Brain better.

[gement]

So it's not left hanging, my previous upset over my reading is mostly past now, thanks to hours and hours of processing time with a variety of people, very good advice from more than one friend, and a cathartic date with meowse Monday night.

I got 10 hours sleep last night and wanted more.

I still feel like ranting a bit, but a lot of that settled out when I actually posted a comment to the author's LJ. (Not bitching her out, just... saying this was my reaction, these were elements that bothered me in the not-good way, and suggesting she talk to the publishers a little more strenuously about packaging, as that was in large part what blind-sided me. But entirely framed as my reaction, not her responsibility or anything, and congratulating her on writing something that felt very emotionally true and affecting.)

I'll be reading the rest of the book on Friday to get it out of my system, and letting my reaction lie fallow until then.

So this is that "trigger" thing people are always talking about... It's really never happened to me before. That was very strange and upsetting, and the fact that it was so upsetting was one of the upsetting parts. I have not had to cope with that vehemence of reaction before, not on that time scale at that intensity.

Brains are funny ducks.

In other news, pics next post.

Comments

Re: dept. of little surprises

[gement.livejournal.com]

Heheh. Yes, I was fairly surprised and flattered to be friended back, and then surprised and flattered again to actually be read and commented upon.

But we turn out to have some entertaining things in common, and I'm glad the election brought this very interesting human being onto my radar. (I've mostly gotten over the "eee, celebrity reading my journal" twitch. Celebrity is a strange commodity on LJ, and mostly seems to be based in really enjoying reading and commenting on LJ, so your chances of actual interaction go *up*, not down. Neat, huh?)

How to format LJ user-names

[gement.livejournal.com]

That's odd. The formatting should work the same in both places. Using angle brackets instead of square:

[lj user="elgordo42"] makes your name, either in an entry or a comment.

[lj-cut text="Here's the long version"] only works in an entry, because it's to snug things up or conceal optional information in the Friends or Journal quick-scanning view, so it wouldn't make sense in a comment.

For a long time I kept mixing up which one had the dash. I wish they'd thought to make them consistent, but hindsight and all that.

Re: How to format LJ user-names

[gramina.livejournal.com]

I believe the issue is that only two "words" can come before the "=" -- thus, "lj user=" is fine, but "lj cut text=" would be too many words; I expect which pair got hyphenated was random (they could have done "lj cut-text" or the one they did do, "lj-cut text").

I could be wrong, but it seems to be a pattern so far as I can tell.

Re: How to format LJ user-names

[gement.livejournal.com]

That's correct, only one word can bind to an =. But that word could have been "cut" since "text" is the only variable you can add to the cut is a text field. So the syntax could have been [lj cut="Blah"] and if no variable is provided [lj cut] use the default. Or something.

Alternately, [lj-user name="Blah"] would have made it consistent. But mostly I'm just rattling on.

[meowse.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, they couldn't have used "[lj cut]"; I'm pretty sure that to be properly formed XML, an attribute has to have a value. But, then, I wasn't aware that you could use "[lj-cut]" without a "text" attribute.

[meowse.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The first "word" is the "html tag"...like (using gement's syntax above) "[h1]" or "[br]" or even "[html]" itself. The second "word" is called an "attribute", and a single tag can have multiple attributs--even multiple attributes at the same time. For example, to make a link, you say "[a href='http://url.goes.here.com/']My Link[/a]", where "a" is the tag and "href" is one of the possible attributes of the tag. The most common example I can think of for a tag with muliple simultaneous attributes is the "img" tag, where you often see the "src" attribute for the source of the image combined with the "alt" attribute to provide alternate text for people using text-only browsers: "[img src='http://some.server.com/my/picture/of.someone.cute.jpg' alt='My picture of someone very, very cute']"

I suppose I can see the reasoning behind having separate "lj" and "lj-cut" tags, but...meh. I still would've done with "[lj-user name='gement']" rather than just having a plain "lj" tag. But one can argue it either way.