Fans Finding Fans

tigresslilly @ 08:51 am: Dollhouse: I think I know what upset me so much in the most recent ep.

Tags: critque, dollhouse, fannish, feminism, review

dglenn @ 05:26 am: QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-24:

"I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." -- David Foster Wallace, from his article E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.

(submitted to the mailing list by Reg Harbeck)

tamibrandt @ 09:10 pm: Shadows of Yesterday (Spike/A(us)/Seeley Booth/Drusilla, Parker Booth) NC-17 3/?
Title: Shadows of Yesterday
By Tami (tabrandt @ hotmail.com)
Disclaimer: The characters from ATS / BTVS are owned by Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and Fox studios. This story is not meant to infringe upon anyone's rights, only to entertain.
BETA: Myself, lexa4227
Rating – NC-17
Pairing – Slash, multiple-partner sex (Spike/Angel(us)/Seeley Booth/Drusilla)
Timeline – Pre-Bones/Post-ATS Season 5, 2-3 months after the events of VISIONS OF YOU
Summary – Two-Three months after the events of VISIONS OF YOU. Booth takes Angel up on that offer of a vacation and brings Parker with him to Las Vegas. Someone from Angel's past takes note of the new addition. The events that follow can only be described as a nightmare. Is history repeating itself or has Angel's past come back to haunt him and everyone he cares about? Sequel to ON THE OTHER SIDE OF FATE, COMING FULL CIRCLE, and VISIONS OF YOU.
Feedback – It would be appreciated. My plot bunny has been lagging lately.
Author's Note - This story takes place before BONES series and after an AU NOT FADE AWAY.
WARNINGS: slash and multiple-partner sex, dark themes, possible minor character death, depending on Angel, Seeley and Spike's mood.
Word Count: 4,187



( Previous Chapters )

**************************

( Chapter 3 )

das_dingsi @ 08:37 pm: In Lieu Of Actual Content: Recipe Poll
This poll is brought to you by that guy who still feels tired and grumpy and doesn't get much done but at least he tried out several new dishes this week and started a recipe collection in a card index box.

Poll #4568 Your Recipe Of Choice
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Which food recipe should I post next?

Tags: misc, polls

dglenn @ 02:21 pm: Using OpenID To Answer Polls

Huh. DW says non-DW users can respond to polls using OpenID. Only one person has responded (using the poll buttons) to my poll from yesterday, and one complained about not being able to do so. This tells me that (a) there's a hiccup in the process of filling out DW polls using OpenID, (b) how to do so is confusing, (c) both, or (d) it works right but filling out poll answers isn't important enough to be worth clicking through the extra steps for, for many people.

I think (d) seems likely -- it's more steps than using OpenID to leave a comment, and it's really not a very compelling or entertaining poll -- (and feel free to simply respond in a comment, of course), but just in case it's (a) or (b), I went and found out what the steps are. It's a little more annoying than I'd expected, but it did work for me. (Note that there are a few people for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work in general, for reasons that so far remain mysterious. And debugging somebody else's problem on a site I don't admin, when I can't replicate the problem myself, is not going to get very far, alas.)

I logged out of DW, and tried to fill in the poll. It looked like I simply could not do so. Then I went to the main page, http://www.dreamwidth.org/, which (if you're not currently logged in) has a login button with username/password text entry fields next to it up in the upper-right corner. There's small text up there, "Log in with OpenID", which links to http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid. (The "Log in with OpenID" link next to the login button on http://www.dreamwidth.org/login also takes you there.)

(In what follows, assume we're currently logged in on LJ ...)

I told LJ months ago to automatically accept OpenID credential requests from DW, so I just typed "dglennlivejournal.com" into the box on http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid, and was immdiately logged into DW as my LJ identity, and could fill in the poll. If you've used OpenID to leave a comment on DW recently, and checked the leave-me-logged-in tickybox, you should already be able to fill in the poll.

If I hadn't told LJ to grant future DW OpenID requests, then I would've gotten a page from LJ telling me that DW was asking LJ to confirm that this user claiming to be me-at-LJ is really me. Telling LJ "yes, I triggered that request, it's really me," allows LJ to tell DW, "yeah, it's her," and at that point I'm logged into DW not as me-the-DW-user, but as me-the-LJ/OpenID-user, and can fill in the poll (or leave comments under my LJ identity, or customize DW viewing options under that OpenID login, even attach a user icon IIRC, etc.) I went into more detail on this process in the context of leaving comments, a few months ago and a few months before that.

This process is rather less of an obstacle when leaving comments (except for the folks for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work, which I wish I was in a position to figure out), and I expect most folks are a bit more motivated when they've already decided to leave a comment and just need to choose between OpenID and anonymous, than when they're still deciding whether it's worth the trouble to fill in a poll. Having "use OpenID" as a visible option on the comment form makes it a lot easier than having to remember, "Oh yeah, I can go to the login page (or directly to the OpenID login page) and log in first, if I want to fill this out" ...

... but if any of you are inspired to experiment a bit with OpenID this afternoon, then hey, I get more poll answers as a side effect. And in the future, if somebody posts a poll where you really, really want to make your voice heard, now you'll know how.

dglenn @ 05:26 am: QotD

"My wardrobe is threefold: Things I wear during sex, Things I wear to have more sex and most importantly, 'I don't give a shit.'" -- Twitter user VaginaDrum, 2009-10-26

catwoman69y2k @ 06:30 pm: Work Vs Play -- Round 4
It has been a never ending battle this week. A few jerky movements, if you will. The promotional gig has been rewarding and it lets me kind of people watch again, from a different perspective. It is also a lesson in futility. No matter how much I dont want to scare kids, the sheer height of my costume might just be too big for most wee ones. The randomness I get is frequent enough, as it should be.

Still, despite the fun, I been trying to push myself to relax. At times, this part time job sometimes weighs on my shoulders--literally. No matter how well I adjust the harness frame underneath that costume, it still seems to be agitating a nerve of some kind. So I often rush to power down for the day, as I get into a working groove.

Finally Im here at the house, actually being able to blog or do something freeform. I break that “date with myself” every time and each time I do I kind of feel very disappointed because I know we all need that kind of time block in our daily flow, or even less frequently, a weekly energy flow. Im slowing things down a bit, since that is how I have wanted to keep it since the BM Reset happened. The amount of inspiration I get seems overwhelming, when it seems that I just cant get them all to paper because of this, that, some other distraction, etc....It goes without saying, that getting myself to relax more is a work in progress. :)

Tags: art, flow, gig, mascot, relaxation, vibe, work, workflow, working life

dglenn @ 04:26 pm: What's Up With Me, and User Interface Opinion Questions

Uh, did somebody just buy me a gift subscription to Science News? A copy of the current issue just arrived in today's mail ... and I did recently mentioned (and a little less recently) mention having been a reader of it in the past.

If so, thank you. A lot. I've missed it. It's a bit thicker now than I remember.

I could probably get all the same news from the web nowadays, but someties it's just easier -- feels more relaxed and recreational -- to read stuff like that on paper. And by just turning pages instead of scrolling up and down and then deciding which links to click next. (I love the web, but I'm glad we still have dead-trees publications as well.)

---

[Note: primary copy of this poll is at Dreamwidth -- that's where the copies of this entry on sites where I can't post polls will link to.]

Poll #4558 Command-Line Interfaces
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

For folks who use command-line tools: if a command has both a "display version number" option and a "more verbose output" option, which of these is more intuitive (and/or less likely to be annoying)?

If some combinations of command-line arguments might produce not-completely-obvious results, but those combinations are potentially useful so they should merely be warned about rather than disallowed, which of these seems more useful?

Let's say you have a bunch of files in a directory (say, "arbeau.abc", "machaut.abc", and "frtrad.abc" in a directory named "french") and some or all are hard-links to (not copies of) entries in another directory (perhaps "french/arbeau.abc" also appears as "dance/arbeau.abc" and "french/machaut.abc" is the same file as "songs/machaut.abc") ... and you decide to modify all the files in that directory ("french") in a batch, using a tool that replaces files with edited versions and optionally saves backups (named *.bak or *~). Which of these sounds like the most correct behaviour (most likely to be desired, least likely to induce cursing)?

[*] Not really, but it's related. A symbolic link is like an alias. A hard link is where a single file on disk has two names -- an occasionally useful error in an MS-DOS filesystem, an established, intentional feature in Unix -- and neither filename is any more or less "real" than the other. I don't know whether recent versions of Windows have added this feature or not, but in older versions you could force it to happen, at the risk of CHKDSK "repairing" it later.

I'm not sure whether I'll get back to the project that sparked the questions in that poll (see below), but the responses will pertain to some future project too, I'm sure.

---

Despite the welcome arrival of a copy of Science News, it's been a discouraging week. The Mac won't boot, and it died just as I was fine-tuning the interface for a program that was nearly ready to share, beautifully comment, with a man-page and everything ... that I had not yet copied elsewhere to try compiling on a different OS, or to post yet. There was a lot else not backed up, but most of that will merely annoy and inconvenience me; this bit is the "somebody kicked over my masterpiece sand castle just before I finished it" kick in the gut. (Hmm. Much of what was backed up was backed up to DVD. I'm not sure yet whether any of my other computers can handle that. Experiments to put on my to-do list.)

Couple that with the main Linux workstation -- the bedroom machine -- which I hadn't been using much since I was given the Mac, no longer talking to its monitor, and I've been getting by with an itty-bitty Windows XP machine with a tiny screen and a so-so X server on it for the past few days, and it's been really putting a dent in my enthusiasm. So, in the immortal word of Charlie Brown: AAAUUUUUUGH!

(The bedroom Linux machine shows the POST messages on the monitor -- which is itself having major problems, but I have an even larger monitor to use ifwhen I ever feel capable of getting it up the stairs -- but at some point the screen goes blank and nothing I do to the keyboard or mouse will light it up again. I can SSH to it, and throw X apps to the itty bitty XP screen (a VAIO that only works when plugged into the wall), but I don't get the benefit of the decent-sized screen or the larger keyboard.)

The small screen is fine for web surfing and email; not so good for editing source in one window, editing docs in another, looking stuff up in a third, and viewing output in a fourth, or comparing two PS/PDF pages side by side. Or maybe I'm just spoiled from having a Mac to use for the past several months.

I haven't had the heart to start reconstructing a week of coding from scratch (get a filter working: a couple hours; add enough comments that I won't be embarrassed if anybody else sees it, usefully robust command-line arguments and options, and somewhat reasonable user documentation: a week) -- and I'm still clinging to the faint hope that the files can be recovered -- so I tried to dive back into composing and arranging, and am finding the tiny screen even more annoying for that than for programming. Or maybe I'm just too acutely frustrated and discouraged to cope with even small inconveniences right now. Maybe I'll feel differently about this in a month. But right now, it sucks.

---

The plan is to head down to Virginia to see whether justgus37, who has more Mac tools, more Mac experience, and OS install media, has any more success ressurecting the Mac than I've had. Wednesday I wasn't feeling well enough to drive that far; last night I got a late start and then ran into some kind of mess that turned I95 and the Beltway into obstacles instead of arteries, and turned back after it became clear I wouldn't get there at any sane hour. So: trying again tonight, if I'm up to it, which at the moment is iffy but I've still got little under and hour to decide. (By the time I got home again last night, it hurt to steer, and I've got power steering. But on the plus side, I got more sleep this morning than the past couple of days, so let's see what my body decides to do with that.)

I want my code back. I want my files back. I want my tools back. This business of knowing I need more backup media and a big disk for a live backup, but not being able to afford either ... well it's starting to wear me down.

morgandawn @ 09:53 am: Broken Computers and Broken Healthcare
1. Computers.  I would like to say tat my Vista computer problems are easing....but that would be a lie. I did have enough crash free time yesterday to balance our checkbooks/bills in Quicken (all 3 months dating back to when my older computer died). This means that - once again - I am not online or reading mail.

2. Healthcare.  One issue that has been overlooked - until recently - in the healthcare debate is how certain federal laws already give health care insurance companies and employers wide discretion to deny health claims with little or no penalties.

Under ERISA (a law created in the 70s to protect pensions and retirement accounts), health care plans funded by employers face no penalties or liability if the employer hired claims administrators falsely deny a health care claim. In fact, if you were to sue you would have to prove that the claims administrator acted arbitrarily and capriciously. In laymen's terms this means you will need to find a memo that says: "I think we should deny this claim because I think the person is really a donkey in disguise and we don't insure donkeys." The memo that says: "We can deny this claim even if we have objective medical evidence to support it because (a) we were able to find one doctor in the world who agrees with us and (b) this is an ERISA claim.  In fact, thank God this is an ERISA claim 'cause if this were any other claim we'd have to pay it.." Well that memo would not help you win your case. And yes there have been those memos.

Currently 170 million Americans get their health care insurance from employers. Many employers over 5000 workers are  "self funded" - that means the employers pay the claims costs and they hire the United Health Cares and the Kaisers and the other insurance companies to administer the claims (for a transaction fee). The claims  administrators use their own insurance claim guidelines and also negotiate fees with the hospitals and doctors on behalf of everyone - both the insurance carriers own clients and the employees covered under the 'employer plan.' But the money to pay for the employee medical bills comes from the employers. Thus, your claim is subject to pension and retirement laws - not bad faith insurance law.

If you buy health care insurance on the open market (or if your employer does), then it falls under insurance state laws. if the insurance company wrongfully denies your health care claim under state insurance law, you can sue and get penalties and recover for the loss of life. Or recover damages to pay for your loved one's ongoing medical care if the person is injured or made more ill because of the claim denial.

Under ERISA all you get is the value of the health care benefits that were denied. If you're dead....well, no need for that health care.

So when you hear pundits talk about doing away with those pesky state laws that make it so hard for health care insurance companies to do business across state lines ..or pundits talking about changing the laws to make certain that *all* employers  won't be required to abide by state health care insurance laws...they're talking about extending ERISA to privately purchased health care plans.

Check out your employer health care plan and remember... your health care is already being rationed and if you have employer funded health care insurance, well you're already living under a different 'standard of care.' ... More here  and here

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Tags: computer, social

dglenn @ 05:26 am: QotD

Mark Danner:	I call this in the book the Athenian problem. Which is how do you have--
Bill Moyers:	Athenian meaning Athens of Greece, right?
Mark Danner:	Exactly. How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world. And the problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about. And this is a political factor that looms obviously very large in [Obama's] calculations.

-- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

beccastareyes @ 08:37 pm: Fanfiction.net Meme
I stole this from galuxkitty.

( Read more... )

Tags: meme

dglenn @ 12:42 pm: QotD

"I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb; it is a device which is exploding." -- French ambassador Jacques Le Blanc (sometime in 1995?)

[My ISP where the QotD script runs was installing a new file server last night/this morning ... I'm guessing that has something to do with the script not being executed this morning, since its scheduled run was in the middle of the maintenance window.]

dglenn @ 12:35 pm: Dream Fragment
( a short conversation )

das_dingsi @ 11:30 am: -.-
I just read an addme-type post where someone said one of their hobbies was "raping [their] computer". As English is not their first language, I sincerely hope it's a misunderstanding of sorts and not a deliberate attempt to use the word rape in "edgy", "hip", "funny", or "un-pc" ways. Which I disapprove of. *

The world and the people in it are pissing me off in lots of other ways, too, but I'm too tired to even list these. Maybe I should just go back to bed.

* Eta: I've explained my issues with the usage of the word in casual contexts in this IJ comment.

Tags: feminism / gender / sexes, grumpy, unimpressed & disaffected

ajatshatru @ 07:59 am: I'm a mess
...


I hope everyone has been well. I was awfully ill last week, and before that things were such that I haven't been able to go properly into lj, ij, jf and dw for a long time. The end result is that my email accounts are a mess and I daren't dnld mails to outlook express till I clean them up online first. I'll be doing that from afternoon today. I feel almost nearly myself today.

Almost.


Also, I plan to buy the paperback of 'Unseen Academicals' as soon as it is out !

But that's a long way away :(

...

Tags: me, pterry, real life

telesilla @ 09:19 pm: I don't care why...
But if you think I shouldn't the same rights as a straight person, you're a bigot. Pure and simple.

She said it better.

Tags: meta: politics

darkrose @ 08:24 pm: You're Standing On My Neck
Last Sunday, telesilla and I went to our favorite "special occasion" restaurant for a belated (because someone might have been at DragonCon) anniversary dinner. It's ironic in the "like people trying to keep you from having your wedding day" sense, because one year ago today, a majority of California voters decided that my marriage shouldn't be valid. This year, it happened in Maine (and you can't exactly blame the black folks for this one).

I've seen a lot of blog comments today about how it's counter-productive to say that people who vote against marriage equality are bigots. And it probably is.

But here’s the thing:

It doesn't matter.

If you vote against marriage equality, then in practical terms, it doesn’t matter to me whether you’re Fred Phelps or whether your best friend/co-worker/son/daughter/second cousin twice removed is gay. I don’t care if you’re a Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Orthodox Jew, or Muslim. Because from where I sit, the result is the same: you believe that my relationship with the person I’ve been with for five years, the person I moved 3,000 miles to be with, the one who goes out at 3 AM to get ginger ale and crackers for me because I have stomach flu, the one who’s held my hand and been there while I’ve dealt with my mother’s dementia and Parkinson’s disease—you’re telling me that because that person is the same gender as I am, our relationship is less valid and less worthy of respect than that of a man and woman who met in Las Vegas, got drunk and decided to get married in front of an Elvis impersonator.

To me, it's irrelevant whether you did so because you believe that God ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman, or because you think the state shouldn't be involved with marriage, or because you're worried about what to tell your children, or because you think two men having sex is icky and gross. What matters to me is that you've taken a conscious, deliberate action to say that I, personally, do not deserve the same shot at being happy with the person I love that any straight person does. Your reasons for choosing to make my life more difficult and more painful are much less important to me than the fact that you've made that choice.

If you're standing on my neck, I'll worry about why you'd do something like that later. My first priority will be getting you to stop standing on my neck.

Tags: lgbt issues, marriage equality, politics, ranty mc rantypants

telesilla @ 07:41 pm: Big Bang Preview!
My preview, featuring an excerpt from Make the Devil Feel Surprise is here. *bounces* Just another ten/eleven/twelve days!

I toyed with the idea of putting up the playlist/soundtrack, but in the end, I just didn't have the energy to tidy it up and then upload it somewhere. Hopefully I will by the time Big Bang goes live.

Tags: sga bb 09

darkrose @ 06:50 pm: Try2WriSoMo: Day 3
Still didn't make 500, but closer today than yesterday, so I feel good about that. I'm glad I decided not to try to make myself stick to one fic, because I've started working on a More Than One Answer futurefic focusing on Joe and Dylan and Christina's daughter. I swear, every time I try to get away from the Keptverse and write something a little more cheerful, I get another bunny.

I had another Keptverse dream last night that was more weird than anything else, in that "WTF subconcious?" way. The only part I remember were that like so many of my nightmares, my old high school was featured prominently, and that there was a real problem developing with excessive inbreeding among the slaveowning classes of the Empire. I suspect that last bit is poisontaster's fault.

856 / 15000 words. 6% done!

Tags: meta: keptverse, meta: writing, try2wrisomo

morgandawn @ 01:39 pm: zine of the day
1. first, more computer and browser instability = makes me cranky and less online/reading checking email.

2. but second: zine o' the day: "The Centaur Tales is an AU Houston Knights series in which, according to the art, the heroes are centaurs. The second volume is a Sentinel crossover. "

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Tags: fanlove