The Middle Ages

(Boy, what a shitty morning. My sciatica hurts like hell, then I get a ferocious cramp in my other thigh that sends me screaming out of bed and actually crying. Then, as I try to settle down in front of the computer, my juice glass falls, hits the bare patch on the floor where the wood pokes through, and shatters, sending needlelike shards everywhere. And I step on one while forcing my crippled, decrepit body to bend over trying to clean the mess up.)

Now that I've wasted your time on that, here's a lulu for you:

Woman Brags About Hitting Cyclist, Discovers Police Also Use Twitter

(Looks like the cyclist will be all right, though.)

In fact, it appears that bragging about what a badass she is on the road appears to be a habit with Emma Way.

Even though the crash hadn't totally been confirmed, people started looking into Emma's social media profiles. They reportedly found photos of her tailgating other drivers as well as a picture of her speedometer a 95 MPH that were also sent into the police. Once the tweet started to go viral, Emma deleted her Twitter account. But by that point, the damage was done and the tweet was out there in perpetuity.

Again, I refer you to this site, so you can play the game of Fill Out the Narcissist Checklist.

If you're too young, it featured science news, fringe stuff, original science fiction, and other cool stuff.

Too bad you can't pick up a copy -- it stopped printing in 1995. But you are in luck: The Internet Archive has just scored the entire collection for download or reading right online.

Thank you to the person that gave me a purchased Dreamwidth account! :-)

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Excuse me, I must share this.

Good part: rbutr does something no one has done before to my knowledge. It collects rebuttals to web pages -- articles, columns, blog entries and so on -- that make (scientific) claims, and lets you access them just by clicking the plugin button. You can mark rebuttal pages as direct rebuttals to a specific paper or whatever, or just link something that generally rebuts the basic idea. Personally, I think this is a fantastic idea.

So far, it'e embryonic, with only 2000 rebuttals as I type this, but it's growing and you can submit a request for a rebuttal -- or link to a rebuttal if you already know of one that you want others to see. (I've already submitted one rebuttal, to this story in the Guardian.)

Bad part: So far, it's only for Chrome, Google's pet browser. I never used Chrome much before now, but now I'll be using it for this.

As it sees more users the quality of the info will probably go down. There's no really solid control on the quality of rebuttals, so there's no easy way to prevent -- for example -- creationists "rebutting" papers and articles on evolution by linking to creationist sites or even just the Bible chapters of Genesis online. As hotly argued stuff like climate change gets more rebuttals, there'll be a morass of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. You can vote rebuttals up or down, but that's likely only to be slight help -- especially if a wingnut cabal organizes to take rbut over, like what happened to Digg.

Still, it would be nice if they branched out into Firefox, IE and Opera plugins.

One of the most depressing things I've encountered recently was a review for ABP that described it as "abandoned".  Its not, although i understand why people would think so.

Bug and I talk about it often, and try writing in fits and spurts. 

Those that have followed us closest might remember we've been dealing with things like both of us having pain issues (joint disease for me, while Bug was diagnosed with MS a couple yrs ago).  So there's the stress and anxiety and depression with that.  About 2.5 yrs ago we moved to our first house we bought.

I know there is lot sof stuff between then and now, but to be honest, I can't remember.  Heck, if you asked me to list our stressors just inthe past month, I'd not remember half of them, let alone put them in chronological order.  Its just like before we have finished with stressor A, stressor B hits us.  We finally take care of A, only to have C hit us, before we are finished with B, and so on.

I'll have to write about the current shit we'll dealing with for anyone who is interested, but not now as i have to get to bed very soon and that needs to be flocked anyway.

Anyway, back to ABP...

For a while, I had been resolving to get the current book finished... and since is was so long since an update, i figured that since people would likely need to re-read to remember WTF was going on, I might aw well just make it one big update - like "update: book finished!"  yeah, that worked well, didn't it?  I mean, just give myself an impossibly big task, with no positive feedback as I went along, while life continues to throw shit at me... why i thought that was a good idea, again, i don't know.

So, new idea!

i'm going to go back to posting updates- even if just a few pages at a time.  I can't promise they will be regular, but I should actually make some progress instead of just falling into despair at my ongoing failure, and hopefully prevent any further encounters of "warning: abandoned fic". 

This entry was originally posted at http://alchemia.dreamwidth.org/44746.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I've been working on an illustration portfolio site in Wordpress and it's driving me absolutely batty, but I think I have finally figured out work-arounds for all the stupid buggy things that are happening. Geez.

In other news, have seen Iron Man 3 twice now, and still enjoyed it. Some things are problematic, but on the whole - yay. Really enjoying the fanfic coming out of it, too.

Been trying to get the house in order, now that we're hopefully done with major interior renovations for a while. I actually have books on my bookcases now, although they are in no way organized or cataloged. Have not found all of them, either. I am sure I am missing a few that must be in odd boxes.

I did set up my sewing machine, though. So, yay.

This entry was originally posted at http://zephre.dreamwidth.org/502770.html. comments posted to original post.

They keep objecting to giving Tamerlan Tsarnaev a decent burial . . .

. . . and all I can think of is Antigone.

Christ, what a shitty day yesterday was. If it had a reset button, I'd punch it.