***

Sooooo. This is what a cross-post from Vox looks like. Mein gott, that is really freakin' ugly. The formatting is not only non-existent, it isn't even the whole Vox post.

Bleh.

Although access to the streaming music is nice (and certainly more legal than the downloads I've been doing), I still dislike Vox too much to do something like this on a regular basis.

And by the way, you can't "go backwards" and cross-post from El Jay to Vox. I've already checked.

God forbid they allow us to cross-post from El Jay to Vox, hunh?

*blinks*

Y HALLO THAR NU UPD473 1N73RF4C3!

I actually don't have strong feelings about the change one way or the other, which puts me in the quiet non-majority. My one big problem is that it looks just a leeeeeetle too much like the Vox update interface.

Dear 6Apart: This makes me unhappy and suspicious. At least on LJ we can do our own HTML, unlike Vox, which keeps us in rich text mode for everything.

[Note: I signed up for Vox mostly to make sure I got the liz_marcs name, and as an "archive" for my music reviews. You can upload MP3s and stream them through the site, which is a nice feature. Other than that, Vox has zero ability to customize, even in individual posts. Haaaaaate.]

( Anyone else nervous about these DHS raids? )

In any case, the DHS raids pretty much had my attention yesterday, in large part because the way they were conducted was...worrisome on more than one level, especially given the legal and political atmosphere in the U.S. these days. There is, I think, an undercurrent of paranoia among people of all political stripes (although the cause of it is for different reasons). Usually, the more you know, the less likely you are to be paranoid. For the first time in my memory, this has been reversed. The more you know, the more paranoid you become.

I need a new layer for my tinfoil hat, I think.

In the course of my DHS raid-watching, I, of course, stumbled across the hilarious story of Michael Crichton fictionalizing a political reporter as a pencil-dicked child rapist. Apparently one Michael Crowley pissed off Crichton when Crowley wrote a less-than-complimentary article on Crichton's global warming denialism in The New Republic.

Even so, imagine my joy when entrenous88 posted a wonderful overview of the wank that has resulted from Crichton's act of asshole. Heeeee!

As a result of the wank, I now have an awesome icon (you have to read the wank to get the joke). More icons here.

MSNBC's Olbermann has even gotten in on the act, by naming Crichton Worst Person in the World.

Man, I needed that laugh, especially after reading about the DHS raids.

So, glasses up to entrenous88! Thanks for the laugh!