You all may have noticed that two Alerts went out for this post, one of which had a bad link. It's not an AOL problem, I just had to delete and repost the entry. Now on to the original post:
In case you hadn't noticed, the Alerts
are appearing a little differently now -- with
pictures!
I'm investigating why that's happening, exactly. But in the
meantime -- what do you think? Do you like it? Let me know, and I think you know
how ...
Hi everybody... as posted to the AOL Journals main page and the Message Boards, here are the Guest Editor's Picks for November 3rd, 2006:
Sheria blogs about her life in North Carolina at On My Mind. She's this week's Guest Editor. Check out her weekend picks:
* My Life Change and Weight Loss Journey
Check out Sheria's blog to see these picks with her unique description. Don't forget, if you want your own chance at being a Guest Editor, or if you have a blog you want us to see for a possible feature, send me an e-mail at JournalsEditor@aol.com. Please don't forget to include a link to your blog.
Have a great weekend, everyone. Thanks -- Jeff
'Lost' is loved by millions for
delivering three things: bottomless mysteries, high scary weirdness, and
powerful yanks on the heartstrings.
Last night's episode delivered heaping double buckets full
of all three. The smoke monster is back in fine
form, scary as hell, and seems to be an actual character. That guy with the
eyepatch and Juliet's video-assisted doubletalk dance with Jack's mind delivered
the suspicious mystery groceries for me in spades, and man, I FELT it when Eko
teared up over the photo of he and Yemi as little boys.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Not a problem: you can
read EW's solid recap of last night's
events here, or, if you've
got the bandwidth, just go and watch the first twenty minutes of
the show itself. There's no
telling how long that's going to be up, though.
But enough
about that -- on to the theories, Easter eggs, and total crap:
Theories
Here's a
'Lost' random theory
generator. Careful -- you
may stumble across some spoilers.
There's a number of
theories surrounding Eko's death:
1) Eko
was the last Tail Section survivor. Bernard doesn't
count, because he only happened to be in the tail using the bathroom when the
plane seperated.
2) The island
itself is weeding out those it deems spritually worthy of survival. It tried to
elicit a confession from Eko, and when he refused, killed him.
3) From a story perspective, Eko and Locke are essentially
the same character: both are on a spiritual quest, both have abandonment/family
issues, and both are tougher than the callous on Ted Nugent's trigger finger. If
you look at it more, both Eko and Charlie are troubled men of God who have
serious issues with their brothers. Story-wise, that's getting pretty crowded.
Rather than chase three overlapping characters around the Island, the writers
had the smoke monster bash them a little breathing room.
4)
According to Shawn Schrager of
SBL, every
'Lost'
actor with a
traffic
violation must die on the
island.
5) Perhaps the actor playing Eko wasn't super-easy to work
with.
The Smoke Monster is spawning
its own theories, too:
1) When Eko sees dismembered people
from the past around him on his sojourn through the jungle, is he hallucinating?
I think the Smoke Monster is actually presenting his memories in a physical
form. Think about it -- the Smoke Monster could have taken the form of Jack's
dad, Kate's horse, Hurley's buddy from the mental institution -- any number of
trippy hallucinations our heroes have seen alone in the jungle could well be the
Smoke Monster running psyops missions instead of full-on
attacks.
2) The Smoke Monster is the collective embodiment of
the island's dead
souls.
3) Maybe it's some sort of genie or
djinn.
Ben, Jack, and Juliet's interactions spawn more speculation, too:
1) The more I think about it, the more I think that Ben and
Juliet are siblings. Sure, they fight like jealous exes, but who hasn't had a
sibling hate their significant other? Mysister dislikes my girlfriends on a
matter of priniple, then warms to them -- or doesn't, usually. Whenever Ben
walks in on Juliet flirting with Jack, he gets pretty
cranky.
2) Neither Juliet or Ben can
be trusted. I think they're in cahoots. Think about it: the island has healed
Locke's legs and Rose's cancer. Chances are the Others know about this -- so why
would Ben still have a tumor at all? Ben's played the pathetic kitten before,
and he only does it as long as he has to to get what he wants. Juliet, man ...
you just can't trust anyone who's devious enough to pull something off like that
cue-card move. I'm starting to think that she may be the one who's really
calling the shots on the island.
The man with the eyepatch
is WAY too exciting to neglect, but right now he's a long list of endless
possibilities. We can safely assume that the glass eye found in a hatch during
Season 2 belonged to him, though.
Easter
Eggs
This episode was pretty low on actual Easter
eggs. However, the folks at Lost Easter Eggs
have put together a couple good posts showing Eko's
death, the
Patch
Man, and all of Juliet's
cue cards from her videotaped
mindbender.
Desmond may be clairvoyant on the island, but in a previous
engagement, he was actually
Jesus.
Man, Juliet and Heather Mills McCartney look a LOT
alike, don't
they?
Total Crap
When
Locke and friends emerge from the hatch to find a dead Mister Eko, they sure
don't seem too concerned about what might have actually killed him. They just
kinda sit there looking at him while Locke shuts his eyes. Don't you think at
least one of them should have charged blindly into the jungle, shouting?
That's all I've got this week, folks. As always, if you've
got more theories, eggs, or crap, leave it in the comments.
So, your Journals should be looking a little different this morning, but working just fine. The Journals team installed Journals R9 seemingly without incident in the early morning hours here on the East Coast, USA.
Stephanie BamBam! has more to say about it here.
I do note in the comments on my last post that some of your October 31st entries are not showing up in your archive listings, though your entries are still there. The two of you reporting that are AOL UK members. Any US members having this problem?
There's another minor glitch --- the continuing absence of a 12-point font size. I'll follow up on those and let you know what I find out as soon as I hear something myself.
Also, some of you reported that your Alerts were acting a little squirrelly over the past few days. I reported the issue, the Alerts team reset their servers, and everything should be working okay now.
If something's out of whack or not working the way it should be -- or the way we think it is, please let me know in the comments.
As you may imagine, I get a lot of
e-mails with problems, complaints, and of course -- the occasional bit of
praise. I've noticed a common complaint from you guys out there in J-Land,
though, and it's a relatively easy fix.
Many of you have
written in to say "Help! My journal is too wide and a) I can't see my "edit
entry" buttons, or b) the text goes WAAAY over to the right and you have to
scroll back and forth to read the whole entry." Joe has covered this before, but I wanted to revisit
the topic.
You may have noticed that this only happens on
your main page, not on the individual entries themselves, or in archived
entries. Let me explain what's happening here.
J-Lander
Sassydee50 has
been kind enough to allow me to use her as an example, although this is a very
common problem. Be sure and thank her in her comments.
These
screenshots were taken a while ago, and may not reflect her journal's current
state. So here's her Journal as it appeared to me earlier this week.
If you take a look at the arrow marked
#1, you'll see that the "About Me" column
is wider than usual -- take a look at mine for comparison's sake. The Journaler
has put something in her "About Me" column that is widening it past the default
setting. The usual culprits for this sort of thing include animations, photos,
long URLs pasted in there or changes to the Journals' actual CSS that force the
column to widen. You only have a finite amount of screen space before the scroll
bar appears, so a wider "About Me" Column means less room for text to appear in
individual entries.
That's big. In this case, I'd advise resizing the photo to
no more than 550 pixels wide. Anything past that is the blog equivalent of
smoking at a gas pump.
Except it's not dangerous to other
people or their property. Please bear in mind that your blog is yours, and you
can do whatever you want with it -- I'm just offering this as a solution to
folks that want one.
Also, please be aware that there are any number of
reasons that your Journal would not display correctly, including CSS problems,
embedded tables, etc. I'll be blogging about those issues in future posts. As
always, please mail me with questions or leave them in the
comments.
New changes are afoot, my Journals
friends. The R9 release is coming up soon, and
we've already pushed it to Beta so everyone can
play around with it, get used to it, and most importantly, find
bugs BEFORE we release it.
As always, Product
Manager Stephanie
BamBam! has a fuller
update.
The most obvious changes are visual, but we've
changed the way error messages are handled and the Blog This! function a bit,
too.
Here's a
sample look at Journals R9 -- the arrow points out the buttons' new
look:
http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke
My URL in Beta would be simply
http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke.
I bolded the "beta" for sake of emphasis only ... please don't drive
yourselves nuts trying to do that.
Have fun, hammer
around, and please mail me about any bugs you find, or leave 'em in the
comments.
