James Jacobs is one of the Secret Masters of Paizo's Pathfinder series, and in the newest KQ interview, he discusses the five secrets to a great adventure, plus talks about his history with Dungeon Magazine and plans for Pathfinder.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

lebaneselove
A wealth of resources for fans of the Lebanese entertainment world.

scenebyscene
This collaborative screenwriting community will accomplish an entire film script--each scene by a different writer--over the course of one year. It's destined to be crazy. Along the way, a slew of smaller challenges will be offered.

add_foreign_ljs
Looking to practice your language skills? add_foreign_ljs offers users a way to find journals written in a language other than their own.

There's an interview with mega-versatile designer Matt Forbeck up at KoboldQuarterly.com.

I'm hoping this is the first of a series, so please, check it out!

There's waaaaaay too much to report, so I'll stick to the highlights. However, there were a LOT Of highlights, the best of which was meeting so many people I only know by online nicknames.

So, ( the highlights: )

Whew.

UPDATE: Man, my post was littered with nasty typos. I'm still recovering from the con whirlwind. And so here's an Expanded List of Convention Greatness:
( Additional GenCon Moments )

Development Goals and Basic Accounts

Last week we updated our development goals for 2008. Generally we noted a number of cool enhancements and investments to LiveJournal that we are working on, including improved search, usability, and site development.

We also wanted to let you know how we hope to accomplish all these things, and how we plan on paying for them. In order to accomplish our stated goals for this year and beyond, we need to increase the revenue gained from both groups of LiveJournal accounts: paid subscription accounts and ad-supported accounts.

As of August 28th, all users will be able to choose to downgrade their account to Basic through their Manage Account page. Additionally, we will start showing advertising to visitors who are not logged in to LiveJournal when they are looking at Basic Account journals and communities.

Basic Account users themselves will not see ads on any Basic journal or community while they are logged in to their account. If you want more information about this, take a look at our new post on lj_2008 where we outline our reasoning.

Indian Flash Fiction Contest

In other news, we are excited to tell you we've launched "Quick Tales" LiveJournal's first initiative for users in India, in celebration of India Independence day, August 15th. "Quick Tales" is a flash fiction writing contest in which we're partnering with Caferati.com, one of India's largest online literary communites. The contest's winners will receive some great prizes and it is open to anyone with a mailing address in India. We hope that users with an interest in Indian writing or just India will watch LiveJournal's india_writing community. That's where the finalists and winners will be announced, so keep an eye on it towards the end of September! If you're in India then enter the contest - if your story is slick and quick (under 500 words) then you could be the lucky winner!

Meanwhile, back at LiveJournal Inc.

We have updated and redesigned our corporate site. The goal of the redesign was twofold: first, to update the look and feel (Dystopia users will appreciate it!); second, we want to provide a destination for prospective employees, partners, and members of the press where they can access important information about the company. Kudos to our design team.