notes of the day

smofbabe: What I'm seeing is a totally different comment-making box than the one I had before, the one that you write comments on posts in. My browser doesn't recognize its "send" button as a button.

irontongue: I'm still using, as my everyday browser, an early version of Firefox which 1) I have customized up the wazoo to eliminate the most annoying features of the web (among other things, I have succeeded at completely eliminating the ads on LJ, and I don't want to lose that), and which 2) predates the screwing up of Firefox. Just about the time I was considering updating, which I'd done once before, I started seeing reviews of the new versions which were harshly critical.

The third reason I don't update is that YouTube is always telling me I need to get a "modern" browser. If they said "current" or "newer", I might do it, but the word "modern" gets up my nose. Do they think any browsers older than this year were hand-calligraphed on vellum by monks?

I do keep around the current version of Opera for emergency use on websites that just don't function any other way, and I have to decide if I'm willing to unbend enough on principle to use that to make LJ comments.

Why am I so stick-in-the-mud about this? Because software vendors and web enthusiasts are always touting the virtues of user freedom and options and the ability to do whatever you want. Well this is what I want and they're not going to take it away from me.

A Noted Tolkien Scholar says that if I don't like the Hobbit trailer I should just not see the movie. (And there is papersky, proudly standing far away from the entire set.) Sorry, that's not an option for me. Unless I decamp entirely from Tolkien fandom, I can't avoid this movie by not seeing it. I am going to be living and breathing its atmosphere wherever I go. I know, because I did that of its predecessors. Just as an example, I have this day alone received six broadcast e-mails from various friends alerting readers to the trailer. So I might as well see it, and be able to have and express my own opinion of it, instead of seething patiently through everybody else's, because you know they're going to be talking about it.

Also, I can't do the job of defending and distinguishing Tolkien's work from the movies without knowing what they say. Half my conversations about Tolkien with non-specialists in the last ten years have consisted of "that's what the movies say, but the book says this" or untangling some movie-born (and -borne) misapprehension, which I'd never have understood or figured out if I hadn't seen the movies myself. "Know Thine Enemy" the proverb goes, and thereby for my own protection I am forced into the theatre.