Queer by Choice

I'd been planning to do something with the ever-so-popular "Refried Paper" LiveJournal style, but after attempting to make 100 million different modifications on it I finally admitted to myself that the bottom line is that just really think the whole thing's irreparably ugly. I do like the idea of having all that space for links down the side, but I absolutely hate every single one of the fonts, the link styles, the colors, the date formats, the lack of any pretty banner across the page with the start of a new day, and most of all I intensely hate having the little "Security: Public" lines spelled out in words instead of using the neat little padlock icons. (That part annoys me even on other people's journals; most of the other details only become annoying to me when I have to be personally associated with them myself.) So after spending a few hours trying to rewrite every last detail of it and insert all the portions of this journal style that I like much better in its place, I finally just came to terms with the fact that I'm really much better off starting with this basic journal style that I actually don't utterly abhor and trying to make only a few modifications instead of 100 million of them.

The current barely-modified format of my journal is certainly not final; tomorrow or sometime when I'm more awake I will probably change the color scheme a whole lot and add the same rainbow background that's on my website to the background of my journal. But I don't think there's any hope for me and the "Refried Paper" style to get along.

Oh, and I want to figure out how to add a "Current Book:" link along with the music one. That doesn't seem to be controlled by the styles page so I'm thinking maybe it involves overrides? I don't know. I'm tired and I'm going to sleep now but I will investigate further sometime soon.

US Plans Widespread Use of Nuclear Weapons in War

I linked to a different article on that same story a while ago but Yahoo News just linked me to that article above, which is more detailed than the previous one I'd seen. It's an extremely disturbing subject. The U.S. government's supposedly non-nuclear missiles that they've used on Iraq and Afghanistan already contain a gigantic assortment of radioactive materials which have caused a gigantic increase in cancer among Iraqi children since the Persian Gulf war and the half-life of those materials is generally about equal to the age of the earth. Now George II looks all too interested in outdoing his father in the competition to see which U.S. president can irradiate the planet most.

A LiveJournal comment, from Richard Evans Lee to me, which I happened to like:

"You are so intolerant. Which isn't a criticism."

This is true. I'm extraordinarily intolerant of all kinds of things that I think it's good to be intolerant of. Not generally to the extent of wanting to kill people, I mean, but I do inform people that I think less of them for certain things. Most people are capable of so much more than they bother to accomplish.

Currently I'm mostly busy just being intolerant of all my prospective LiveJournal styles, but it's the same personality trait as my intolerance of people. There are also only about six foods in the world that I can stand to eat, for the same reason. I'm the pickiest person in the whole world about pretty nearly everything. Sometimes it would be nice to be more easily pleased, but at other times being intolerant can be a good thing.

My journal's appearance is slowly evolving toward what I want. I think I'm still going to end up fighting with the "refried paper" thing again eventually though, and trying to create a sort of half-and-half hybrid of the two styles. I like the setup of the individual entries exactly the way I have them, but I'd rather make the upper and right hand edges of the screen surrounding the entries bear an approximate resemblance to the "refried paper" format. And unfortunately I can't really just copy and paste the pieces in directly, because the table cells don't intersect right at all and I end up with a hideously disturbing jumble of garbage. I hate coding tables. But really, I think there's still hope that I'll sort it all out someday.