Because it was, in fact, 1999. I found a few old photos the other day. This one, of Storm as The Crow is probably the only time I can get away with posting a picture of Storm that he won't mind too much. He was scary enough that he seemed to be the Angel of Death to a drunk party goer, who gave up drinking for a few years after the experience. If you click through you can see

I got my copy of the blood test results for diabetes that I had done earlier this week.

The test results are...pretty bad.

That's all.

OMG! After my other tattoo, I MUST HAVE THIS ONE!

(I know… nobody knows what the heck that is… but I do!! Set Theory was my focus for my MS.)

This Saturday, May 10, if you live in the United States and have a mailbox at your house or apartment, please consider leaving a bag or box of non-perishable groceries out by it. It will be picked up by your mailperson and delivered as a donation to the 14th annual Stamp Out Hunger program.

My union brethren and sistren in the National Association of Letter Carriers, as well as the US Postal Service, Campbell's Soup Company, America's Second Harvest, the 35 million Americans who stand on the brink of starvation (in the richest nation on the planet!), and Your Humble Correspondent will all thank you.

Aug. 15. Looks better than the rest of the increasingly misnamed prequel "trilogy", and it's got at least some of the voices, but it still takes itself so damn seriously.

Thoughts?

A deer hit the car, which sucks for the dead deer and the busted headlight. But I don't have to go to work, and check out got pushed to 6, so bully for me.

*Want*. Steampunk Vader helmet.

~~~

Interview with Amy Sedaris at the AV Club

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New Great Big Sea album on June 24th. YAY!

~~~

Whenever I get a Paperbackswap request for a book I didn't like very much, I want to write to the person and go "Are you sure? It actually kind of sucked". But, I'd be a bit grumpy about someone questioning my selections, so I don't. (I'm pretty sure I've either mentioned this before or thought of mentioning this before. It does happen every time though.)

~~~

Dear medium-sized child,

When you're foraging in the fridge, and I say "And an apple", oddly enough this means take an apple and *eat* it. It does not mean "Take an apple and leave it on the table". I'm not asking you to take the apples on an outing, I'm trying to get more vitamins into your ever-growing bod.

Love you.

Mama

~~~

In April, there was Drop Everything and Read. And, on June seventh, it's Drawing Day, aka Drop Everything and Draw, which doesn't work out to a cute acronym...though, it does work out to DEAD, which could be why it isn't the official title.

Still, drawing is fun. Maybe I'll even figure out what the hell is wrong with my hippopotamus...I should be able to draw one, and I can't. It looks wrong. But nobody has been able to tell me *why* it looks wrong. Clearly, I need to spend more time looking at hippo pictures. Research, y'know.

We just got our notification that our lease will be up soon and we could stay here for another year but we would be barely scraping by.  So we're going to be moving into my dad's condo(he's living with his girlfriend somewhere else) and taking care of his place but rearranging it to suit us. We're making sure we get a rent agreement of at least a 2 year lease so we can save some money for the next place in case of emergency.  But we're only moving  12 from our former place and we have some good amenities there. We're going to going through our stuff and downsizing considerably. Also, we're going to need some help moving what furniture we are taking, as we only have a Toyota Corolla. We will be posting stuff periodically for sale or freebie so keep an eye out.

Fuck five hours a week and seven dollars an hour. Fuck you, cause I have a line on a real job. }:D

Wal-Mart is still taking for hell and ever, but Kroger pounced on my when I said I have deli experience. I should know by Monday.

I don't find being offensive just for the sake of being offensive to be funny at all.

Well, I'm about halfway through with my character sheets for Specter Stalkers. I'll be running this either two or four times at DragonCon this year. If I only run it two times, I'll fill the other slots with Kill Buddha, a game where the characters are affiliates of the Catholic Church who carry out the church's dirty work, whether it be denouncing another religion, finding and/or destroying religious artifacts, or silencing nonbelievers.  But I digress...

Here's my first run at a character sheet for Specter Stalkers:
I've combined a few Skills to simplify things and have made up some new Feats.  I also simplified the character creation rules.  My players will fill in the biographical stats for their characters and they will be given a list of items that the party has so they can divide them up however they want. They can also add on any other items they wish, as long as the requests are within reason. Also, there are no Weapon or Armor stat blocks. Anything weapons they find along the way can be added in the Items block.  There are seven characters currently slated for this game:  two lead investigators, a technical lead/equipment specialist, a psychic, a researcher, a skeptic and an intern.  I'll have to cull it down to six before I get to DragonCon.  A few times play testing it with my local group should help determine who will get axed.

There is a cite to a man named Kcfsky, in one of the group project programs. Crazy name, or typo?

For those of you who are registered members of GreatBigSea.com, they just put Fortune's Favour up for pre-sale. If you order through the site, you ALSO get extra bonus download links for not only "Walk On The Moon" but two extra songs as well that aren't on the album!

Go! Order! Purchase the shiny new Great Big Goodness!

to wish kyaraelf the happiest of birthdays

A brief note on oil, then to politics; oil is currently acting like a mo-mo stock, hitting $126.25/barrel this morning. In the short term - heading into a recession - I think the momentum of the last month or so is unsustainable, even in a flat production environment. You're also seeing a lot of press idiocy about oil being up each day "on a weak dollar;" the dollar is actually stronger, very slightly, than it was when oil was hanging around $105/barrel, and has been gaining strength the last couple of weeks while oil shoots up to the moon. (The US dollar is up 2% against the basket as oil goes from $115/barrel to $127/barrel. There is cause-and-effect here, btw.) But hey, what's reality got to do with news?

Talking of news, Glenn Greenwald today reports on the broadcast media's continued refusal to cover the illegal domestic propaganda campaign waged by the Pentagon, no doubt because they helped so much. There's been a document dump, and amoungst the things you can trace in those documents are the locking-out of analysts who went off-message, and the co-ordinated attempt to discredit Amnesty International's report on conditions at Gitmo. I wonder how long the network news organisations can continue their silence on this matter?

Meanwhile, Senator John McCain continues to run for Chief Executive Bush's third term, claiming the problem with abuse of power in the Bush administration has been not any claimed powers of the executive (including but not limited to being above both Congressional Law and Constitutional restraint, being able to spend against Congressional law and to block spending by Congress, and, oh yes, editing laws at his whim), but "activist judges" who get in the Chief Executive's way.

This leads, in turn, to that latest attempt by various Democrats to revive retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreaking in illegal domestic spying by the administration. The ACLU has an action item up against it, along with more details than previously reported. The reported plan is to work it in to a "compromise" bill that grants Chief Executive Bush basically everything he wants, as always. As always, it's about closing down the last functioning route to investigate these crimes, and making clear and obvious lawbreaking retroactively legal. I strongly recommend you take action. (Pointer courtesy slashdot and hubbit.)

In other politics, the American Psychological Association has, inexplicably, named two determined opponents of the transgendered to a work group assigned to revise the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in preparation for the DSM-V. On the Task Force assigning the workgroup members is Dr. Ray Blanchard, a proponent of the idea that people with gender identity disorder are actually paraphiliacs, or men who have a fetish for forced feminisation. (The proponents of this theory ignore ftm men - half the transgendered population - pretending and sometimes even stating outright that they don't actually exist.) He's assigned Dr. Kenneth Zucker to the workgroup as chair; Dr. Zucker is a proponent of "reparative therapy," a hobbyhorse of the anti-gay "ex-gay" movement, only this time applied now to gender identity disorder. There is, of course, no doubt that this would, if institutionalised against GID, also be used against lesbians and gay men.

[ETA:This story must be going around, as elfs also posts about it, and adds Obsidian Wings' coverage of an NPR story that follows two GID children, one getting okay-let's-deal-with-it treatment and one getting reparative therapy. Guess which kid is all screwed up? ;_; ]

And in other outrages, this story of gang-rape going unprosecuted will be disturbing to anyone sane. And apparently some are shocked! Shocked! that proponents of Michigan's anti-gay anti-marriage amendment would lie about its impacts on domestic-partner benefits. Blocking recognition and benefits for even the children of queers was the entire fucking point, and if you listen to them talking to their core, in their own media, they'd say things like that out loud. But, as always, the mainstream media takes liars at face value without the first hint of fact or consistency checking.

So there you are. Good morning!

Allergies absolutely sucked yesterday. I just gave up at 8:30 and went to bed as my head hurt enough that I couldn't concentrate even on something as mindless as playing a video game.

Today I'm proclaiming (cautiously) that they are better. Hopefully they'll remain that way as I'm actually supposed to leave the apartment this weekend.

Dad has apparently gotten a bit better, they changed his antiobiotic. Unfortunately he's still having problems...they did a scan of his lungs and there doesn't appear to be any fluid there which means that there's some other cause behind his trouble breathing (according to dad anyway...he's not always the most reliable of sources when it comes to his own health...mom still hasn't managed to talk to the doctor herself)

I hope to do some art this weekend. I've been so wiped from allergies that I've spent most of my free time just staring at screens mindlessly rather than doing more interesting stuff.

A recent conversation made me wonder just how many "relationships" (by some definition) I've had over the course of my life, and how many ended in "breakups" as opposed to just quietly drifting apart (or, in one case, staying together for over three decades).

So let's define a "relationship" as something lasting more than a month, with some non-trivial level of romantic involvement ("love" by some definition), mutual physical attraction and physical contact. Define "breakup" as an abrupt, major decrease in the closeness of the relationship.

The answers turn out to be seven and one.

The corresponding numbers for Colleen, who is 5 years younger than me, are four and zero.

I haven't read any erotica in a long time, mostly, I think, because I have not found any other than good slashfic that engaged my brain as well as the bits. But, oh, my friends, Louisa Burton's House of Dark Delights is a searing hot romp through the secret history of a French chateau that has provided protection through the centuries for the follets, supernatural incubi and succubi to keep them safe and well fed throughout the centuries. Our cast of characters includes an elf that can change sex from male to female, an ancient Babylonian goddess, a converse-wearing satyr, and a djinn who is subject to the desires (conscious and unconscious) of those he touches. The supernatural and the fantastic play out in a view of life in the chateau through the ages, from the days of the Roman invasion to the sport of the Hellfire club and down to modern day. The author has a background in mythology, and Burton can write, my friends. The characters are well rounded and the sex is far from boring, with a good smattering of bdsm. My only complaint is the work is mainly het-focused, but the sequel, "Bound by Moonlight" is showing a shift...not to mention containing a main storyline of a Victorian slave auction. I can't recommend these highly enough, folks! Rich characterizations, vivid settings, and actual plot (revenge, love triangles, a dangerous vampire on the loose, and hope for an heir for the guardian of the grotto, to name a few) as the residents work to keep their hungers fed, keep their existence secret, and keep the chateau under it's sacred guardianship. 5 wicked elf lashes out of 5!

Haven't done a meme in a while, so I figured it was time to do one. Got this one courtesy of thebitterguy, but have fleshed it out with three other questions to bring it up to an even fifty.

( 50 Questions and Answers are here )