I have four three two more Dreamwidth invites, friends!

If anyone wants one, or has a friend who wants one, or whatevs, leave a comment here with your email address (comments, again, will be screened).

It seems I caused a little bit of a kerfluffle yesterday.

To all the folks who've subscribed to this journal in the past twenty-four hours: Welcome! If you've come looking for a source of more drama, I'm afraid you're going to be a little disappointed. I'm pretty oblivious to it, and my posts tend to get about fifty readers tops. Still, I hope you like what you see here, and that you'll stick around!

So, what happened yesterday? What happened is that I got maybe two hours of sleep the night before, sat in bed with my laptop to get my head in a place where I could go in to work, started browsing my LJ Friends Page and... Well, you probably know the rest by now. Hell, you probably know more than I do. I only really followed what happened in my space; apparently it spread all over LiveJournal and Dreamwidth and InsaneJournal and JournalFen and...

Okay, first of all, wow. I put thought into a post and three people read it. I crankily type out a few sentences, and everybody and their mom is commenting on it.

Second of all, I've seen some of the conspiracy theories out there, and please. It was a mistake. Does that absolve them of responsibility? Not in the least. But seriously, as far as I've heard yet, I'm the only person who actually saw the ad in question (though Google has always put some pretty disgusting text ads up). Not the best way of drawing in a new crowd of readers and users.

Third, I'm not leading any kind of mass exodus to Dreamwidth. I, personally, will be doing the bulk of my posting at Dreamwidth from here on out. And honestly, yeah, I would really like it if the people who want to read my stuff follow me over (but OpenID means you don't even have to set up an account). LiveJournal has, over the past few years, become less and less what I want out of a webjournal community, and I'm hoping Dreamwidth will be able to fill that gap. But a mass exodus? A boycott of LiveJournal? That's just gross consumer activism. It's slacktivism, and given the work I do, I don't really want to be associated with it.

I want to thank marta from the LJ Staff for how she handled the situation. I stand by the point I made yesterday in that this didn't have to happen and that LiveJournal holds some responsibility for it, but given that it did, her response to it was really good. At this point, the National Organization for Marriage ads should be gone (we'll see about the Google AdSense ones in the coming days), so again, thank you.

To my friends at LiveJournal, snugglebitch isn't going strikethrough any time soon, at least not by my hand. After all, there are a lot of people at LiveJournal who aren't switching any time soon, and I still want to keep in touch with them. It'll just be a lot quieter at my site. Again, snugglebitch is where I'll be doing most of my posting from now on, and I hope you'll keep reading.

Thanks everybody! :D

This entry was originally posted at http://snugglebitch.dreamwidth.org/1484.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

So this lovely ad was plastered all over my Friends Page this morning:



Yuck. Whatever my thoughts on same-sex marriage, I do not want this in my space. It's disgusting, deliberately perverting Day of Silence imagery (because marriage is far from the only thing they want to "defend;" the right for their kids to beat up queers at school is pretty high on the list too).

And this is why I've switched to Dreamwidth.

ETA: The ad should be down now, folks. My thanks to marta from the LJ Staff for helping me out with this. There's an update on the situation (such as it is) here.

So, friends...

Who came over to Dreamwidth last night? What are your screennames?

And who didn't, but would like to? I have five invite codes to give out.

I need your email address if you want an invite, so the comments have been screened.

So, now that I have a Dreamwidth, I need to add some content.

While I certainly have some ideas for what's going to fill this space, I'd also love to hear from all of you! What would you like to see here in the coming weeks and months? What subject have you always wanted to see me write about, what question have you had for me that's gone unanswered?

I reserve the right not to answer a question, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't ask. Just leave it in the comments!

I got invited to Dreamwidth!

Go check it out! If you want to join me over there, set up your OpenID with them so that you can get invited when it opens up officially on April 30th.

I'll probably be doing a lot of cross-posting between accounts, but I'm setting it up as a new space, different from my LJ (though with a lot of familiar touches, cuz that's just how I've been doing things online for the past eight years). It's very similar to LJ, but the little differences here and there are ones I really like. (Things I like: Separating out "subscriptions" and "reading access," so that you can let someone read your posts without having to add them to your "Friends Page;" easy cross-posting back to LJ; being able to set up feeds without a paid account; the red or purple default color scheme; no ads anywhere; other stuff that's not coming to mind right now.)

Anyway, I hope you like it!

I was tempted to save this for later this weekend, since today is going to be crazy, but since I'm awake, here's my review of...

Star Trek: First Contact

Synopsis: Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) must confront his demons when the Borg attack Earth's past, trying to stop humanity from making first contact with an alien species, bringing an end to the future as we know it.


( Click here for the review! )

Final Verdict: I often forget just how good this movie is. Well-shot, well-written, well-acted, well-edited, and just plain entertaining, Star Trek: First Contact is one of the best films in this series, and stands among some of the best science fiction films of the 1990s.

Since I'm writing about Star Trek: Generations today...

In 1998, Pocket Books published a volume of Star Trek short fiction entitled Strange New Worlds. While there had been anthologies of Trek short fiction before, Strange New Worlds was unique in that it was proposed as a means of finding and printing the work of amateur Trek writers from across the United States and Canada. By the time the program ended in 2007, it had spawned ten volumes, and brought to fruition the dreams and career aspirations of dozens of writers.

Naturally, as soon as I was eighteen years old I lept at the chance to send them my work.

I don't write much fan-fiction. Even when I was younger, I thought I'd be better off spending my time writing things that were mine, things I could maybe possibly get paid for one day. Still, I have to say, I really enjoyed writing for Strange New Worlds. There's a challenge in writing someone else's characters that I found really helped me hone in on how to make my own characters more than just plot puppets.

I submitted a total of four stories for publication, and while none of them were published, I'm proud to say that each one was deemed worthy of a second read by the editors. It was my first time submitting to a professional publication, and even though I didn't make the cut, it was a great doorway to the oftentimes unnerving world of publication. It got my work in front of a team of editors who sent me brief but valuable feedback on my writing, it introduced me to the cost of mailing in manuscripts (wherever you can make an electronic submission, DO IT), and it helped me learn to accept both criticism and rejection without giving up. Plus, they liked my work, even if they didn't print it. Eighty percent of the people who submitted didn't get the honor of feedback or a second read, and so whatever rejection I might have gotten, they still liked my work.

This is the first story I sent them. I wrote it almost five years ago, and while I think my work has improved since then, there's still a lot that I like about this piece (and I'm not going to tell you what I don't like about it, so it won't taint your reading of it). It's something of a sequel to the film I just reviewed, which is why I'm publishing it now. Only a handful of people have read this, so I hope you all like it too.

Let me know what you think!

( 'A Butterfly's Dream' )

We're less than a month away from the premiere of Star Trek, and omg, friends, I am so excited! If you haven't done so yet, go check out some of the trailers at the official site.

In the meantime...

Star Trek: Generations

Synopsis: James T. Kirk (William Shatner) passes the torch to his successor, Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), as the two captains of the Enterprise team up to stop a madman from destroying a solar system.


( Click here to read the review! )

Final Verdict: Star Trek: Generations is a beautiful film, and an enjoyable enough coda to both the big screen adventures of the original Trek stars and the small screen adventures of The Next Generation. However, fans of both series will find the storyline somewhat lacking. With far better endings already existing for both series, this crossover makes for a decent Saturday afternoon movie, but is ultimately little more than unnecessary fluff.

Okay, so if I backdate this thing, we can all go back to pretending I did this review on time, right?

Anyway, let's get on with...

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Synopsis: After a catastrophe within Klingon space, the Federation's fiercest enemy can no longer maintain the conflict. While the two superpowers vie for peace, the crew of the Enterprise gets caught up in a conspiracy to end that peace before it can begin.


( Click here to read the review! )

Final Verdict: While it's nowhere near as tight a film as the director's previous Trek outing, suffering from a weak middle act and a few poor dialogue moments, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is an otherwise perfect finale to twenty-five years of adventures with the crew of the original Starship Enterprise.