Thamus

Here's your escape route, Old-school Stumblers - a simple, excellent toolbar for Categorian, the best option to replace SU. (Thanks to Inga for drawing attention to the link).
It sits fine under the Firefox StumbleUpon toolbar, which many of us are keeping for the moment as a clearing house or meeting point, for old friends and followers who come looking for us, even if we're not going to contribute any more sites to the new capitalist wasteland of SU.

QUOTE: "I just watched my dog chase his tail for ten minutes and I thought to myself,
'Wow, dogs are easily entertained...'
Then I realised, I just watched my dog chase its tail for ten minutes.

Huh! When I was younger, I was quite happily entertained chasing lots of tail myself.

No piteous wails or heroes
AS the news this morning was showing the latest footage of Gaddafi's last bloody minutes, I was doing some literary research, and my eye was arrested by the phrase "shooting spasm" in these lines from Sophocles:

"Whereat the hero, while the shooting spasm
Had fastened on the lungs, seized him by the foot
Where the ankle turns i' the socket, and, with a thought,
Hurl'd on a dune-vex'd reef that showed i' the sand:
And rained the grey pulp from the hair, the brain
Being scattered with the blood. Then the great throng
Saddened their festival with piteous wail
For one in death and one in agony.
And none had courage to approach my sire -
Convulsed upon the ground, then tossed i' the air
With horrid yells and crying, till the cliffs
Echoed round, the mountain-promontories
Of Libya, and Misrata's rugged shore."

There are no piteous wails for Gaddafi in death and agony, but his killers look less than heroic. It would take a Sophocles rather than a mobile camera to render them so.

NOTE: To make the point with dramatic effect, I changed four words above from the original The Women of Trachis:
dune - from surf
sand - from sea
Libya - from Locris
Misrata - from Euboea

Another view: 'Please don't delete your SU accounts'
DESPITE my rant (below), the immediate objective of seasoned Stumblers is not to lose contact with the true and trusted talented friends we have built up here over the years.
At present the hot favourite for an alternate site appears to be Tumblr, but thanks to Inga for posting this alternate opinion about deleting SU accounts. The originator is LLBwwb [Lynn] on the GS thread "Changes to your StumbleUpon account as of October 24."

Partial Lynn Quote: "Even tho' I am seldom here anymore and I'm now a diehard Tumblr addict, I was still shocked and saddened to read the News. I said all I had to say, when SU changed to V4, so won't waste my time begging for something that SU has already made up their minds about. I left, found Tumblr and never looked back, as so many of us have done. As I've watched you all flood into Tumblr, I just want to warn you NOT to delete your SU account! As all of us Tumblrs found out, their message system leaves much to be desired. But we all learned fast. We use Tumblr, with SU..."

As Inga says: "Dear Stumbler friends, please read the rest of this before making hasty decisions."





[IMAGE: The Oktober SU-icide Fest. Thamus2011]

Fuck you, Bumblealong
"Dear SU -
It pains me to say this but, I want to break up. Things have changed between us and not for the better. But then, it's always been that way. You've always called the shots forcing me to dance to your tune.
In the beginning it was like most love affairs. We each had what the other wanted..."
Go to Red and read on. This is the finest condemnation I've seen of the latest (and probably last) blast of user abuse from the ghouls running the site formerly known as Stumbleupon, and now Bumblealong. As she notes, most of us formerly prolific posters have long since given up and gone to ground. No more does the Texas lemur (emmuttmax), howl in the night, no longer rage the Lemur-Celt Galactic wars of yore. Long gone are the poets, artists, Photoshoppers, photographers and storytellers, their once resounding names fading away like old school friends.
Fuck you Bumbleupon! I hope you rot forever in a hell run by MySpace.