The former is, well, something of a non-entity for me. It's actually kind of weird - I've spent every Christmas before this with my family. Last year my dad came out for a few days, and before that, I've always been at my mom's house. Christmas is a big deal for our family in a sort of family-tradition way (and Christmas Eve is the one church service a year you will possibly find me at). But I only have a four-day weekend for it, and my dad's busy, so... my plans are mostly to catch up on knitting and cleaning, and spend the rest of the time sitting on my ass doing fuck-all. So basically a regular weekend, just... more of it. And with mail.
As for the latter - I feel the need to get out my two cents (or the Canadian equivalent thereof) and both sides of the debate on my plurk timeline have basically been chugging the rageahol and it basically makes me want to crawl under my covers and not deal with it. They have a right to be angry, and I have a right to be stressed as fuck about it. So. Posting here instead, where I think I will be less attacked for my POV. I hate the changes - it's laggy, removes functionality, and is aesthetically displeasing. But I'm not up in arms about it, ironically, because I've been more or less on the anti-LJ side of the fence forever. I will admit that for communities, it's awesome. But I started blogging on a personal site (and right now, am writing this entry in Movable Type, which I will then copy-paste to DW, which will crosspost to LJ for me), and I've never liked the feel of being part of the 'cloud'. I also joined when it was invite-only, and didn't like invite codes (though there is a certain irony to people bitching about that as like their number one hate-on for DW. I understand both the necessity of them and the dislike of them, but LJ used to be the same).
As a result my expectations for LJ as a site are pretty much nil. I mean, things started going down the tubes when Six Apart bought them, and haven't improved since. I have spent years stoically giving LJ as little of my money as possible (unlike most RPers apparently I am not compulsively addicted to icons?) - I've bought paid time exactly twice: once as a Christmas present for a friend, many many years ago, and once recently because I needed a journal I could track subthreads on for RP. And honestly, shit like this is pretty much why. This, Strikethrough, staff abusing their admin privileges, clusterfucks with other changes - this is just the bale of hay that broke the camel's back. And I pretty much sat on my ass through those, and will continue to do so again. If everyone moves, so be it, if they don't, I'll continue crossposting and reading my friendslist there (which, along with my DW circle and my RSS feed reader I do every day). And if all of the social media sites implode, I still have here. My own little domain, my own little blog. Probably one of the only ones left in fandom, at this point, but I'm okay with that. I like having a space that's mine.
(And, on the whole, I like DW. I don't like the feel of invite-only, though I know why, but I do like the level of transparency present so far in both changes and malfunctions. It probably helps that one of the founders is responsible for my favorite FST of all time, though.)
