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We're going to keep this short and sweet (Frank and birthday vgifts will be back next week). You've probably seen the updates to our main menu. Don't be alarmed. You'll find everything you need, just in slightly shifted format. Just so you know, we based these changes on input from both experienced and new users who were not familiar with LiveJournal. Our goal was to reduce barriers to usability and make LiveJournal more accessible and easy to navigate. Please note that this is a work in progress. We welcome your detailed suggestions in feedback. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve your LiveJournal experience.

We've updated the global navigation menu:

Here's a quick breakdown of what you'll find where:

• Scrapbook can now be found under Profile (thanks for your feedback, btw), along with Settings, Stats, and Edit Profile.
• You'll find all the tools you need to post and update entries under Journal, which includes posting and editing entries, managing comments and tags, and customizing your journal's style.
• Friends contains all of your friend settings, from filtering your Friends page to adding, removing, and finding new and existing friends on LiveJournal.
• Under Communities, you'll find links to manage your communities, accept community invites, and create new communities.
• Explore includes search features, RSS feeds, Question of the Day, and FRNK radio.
• Under Shop, you'll find links to upgrade or give a paid account, buy virtual gifts, purchase LiveJournal merchandise (like T-shirts), and view your payment history.

LiveJournal Mobile update:

We've enhanced LiveJournal's mobile site to improve usability and load times. We've made more of LiveJournal's features accessible via mobile, including posting comments, uploading photos, reading and commenting on friends' posts, finding and messaging friends, and more. We look forward to reviewing your feedback and recommendations for future improvements.

Other important changes:

• You can lock comments to prevent further commenting on a post, while leaving existing comments visible.
• We replaced the "Tell a friend" link with a new "Share This" widget that lets you share LiveJournal posts on other social media sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
• We changed some of the icons on entries (you can hover over the icons to view descriptions).
• You'll see a Tag count on your Tag management page.
• You'll now see the 10 most recent vgifts on your profile page. To remove vgifts, left-click on the vgift and choose whether you want to remove the vgift from your profile or delete it entirely.
• We've added options to help you control receipt of vgifts, which you'll find in My Stuff under Edit Profile. You can now enable vgifts from friends or everyone and disable anonymous vgifts.

We've got your fix:

• UPDATE: Rolling several updates into one listing here -- 1) Scrapbook should be back and working again. 2) The problem with the Update Journal page in IE6 and IE7 should be fixed now. 3) The problem with the userpic add-on package pricing has been fixed and refunds issued to anyone who was overcharged while the erroneous prices were in place.
• Non-conforming images will now be automatically resized for custom mood themes.
• Line breaks no longer count as two characters against your entry's character limit.
• We fixed a bug on the Manage Tags page so you can clear all tags and add new tags.
• We corrected the UI for the update.bml page so it displays properly in IE8.

Thanks again for joining us. Frank and company will be back next week!

I'm a Porsche Boxster!

You're stylish, nimble, and good-looking. When it comes to having fun, there are few who can surpass you. And yet, you suffer from a lingering inferiority complex. Maybe it's because you have an older relative who is always in thelimelight?

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

(via trinityva )

Poll #1537215 John Lydon
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3

In this video, I think John Lydon is (choose one)

In general, I think John Lydon is (choose all that apply)

We're finishing up a few odds and ends before our next major release. Our mighty Ops guys continue to slay spambots and balance load times on a highwire without a safety net (which is kind of tough dressed in full ninja gear). Down on solid ground, we're celebrating this week's virtual birthday party with a warm toast to pants. If you can rearrange the letters of your favorite city, state, and/or country (feel free to combine these elements) to spell one of Frank's favorite treats (e.g., pants, wire, paper, etc.), he'll send you over a can of whipped cream to top it all off (provided you return the empty can for his midnight snack)! And, with that, let the word scrambling commence!

Stuff you should know:

We're still working on the delayed/missing notifications issue. Sorry, we're frustrated too. We'll keep you posted. Last week, we became aware that a recently-implemented script was overwriting affiliate referral fees for some of our users. Once we confirmed this, our Ops team quickly removed the script. Please be aware that, while we may beta-test other affiliate scripts down the line, we will take greater measures to ensure that no existing user-referral arrangements are impacted in any way. While we plan to stick to a weekly news schedule, if we have a release in between regular newsletters, we'll post here to keep you informed. You can also check lj_releases for current release information.

To our paid users, we send squirrels in love!

If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free Squirrels in love vgifts through Monday, March 15th at 4pm, PST! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 squirrels displayed until they've scurried off to their new homes. Please send only one vgift at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each vgift you send. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and select 'Do not disable' from the drop-down menu. Have fun!

Help is on the way!

We're pleased to announce the winner of our first charitable vgift poll, Doctors without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, which provides critical medical care to under-served populations around the world. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of the proceeds we raise from the sale of this vgift (we'll cover credit card fees). We invite you to start recommending nonprofits for our next fundraising drive at ljnewscontests. We'll take suggestions through the month and post a poll in the news during the first week of April to let you choose the recipient. We thank you, again, for your passion and generosity.

We've crowned a header

Congratulations to ohterlus for submitting the winning header, which will go live next week and keep us leafy through mid-April! You can submit designs for our next header contest at ljnewscontests now until March 31st. We'll post a poll in the news to let you decide which header will sit at the top of LiveJournal from mid-April to mid-May. All artistic interpretations are welcome. The winner will get a $25 LiveJournal gift certificate. All other contributors will receive $5 gift certificates. Our heartfelt appreciation for sharing your talent and creativity!

For this week's winning photo and more adventures with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut!

( Read more... )

Tupac Shakur : the life and times of an American icon / Tayannah Lee McQuillar & Fred Johnson.

more info

Girl power : the nineties revolution in music/ Marisa Meltzer.

CONTENTS: Riot grrrls -- Angry womyn -- Girl groups -- Pop tarts -- Ladies first -- Girl power.

Info from the publisher

Cultural codes : makings of a Black music philosophy : an interpretive history from spirituals to hip hop / William C. Banfield.

CONTENTS: Black notes and cultural codes : makings of a Black music philosophy -- A new Black music arts aesthetic -- A history of aesthetic definitions -- Hip to the hop -- A cultural education -- Black music studies -- African roots to blues, New Orleans, and ragtime -- Jazz : the new modern mode of being -- Race records, gospel, R & B, and urban blues -- Urban contemporary : soul, funk, and global -- Hip hop : connecting the dots -- Core values and the Black aesthetic code.

Stance : ideas about emotion, style, and meaning for the study of expressive culture / Harris M. Berger.

CONTENTS: Locating stance -- Structures of stance in lived experience -- Stance and others, stance and lives -- The social life of stance and the politics of expressive culture.

Info from the publisher

Musical gestures : sound, movement, and meaning / edited by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman.

CONTENTS: Why study musical gestures? / Marc Leman and Rolf Inge Godøy -- Musical gestures : concepts and methods in research / Alexander Refsum Jensenius ... [et al.] -- Gesture in performance / Sofia Dahl ... [et al.] -- Music and gestures : a historical introduction and survey of earlier research / Albrecht Schneider -- Gestural affordances of musical sound / Rolf Inge Godøy -- Music, gesture, and the formation of embodied meaning / Marc Leman -- The functional role and bio-kinetics of basic and expressive gestures in activation and sonification / Leon van Noorden -- Gesture and timbre / Tor Halmrast ... [et al.] -- Sensorimotor control of sound-producing gestures / Sylvie Gibet -- Visual gesture recognition : from motion tracking to expressive gesture / Antonio Camurri and Thomas B. Moeslund -- Conductors' gestures and their mapping to sound synthesis / Gunnar Johannsen and Teresa Marrin Nakra.

Metamorphoses of the vampire in literature and film : cultural transformations in Europe, 1732-1933 / Erik Butler.

CONTENTS : Part I. The rise of the vampire: Vampire country: borders of culture and power in central Europe; Vampires and satire in the Enlightenment and romanticism -- Part II. England and France: The bourgeois vampire and nineteenth-century identity theft; Dracula: vampiric contagion in the late nineteenth century -- Part III. Germany: Vampirism, the writing cure, and realpolitik: Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of my nervous illness; Vampires in Weimar: shades of history -- Conclusion: the vampire in the Americas and beyond.