Xengar

*slaver*

Friday night was, of course, FAILNIGHT with regard to telly, and as I currently have to spend most evenings quietly for fear of going back to being Mrs Deadblood, this was a source of distress to me at seven pee em, when I clicked on the Beeb and realised it had been infested by a bad case of Pudsey.

Mope, mope! I went. Then a glimmer of dim realisation lit within my breast. Hang on. Hadn't I bought something earlier in the week, some tender morsel of delight, some potential new suitor for my attention span?

I rummaged in my handbag and pulled out a double fist-full of WIN. Battlestar Galactica, season 1 (I've never seen it). And the final season of Buffy. I slapped BG into the player quite prepared for it to be alrightish, but goodness it is superb, isn't it? I love that Starbuck is a woman! It's yet another one of those US series that leave you in silent awe of their writers, while simultaneously inducing bowel-clenching moments of horror where you imagine, fleetingly, what would have happened if those writers had chosen politics as their career, instead.

Me being me, I didn't just watch a couple of episodes. I watched the lot back-to-back, and the following morning, ordered seasons 2 and 3, the mini-series, and Razor, which is the prequel to season 4 (I go from uneducated to expert faster than anyone I know, just flow with the current for a moment, baby, once we're over the rapids it will be fine).

Season 3 and Razor arrived today. (As did The Anubis Gates, Ms Mango - thx bebe). Season 2 is still awol, which is causing me to chew the edge of my desk a little, as I can't do anything with 3/Razor until I have seen 2.

Patience, young padawan.

I know, BUT! *chafe*

Things you catch yourself saying in a business meeting #105471:

Hahaha! It was a great place to work - nothing but second-career biochemists and geologists! We had several offices full of stacks of used chromatography paper. It was as if Dante's inferno had sprouted a Rorschach level.

After eight years that nobody would call easy, it's nice to see that Mr. Bush is still willing to break up a little more furniture for the cause.

Excerpted from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — A last-minute Bush administration plan to grant sweeping new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures on religious or moral grounds has provoked a torrent of objections, including a strenuous protest from the government agency that enforces job discrimination laws.

The proposed rule would prohibit recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or to assist in the performance of abortions or sterilization procedures because of their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

. . .

Mr. Ishimaru and senior members of the commission staff said that neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the White House had consulted their agency before issuing the proposed rule. The White House Office of Management and Budget received the proposal on Aug. 21 and cleared it on the same day, according to a government Web site that keeps track of the rule-making process.

Here's the rest of the story

Meme from jossish:

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Rachel (work, ex-flatmate, some ex-lovers, some friends)
2. Chiller (bizarrely: work, one ex, some friends)
3. Smoo (sister)

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. Chiller
2.
3.

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My eyes
2. My hair
3. My boobs

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU DON’T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. I'm too fat
2. One little fingernail is beautifully curved, the other is straight. The asymmetry bothers me.
3. That's about it. Sorry.

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. Irish
2. English
3.

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. The abyss
2. Men getting anywhere near me
3. Being under water

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. Makeup
2. JOOF
3. Cats

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING NOW:
1. A burnt-orange knitted swing cardigan
2. A deep purple top
3. Orange shoes! That match the cardigan! Oh, I win. I win.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR MUSICAL ARTISTS:
1. I really am so utterly, utterly, utterly bored with fanboy/girl music wank.
2.
3.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS (RIGHT NOW):
1. BORED
2.
3.

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:
1. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting me
2. I can't imagine responding to that with anything other than fear.
3. I can't imagine ever being in a relationship.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:
1. I am a terrible liar.
2. This is a lie.
3. This is true.

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE PREFERRED SEX THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. tallness
2. lean-ness
3. a long face and hands

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. Writing
2. Painting
3. Cat-wrangling (I'm afraid gardening has had to be given the chop as I simply am not well enough to do any).

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. Go back to sleep.
2. Not have to meet these people at 11.
3. Feel better.

THREE CAREERS YOU’RE CONSIDERING/YOU’VE CONSIDERED:
1. Writer.
2.
3.

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. India
2. Japan
3. Africa (pb Kenya)

THREE NAMES YOU LIKE:
1. Ophelia
2. Hanalore
3. Henry

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. Spend some time just writing
2. Live in the house, even if it's just for one day.^[1]
3.

THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A GIRL:
1. Makeup!
2. Clothes!
3. Empathy.

THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A BOY:
1. Very good navigator.
2. I can fold maps.
3. I think like an engineer, and aside from that I believe there is nothing I am not ultimately the best in the world at, except dancing.

^[1] Not my house, THE house. Although, annoyingly, it might be one of those places that only exists after you die.

I return home a conquering hero.

I almost didn't go climbing today, but I'm really glad I did, as I had a pretty awesome climbing night. No new routes, but I sent a 5.5, an unrated (and challenging) route on the slab, the 5.8 and the 5.9 again, and did better on all of them except the 5.9, but I might have figured out a way to do it smoothly.

My anaerobic capacity and recovery are really improving. Not only can I keep pushing longer, but I get it back fast when I have to take a break. That makes me amazingly happy.

I've got nothing today, and I have to get home. However, lord_whimsy was kind enough to share his experiences with Darlingtonia colonies in the wild. Have fun.

PETA just gets more and more cracktastic every time I see them. I actually feel bad for my loved ones who are vegetarian and vegan, because they're NOT the raving, hostile psycho-beasts PETA makes them out to be. ;)

Recently I was howling with laughter over their attempt to make kids stop eating fish by renaming them "sea kittens" and writing kids' stories about them... where the fish sea kittens are bitter and insane with grief over their eaten loved ones and plot the death of "land kittens" and their owners.

No, seriously.

Because THAT'S going to make a 6-year-old want to be nice to fish, right? Tell them that Charlie the Tuna wants to kill and eat Fluffy and you! Nighty-night!

But their most recent attempt to brainwash influence the kiddies is through a parody of the vastly popular video game Cooking Mama, by making their own ripped-off Flash version: Cooking Mama Kills Animals.

I have to admit, I've played it 5 times already because I am a sick and horrible person. But some of their "reality" effects are HILARIOUS. Did you know eggs are full of blood and feathers that burst out when you crack them? Also, when preparing a turkey, you leave the pinfeathers on, and make sure to remove the head only AFTER you've stuffed it. Make sure you didn't drain the blood out of the carcass either! Also, basting a turkey causes it to break out in diseased yellow boils. Trufax!

Of course, at the end you "convince" Mama to mend her ways and "go veg!" (Even if you were giggling gleefully whilst ripping out the turkey's organs), and you get to make a "tofu turkey". No, not even a Tofurkey. This thing bears as much resemblance to a turkey as a codfish does to a Scottish Fold. From what the game tells us, it's a block of tofu torn into moist wads, patted into a featureless mound, basted with a nameless brown "vegan liquid" and then randomly baked until it resembles a fecal zit the size of a basketball, at which point it magically sprouts carrots and you are treated to a .gif of Cooking Mama gleefully strangling hugging a turkey around the neck until its eyes bug out.

I don't think she's learned yet.

Yes, mix packs of the cards are now available.

Last store post for today. Now to mail stuff out. WHEEE!

Guys, I have to go to the hospital now.

Tell Mom I'm sorry.

I'll call with details when I have some.

"Early Christmas and one a little more religious.

Be sure to send the second one to your religious aunt. She'll adore it.

(Worthy of note)

However, the warm has vanished as if it had never been.  Temperature a little over 40 F out there, with a breeze still chasing that abnormal Florida stuff away and replacing it with dry bracing Alberta air.  Daytime highs may not even reach that in the next few days.  The forecasters are throwing the "S" word into their prophecies, with maybe enough of the stuff that Measures Must Be Taken.  Like, that snow-blower.

Or the storm may pass out to sea.

None the less, we shall walk.  Once you get beyond a Certain Age, if you give the body a day off, you have to retrain it.

Bugger.

Hiccups.

Incidentally, the whole not-drinking-alcohol thing went very well on Saturday - truth be told, after placing my first unusual order I didn't notice it, and I don't think it's going to be a problem.

Bizarrely I found myself sitting in a pub drinking fizzy water, happy as larry about it, but still craving cigarettes. Is that ever going to wear off?

**

Fnoip?

Also, this is nuts.

Not raining.

Do you ever do that thing where you type in "htttp:" by accident, and your eye detects that something's up, but doesn't identify the problem, and for a minute you have an uncomfortable feeling that you have somehow slipped across into a Lovecraftian reality where geometry isn't Euclidian and triangles can have more than three corners, and URLs can go mutant?

And then your browser throws a WTF and you realise.

***

I know exactly how this guy's day is going:



I managed to wake myself up crying in my sleep this morning, which is, I think we can all agree, the lamest possible way to start your week, short of waking up and realising you've actually shed a limb (fortunately, that only happens in the Spring moult). By the time I was dressed I had managed to buoy myself back up again.

This follows a weekend of inexplicable nightmares about the usual, running (not me, him), literally running hell-for-leather^[1]. I'm trying to be very poised and graceful about this, but my subconscious won't quit, and it feels as if I'm strapped to a mad horse. Trying to drink tea from nice china. While strapped to a mad horse.

Quite aside from the issue itself (and there's nothing to be done on that front, since decency fled and continues to flee), what bothers me about this is that I am supposed to be living a life of no stress for the good of my health, and it's physically impossible to. I spend my days as calm as a Tibetan monk (ref above pic), the nights get me.

Nomatter. I have contracted the services of a witch-doctor so all should be well shortly. Although my head might look a bit smaller next time you see me, so if you were going to buy me a hat for my birthday, pls get one sized for a Blythe doll.

^[1] What is the origin of this phrase?

Welcome to a Very Special Edition of LJ News.

Moving Day and What It Means for You

Moving What Where?

The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We're moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. We don't think the move will take more than four hours, but there's always the possibility that it could take longer (the best laid plans and all).

What Does This Mean for You?

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we're going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

New servers mean new IP addresses, so it's possible that LJ mail might not reach your email inbox because your email provider or client doesn't recognize the new IP addresses. We're working with email providers to whitelist the new IPs. There are a few things you can do on your end:

• Add these two IP addresses to your "allowed senders" list (or whitelist) and address book in your email client: 208.93.0.18 and 208.93.0.50. These are the new IPs for sending comments notifications and LJ mail to your email inbox.


• Add lj_notify@livejournal.com and webmaster@livejournal.com to your email address book.

If you can't edit the spam or junk filters in your email client, you may need to disable them entirely. Make these changes just before 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning or shortly after the site comes back up to ensure that your LJ mail makes it to your inbox.

Those of you who use domain aliasing to forward your domain to your LiveJournal will need to create a CNAME record that maps to livejournal.com. Please note that we're no longer supporting the A record. For more information, check the domain forwarding FAQ.

Before the move, you can check lj_maintenance for complete details about the planned downtime. During the move, you can check status.livejournal.org for updates about the site's status.

Permanent Account Sale Delayed

We regret to inform you that due to the server move, the Permanent Account sale has been pushed back to December 4, rather than November 20 as announced in the last news post. After the virtual dust has settled from the move, we'll be able to turn our attention to the Permanent Account sale. Except for the start date, the details remain the same: You have a limited opportunity to purchase LJ for life for only $175. It's a bummer to delay the sale, but on the bright side, you have more time to save up.

But What About A La Carte Userpics?

We know we promised more information about a la carte userpics, and we're sorry that details have not been forthcoming (blame it on the move). We're still planning on having a la carte userpics, but we don’t have any details yet. When the move is over, we'll have more information. We're sorry for the delay.

An adept hand with a pair of chopsticks is amazingly useful when removing a bit of random detritus from the garbage disposal.

Dear Sir:

That any one dog should meet in one lifetime with so many misadventures seems to me an indicator of irresponsible pet ownership.

I remain,

yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Bear

I was sitting in the gang tree-house with rainsinger and offensive_mango on Saturday night, waiting for everyone else to turn up, and the three of us were talking about the fact that we were a bit hungry, when a small man sidled up to us. I say up to us, in fact, from the way I was sitting, he was immediately behind me, but facing everyone else.

"Oi," he said, his words laden with overtones of Withnail's Jake-the-Poacher, "can I interest you ladies in ... A STEAK?"

I turned my head convulsively (MEAT) and found that immediately beside my face was an enormous raw rump steak, shrink-wrapped against a printed cardboard base.

The three of us recoiled. Well, two of us recoiled, and I restrained myself from snapping.

"Uh .. no ... thanks," we mumbled.
"Oh. It's good stuff. M&S!" He pushed it further forward, there it was, right by my head, pink and somehow rude, but happily, due to the shrink-wrap the scent of the thing never reached us, or he would have been torn to shreds.

"No, really. But thanks. But no. Really."

The steak disappeared, I know not where, and the Man With Meat lifted a floorboard and returned to his nether family. Actually I'm not sure about that bit because he was behind me. It is possible that he just walked out.

It took us approximately 30 seconds to work out that we were sitting in front of a roaring fire and had just turned down a slap-up feast. And another 5 seconds to realise that that steak might have been in his pocket for a while, and another 5 seconds to establish that that doesn't count as "hanging".

Death narrowly averted there, I feel.

The remainder of the evening is best summed up by the phrase "those aren't sleigh bells".

***

FB's advertisements are like the advances of an increasingly hapeless suitor.

It starts off throwing everything at you - diets! patches! holidays! dating! And then you start flagging the items as offensive or pornographic (I flag anything diet related as offensive and anything dating related as pornographic). So it dwindles off ... and now my poor ad server has figured out that I like yoga, but it either can't fathom my other interests, or it has nothing else it can offer me, so all it gives me is yoga holidays. Hahahaha! It's like when you say "I really like lilies" to a man, and thereafter he turns up every Friday with a bunch of lilies.

When actually you also secretly like green spider crysanthemums and forget-me-nots.

I'm sorry ad-server. Our relationship is not going to work out.

***

Look, I'm not being funny, and I think it's great that they've discovered a new planet, and WOO and yay etc.

But hasn't anyone else noticed that the new planet appears to be embedded in the Eye of Sauron? Damn.

Etiphany: The exact moment at which you realise you're alone now.