Yes, I have been MIA in that I haven't bogged or blopped in months. Yes, I have neglected my friends on this site. But have I really been MIA as an editor and neglected my guides as well?

Apparently so, because I received a PM today saying that I had been reported MIA. Now, I have been struggling with two mass-contributors lately who, by the sheer amount of their often daily – and mostly junk – submissions, have indeed made it problematic for me to juggle my editor duties with my workload IRL. So it's true that a couple of times I haven't always found the time to process all of the many submissions in my queue, even though did endeavor to clear as much as I possibly could. And when I did manage clear them all, I had to do it all over again the next day. Upon one of the instances that some subs had to be processed by staff as I couldn't get to them in time, the first of these contributors had their submissions denied, precisely because of mass-contributing. The second user is a lot more troublesome in that he put me in the no-win situation of being forced to accept his contributions just so he could fix what he'd messed up in the first place. First he flooded my queue with hundreds of cast edits. As I was leaving for a two-week vacation in August, I didn't have time to clear them all, and when I came back what I'd left pending had been accepted by staff. Now, be it that the subs were erroneous to begin with, or that the bugs caused by the overhaul of the contribution system had messed them up, the cast lists were riddled with junk upon my return. Consequently the same user continued to swamp me with submissions, tweaking the same entry over and over again. And if I wanted to put an end to the can of worms he'd opened, I had to accept at least some of them. Though I did tell him time and time again that what he was doing constituted gaming, he kept resubmitting, saying that I just "didn't get it", or that he was not doing it for the points, as if it didn't amount to the same thing one way or another.

The issue was complicated by the fact that the guide he was contributing to happened to be a show I used to story-edit. So that while he was doing a lot of guess work in terms of identifying voice actors (we're talking about a cartoon here) I actually had the recording schedules with me and knew for a fact who had voiced whom. When I pointed this out, it just angered him more and he lashed at me for not editing the cast lists myself. I told him that I couldn't because I was a Mac user and Safari no longer worked on cast lists since the contributing system'd been overhauled. Besides, the cast lists were fine before said overhaul messed up the recurring roles, and before his endless edits came along. He also questioned the fact that I'd put one of the characters as a "star", even though as the former story-editor of this show I think I have a pretty good idea of who constituted the main characters or not. But he endeavored to change this character to recurring nonetheless, in every single episode.

Next he proclaimed that 4 episodes was enough to label a character as recurring, and when I rejected one of his submissions saying that according to his logic one of the characters he'd put down as guest should therefore be recurring, he changed horses mid-stream. He practically accused me of wrongfully rejecting his submissions because a moderator had recently told him that the commonly accepted rule was in fact 5 episodes, not 4. I just wish I hadn't been stupid enough to take his word for it and checked from the beginning myself. The situation was even more ironic due to the fact that the moderator he'd asked about the matter was angelandspike, whom he called his "good buddy". Things escalated from then on as he started to flood me with PMs on top of his submissions, at one point sending 3 in the course of ten minutes. At that time I was up to my neck processing more of his gaming submissions, so it took me ten minutes to reply in turn. But no sooner had I sent my response than he sent yet another PM saying that since I had "never responded", he had decided to continue with his edits regardless of my say in them. The bottom line is that I have wasted so much of my time dealing with these two mass-contributors that sometimes I could not clear my queue in due time. And now it's one of them who has in all likelihood reported me as MIA to boot. I can't even begin to imagine what they'll do with the guides if I'm retired because of them and they take over…

The situation pains me even more because I already felt guilty enough neglecting my friends on this site without being accused of the same neglect with shows that I care about as well. So, sorry friends, and thank you for listening…

A belated Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and a great start into 2007 so far.

For the first time ever I was the hostess on Christmas Eve this year. I was never much of a cook, but always a gourmet, so I concocted a typical French menu with foie gras-flavored madeleines, black truffle-buttered pastries, poularde with morels, and sautéed chestnuts with cardamom, almonds and honey. Quite tasty dishes, if I do say so myself.

Here are also a couple of pictures of my apartment taken that evening:





And for those of you who don’t know what I look like, there now is a picture of me on my profile under personal image.

Against, best wishes to you all, and see you around!

Thanks all for the birthday wishes! The big celebration dinner was on Saturday (still haven't fully recuperated... That's what you get for living in Champagne Country! ) and here are some of the presents I got.

DVDs:

Necklace (in blue and copper):

 

Dinner plates:

Dessert plates:

In the words of Austin Powers: It's good to be me!

Did I really have to become an aunt just two days before I turned 25? Sure, 25 is young and everything, but it's still that whole quarter-of-a-century landmark, blah blah blah...

And there's nothing wrong with having a nephew either... It's just that now people call me Auntie, which to my ageist  post-teen ears sounds remarkably like Grannie!

I am really not where I thought I'd be in my life by the time I reached that age. I've accomplished a lot more in certain areas, and a lot less in others which now seem more important to me... But perhaps they only do because the heart wants what it does not have?

You know how they say it’s the little things in life that makes someone’s day? Well, that becomes true once you’ve actually run out of big new exciting things to relish.

For instance, what makes my day these days is my morning and evening ride on the bus, going to work and then back home.

Why? you ask. Let’s just say I’m enjoying the view, especially this one:



I know it may seem strange that after over 20 years of living in Paris I’m still drinking in the sights like a tourist. But I truly don’t get tired of going through the Quartier Latin and crossing the Seine in front of Notre-Dame everyday.

This contemplative moment always recharges me somehow for the few seconds that it cocoons me in an aesthetic bubble. So Carpe Diem, my friends! Even when the hectic ugliness of the world around threatens to get you down, there’s bound to be a vista somewhere that will soothe your soul...