I am happy because I get to put ridiculous little bits in and change lots of settings and once again have my space to write in where I have the potential to reach lots of people but in reality reach only the truly intrepid friends I have who glance over this way every once in a while, usually by accident.

Hooray! And I hardly had to spend more than a couple of hours tearing out chunks of hair trying to work with WordPress!

Hopefully this will encourage me to write more, and write better. Much, much better. Maybe. =)

Since I rarely updated anyway, nobody will particularly miss my raving or find the any downtime inconvenient; I also have my own personal shenanigans to attend to which will make it a bloody miracle if I actually manage to get anything even remotely creative done, much less this managing to get this sucker up and running again. But I’ll start simple and keep my fingers crossed and go from there. It’s a good project for me in a couple of important ways, but I simply may not be up to it yet and may not be up to it for some time. At least until some things in my life are stabilized. I just can’t focus.

Anyway, I’m elsewhere on the web; my mouth roars on. I miss my blog, so hopefully that will provide at least a little impetus for me to get it taken care of.

This blog may break without warning as things go on behind the scenes. For instance, to start off with, I’m deleting as much as I can from the server. It’s an unholy mess. Newer things may break – email me to let me know. Older things will DEFINITELY break because I’m deleting all the old sites I put up before. Some things, like my Martin Luther King page, I’ll try to keep from disturbing until it’s moved to its new home because that page gets a ton of hits and a lot of schools use it. A lot of black history sites also steal it, without even so much as a linkback. Nice karma you got going on over there, you guys. :P Way to keep the flame alive.

Anyway, my email remains the same: perilous at sithly dot com. So give me a shout if you need to talk to me or if the site is broken somehow. I’m just going to start with getting back the ability to post if I want to -that broke sometime between April and a couple months ago, probably because of the old theme I had – and go from there. I’ll be curious to see what happens, if anything, from this point forward!

Peace. Stay safe out there, folks.

Okay, so there’s one syllable too many, but that’s for the extra awesome in this story:

May 16, 2008
Marriage Equality Comes to California
By George Takei
Our California dream is reality. Brad Altman and I can now marry. We are overjoyed! At long last, the barrier to full marriage rights for same-sex couples has been torn down. We are equal with all citizens of our state!
The California Supreme Court has ruled that all Californians have a fundamental right to marry the person he or she loves. Brad and I have shared our lives together for over 21 years. We’ve worked in partnership; he manages the business side of my career and I do the performing. We’ve traveled the world together from Europe to Asia to Australia. We’ve shared the good times as well as struggled through the bad. He helped me care for my ailing mother who lived with us for the last years of her life. He is my love and I can’t imagine life without him. Now, we can have the dignity, as well as all the responsibilities, of marriage. We embrace it all heartily.
The California Supreme Court further ruled that our Constitution provides for equal protection for all and that it cannot have marriage for one group and another form – domestic partnership – for another group. No more “separate but equal.” No more second-class citizenship. Brad and I are going to be married as full citizens of our state.
As a Japanese American, I am keenly mindful of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that the law can impose. During World War II, I grew up imprisoned behind the barbed wire fences of U.S. internment camps. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Fear and war hysteria swept the nation. A Presidential Executive Order directed the internment of Japanese Americans as a matter of national security. Now, with the passage of time, we look back and see it as a shameful chapter of American history. President Gerald Ford rescinded the Executive Order that imprisoned us. President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the unjust imprisonment. President George H.W. Bush signed the redress payment checks to the survivors. It was a tragic and dark taint on American history.
With time, I know the opposition to same sex marriage, too, will be seen as an antique and discreditable part of our history. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked on same sex marriage, “Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper, in fact, serve only to oppress.”
For now, Brad and I are enjoying the delicious dilemma of deciding where, when, and how we will be married. Marriage equality took a long time, but, like fine wine, its bouquet is simply exquisite.

George Takei

Yeah, the haters are already working to overturn everything, but this is still really, really cool.

I can see why two people, both of whom happen to be of the same gender, being in love together for a really long time in a committed relationship would be so threatening to the Christian conservatives that they’d be outraged about this, you know? Everyone knows that only straight people can have that kind of relationship.

Right?

I just spent about a half-hour staring at my account on their website and all the lovely $0.00 notations that appeared today under “balance due” – I paid the thing in full on Friday and spent an anxious weekend checking it roughly every 13 seconds to make sure that the payment posted. When I got the “preapproved” offer for the card in the mail a couple weeks ago I was extremely skeptical, but leapt at the chance to finally have a real live credit card again because for about three months now I’ve been trying to get a card again. My credit this summer finally went from “omfg no” to “no credit history” because all the bad stuff has finally dropped off. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone said “well, okay…we’ll take a chance on you,” but had had no luck and didnt want a secured card.

Then this offer came in the mail and I checked them out and yeah, the company is horrible, but this is where you start over, and I’m okay with that. This is where you begin, reestablish, and then move on to better cards with better companies. And it was pretty funny reading up on them because Credit One has a terrible reputation. Shocking, I know. But I noticed as I was reading that the loudest complaints seem to be coming from the folks who were bad credit risks, got the card, and continued to fuck around by making payments either late or so close to the deadline that they were doomed to be late, or shit like that.

Now I’ve got no doubt that this company is awful and that any problems with them are bound to be magnified by a factor of about a million when compared to dealing with a far more reputable credit card company (if there are any – sounds like an oxymoron to me), but the thing that worried me was I saw a couple people had made payments online and didnt see them posted for 14 days, or so they said. So that kind of scared the shit out of me and that’s why I was camping the online statement for three days. I honestly didnt think it would post today, being Veteran’s Day and all, but it did, and I’m all about the YIPPIEEEE!

I paid it through my checking account so I’d not only have the Credit One confirmation numbers but my bank would have a record of the payment, too, and Credit One can’t turn around and tell me they never got it. Since I dont trust the company, I’m being super cautious, but really, now that I see they even posted on a holiday and I’ve already been through the process once now, I am going to go with the belief that as long as I make a payment the day I get the statement, it’ll be posted within a few days, never even go near the “due by” date, and I’ll be fine.

I monitor my credit reports carefully now, and I saw yesterday that Credit One has reported a new account to all three credit bureaus, just like they said they would. :D So that’s great, too. And in six or eight or 12 months from now, when I have months of unbroken, on time, more-than-minimum payments every single month, I’ll be able to tag one of the better companies and see if they’ll give me a better card, and get rid of this one and its four million percent APR, compounded six times daily and twice extra on Sunday.

Why am I telling you this? Because the day I got that card it was like a prison door opened in my life. It is my Next Chance at a Fresh Start. And I know that I’m going to do great with it because the only reason I got screwed in the first place was because I got laid off and couldn’t pay the bills and they wouldn’t allow me to enroll in the credit protection thingie even when I told the companies about the pending layoffs I was facing more than 90 days in advance. But up until the day I got laid off, I was paying about double the monthly minimum on all three credit cards I had at the time, and was doing extremely well with them and building a pretty good credit rating as a result. And that was on a significantly lower income than I have now. So I know that I can do extremely well with this thing, especially since it’s only a $200 limit, and I can’t really get into trouble with that. And even so, I enrolled in the credit protection thingie anyway. Never again will I be that fucking stupid and not enroll in the credit protection thingie.

So yeah, I got that card in the mail and actually had it out sitting on my desk, propped up against my monitor for about two days before I carefully and lovingly tucked it into my wallet. I couldnt stop staring at it. It is only a small rectangle of silver plastic, but for me, the incredibly significant meaning of this little card makes it completely transcend what it is to most people. I can’t stop thinking about it, I can’t stop staring at it, I can’t stop checking that stupid account page on their website and grinning cheesily as I gaze at that lovely, lovely $0.00 balance. And I’m cogitating very, very carefully what I want to buy first with it.

I was thinking maybe this and this. They have a buy them both and get a deal thing going for them on Amazon.com. But then there’s also this, which is enormously tempting, as well. And then there’s this. And this is also awesome.

And then, of course, almost (but not quite) everything on this list here is extremely tempting, but I do have to go through and update it with the newer stuff that’s come out since I built that list.

This is all just so exciting. :D

It’s just an automatic reaction; I’m powerless against it. Even though he’s managed to turn the Star Wars legacy into nothing more than a corporate cash cow with no soul to speak of, even though he’s a talent-free, money-grubbing, pretentious, arrogant hack with stupid fucking hair, I am still so deeply in love with the original trilogy, I still believe in that story so much, that I can’t help but get excited. Hell, I even still watch the prequels. I’m a passionately, incurably devoted Star Wars geek.

Note that I did NOT say “deluded.”

I suppose it’s the eternally optimistic romantic in me that’s hoping against all the odds that this actually turns out to be something awesome. It won’t, but a geek can dream, can’t she?

I hate you, George Lucas. I hate you. With gobs of flaming hate sauce.

Lucas planning ‘Star Wars’ TV series – CNN.com

Well, I’m going to cancel my BlueHost account and possibly move over to Lunarpages instead. BlueHost has a weird no-nudity-even-for-art policy that really rankles me that I didnt know about until I forked over a C-note, and also they seem to be having a lot of trouble with their CPU limit being set so low that some people can’t even run a WordPress installation on it. Apparently if you use any scripts and the script code is sloppy you trip the CPU load limit and your site gets blacked out for a little while. You also can’t do any backups of any size without tripping it, either. And also there are rumblings of email problems with BlueHost customers as well. These things have made me leery!

And finally, though their tech support is highly available and very responsive, their forums are nowhere near as awesome as the Lunarpages forums are – and one of the mods at the BlueHost forums is actually breathtakingly rude.

So this combination of factors has led to my calling BlueHost to get my money back and then I’ll go over to Lunarpages – $30 less for more features and what looks like better support, though BlueHost was very, very good. If they turn out to suck they also have a 30-day full refund guarantee, like BlueHost – and then I’ll just stick with the host I have now until I can find something better.

Also, Lunarpages accepts adult content – you can host an adult site with Lunarpages – and I heartily approve of this.

Because fuck censorship.

***************************

So I went and registered a new domain today so I can use it strictly for business purposes, and went looking for a new host. The guys I’ve been with for years now, Rackhost.net, are really awesome. I have no complaints at all about their service and I will say right now that their tech support is amazing. John Q is the best. I hate to leave them.

But I did a quick search ’round the ‘tubes and found BlueHost.com, who are apparently one of the best host providers anywhere. Their tech support is rumoured to be excellent and they have a ton of features and services with each account, not to mention a shitload of bandwidth and disk storage. Plus, I can host unlimited domains with them – so that means I no longer have to have separate hosting accounts for my domains.

It costs me $21 a month to host two domains with Rackhost and I only get a total of 12 gigs of storage and a few hundred gigs of bandwidth a month. For $8 a month with BlueHost, I got more features and a 350 gigs of storage / 3500 gigs of bandwidth. Clearly, though I have no complaints about Rackhost’s service at all, the clear winner here is BlueHost.

I’m a little nervous switching hosts because you just never know if the new guy is gonna suck, and boy, bad hosts are a real pain in the ass. But I couldnt find a single bad review about BlueHost and so I figured what the hell – it saves a lot of money, and I need to be saving a lot of money. :) Once I’m sure that BlueHost is reliable and trustworthy I’ll be able to launch my business-related domain too, and get my work stuff off sithly.com forever, which is good, because screw these friggin’ corporate Nazi web-surfing snoops. I want my work stuff totally separate from everything else.

This was triggered by just such a super-corporate, anal-retentive twat that bitched about my email yesterday. Turns out she was a dumb shit when it came to configuring her email client and when she went to see who I was by surfing over to my totally awesome home page, I guess she was scandalized.

Another victim Hoffed! I have the best homepage on the internets, man. I still get hate mail about it after all this time, people demanding I pay for the bleach with which they had to scrub out their eyeballs. I love my homepage. Sheer brilliance.

Anyway, in the next few weeks I’ll be switching this blawg over to the new host. Things should go smoothly (heh) but if the site blacks out for a day or two that’s probably what the deal is. It’s a good opportunity to try to tidy things up and put up a couple pages I’ve been sitting around not doing for like probably 10 years.

And, of course, my homepage is coming with me, intact.