eruthros

1. Sometimes I cook all fancy! I'm home visiting my folks, and my dad wanted to grill because he's been watching this grilling cooking show. But I basically don't eat meat except for fish, so we settled on tuna, because it doesn't stick to the grill. So this was yesterday's dinner:

( grilled marinated tuna and mango salsa taco-ish things for the noms )

2. Speaking of California, I often find staying with my parents somewhat frustrating (and helping my mom out with her work can be exceptionally frustrating).

But! Here are some of the things that California has in addition to fruit: It's-Its. Blue Bottle Coffee (<3<3<3). Tacos. Breakfast pastries at the Ferry Building. Boogaloo's amazing grilled plantain cakes. Persimmons from the tree in the backyard. Some friends I haven't seen in a while. Fan peoples. Thrift stores. An ocean.

3. There is going to be another Avatar: The Last Airbender (and Avatar: Legend of Korra) fanwork exchange over at white_lotus! I plan to ask for Korra/Chief Bei Fong, among other things, so it is basically guaranteed to include great things.

Anyway, if you are interested, there's a draft signup post to poke at (to make sure all your favorite characters are on the list!) and tomorrow there will be a draft rules post that take people's suggests from last year into account. And signups will start later this week!

As part of making it work this year, we've also made an AO3 collection for the challenge, so that people who want to play in an anon-slow-reveal challenge but also want to be able to edit their fanworks can play that way. People will still be able to just send us their fanworks and have them posted straight to the comm, but the AO3 thing should make it easier for people who are already using the AO3. (Plus we belatedly made a collection for last year, so if you want to you can submit your fanworks to the collection.)

4. Remember that top one hundred specfic works thing? I haven't forgotten it, I promise, I just got cranky when I organized everything for Condorcet voting on a website that said it would do it ... and then couldn't deal with 250 things in a list, Grr. And then I tried a bunch of other places, and they all would only do ten items or allow 50 voters or blahblah. I might end up just doing it in comments and uploading the data flat to a Condorcet calculator. (The short version of condorcet: it's sometimes called ranked-choice or instant-runnoff voting [though a lot of different methods end up being called these things, since the terms are used confusingly in news stories], and it's usually done for single-winner issues. It can be done for a multiple-winner issue, though, and I thought it would be fun because it would let people rank as many things as they wanted. It's a kind of neat alternative since it lets you rank things you hate low, and not have to do careful vote manipulation to make your vote "count." But APPARENTLY the javascript version of the Condorcet page crashes liek whoah.)

5. ( some stuff about the OTW )

I know a lot of y'all don't use lj, but in case you do, there seems to be a bug that caused (is causing?) a security/privacy breach: multiple people have reported that when they try to edit their own entries/profile/inbox, they are taken to another random user's edit entries/profile/inbox page, and can see all of that user's flocked and private entries. Basically, the system seems to think that they're logged in as another user. Here are some of the early bug reports from last night:

cocanuts reports the logged-in-as-another-user bug
itsaserket reports the logged-in-as-another-user bug
rachelmanija reports the same bug (and also reports that it stopped happening to her) (ETA: she expanded on what the bug looked like in comments here)
nix_this reports the same bug (with other details in nix_this's lj)
kazzisato reports the same bug

... but there are a ton of comments on the lj releases post now; those are just the first reports of the problem that I saw. LJ staff have not yet commented to my knowledge, so all that there is so far is a series of bug reports - nobody seems to know the extent or scale of the problem, whether it was a temporary glitch that has already been fixed or whether it's ongoing, or basically any other details. I haven't seen any bug reports from users who noticed unauthorized access of their journals - just from people who noticed being logged in as someone else.

There's also an overview post about this lj bug at unfunnybusiness. There don't seem to be any suggestions for fixes yet, but the lj release entry for their recent code release has 800+ comments and is growing, and I haven't looked at everything. I haven't seen any reports on why it's happening, but some folks are suggesting that it might be related to an (unannounced) change in handling cookies that has also affected plugins like LJ Login and dreamwidth's comment importing.

Unfortunately, while you can tell pretty easily if you have access to the wrong journal (click edit entries, see what happens, if something goes wrong log out and log back in), so far there's no way to tell if anyone else has access to yours. Will ETA if I learn more.

ETA1: I haven't seen any bug reports from people who experienced the bug after mid-morning today UTC (but I could have just missed them) - if you know of any, please let me know and I'll ETA again. Now I've seen some more recent reports, so it hasn't stopped happening. I have also seen people reporting that it's no longer happening to them, though - rachelmanija, linked above, and wendelah1 in comments here.

ETA2: fallacy_angel took a screencap of the journal they were temporarily logged into; see also their comment at lj releases.

ETA3: Strike ETA1; I think dapperdinosaur is reporting the bug shortly after it happened to them, which makes a bug report from about 4:00 am UTC on the 27th.

ETA4: lorax experienced the bug at about 3:15 pm UTC on the 26th, and wrote up an detailed report of what the bug looked like plus some notes about lj's response.

ETA5: In the comments here, silveraspen describes the response to their pm to a site staffer (at 2:46 pm UTC on the 27th) which suggested that info was going to go up at lj_maintenance soonish.

ETA6: There's a new lj maintenance post that describes the problem: they're saying that it didn't allow people to edit other users' pages, just view them, so it wasn't a security risk. (This is one of the times when I facepalm about lj's communication - site security vs security of people's info would maybe have been a good thing to mention there.) They also describe it as a bug that lasted for only three minutes - while it's true that most of the bug reports I saw were clustered around the same time period, I've also seen a couple more recent reports, so that seems ... unlikely.

ETA7: Make that a really recent one - here's snailbones's report of the problem happening after that lj maintenance post was made.

ETA8: This is the first instance I've seen of someone saying that they actually did something with the account they were logged into (I think - it's somewhat confusingly worded, so definitely grain of salt here), plus some discussion of how long the problem was happening: misstiajournal's comment at the lj maintenance post.

ETA9: moropus also reports that they accidentally commented as another user when they experienced the bug (note that the comment also has anti-Russian sentiment)

ETA10: siljamus talks about things to do to minimize the risk of this happening to your journal, which mostly involve logging out of all of your livejournal login sessions, and then not logging back in at all (which includes not crossposting from dw).

ETA11: I haven't seen a live report of the bug since snailbones's, linked above, at 9:38 pm UTC on the 27th. Anyone else seen anything? Yup, other people have seen something - see ETA14.

ETA12: LJ mentioned the problem in passing in their most recent lj news update; many of the comments are angry about the in-passing remark, wording, challenge the details, etc.

ETA13: rachelmanija describes what the bug looked like (what she could see, how long it lasted).

ETA14: strike ETA11; majoline reports seeing the bug (or a different bug?) at about 3:30 pm UTC on 10/29. This bug report is different, though - they were taken to the edit entries page of a journal entry they clicked on, not to a random journal. No word on whether they could do anything on that page. majoline commented to say that the buttons were grayed out and couldn't be clicked on.

ETA15: It turns out that anyone can see anyone else's edit-entry page for a public post by putting in their username and the number of the entry; it only works for public posts, and it grays out the boxes and nothing can be clicked on. So a misdirected link could send someone there, and so could I if I manually entered it, and etc. darkspirited1 and xenotaku have been figuring out the parameters of how this works in a comment thread. The existence of this weird UI is irritating, because it means that the cache error(?) bug and this thing might be described in the same way by a user. The important differences seem to be that in the cache error, someone appeared to be logged in as someone else, so the edit entry page would appear normally but with someone else's data (buttons appeared pushable, someone else's username and icon, etc), whereas in this edit entry page looks weird and unusuable (buttons and text greyed out, at the top it looks like you're trying to edit a post in a community: [yourusername] in community [otherjournalname]).

ETA16 I just saw another new bug report on lj maintenance of something weird that looks a bit like the original bug circa 4:53 pm UTC 10/29. Their comment with screencaps got marked suspicious, but since the comment was emailed to me I saw the screencap, and they said I could link it here: screencap of the post entries page as snowsoftsong. It looks like the post entries page as if someone else was viewing it - there was no "in community..." or anything and the entry page wasn't greyed out - except that the username was snowsoftsong, and the original poster of that post was alwaystheheart in a different comm. So: WEIRD.

(Almost) everything I've linked to in this post is a single user's bug report or description of their issues - I have no way of checking the veracity of anyone's comments.

I haven't been paying much attention to the new tv schedule, and I had mostly dismissed Alphas as soon as I saw ... anything about it (fyi it started airing in July). But the detention center in the show is in upstate New York, so I keep seeing links about it. Which is how I came across this interview with Zak Penn in which he talks about the premise and characters of Alphas:

( disability fail, half of the tv tropes pages on disability especially disability superpowers, mostly about the autism spectrum )

Using the general principle I mentioned in the long list poll, I've combined some works into single line items on this list - wherever a book and the series containing it both made the cut, I picked the version that included more works (e.g. The Hainish Cycle rather than Four Ways to Forgiveness and The Dispossessed as two separate items), and whenever there were two works where one was based on the other and they contained the same characters I combined those (e.g. Firefly and Serenity, The Never-Ending Story book and film). If you see instances where I combined things and shouldn't have, or didn't combine things and should have, please let me know in comments. Ditto if you see any typoes, misattributed works, etc. They'll be turned into a ranked-choice poll in a bit.

( Here's the short list as it stands now )

I don't know everything on this list, obviously, but just glancing at it here are some impressions I got:

1) There seem to be a lot more things created by women on this short list than the NPR one, probably partly because of the inclusion of YA and children's lit and partly because of the segment of fandom nominating/taking the poll.

2) There are some more creators of color than on the NPR short list, partly due to the fact that there's some anime and manga on the list, and partly due to the fact that hello, Samuel Delany totally belongs here.

3) There's a lot of what's often dismissed as "low culture" - like, looking at the movies, there are a lot of "classics" (Blade Runner, Alien, etc) but there are also things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Labyrinth and Spaceballs.