that, the ability to create polls or store pictures or make phone posts or have 50 billion WWJCD icons means absolutely zero to me.

And although I assume many of the posts I read are made by paid users there is an equal or larger number that are not. And if enough of them go elsewhere or simply drop off the face of the earth, my reason for paying goes away.

That's why I supported the strike. I don't think LJ is going to take any financial hit[1] because a bunch of people all decide not to log in for one day. The strike was not about punishing the new owners of LJ. It was about making the point that those to create content for the site, those who drag in their friends and relatives and make the site engaging for everybody, they are the reason that LJ can convince people like me to fork over my membership fee, and the reason why advertisers want to hawk their wares here in the first place. Non-paying users deserve to be treated with respect, as valued contributors and not as freeloaders.

Because if LJ pisses off enough regular users that the majority of my f-list moves over to InsaneJournal or GreatestJournal, I probably won't give up my LJ account. But they'll probably stop being the ones who get my money.

[1]Although I admit I have no idea how google ads revenue works so maybe I'm wrong.

B is also for Blotto

I used to be able to say I couldn't remember the last time I threw up from drinking. Now I can say I can't remember the second-last time I threw up from drinking.

(The first time was over 20 years ago and involved crawling out of a house party on my hands and knees and puking all over a cop. Never let it be said that I do anything in a small way.)

So apart from saying that the_axel and elusis are the most excellent of friends to have when one has imbibed rather too much gin, there is actually a story to this story. And that story is the sequence of events where elusis came over to talk to me in the club, watched me take a sip out of my drink and put it down, blinked, and said, "What is that?"

...and plucked a cell phone out of my cup.

melete looked over and said, "Hey, that's mine."

Nobody knows how her cell phone managed to make it's way out of her sealed purse and into my g&t. All I know is that reality moved four feet to the left that night, and I got a touch of motion sickness as a result.