I have now entirely moved to synecdochic@dreamwidth.org. All new entries here will be crossposted from Dreamwidth with comments disabled and redirected to Dreamwidth. Over the next few weeks, I will be replacing older posts with links to their Dreamwidth version and disabling comments on those as well.

* Next week: Will be having a party at mark and janinedog's on Saturday. Will be at Azkatraz's MPA track on Monday. Will be at OSCON Tues-Fri. Will likely not have a lot of energy to coordinate meetups, but if you are at either conference and see a chick with a shaved head in a hot-pink wheelchair, say hi.

* oh my god, my keyboard is broken (the v key only works about 1/4th of the time I hit it, which is at least better than the completely broken it was last night) and -- while Apple is replacing the whole keyboard + the external casing of the laptop -- they didn't have the parts in the store, so they couldn't fix it until the order comes in. I am this close to saying fuck it and buying a new USB keyboard that doesn't have the same huge-ass keys and bad tactile feedback of the existing one I have, because this is driving me nuts.

* Today I was forced to make sarah go down and tape up a sign to our front door reading something along the lines of "If you keep turning the power switch on this door to 'off', I cannot get inside the building in my wheelchair. PLEASE STOP DOING IT." Bets on how long the sign stays up?

* We need to get v-gifts put into the codebase if for no other reason than being able to give out the Commit & Ditch Pony V-Gift, aka the I Broke The Build Badge, aka the badge of shame for those who commit patches that have bugs critical enough that people notice. I would have earned three of them for this code push. Oops.

* For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture in time, I have found myself rereading old lj_dev entries since that comm's inception this week. I have alternated between saying "oh, brad" a lot and pasting things at xb95 and jnala to chortle at. (My favorite was the "let's port LJ to Apache 2.0" -- in 2003, and again in 2005. "It'll be easy!" It took us what, four months to do it?)

* I want more style options for DW so damn badly. If you are at all CSS-inclined, pretty please make some themes for us? You can do it entirely using CSS! You'll get paid time and invite codes! You'll earn our undying gratitude! I will beg if I have to!

* Tonight, driving back from the Apple Store, sarah told me about a production of King Lear she'd heard about, in which Regan and Goneril were presented as sympathetic characters who are trying to learn to cope with a parent's aging and decline -- a meditation on the modern "greying of America" type theme that Boomers are struggling with, etc. I think she was expecting me to say "oh, cool!" Instead she was treated to a five-minute rant about why that particular premise for a production would totally gut the play, including a wandering digression into the role of the Fool. Fortunately, she is amused at her ex-theatre-major girlfriend. (I have a love-hate relationship with the theatre, but oh, I can talk your ear off about dramatic structure.)

* I would like to know how I found myself writing a story in which Dean Winchester picks up JD Nielson while hitchhiking. I would also like to know how it grew a plot instead of being the simple little smut it was supposed to be. I defend myself by saying that it's a present for sarah.

* The cat is lying on his back on the pillow on top of the yarn bin next to me, with his paws twitching in midair, snoring. I don't think it's possible to maintain one's glum and vaguely grumpy mood when one's cat is snoring. It's like, a rule or something.

This post was originally made at Dreamwidth. You can comment there using OpenID, or read comments.

Mondays, every week, let's celebrate ourselves, to start the week right. Tell me what you're proud of. Tell me what you accomplished last week, something -- at least one thing -- that you can turn around and point at and say: I did this. Me. It was tough, but I did it, and I did it well, and I am proud of it, and it makes me feel good to see what I accomplished. Could be anything -- something you made, something you did, something you got through. Just take a minute and celebrate yourself. Either here, or in your journal, but somewhere.

(And if you feel uncomfortable doing this in public, I've set this entry to screen any anonymous comments, so if you want privacy, comment anonymously and I won't unscreen it unless you tell me it's okay. Also: yes, by all means, cheer each other on when you see something you want to give props to!)

(PS: The site's lying when it says OpenID comments will be screened; if you've set and validated an email address for your OpenID account, it will post normally.)

This post was originally made at Dreamwidth. You can comment there using OpenID, or read comments.

Testing after codepush!

This post was originally made at Dreamwidth. You can comment there using OpenID, or read the comments.

Reading Skills, by princessofgeeks: a sequel to Calibrate, and awesome.

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/336123.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Inspired by Doctor Who's "Turn Left:" Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you'd change -- something tiny or big -- and I'll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story.

Stitch & bitch Sunday, 3PM plus or minus the usual for Fannish Standard Time. For those who are new to these: our apartment, downtown Baltimore, directions available upon private-message request. This month we're going to be collecting clothes and cash for the friends-of-a-friend who lost everything in a house fire, so if you have clothes that might work or any gift cards you're not using, bring 'em with you.

Make carpool arrangements in the comments!

So, I play poker online now and again (on Full Tilt). I'm not all that great at it, and I'm really not great at hold 'em, which is the game that most everybody knows (since it's what's usually seen on TV), but as long as I stick to games of seven-card stud and razz (razz is why poker players drink), I'm good: win a little, lose a little, burn off some steam, etc. I won $2 in a freeroll (no-cost tournament with cash prizes) a while back, and have been playing on that for a while; I nurtured it up to about $25 or so, and I've been bouncing back and forth between like $23 and $28 playing micro-limit stud this past few weeks.

As a promotion for the World Series of Poker, Full Tilt has been running a "fantasy poker league" -- pick your poker pros for each event, and you get points for each dollar they win in that event. The top 2000 finishers for each event get entry into a special freeroll, playing the game that event was, as well as some other prizes. I put together a league at the beginning of Series season and left it alone, instead of fussing with it for each event, and wound up earning entry into seven or eight freerolls, most of which I promptly forgot about and failed to show up for.

Tonight was the last freeroll I earned a place in, which was a mixed game: limit and no-limit hold 'em. Great, I think: hold 'em is so not my game. But, eh, it's free, I'll play.

I finished fifth, and $30 richer. And -- as any poker player will tell you -- if it hadn't been for that @(*&#$ bad beat on the bust-out hand, I woulda done better.

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/335266.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Reposting for a friend:

First, go read this. It's ok, I'll wait.

For those who didn't read, the article was about a family in upstate NY who lost everything in a house fire. Those people, Vance and Lisa? They are also known as Talorc and Emma McTaran in the SCA, and you couldn't ask for better people. Their kids, Brian and Josh, are pretty awesome too. They lost everything, including their dog, all their clothes and all their stuff. While Grizzly can never be replaced, the clothes and stuff can. This is where you come in.

They need everything, but clothes are especially needed. Emma wears a 14-16 womens and tends more towards jeans and t-shirts than fancy skirts. However, business casual wear for her would get used. Talorc needs jeans (size 32/32) and large shirts. He likes button downs and t-shirts. The boys also need clothes: Brian is 36,/32 pants xl shirt, Josh is 36/32 pants and xl shirt. They're 15 and 17, so use your best judgment.

Obviously, it's going to be easier for non-locals to send money rather than goods. To this end, gift cards to Target and Walmart are requested, along with Visa pre-loaded cash cards. They've also had a PayPal account set up for them. The address on that is emmaandtalorc AT gmail.com. Every little bit helps.

If you have physical goods that you'd like to give them (clothes, housewares, SCA stuff), please contact either Kat Toomajian aka zarhooie (zarhooie AT gmail.com) or Jen Melchert (jenphalian AT gmail.com) for an address. You can also contact either of us with any questions or concerns.

Thank you in advance for your kindness. Spread the word! See the bottom of this entry for a copy-paste text box.

Pax,
Kat/zarhooie

Mondays, every week, let's celebrate ourselves, to start the week right. Tell me what you're proud of. Tell me what you accomplished last week, something -- at least one thing -- that you can turn around and point at and say: I did this. Me. It was tough, but I did it, and I did it well, and I am proud of it, and it makes me feel good to see what I accomplished. Could be anything -- something you made, something you did, something you got through. Just take a minute and celebrate yourself. Either here, or in your journal, but somewhere.

(And if you feel uncomfortable doing this in public, I've set this entry to screen any anonymous comments, so if you want privacy, comment anonymously and I won't unscreen it unless you tell me it's okay. Also: yes, by all means, cheer each other on when you see something you want to give props to!)

(PS: The site's lying when it says OpenID comments will be screened; if you've set and validated an email address for your OpenID account, it will post normally.)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/334839.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I forgot to post this earlier than now, but due to the holiday weekend, this month's stitch & bitch will be next Sunday, not today. :)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/334571.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Mondays, every week, let's celebrate ourselves, to start the week right. Tell me what you're proud of. Tell me what you accomplished last week, something -- at least one thing -- that you can turn around and point at and say: I did this. Me. It was tough, but I did it, and I did it well, and I am proud of it, and it makes me feel good to see what I accomplished. Could be anything -- something you made, something you did, something you got through. Just take a minute and celebrate yourself. Either here, or in your journal, but somewhere.

(And if you feel uncomfortable doing this in public, I've set this entry to screen any anonymous comments, so if you want privacy, comment anonymously and I won't unscreen it unless you tell me it's okay. Also: yes, by all means, cheer each other on when you see something you want to give props to!)

(PS: The site's lying when it says OpenID comments will be screened; if you've set and validated an email address for your OpenID account, it will post normally.)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/333521.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Tonight, while semi-drunkenly and three-quarters-asleeply being chauffered home from dinner with reginagiraffe and Mr. Giraffe, I had the breakthrough on What Needs To Happen In The Back Half Of Broken Wings 3: kerpoom!

I love it when that happens.

(The characters are going to hate me, though.)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/333164.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I don't want to get into the warnings debate that's going around again, because this particular iteration of it has quickly reached a level of moral absolutism that I find highly offputting and the language being used all around makes me want to bang my head against the keyboard.

I will, however, state once again for the record: as a rule, I generally do not warn for anything in my fiction. There are a very few exceptions, situational rather than element-based -- in other words, I judge the mood of the piece as a whole, and will only provide a warning (and even then, a very very vague one) if I feel that the mood of the piece as a whole crosses a particular level.

If you are likely to suffer psychological harm from being exposed to any particular element in fiction, please consider any and all of my fiction to be suspect until told otherwise. I am always willing to answer specific questions about the presence or absence of any potentially harmful material if asked.

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/332983.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I've been lax in posting book reviews lately -- okay, I've been lax in posting everything lately -- but I just finished this book this afternoon, and I absolutely have to recommend it:

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose

The premise of the book: Kevin Roose, a 19-year-old sophomore at Brown University and the textbook definition of 'secular liberal' -- raised in Oberlin, Ohio as a kinda-sorta Quaker -- decides that he's going to spend a semester 'abroad' at Liberty University, a private Evangelical Christian liberal arts college started by Jerry Falwell. This book is his memoir of that semester: an unflinching and nakedly honest exploration of evangelical culture, society, and faith.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this would be a recipe for a rousing game of poke-the-freak, but Kevin writes with a maturity that authors three times his age can't manage. His decision to do a transfer semester stemmed, he says, from a genuine desire to understand the "God divide": those 10,000 undergraduate students were his peers, so what were they like? He went into the project with considerable misgivings, all of which he covers -- along with the misgivings of his family, including his lesbian aunts, which were even greater -- but he also brought an open mind, and it shows.

He faces evangelical culture head-on, both the good and the bad, and manages to explain both without sounding either too strident or too forgiving, writing with equal candor about the love and fellowship he found there (even for those on campus who were 'unsaved') and the frequent intolerance of the evangelical cultural mindset. The people he writes about come across as real people, with all the sympathetic and unsympathetic moments that entails. His gift for description (and his wry humor) makes the reader feel like they're right there through everything: from thrice-weekly convocation meetings, to disciplinary action for violating the student code-of-conduct, to the moments where his dorm-mates broke the rules anyway, to his classes (where he's expected to take a full semester of classes in young-earth creationism, Old and New Testaments, and doctrinal elements of culture that, reading between the lines, he finds appalling), to being asked by his next-door neighbor (the most cheerful man on earth) to be a "prayer partner" (he agreed out of a desire to be friendly; he wound up touched and uplifted).

Where the book really shines, though, is Kevin's ability to chronicle his own reactions to what he's experiencing. If this were just a travelogue of a semester spent among the 'Other Side', it would be a curiosity if nothing more. But Kevin himself says that this isn't the book he intended to write about his experiences, because Liberty University turned out not to be the place he had assumed it would be. What results is a memoir of three months' worth of examining his own beliefs and his own assumptions -- about culture, about faith, about ethics, about ideals, and about communication.

This book is one of the more thoughtful, nuanced meditations upon evangelical culture I've seen in a long time. Kevin freely acknowledges and condemns the more intolerant aspects of the culture throughout. Much of the memoir is taken up with his disapproval of the insitutionalized homophobia present at the school. Though the school itself has policies against racism, he shows us (through the experience of one of his friends there) that those policies are sometimes honored more in the breech than the observance. He flat-out says (in a statement I found really interesting for its self-awareness) that his experience would have been much, much less pleasant if even one piece of his identity -- straight, white, male, nominal-Christian -- had been different. And about the most charitable thing he can find to say about his classes is that his Ministry 101 teacher genuinely cares about his students. (Although he does praise the fact that he's taught a great deal of historical information about the history of Christianity.)

But he doesn't shy away from praising the good bits he finds, either. And what we're left with, in the end, is not so much an explanation as an exploration. It's a book I think everyone would benefit from reading, no matter what one's particular religious beliefs happen to be, for Kevin's willingness to bring us with him on his personal journey.

Ultimately, this is a highly-readable, witty and yet compassionate tour of the stranger in a strange land and the home he somehow manages to find there. I'm really looking forward to seeing what else Kevin writes in the future; if he's capable of presenting something this mature and well-rounded now, he's going to be a major writer to watch.

(EDIT: A great article from the Brown alumni magazine, in which Kevin explains his motivations and background.)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/332576.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

This should be good.

Wank in five, four, three ...

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/332469.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Mondays, every week, let's celebrate ourselves, to start the week right. Tell me what you're proud of. Tell me what you accomplished last week, something -- at least one thing -- that you can turn around and point at and say: I did this. Me. It was tough, but I did it, and I did it well, and I am proud of it, and it makes me feel good to see what I accomplished. Could be anything -- something you made, something you did, something you got through. Just take a minute and celebrate yourself. Either here, or in your journal, but somewhere.

(And if you feel uncomfortable doing this in public, I've set this entry to screen any anonymous comments, so if you want privacy, comment anonymously and I won't unscreen it unless you tell me it's okay. Also: yes, by all means, cheer each other on when you see something you want to give props to!)

(PS: The site's lying when it says OpenID comments will be screened; if you've set and validated an email address for your OpenID account, it will post normally.)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/332211.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Question for those of you who use LJ Archive for whatever reason:

* Which of its features do you use it for?
* What would you need a replacement to do?
* Which of its features do you not care about at all?

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/331783.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Mondays, every week, let's celebrate ourselves, to start the week right. Tell me what you're proud of. Tell me what you accomplished last week, something -- at least one thing -- that you can turn around and point at and say: I did this. Me. It was tough, but I did it, and I did it well, and I am proud of it, and it makes me feel good to see what I accomplished. Could be anything -- something you made, something you did, something you got through. Just take a minute and celebrate yourself. Either here, or in your journal, but somewhere.

(And if you feel uncomfortable doing this in public, I've set this entry to screen any anonymous comments, so if you want privacy, comment anonymously and I won't unscreen it unless you tell me it's okay. Also: yes, by all means, cheer each other on when you see something you want to give props to!)

(PS: The site's lying when it says OpenID comments will be screened; if you've set and validated an email address for your OpenID account, it will post normally.)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/331657.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

accessibility_fail: You Fail At Accessibility!

Have you ever been in an 'accessible' hotel room that had an half-inch-high curb at the threshhold? Ever been caught in a 22" wide wheelchair facing down a 20" door? Ever been assured that the allegedly-accessible route has 'just' one step?

Take a picture. Then post it here, with where you were, what you noticed, and why that place fails at accessibility. (Filing ADA violation reports can be a community bonding activity!)

Pictures aren't necessary, and whether or not you have a picture, describe the situation as completely as you can. (That way those with visual-based disabilities can share in the mocking of the fail as well.) And if you come across someplace that does it right, please also feel free to post accessibility wins.

(All kinds of accessibility fail welcome: mobility-based, visual-based, physical-world, online-world, anything at all.)

(note: if you get an error on joining the comm, it's one of the bugs we're trying to patch -- you are a member, you just don't have posting access, and I will correct it ASAP.)

This entry was originally posted at http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/331332.html. Please comment there using OpenID.