Locavore and I'm elite!

Well, I've been vegetarian for about twenty years now. A small part of that time I've spent as a vegan...but I couldn't seem to stay away from cheese. Actually, my downfall turned out to be a box of milk chocolate covered cherries I received as a christmas gift.

More recently I've been learning some new food terms. Of course I think most people by now have heard "ovo-lacto vegetarian" and whatever variants may have become popular. Breatharian? Fruititarian? Okay, I don't think Breatharianism every really caught on, because you are supposed to live on only air. Fruititarians are supposed to live on only the fruit of plants (no roots or, I think, seeds.)

Now in the last few days I have been reading "What We Eat, Why Our Food Choices Matter" and learned the terms "responsible omnivore", which sounds rather intruiging, and "Locavore", which I will talk more about in a minute.

A responsible omnivore takes care to make the best (from an ecological and sociological and humane perspective) choices possible when selecting their food, and yet they may choose to eat meat at least sometimes. I kind of like that idea, but I must admit that I had a few bites of locally farmed chicken a few months ago and a bite of locally farmed duck last week and...well, I'm not saying that I will absolutely not eat any more meat, but it just didn't make me want to go out and eat a cow, a pig, five chickens and a whole barnyard of other animals the way some chocolate covered cherries made me want to go out and rob a dairy of all their fattiest cheeses and chase them down with a truckload of creamy milk chocolate.

So, not too excited by responsible omnivorism at this point, BUT I found out that September is Locavore Challenge month (or something like that.) A locavore is someone who tries their darnedest to eat only locally grown seasonal food, preferably grown within one hundred miles of where they live. SO...for various reasons it is probably NOT the most ecological, sociological and humane thing to do with all foods in all cases all the time, BUT I thought I would give it a try for the month of September. I think it will be educational.

Wish me luck! Tonight we are going to try to eat most anything I have on hand that is NOT locally grown, so I won't be tempted tomorrow (September 1st.)

AND...on a mostly unrelated note...I've been made Yelp Elite. WooHoo! (If you don't know what Yelp is, click here.) I kind of had this little goal for myself of achieving "elite" status without actually nominating myself, which I decided would be cheating.

What are the benefits of Elite status? Not much...you get a free tshirt, you get a little icon labeling you as Elite (gee...kind of like IMVU VIP, only you don't have to pay for the privledge) and a few times a month they have local area events sponsored by local area restaurants and bars or other venues where they have free food and free booze. Oh, and you get to bring a +1. The real question now is...will my bf and I actually attend one of these? I'm a bit shy with strangers and his opinion of Yelp is that it is a bunch of 20-somethings looking to hook up, so I dunno...maybe I'll be able to convince him to go (and convince myself as well) IF it's something really awesome sounding...we'll see.

OMG...jinx was disabled!

Heheh...so much drama today. Here I am sitting here listening to a somewhat boring audio book on heart disease and feeling the fact that, between a wedding and an extended Sunday brunch at the exquisite Wente Winery this past weekend, I am just sort of blah and tired today and STILL when nearing the end of the day trying to convince myself to do a little erging when...

...BAM!...

I see that my avatar "jinx" on imvu.com doesn't appear to exist any more. At first I thought IMVU was having problems but I was still able to access the site and log in under another avatar so...wth? Did I do something wrong? I haven't done ANYTHING different lately and haven't been that involved with IMVU stuff lately...what could be going on? I couldn't find an email from IMVU about it either. Good thing I'm not prone to panic attacks, I probably would have had one.

Well, I contacted Matt and FINALLY received an email about it while talking to him (why did I never receive an email about this BEFORE they did it? Instead it arrived 20 minutes after) and I found out I'd been disabled because I didn't have a birthdate listed on my account and I have an access pass. Sheesh. They said they sent me a PM about it earlier but I checked and I didn't have anything like that...but according to Matt this is still all my fault because there had been an announcement at the top of the IMVU website pages.

I don't really care if it was my fault or IMVU's fault or if there is a fault here...whatever, I'm just glad I was around and Matt was reachable and I got it taken care of right away. Of course, the result is that my ACTUAL REAL BIRTH DATE is listed on IMVU and everyone can see that I turn 40 on August 26 :(

Meanies.

Er I mean...Happy Birthday to ME...woohoo, what a great landmark! :)

Meanwhile, I found that in about a half hour total of being disabled I managed to generate a speculative forum post that was 7 pages long!

Who knew I was such a hot gossip topic? I feel so special now. (Kidding.)

A few things to say from this whole thing:

IMVU should really um....send people an email about something like this. I mean, I may miss a PM or a telegram (especially a telegram) but I would have gotten an email.

and

I asked Matt about the devcon-that-never-happened and he said there just wasn't enough new or fixed dev-type-stuff to warrant one right now but he made noises about how that would probably be different early next year. Hmmmm....interesting.

and

I really need to get developing again!

What is real?

Today I rather randomly received the following email from some random person:

I know what you're up to, you're just advertising those imvu credits and believe me i won't spend my money on something not real so nice try girly

I usually receive an average of about one email a day that appears to be from someone with an avatar at imvu.com and has to do with imvu credits...like someone either wants me to give them free credits because they think buying them is stupid, or they don't think it's stupid but they don't have a credit card or maybe like the above email, they aren't actually asking for any free credits, they just want to tell me buying credits is a foolish idea.

This one is probably my all-time favorite:

jinx can you please give me some creds 5,000 please I dosen't have aby money I dont wont buy a creds its stupid :( please :) 5,000 and thets all ..........

Like...hello...first of all, proof-read what you write but besides that...you are telling me what I do for a living is stupid and then you want something for free from me? That's like going into a bakery and telling the baker/owner, "buying cupcakes is stupid, I don't want to pay for your cupcakes, so please give me some cupcakes." Like, is this actually supposed to work???

Mmmm...cupcakes!

But anyway, back to the first email above. It got me thinking, "what is real?" It's like I asked them to pay for something that has absolutely no value (well, not ask them...more like just passively advertising them) and I find that an incredibly interesting point of view. I mean, if my grandmother thinks IMVU credits have no value, that's different. I don't think my grandmother has ever been on the Internet and she certainly hasn't used IMVU...credits really do have no value to her (unless, of course, she had a whole bunch of them for some reason and then someone offered her a wad of cash for them...then they would have value to even my grandmother who couldn't use them herself.)

But...if you have an IMVU account...if you use IMVU...how are credits not real? IMVU is a real company, it has real employees, real venture capitalists, real offices located in Palo Alto, CA. and millions of "real" users. A bunch of people make money off of IMVU and a bunch more people spend money on IMVU. If IMVU credits aren't real then I'm thinking perhaps the following things are also not real...

The Internet
Anything downloaded from the Internet (software, movies, music, audiobooks)
Movies watched in a movie theater
souls
money spent against your credit card limit
etc...

If you can't touch it, can't hold it in your hand, it must not be real, right? If this person REALLY TRULY never buys anything that is not "real", then I'm impressed as it seems quite hard to do these days. Well, either that or it's just a kid who's parents won't let them use their credit card.

smacking the technicolor curtain

The euphemism generator appeals greatly to the really immature "teehee" side of me.

dot.bomb

I just finished the audiobook version of "dot.bomb" today. The book, which is the story of one dotcom that failed as told from the POV of one of its employees, held my interest for the most part but by the end I realized I had just wasted about 7 hours of my life listening to a story that anyone in the high tech industry is probably all too familiar with.

Just substitute different names for the company, the CEO and founder and all the other players and you could have just about any dot.bomb out there. In fact, some of them might be a little more interesting (like the place I used to work, Skyfish!) Still, if you've never worked for a dotcom, it might be worth a read or listen.

No IMVU dev con?

I found out today that there are no plans for an IMVU dev con at this time. Last year the dev con was the day before my birthday or on my birthday or something like that and they had a cake for me as I was rushing out the door for a quick (24 hour) trip to Minnesota, which was sweet of the IMVU peeps but somewhat lame of me.

At first I was thinking "it's not that big a deal that there isn't a dev con", the biggest implication is that people who paid for a VIP membership were paying $10 a month for something that included the benefit "free admission to all dev cons", but that's a rather stupid benefit anyway, since some people will have been paying monthly for quite a while and others might sign up for just one month in order to gain a discount on their admittance, so hopefully it wasn't a big selling point for anyone.

Then I thought about it a little more. Now I'm actually a bit sad about it. Last year I got to meet some devs who I knew online and by pseudonym only (eXium, Cass, Twiddler, Whystler, I think BoogiePanda and more I can't remember) and it would have been very cool to meet even more devs this year...IMVU has grown a lot in the last year and it would have been quite something. Oh, more employees, too! Last year I even met someone from the Board of Investors, which is a bit like meeting a unicorn.

Perhaps it's just as well, I might get the cold shoulder from some people who seem to be under the impression that I did something wrong (and I didn't) and they might give me the cold shoulder or whatever, plus the other thing that often happens to devs is they get quite isolated after a while, spending more time developing and less time socializing until they don't know anyone...or as I find lately, I get more and more about the business end of things.

Lately I've really been pining for doing some more dev work, though, so if I can get my dual boot thing going on the computer I STUPIDLY chose Windows Vista as the operating system for, perhaps I can actually submit some new content.

Anyway, I guess it's possible they'll do a dev con before the end of the year...someday I'll have to actually talk to somebody like Matt or Marcus again and see what up wit dat.