Go forth and vote vote vote. Vote.

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lj_stylecontest: for the submission of new S2 styles. They're going to make the top five layouts public (meaning free account holders can use them). Submissions are closed; it's the voting round from now until April 22nd. Which means you should GO VOTE for your five favorite styles. I don't care which ones you vote for as long as FLEXIBLE SQUARES is one of them. (Solicitation? You bet!)

Is it sad that the only mail I've gotten recently has been the same drug and alcohol survey over and over? I mean I'm sure the department has deep pockets but the survey is the size and shape of a phonebook and this is the fifth time they've sent it to me (together with progressively more polite forwarding letters saying we've noticed you haven't filled out our survey yet did we mention the CASH PRIZES no pressure of course). If I'm a random selection, can't they find someone else? Do I really seem like the sort of person who'd develope unhealthy addictions please don't answer that.

Thought: Here's a guy who regularly attacks fanfiction of all varieties using strong, antagonistic language, who doesn't ever appologize, and who doesn't make any attempt to back up his opinions whatsoever. He also uses a lot of elipses, but honestly elipses are so prevalent everywhere I go that isn't my friends page that I don't think this automatically disqualifies him. His logic is what disqualifies him, and yet by the end of the comments he's somehow gotten everyone to agree with his most basic point--that is, it is WRONG to write fanfiction without the permission of the original author. Amazing!

This might be the reasonableness phenomenon? Because the author is so openly biased, the commentors feel as if they have to be rational. A few do this by introducing evidence, but the majority choose repeat someone else's evidence while adopting a "reasonable" concillatory tone. So they'll aquiesce to the OP's least toxic point, but this is also his main point, so that in the end they are all agreeing with him.

Or maybe they're agreeing because he's right. But I keep thinking, if I ever wrote to a Shonen Jump mangaka--in terrible babelfish Japanese--asking for permission to use his or her original works, I probably wouldn't get it, and the reason I wouldn't get it would be an entirely unjust one (ie because I don't speak Japanese).

The comments on that post make my head hurt. If someone has said something already, you should say something different. But then I cop other people's ideas all the time without remembering the source or even that there was a source, so I can't really judge. I wish my brain was better organized, because I hate the feeling of sloppy thinking. It's like...standing on a pile of sand, only worse. It's unsettling. Not as unsettling as when you recognize phrases from your reasearch paper in the professor's lecture notes, though.