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Dec. 4th, 2009 07:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickBeen watching True Blood (season 2) here of late. I could pretend that it's because I'm doing some kind of deconstructionist literary theory thing but that would be lying.
The thing is, I like vampires, even sparkley ones with bizarre stalker-type relationships. I'm a huge fan of the vampire thing, the allegorical biting stuff. I like the religious symbolism, the angst, and the striking of poses. Big fan, here. I like vampires in Buffy. I like vampires in Forever Knight. I like vampires in those awful novels by that Rice woman. So, y'know, bad southern accents and sprawling mythology in Louisiana? Yeah. I'm down with that. Vampires (for the most part) are sexy. Mostly. (Full disclosure: Bill (in True Blood) has zero sex appeal but that's okay because there is so much else in the damn thing to drool over.) For what are basically animated, room-temperature corpses, they are full of hotness. Note that very few people lust over zombies but the number of people lusting over Edward from Twilight, alone... And it's not necro. Or is it? I think the appeal of necro (Why yes, I have spent time considering the appeal of necrophilia.) is that they don't move or talk or look at you. They're just *there* like a RealDoll, only more real.
At any rate, I watched the first season of True Blood last year (No link because I'm too lazy to try looking manually through past entries. There's a widget in my LJ software that allegedly lets me download of all my lj text to offline status, which I am redding up to do here directly so that I can set up a fucking text-based search feature on my own hard drive. I'm tired of LJ's steadfast refusal to provide me with anything useful on the search engine front.) and I still like allegorical bites, same as I did then. I am also continuing to watch because (like at least half of the viewership) I want to see more Eric more nekkid. He's such a pretty thing, worth the price of admission.
I like the casual cruelty of vampires. Blaming 'em for it is like blaming a cat for batting a wiggling string. It's what they *do*. Amusing, that, at least to watch. Probably it isn't something I'd actually like applied to me, but watching it is entirely fun. In season 2, the eye candy front also gives us Godric, who made Eric. He's a young thing (note to self: do not imdb actors -- it always depresses you when they're born after the year you graduated from high school.) but a delightfully pretty one. There's something to be said for delightfully pretty. (Blood down his chin makes it better. Yes.)
Actually, this season (I've got two episodes to go) has been chock full of eye candy. We had Eggs, who fit into blue jeans better than anyone I've seen in a very long time. Jason Stackhouse, of couse, is pretty in a 'needs to eat more' bodyfat percentage kind of way. Tara's also built like a brick. Add them to the aforementioned Eric and there's something worth watching in every episode.
Also, I am looking foward to the exploding mythology. In the books, the mythology explodes and it started going supernova (or possibly suprnova, given how I get my television) about the time I stopped reading the books. I'm interested to see what HBO does with the source material at that point.
The thing is, I like vampires, even sparkley ones with bizarre stalker-type relationships. I'm a huge fan of the vampire thing, the allegorical biting stuff. I like the religious symbolism, the angst, and the striking of poses. Big fan, here. I like vampires in Buffy. I like vampires in Forever Knight. I like vampires in those awful novels by that Rice woman. So, y'know, bad southern accents and sprawling mythology in Louisiana? Yeah. I'm down with that. Vampires (for the most part) are sexy. Mostly. (Full disclosure: Bill (in True Blood) has zero sex appeal but that's okay because there is so much else in the damn thing to drool over.) For what are basically animated, room-temperature corpses, they are full of hotness. Note that very few people lust over zombies but the number of people lusting over Edward from Twilight, alone... And it's not necro. Or is it? I think the appeal of necro (Why yes, I have spent time considering the appeal of necrophilia.) is that they don't move or talk or look at you. They're just *there* like a RealDoll, only more real.
At any rate, I watched the first season of True Blood last year (No link because I'm too lazy to try looking manually through past entries. There's a widget in my LJ software that allegedly lets me download of all my lj text to offline status, which I am redding up to do here directly so that I can set up a fucking text-based search feature on my own hard drive. I'm tired of LJ's steadfast refusal to provide me with anything useful on the search engine front.) and I still like allegorical bites, same as I did then. I am also continuing to watch because (like at least half of the viewership) I want to see more Eric more nekkid. He's such a pretty thing, worth the price of admission.
I like the casual cruelty of vampires. Blaming 'em for it is like blaming a cat for batting a wiggling string. It's what they *do*. Amusing, that, at least to watch. Probably it isn't something I'd actually like applied to me, but watching it is entirely fun. In season 2, the eye candy front also gives us Godric, who made Eric. He's a young thing (note to self: do not imdb actors -- it always depresses you when they're born after the year you graduated from high school.) but a delightfully pretty one. There's something to be said for delightfully pretty. (Blood down his chin makes it better. Yes.)
Actually, this season (I've got two episodes to go) has been chock full of eye candy. We had Eggs, who fit into blue jeans better than anyone I've seen in a very long time. Jason Stackhouse, of couse, is pretty in a 'needs to eat more' bodyfat percentage kind of way. Tara's also built like a brick. Add them to the aforementioned Eric and there's something worth watching in every episode.
Also, I am looking foward to the exploding mythology. In the books, the mythology explodes and it started going supernova (or possibly suprnova, given how I get my television) about the time I stopped reading the books. I'm interested to see what HBO does with the source material at that point.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 07:59 pm (UTC)For those who are in need of a fucking functional LJ search utility, you can approximate an inelegant-but-effective LJ search utility as follows:
1. Go get the Python script ljdump (http://hewgill.com/ljdump/). You may need to go get Python (http://www.python.org/download/) if you don't have it already. Python is free and works on all kinds of operating systems, even stupid ones.
2. Use the script as indicated in the Readme. (Read the Readme. If you don't, you will not get your private or flocked entries. READ THE README. Follow the damn directions.) The script will automagically pull your entries (the words you wrote and the comments you got. It won't get your layouts or your posted pictures or any of that crap though I believe it does rip the user icons.) off of lj and put them into a self-titled folder for you. Each entry is a file in the folder. Each string of comments is a file in the folder. The files are more-or-less flat-text lightly tossed with a smidge of xml dressing and are, therefore, human readable and searchable using ordinary text-based searching. Huzzah!
2a. Let us have a happy round of applause, warm-hearted and sincerely meant, for text-based searching. In particular, let us shout out joyfully for grep, brought forth into the world on March 3, 1973 by Ken Thompson at the request of Doug McIlroy.*
3. Once ljdump is done running, be amazed (again) at how damn tiny text files are. It is the amazing, yo. Single picture is not a thousand words. It's more like a hundred thousand words. For realz... at least if you want any kind of size/resolution, anyway.
4. Use the "search" function of your operating system (this would be the crap that goes "File Contains..." in Windows but in my world it's easiest and quickest to use the aforementioned "grep") to locate probable suspects on the LJ-entry front.
Example: I'd like to find the LJ entry from a year ago when I was talking about True Blood on HBO. I'd type something like
$ grep -H "True Blood" /home/jessica/ljbackup/*
In response to that, I'd get a list of files back that contain the string "True Blood" exactly like that with capital letters and the space in between and everything. Grep cannot handle fuzzy 'did you mean...' search requests like Google does unless you use wildcards to TELL it that you mean a fuzzy request when you are requesting. (Grep is not for stupid people.)
So, now I have a list of files. Because inside each file is the url the file was originally pulled from, linkage = easy. Because inside each file is the text of the posting in human-readable English, finding the appropriate entry from among the returned results is fairly trivial assuming I can pick good strings for searching.
What would be really *nice* is something that I could put on the fucking desktop that would have like a google box and a search button and I could feed it the string and it'd come back with clickable-browse-able links to each of the likely files and then I could just click my way through them like in a browser sort of way. Yeah.
Now, Google allegedly makes this really *nice* product, more or less. It's called Google Desktop and, according to Google's blurbs on the subject, it will do absolutely everything I want it to do. However, I will not be using Google Desktop. I have some doubts about Google's ability to not-be-evil when granted access to my entire hard drive. I'm not sure I trust Google. On the other hand, grep only ever does exactly what I tell it to do. It will never, ever send my information back to its corporate masters. I trust grep, relied upon by computer people since 1973.
*source (http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch001j.c11)
no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 11:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-05 12:49 am (UTC)Does it index flocked and private posts as well? (Checking.) No, no it does not. So, helpful but not thoroughly and completely helpful.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-05 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-05 05:58 am (UTC)