A dark night, in a city that knows how to keep its secrets. . .

Nota Bene In Vacuo

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:49:25 GMT

In re rumors I have been hearing about unfunnybusiness:

1. There are two active moderators at UFB, and only one of them is pyratejenni.

2. Nobody has *ever* contacted the other moderator with a complaint about PJ's moderation at UFB.

3. There are currently exactly two accounts banned at UFB; one was a blatant troll and one was that annoying guy with the tea icon (He got a permaban mostly for trying to cheat his way out of a temporary ban.) They were joint (and very satisfying) decisions.

4. In the year since the new, clearer moderation policy was posted, nobody else has been banned for more than a one-week cooldown, and there have been very few bans total. (If this statement is wrong, *please* correct me.)

5. If you want to see something at UFB change, you probably want at least one moderator on your side.¹ Insulting one of them while assuming the other is either nonexistent or irrelevant is probably not a good strategy.

6. As far as I am aware, everybody who has ever followed the policy for contacting moderators that is in the community userinfo has gone away satisfied. Failing to read or follow the userinfo is also probably a bad strategy if you want to be heard.

(This is not me speaking officially, btw, as officially, I have never been given a complaint. This is me speaking as somebody who is darkly amused by people's consistent inability to at least complain *accurately* or *usefully* when they complain, since I run across someone whining that UFB is ground under PJ's iron boot at least once a month.)

¹Technically, in fact, the other mod is the community owner and could lock everyone else out if she felt like it, so if you have an irrational grudge against PJ, your best bet is probably bribery. I happen to know that she would currently do just about anything for a Doble Model E steam automobile.

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:52:41 GMT

My opinions on the Lambda Awards debacle (not that any of you care about my opinions on it, but it took me long enough to figure them out; I want to record them for my own posterity, if only so I can later marvel at how wrong I was. Also, may I note that I am continually befuddled by what does and doesn't wind up on UFB? ..oh god, while I was writing this it ended up on f_w instead, heaven help us.)

1. The Lambda Literary Foundation has every right to make this decision, they are not oppressing anyone by doing so, and I think it was, in fact, a good decision: the nature of glbt literature and community has changed, and the LLF needed to change as well, to keep doing what it wanted to do.

2. The way they went about implementing and publicizing this decision was deeply, deeply unprofessional, and has major problems with the implementation. (And frankly, the more I read, the more I suspect that it was also made for the wrong reasons, and some of the people closely involved who oppose the decision probably have reasons to oppose that aren't visible to us.) All the same, I still support the decision itself.

3. People talking on all sides of this argument are full of entitlement, privilege, and bonus!racism, and I don't want to be on a side with them. :/ The people on the anti-lambda side are managing to be offensive in far more creative and comprehensive ways, while the pro-lambda side are being more offensive in ways that are grindingly personal to me, so congrats there guys!

4. If I try to talk about it in any more depth, I run smack-dab into my major issues about the umbrella label glbt and its component parts (and, yes, glbttqqi++ too), and any attempt to go into any depth beyond that rapidly involves into me rambling at tl;dr length about that instead of privilege, so I shall keep my thinking about labels until a better time to talk about them.

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 03:24:27 GMT

I am at Small Press Expo!

Well, actually I am currently at the home of Das Flughafen, where we are lairing for the weekend to get to the convention. We went early tonight to pick up our exhibitor badges and go to the special exhibitor panel with Gahan Wilson & networking reception. I met a Harry Potter slash fan already! (there are fangirls *everywhere*. I will be wearing my pin from last year's con.txt all day tomorrow, and see how many I can smoke out.)

So, yeah, Interrobang Studios has an exhibitor table, selling comics and prints and Spinks what I have crocheted, but there are five of us to about five feet of table, so I will probably get to do quite a bit of wandering around. We are under orders to actually talk to people and make friends at this con. Making friends is *hard*. (Unless they are fangirls.) But SPX is awesome! How have I lived here all my life and never gone before? Everyone here is whacked! It's awesome!

Also, Kevin from the studio has a design up for voting at Threadless. It is a cartoon of a vegetarian zombie saying "BRAIINSSS!". If you grok Threadless, will you please go there and vote for him? Thank you. Otherwise Kevin's girl user will do dreadful things to me for not promoting it hard enough.

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:10:39 GMT

Hi! Remember when I used to talk about Doctor Who on here all the time?

Let's do that some more.

The best_enemies community on lj is picking up speed, and they've started an Academy-based rpg (or something, rps confuse me these days) and that combined with going through some of my old school papers, has me reading the Wikipedia entries on "Theta" again and trying to understand them. ("Theta", of course, is the Doctor's school nickname, short for Theta Sigma which may be his actual use-name on Gallifrey, or as close as can be rendered in English.)

And now I want a Doctor Who fic fest (preferably doctor/master, but I'm easy) with these as prompts:

"Johannes Lydus says that the Egyptians used a symbol for Kosmos in the form of theta, with a fiery circle representing the world, and a snake spanning the middle representing Agathos Daimon (literally: good spirit)."

"In classical Athens, it was used as an abbreviation for the Greek θάνατος (thanatos, “death”) and as it vaguely resembles a human skull, theta was used as a warning symbol of death, in the same way that skull and crossbones are used in modern times. It survives on potsherds used by Athenians when voting for the death penalty. Petrus de Dacia in a document from 1291 relates the idea that theta was used to brand criminals as empty ciphers, and the branding rod was affixed to the crossbar spanning the circle."

"Euclid defines a plane angle as the inclination to each other, in a plane, of two lines which meet each other, and do not lie straight with respect to each other. According to Proclus an angle must be either a quality or a quantity, or a relationship. The first concept was used by Eudemus, who regarded an angle as a deviation from a straight line; the second by Carpus of Antioch, who regarded it as the interval or space between the intersecting lines."

"Potential temperature is a more dynamically important quantity than the actual temperature. This is because it is not affected by the physical lifting or sinking associated with flow over obstacles or large-scale atmospheric turbulence."

"The Jacobi theta function is a function defined for two complex variables z and τ, where z can be any complex number and τ is confined to the upper half-plane, which means it has positive imaginary part."

"Θ is often studied in contexts where the axiom of choice fails, such as models of the axiom of determinacy."

"A Theta structure is an intermediate structure formed during the replication of a circular DNA molecule (prokaryote DNA)."

"In statistical usage there is a clear distinction: whereas "probability" allows us to predict unknown outcomes based on known parameters, "likelihood" allows us to estimate unknown parameters (θ) based on known outcomes (x)."

"The Big O notation often is permitted to be somewhat abused to describe an asymptotic tight bound where using Big Theta Θ notation might be more factually appropriate in a given context."

"The calculations performed by the Petersburg trio predicted a pentaquark, named "Theta-plus," that contains three different flavors of quarks: two up quarks, two down quarks, and a strange antiquark. The presence of the strange antiquark should make the particle uniquely identifiable in experimental searches, giving it a property called strangeness. Armed with this specific information, several experimenters turned their attention to the finding the Theta-plus and its partners."

"The symbol was a combination of the letters "E" and "O" taken from the words "Environment" and "Organism", respectively. The theta symbol that it is similar to has been used throughout history as a warning."

"Theta is seen normally in young children. It may be seen in drowsiness or arousal in older children and adults; it can also be seen in meditation. Excess theta for age represents abnormal activity."

"Theta Θ, or "time decay", measures sensitivity of the value of an option to the passage of time."

"In Generative grammar, (in particular Government and binding theory and the Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar) a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure required syntactically by a particular verb."

"A Body Thetan is an alien thetan who is "stuck" in, on or near a human body, and all human bodies are said to be covered in these misplaced thetans, or clusters of them. This information is not divulged until a Scientologist reaches the third Operating Thetan level (or OT III). Most Body Thetans were said by Hubbard to be a result of a prehistoric "Incident" involving Xenu, as well as other similar alien occurrences on the whole track."

"The Theta Society is a non-collegiate social sorority, women ages 35 and older, in Texas."

(Also, Θ looks like an egg with a needle in it, which is where Koschei left his heart. just sayin'.)

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:14:45 GMT

I love my jf flist: I can be away for ten days, and it only takes a perfectly reasonable amount of time to get caught up on reading. :D

Of course I suppose I should still check over community business more closely. And read the h_d picspam. But I haven't *dared* even look at my other journals yet...

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:05:09 GMT

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

Hi I am here.

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:39:01 GMT

Among other things, have been catching up with JF happenings for the past week. Wow. Unfunnybusiness sure isn't being funny right now, is it?

Every so often I think maybe I should start actually paying attention to comment threads there, and even doing vaguely mod-like stuff. But then, the mob there presumably knows what they're getting into, and are fairly good at shouting each other down when necessary, so why bother unless there's an actual TOS issue or something?

Then I remember that a large part of my initial purpose for the community was to put all the ferrets down one pair of trousers, after all, and I wander off and do something else.

(I am currently playing with a ST fantarty meme, my response to which that gets the notes "tentacles, hybrid babies, cocktail metaphors, space floozies, old people, Rihannsu, crossdressing, Star Wars quotes, JF injokes, Captain Rachel Maddow, Vulcan-touching, anthropomorphization of spaceships, bad art, large image files without alt tags, and girlsex." I feel this is adequate warning, and only spoils as much as is necessary.)

Things I have learned today:

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:29:58 GMT

Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei are not the same person.

I am ashamed of the fact that I didn't know this.

I would be more ashamed, if it weren't for the fact that when I tried to tell RL people how ashamed I was, none of them even had any idea who Ayatollah Khomeini was. D:

librarything is dangerous

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:59:08 GMT

OMG COLLECTIONS!!!

Collections are finally here!

Now to find the energy to atually play with them...

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:23:58 GMT

There is a giant (anti-gay, anti-choice, pro-hate) evangelical church in my town that is currently running a giant ad campaign themed around God Loves Shrimp.

No, really.

I... don't even know where to go with that. I ... where are *they* going with that? When I saw the ads I assumed they were a with-it, liberal church, riffing on the protest slogan to point out that not all Christian bank on hate, but according to their website, *not so much*. How to you run a message series with that title (apparently actually *about* the way that Christ's sacrifice frees us from the old laws of the Pentateuch) and still preach in support of Focus on the Family? ...it's. just. And, yes, considering that the filename of the ad is "god_hates_shrimp", they know exactly what they're referencing.

You know that bible quote about the log in your eye? Yeah. That one. (I love that searching the internets for "beam in your eye" gets links to people talking about robots with lasers.)

To keep on the topic of my town and Christians, though, there's one thing that always makes me happy coming into town. If you're not American, you may be unfamiliar with the phenomenon of people who own land near a busy highway putting up three crosses so everyone who drives by has to see them, usually with a sign quoting John 3:16 or some other over-referenced-to-the-point-of-triteness Bible verse. (If you are American, you're probably all too familiar with it.)

Well, someone's done that on the road into Annapolis, but instead of three crosses, they've got a cross, a crescent, and a star. And instead of referencing John 3:16, they reference 1 John. (Alas, I don't remember the exact verse, but I think it was 1 John 2:11. Something along those lines, anyway; most of 1 John is like that.) I'm with that guy.

GIP

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:53:31 GMT

There is a new Tek Jansen comic! So I have a boobies icon. Now that nobody's bothering with boobies icons anymore.

Tue, 19 May 2009 20:55:11 GMT

Ah, graduation day at the U.S.Naval Academy.

(At least, I assume it's graduation day. That would explain the jets that have been flying over the house since o-dark-thirty this morning.)

I actually find it soothing. Growing up on the main flight path to an international airport will do that to you: I don't notice how much I miss the airplane noise, because when I'm at Mom's house or the school, it just gets filtered out. Until I'm somewhere else and I hear it and suddenly it feels like home.

Wed, 13 May 2009 21:43:56 GMT

Ooops, I seem to have jumped into the middle of sockpuppetry wank.

Seriously - your live-in gay boytoy is suddenly off on a TOP SECRET WORLD ENDANGERING MISSION, and you post on your LJ about how scared you get when he goes on a TOP SECRET MISSION without you, and you don't expect people's thoughts to go immediately to sparklepens and lipgloss?

(Context for the unitiated: the journals in question are RP journals belonging to AU versions of an AU of an AU of a couple of Stargate characters, and due some rather complicated circumstances, one of them is living under an assumed name. So those of us trying (by invitation) to convince everyone else that they're attention-whoring sockpuppets in-character have a hard row to hoe. :D )

mother's day

Sun, 10 May 2009 21:30:50 GMT

The coolest things I found while helping Mom clean out Dad's workshop (*still* the best mad scientist lab ever! Even after she's cleaned it out about five times!):

1. A bolt about 5" long with a metal pulley on it. (The general coolness of pulleys cannot be overestimated. Once you figured out pulleys in Miner's Cave, you were golden.)

2. A thingy that you stab into a can that turns into a spout, for when you have a can with no spout that needs one, a situation that one surely must always be prepared for.

3. A huge bottle of muriatic acid. (We used to raid Dad's shop chemicals for our science experiments in middle school! How come he never let us use the muriatic acid? It's okay, though, we had a huge bag of CaCl2, so I figured out how to make my own.)

4. A sheet of radiation-shield glass. Just in case we ever need to put a glass window in a radiation shield.

5. Two giant suction cups connected to a handhold, like burglars use on plate-class windows in caper movies.

6. An old juice bottle with about a half-inch of white powder in the bottom, labelled "hydrated lime", and another old juice bottle half-full of pale blue liquid, with a tag tied around the neck that said

1/2lb = 3/4 cup hydrated lime
in 1qt water (~=1lb:1gal)
1/4lb = 3/8 cup copper sulfate
in 1qt water(=1lb:1gal)
1/2 cup lime sol ->
1/2 copper sulfate
+6 cupts h2o
~=7 cups 4:4:5048
Bordeau mixture

According to the wisdom of the Internets, Bordeaux mixture is fungicide for plants. The internets knows not of 4:4:48, but it suggests 4:4:50 for common diseases of, er, Cannabis sp. (Dad did spend his summers in the late '60s "finding America" with a motorcycle, backpack, and goatee, but he wasn't really the herbology type, I swear.)

So question one, is the blue stuff Bordeaux mixture or pure copper sulfate? And question two, will Mom throw it out instead of devising an experimental protocol to answer question one? (Answer to question two: yes.)

7.
(photo under cut): it's approx. 3' long, and consists of 18" of broom handle socketed into about 18" of aluminum pipe, with gray pipe insulation along most of the length. The broom handle end is capped with an old detergent bottle lid, held on by a twist of wire. The pipe end is cut off in a long J-curve to make a sort of scoop, with the pipe insulation trimmed to match on that end, and it has a small L-bracket bolted to hang down into the cut-off part of the pipe, with a another small bolt about 2" farther down the pipe.

Whatever it was that Dad built it to do, I'm sure it did that thing very well.

...no one Mom has showed it to has even a vague hypothesis as to what Dad might have built it to do.

Fri, 01 May 2009 22:07:31 GMT

FRONT PAGE NEWS: MELANNEN LOOKING FOR A JOB

No, rly, see:

I always get my picture in the paper for the most RANDOM things. Buying rollerskates, going to a Girl Scout event, being evacuated for a bomb threat... (I think this makes at least the fourth time I've been on the front page of that paper for being in the right place at the right time.)

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:14:17 GMT

Vote Muppets at hot_daily!

That is all.

Oh! I also got rec'ed on crack_van! (What, you didn't know that I ~~used to~~ write fic?) I once said that my goals in life were to get on both metafandom and on crack_van. Well, now I've done both in the same week! I am *win*. Of course, it was a small-fandom story for Earthsea, that I wrote, for the person who is doing the recs, in a ficathon on her community, and she's also on my friendslist, but. It STILL COUNTS.

~~also my jf user number is cooler than yours~~.

EDIT: Also:
I have one Dreamwidth beta invite code unclaimed after offering to all the flist people who wanted one.* Tell me about somebody else who posts on JF who ought to get a DW invite before open beta! (Or send them here to ask for it!) And I will choose a worthy recipient from among them! Yes! Possibly using tyromancy.

*unless I missed somebody, in which case speak up quick.

OpenID tutorial for JF

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:21:56 GMT

Hi, all. I am still messing with JF/DW imports and stuff. And thus I have created this tutorial for getting an OpenID through your journalfen. I'd love it if a few of you'd try to work through it and tell me if you succeeded and where it's confusing; it shouldn't take very long, if it works. I'll probably be crossposting it to a few JF and DW communities eventually.

So, Journalfen is an LJ clone site from which you can import to DW, but it does not actually have a functioning OpenID server. So it is difficult to actually use the openID JF accounts that the Dreamwidth importer creates.

However you can still use a JF OpenID by using OpenID delegation. That is, link your JF page to an account that *does* have an OpenID server, and Dreamwidth will use that server to give you a JF OpenID.

The Easy Way:

If you're currently using S2, switch back to S1 by going to: http://www.journalfen.net/customize/switch_system.bml and choosing "switch to S1". If you're already in S1 (new accounts at JF still default to S1, I believe), skip to step two.

Go to http://www.journalfen.net/customize/ , and scroll all the way to the bottom, to where it says "Overrides". Copy/paste this text:
```
GLOBAL_HEAD<=
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.exampleserver.com/openid/server.bml" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourusername.exampleserver.com" />
<=GLOBAL HEAD
```
(JF seems to be sometimes adding an extra <=GLOBAL HEAD at the end when you save; if this happens, go back, take out both the <=GLOBAL HEAD s at the end, and save again, and you should be fine.)

If you're going to delegate to an LJ clone, replace "exampleserver.com" with the service you're delegating to, and "yourusername" with your username at that site. LJ, DW, IJ, inksome, and basically everybody who is cooler than JF will work. However: you have to be logged in to that service in order for your journalfen openID to work. So pick a service that a) you are usually logged in to, and b) you are *not* going to be using your JF OpenID account at. (You can't be logged in to your personal account there while logging in to your OpenID, so you will always get a login failure.)

If you want to delegate to something that isn't an LJ clone, and get around the login problem, try an OpenID from one of these places. In the text in your JF style, you'll replace "http://www.exampleserver.com/openid/server.bml" with the URL of your service or domain's openID server, and replace "http://yourusername.exampleserver.com" with the URL of your account there.

Click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page.

You should now be able to use your JF account anywhere you can login with OpenID. However, make sure the URL you use is www.journalfen.net/users/yourusername , since JF doesn't do subdomains. In terms of DW, you will be able to use that account to claim and put an icon on imported comments originally made on JF, and eventually associate that account with your personal account. It will not affect your ability to use the OpenID account you delegated to (so, I delegated my JF openID to my LJ, but my LJ openID account still functions completely seperately ~~and it counts as another openID account for invite code lottery purposes~~)

The Hard Way

Think very hard about how badly you want to keep using S2. Most of the JF styles are there in S1 too! And S1 is so easy to customize if you know even a little HTML! If you decide to switch to S1, go to The Easy Way.

Are you sure you want to stay in S2? It's really much nicer over in S1 land! ... fine. Go to http://www.journalfen.net/customize/advanced/ . We're going to create a custom theme layer. This is technically only allowed for paid users, so if you're a free user, you really ought to try The Easy Way. Or you could dishonestly take advantage of the fact that JF doesn't bother to block free users and do it anyway. I guess. This tutorial for creating theme layers is pretty good, and has pictures, so do reference it if you get confused here. If you're already using a custom theme layer, skip to step 4.

Go to "Your Layers", then "Create layout-specific layer", type= "Theme", layout= whatever layout your journal is currently using, and click "create".

The layer you just made should now appear in the chart at the top of the page, labeled "child of" whatever layout you used. If you're already using a custom layer, choose that one. Click the "edit" button under it to go to the S2 compiler.

If this is a new layer, you should see a mostly-blank screen divided into several boxes, with the text
```
layerinfo "type" = "theme";
layerinfo "name" = "";
```
in the largest box. Fill in the "" after name with a name that will remind you what layer this is.

Underneath those first two lines, copy and paste this text:

function Page::print_custom_head() {
"""
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.exampleserver.com/openid/server.bml" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourusername.exampleserver.com" />
""";
}

It should also work to copy-paste the same text with a pre-existing theme layer, but I have not tried it.

If you're going to delegate to an LJ clone, replace 'exampleserver.com' with the service you're delegating to, and 'yourusername' with your username at that site. LJ, DW, IJ, inksome, and basically everybody who is cooler than JF will work. However: you have to be logged in to that service in order for your journalfen openID to work. So pick a service that a) you are usually logged in to, and b) you are *not* going to be using your JF OpenID account at. (You can't be logged in to your personal account there while logging in to your OpenID, so you will always get a login failure.)

If you want to delegate to something that isn't an LJ clone, and get around the login problem, try an OpenID from one of these places. In the text in your JF style, you'll replace "http://www.exampleserver.com/openid/server.bml" with the URL of your service or domain's openID server, and replace "http://yourusername.exampleserver.com" with the URL of your account there.

Click the "Save and Compile" button at the top of the screen. If you're lucky, the page will reload, and the box at the bottom of the page will tell you "compiled with no errors". If the box at the bottom of the page spits gibberish at you instead, try the easy way.

If your layer compiled with no errors, go back to http://www.journalfen.net/customize/advanced.bml . If you're already using this custom layer, skip to the last step. If you created a new layer, choose "your styles". Go to "Create style", type in a name for your OpenId-ified style, then click "create".

You're taken to the Edit Style page. Go down to "Style Layers", and select the layout you chose when you created your theme layer. This should give you more options; go to the "Theme" dropdown, and select the theme you just made (it will be at the very end of the list.) Choose "Save Changes"

You should get taken to the "Your Styles" page. Click the "use" button next to the style you just created. Your journal should now be using the new style, including an openID delegation in the headers. However, if you ever change your style or theme, you will need to repeat this tutorial. (Or you could just switch to S1 and do it the easy way.)

You should now be able to use your JF account anywhere you can login with OpenID. However, make sure the URL you use is www.journalfen.net/users/yourusername , since JF doesn't do subdomains. In terms of DW, you will be able to use that account to claim and put an icon on imported comments originally made on JF, and eventually associate that account with your personal account. It will not affect your ability to use the OpenID account you delegated to (so, I delegated my JF openID to my LJ, but my LJ openID account still functions completely seperately ~~and it counts as another openID account for invite code lottery purposes~~)

More Dreamwidth-ness

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:59:50 GMT

I gave out some more invite codes today to people who answered the poll, in more or less random order. If I get more, I'll keep contacting people from that entry, so if you didn't answer yet & you want one, you can still go to the poll, though again, no guarantees.

Meantime, they're giving invite codes out at random to people with validated openIDs, and they've promised one invite on April 30th to everybody who has a validated openID on DW, so if you want to get one, make sure you have openID set up!

(At some point I'll post about something that's not DW. Probably. :D )

ETA: list of people JF denizens who I think have accounts at DW already (not all from my invites, obviously):
stellar_dust
kadath
threegoldfish
sepiamagpie
also_not_a_pipe
notjo
sparkysrevenge
b_jellybean

Also, lol_meme.

If you should be on the list & aren't, or you're on the list and shouldn't be, or don't want to be, or there are other jf posters who are over there already, let me know!

The Easter Bunny always leaves a map.

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:44:53 GMT

Easter miracles!

Number one, I can get internets at my 90-year-old grandfather's house now! This is more of a miracle when you realize that his house has swamp on two sides and a wide highway on the third, so the unsecured wireless must be coming from the one next-door neighbor.

Mind, I didn't get time to post or anything over the weekend (at his house, we sit at the kitchen table and listen to him talk. Because, well, he tells stories. Sometimes for eight hours straight. Going from the person who visited yesterday, to tales of his grandfather's youth. And he won't be telling them forever.) But I did manage to check every night, which means I'm not actually backlogged on flists and e-mail for once!

And Number two, I got my first DW invite code! They sent them out to basically everybody with a personal account. I gave mine to my sister stellar_dust, but if more come I will keep working down the list of people who answered my dw interest poll. Though at this rate, ya'll will have accounts of your own before I get a chance!

Oh! Also, as you may have heard, stellar_dust will be spending six weeks this summer working on a Viking-age archeological dig in ICELAND! and I am filled with envy. I got to read the grant proposal for the dig, and it sounds really fascinating and fun, but I kept just thinking PERN. Because, see, the main research question is about household sizes, and the shifting relationships between large and small farmholds in the just-post-settlement period.

And what always fascinated me most about Pern (no, not the soulbonded dragons or talking dolphins or Anne's Daddy issues, sorry) was the Hold and Hall system and the ways it changed alongside population cycles on the planet. McCaffrey has a lot of problems, but Pern is still probably my favorite account of a semi-isolated colony. (I would love recs for others, ones that concentrate on the adaptive social and economic organization among the settlers rather than engineering or biology or galactic politics.)

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:40:50 GMT

So I wasn't planning to do this until closer to open beta, but there have been some very vague hints that having a list of people eager to move to Dreamwidth gets you a better chance at getting closed-beta invite codes, so just in case, haves a poall:

View Poll: #456

(Dreamwidth invite codes will be assigned to users according to arcane rituals determined by how well your last set of invite codes were used. So answer all poll questions that apply to you. Honestly, pls!)

(If you don't have a JF account/I don't know you by your jf, feel free to answer in comments, w/an e-mail in case I need to get back to you. Anon comments will be screened.)

(There are no guarantees I'll have any invite codes to give out before open beta.)

Here are bunches of disney icons.

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:57:08 GMT

So a) I don't actually want to be an f_w mod (in any way whatsoever),

and b) I'm expecting shenanigans anyway,

but when I start making icons from comics I go way overboard, so here are 27 icons from Walt Disney's MAN in SPACE, A SCIENCE FEATURE FROM TOMORROWLAND. It has no art or writing credits, and I can't find any online, but it does have the date 1956 and my dad's name signed all over it in pencil. :D

Anyone who wants can steal them. No credit necessary, since I can't credit the artist either.

Preview:

1	2	3	4		5
6	7	8	9		10
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26	27	28		<-- #28 is from "Spin and Marty and Annette: the Pirates of Shell Island", 1957, no credits.

OH! Oh! oh! oh!

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:39:21 GMT

And WHO has a Dreamwidth account?

Oh, that's right!

melannen has a a Dreamwidth account! (eta to clarify: in the closed beta; DW opens for reals April 30.)

(And OMG, I have only had the account for, like, 24 hours, and I already feel a deep, deep resentment toward the idea of using a service where I have to do user-tag-links to other services manually. If JF was as cool as DW I could've just gone <user name=melannen site=dreamwidth.org> and it would've *automatically* made a tag like this one, melannen, which goes straight to my new DW account.)

Look! I have a Dreamwidth account! Go gaze upon it in all its haven't-quite-figured-out-the-style-system-yet still-obviously-in-beta glory! Dreamwidth is *so cool*, you guys. It makes sense. And it does stuff. And it functions properly. It's like, what if Livejournal were run by people who actually understood Livejournal, and the internet, and sustainable small business, and who had the time and resources to make work the way it should, both as software and as community.

...and they will be giving closed-beta accounts to a random selection of people who have open-id accounts there for the next month. So you should go get your open-id account. And go play. Open-ID accounts can do pretty much anything except post entries.

I got into the beta because I never shut up about how I'm such a special snowflake that I post solely on JF (*g*) and they wanted someone to test their JF-interoperability features. So if anyone has any suggestions about JF interoperability, you should pass it on.

(...and they all laughed when I said someday, being on JF would pay. Who's laughing now? Bwahahahahaha!)

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:35:26 GMT

So in the past 24 hours, I have managed to break my laptop, figure out how to disassemble my laptop, un-break my laptop, re-assemble my laptop, apply judicious coating of duct tape, and have fully functioning laptop again!

\o/ Go me, my laptop-fu is powerful!

Toshiba laptops continue to be stupidly complicated and un-intuitive to disassemble. But, hey, if this one had been put together the same way as the last Toshiba laptop I broke, repairing it would have required soldering on the motherboard rather than duct tape, so apparently they have at least learned *something* about design.

(And, thanks to the fact that I panicked and backed up *everything* before cracking the case, I even had a saved Opera session to restore to when my computer just now crashed and wiped out my tabs and browser history!)

****

So I have discovered what is essentially the mp3 hoard of my heart, WFMU's On the Download, "MP3s from the fringes once a month: new sounds, obscure audio, found sound, and other sonic stimulants." In other words, bizarre, freaky music that nobody has ever heard of and nobody with any sense or taste would *want* to.

In other words, exactly my kind of music!

How did I find On the Download? Well, I was googling for an mp3 of Rotten Cocksucker's Ball (Were You Aware Of It? In the '40s and '50, in some parts of the US, cocksucking actually referred to cunnilingus rather that fellatio. Now You Know!)

I was looking up cocksucker's ball because I was trying to get together a good collection of Dirty Blues. Because - well, you trying putting together a Jack-Harkness-and-sex playlist consisting only of songs recorded before 1940 that doesn't include dirty blues! (Also, while going through my jazz collection per that playlist, I found an mp3 of the dirty* version of "Shave 'em dry" - an mp3 also available at wfmu, btw - and fell in love with it. It's just so *catchy*!)

I am putting together a Jack-Harkness-and-sex playlist consisting only of songs recorded before 1940 because apparently, you lot are dirty pervs who want me to write the Who/Wimsey crossover where the Dowager Duchess caves to the Captain's charm and turns out to be quite entirely her brother's sister. Though the poll's still open for a couple more days! You could still make me write about O'Neill and Thor doing gay sex magick or Time Lord incest or dragons who marry humans! Among other things!

My finishathon post is up!

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:14:46 GMT

Go vote here!

If you missed my earlier post, finishathon is a fest where participants pledge to finish one of their WIPs or write one of their bunnies, and the rest of the participants get to vote on which one they have to write. (I am hoping that having some guidance will help me settle on just one story to focus on!)

I put bunnies The Tale of the Five, Dr. Who, Lord Peter Wimsey, Firefly/Good Omens, Harry Potter, Highlander, Young Wizards, Barrayar, and Stargate:SG1 up for vote. As it stands, it looks like it's going to be between Highlander and Dr. Who, so if you have an opinion on what I should be babbling about on here for the next month, go vote!

(You can also vote on most of the other participants' polls, by going through the recent entries on the lj community.)

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:16:25 GMT

So I did, in fact, sign up for Finishathon - the idea behind the fest is that it's easier to actually sit down and write if you have a deadline, and people who are waiting for your story, so everybody submits up to ten unfinished bunnies of their own, and everyone else votes on which one we make them write. (Discussion of the submissions is going on at multific, the associated lj comm.)

That seems *really cool*. Because a) I have reassurance that whatever story I end up writing is one other people are interested in, and b) I don't have to pick which of my many bunnies to concentrate on - they pick for me. I'm much, much better at getting things done if I know for sure that other people are waiting for me to do them.

You can see the prompts I submitted here (and the other participants' prompts too). They're still taking sign-ups until Friday, and then voting starts! (I'll post a link to the poll for my stories once it goes up; anyone can vote, participant or not.)