Depressing in some ways, but exciting. I have lived such a sheltered life; I had no idea that when large limbs of large trees break off under the weight of falling snow, it sounds like rifle shots going off all around you. This is particularly exciting in the middle of the night, when snow is falling at upward of two inches an hour, there is also ( Read more... )

ETA: And to prove just how distracted by the RL stuff I've been, I see on rereading that I forgot the bit of news that triggered this entire post. Namely, that Facebook has apparently silently reintroduced an extraordinarily intrusive tracking cookie that it had pulled following an enormous outcry from the user base. The sort of thing that tracks ( Read more... )

If people have written you gift stories and posted them on AO3, and you have hit some sort of fest jackpot and gotten stories that make you totally happy, do you leave kudos after you have commented to say so? Or is to leave both comments and kudos violating some unwritten rule of manners that I'm too dense to have divined on my own ( Read more... )

I admit it: part of the purpose of this post is to try out my new crossposting settings. But it also genuinely did occur to me that if I were watching our debt ceiling debate clown show from afar, I'd stand a good chance of being mystified by the underlying legal issues. And it's not as if mainstream media are generally doing much to explain them ( Read more... )

So I went to boot up my computer this morning -- my default computer, that is, the laptop with all my data and applications and things on it -- and found that something dreadful had happened to it in the night. It would make its startup noise, and as best I could tell it was booting, but the screen remained black like a black thing. It wasn't ( Read more... )

I have just been inspecting my beehives, and have gotten my very first bee sting. (Everyone tells you when you take up beekeeping that you will eventually be stung, so I was overdue for this particular rite of passage.) The sting is probably no big deal at all -- I'll know for sure within a few hours, when my arm swells up or doesn't -- and ( Read more... )

Now, with extra helpings of We love you, come save us from ourselves.

Adweek reports that the Guardian sees its future in expanding into the U.S. market, where presumably it would be positioned to swoop up the now-unserved market for, you know, news. While I'm sorry to know that the paper has any financial concerns at all, this country ( Read more... )

In a summer of political news so awful and so stupid that it is agony to even look at it, you are a shining oasis. Can I just stay here for the next few weeks, ignoring the catastrophe looming beyond your gardens and sweet waters, and hope that by some combination of magic and good fortune our political press will take heed of your example of how ( Read more... )

I usually avoid these things, but the timing on this one is so perfect that I'm making an exception. Gaacked from fandom at large:

Go look at your blog/journal. Find the last Fandom-related thing you posted. The characters in that post are now your team-mates in the Zombie Apocalypse. How fucked are you?

Ha. I have the professionals. I have ( Read more... )

So, a few days ago incandescens very generously put up one of those prompt memes that goes, "Give me two characters and I'll write you a letter, or restraining order, or email, from one to the other." And because I admire her writing more than I can say, and the temptation was really too much to resist, I pounced and asked her for Muraki and Grell Sutcliffe ( Read more... )