Recently I had a rather uncomfortable realization that I am older than either of my grandmothers were at my parents' wedding. To my mind, they were both old, and not just because I was looking at their ages from a much younger perspective. In the photographs in my parents' wedding album, both of them look very much like elders, with wrinkled skin ( Read more... )

Now that we're going to have three months without conventions, we need eBay sales. And to get that, I need to get more merchandise listed. Ideally, I should be using all 250 of my monthly free listings, in order to put as much merchandise as possible in front of potential customers ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Becky Jones: The wyverns and the cats stared at each other before cautiously approaching to sniff noses.The sheer number of kitten prompts, including visual prompts, was a little painful coming so soon after we'd lost our cat. All those cute little orange tabby kittens ( Read more... )

Yesterday I pulled up the pea trellises and took them into the garage for the winter, hoping to reduce weathering on them and enable me to use the plastic mesh another year. (Last year I was so busy I never got around to it, and the plastic mesh was noticeably more brittle than it had been at the beginning of winter). I noticed a few dried-up pods ( Read more... )

There's a new vignette challenge at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is from the Grissom timeline, as Elaine Woods reflects upon her childhood

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge over at her Dreamwidth blog. My effort looks superficially mundane, but I think it's actually from the Chaffee Artilect 'verse, given the reference to virtual reality gamingThere's ( Read more... )

Today is the 83rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, which marked the entry of the US into World War II (and ultimately sealed the fate of the Axis, since they simply were no match for US industrial might ( Read more... )

Not the cartoonish one portrayed in the prequel trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson, which could've made a decent manga or light novel if it had been set in a universe original to the creators instead of pretending to be in the distant past of Dune and ending up making the Dune 'verse feel smaller and even flimsy. I'm talking about the " ( Read more... )

In "One Last Homecoming" I had my protagonist driving a Tesla because it was such a sharp contrast with the Chevy II that she'd been driving as a senior in high school (a car that was based on one my paternal grandmother and my uncle actually owned, and if circumstances had been different, we might've kept and still had when I was in high school). ( Read more... )

I found out almost by accident, from a comment on Facebook -- and went immediately to several news websites to verify that this was in fact true: the CEO of UnitedHealthCare had been murdered in cold blood on the streets of New York, in a manner that made it clear that it was a premeditated assassination, not an act of random street violence ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Fiona Grey: “What do you mean, the arena is filled with ‘relentless spiders’?”My first thought was a gaming scenario -- and thus "NPC's" and particularly the climax, in which Sierra's fleeing through one after another gaming company's virtual spaces. Might this be the ( Read more... )