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[Jul. 15th, 2009|05:42] |
Happy birthday, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ekovar |
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| recent bookspoils |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|04:41] |
mostly as a reminder to myself that I need to write up both Australia and Readercon.
Galaxy Books, Sydney:
Black Juice, Margo Lanagan, country-of-origin edition
The Game, Diana Wynne Jones, as the Aussie-edition cover was so gorgeous that I finally allowed my completist instincts to take over
Seen in Galaxy Books but not purchased because I am an idiot (and it was overpriced) (someone had better have this at Worldcon):
Cheek by Jowl, Ursula Le Guin's new book of essays
Readercon:
We Never Talk About My Brother, Peter S. Beagle-- Tachyon has done a lovely edition which has made it into no bookstores around here, including the one I work for despite best efforts, so I was very glad to see this
God Stalk, P.C. Hodgell-- something in B.'s house ate my paperback, and delighted as I am by the omnibus I have a perfectly lovely copy of Dark of the Moon already, so I got this hardcover
The Castle of the Otter, Gene Wolfe-- the little book on how and why he wrote the Book of the New Sun, containing an essay in which significant characters from that each tell a joke, which jokes are worth the price of admission all by themselves despite not remotely being, you know, funny
On Joanna Russ, ed. Farah Mendlesohn, a sheer inevitability
Zeee, Elizabeth Enright-- what I wanted was Tatsinda, but no one has that, and did I mention completist? anyway this is a charming little picture book
Manuscripts Found At Saragossa, Jan Potocki, which sounds like exactly my sort of thing
the Michael Swanwick book on Hope Mirrlees as a present from Barbara
Things I Did Not See At Readercon:
the abovementioned Le Guin, any Geraldine Harris or Elizabeth Goudge (I cannot imagine seeing a copy of Valley of Song in the wild, but Readercon isn't the wild, and I had mad and unproven hopes), The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Bone People, various other unattainable and unlikely things no one ever has: doesn't everyone have a list like that? someday, I will own a copy of L. M. Boston's only published play and then dayenu
I Probably Should Have Gotten:
Evenor, George MacDonald, a compilation of the three longest stories he wrote I don't already own; the Small Beer Naomi Mitchison about the bear; the Mendlesohn on Diana Wynne Jones
Oh this has gotten long, which is a pity when one is blogging so as not to have to put in the effort of writing up one's trip yet.
What single book would you ever be most violently surprised to see in a bookstore? |
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| Tantrums |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|09:43] |
My experience of tantrums is that they mean the child is upset. Sometimes they don't know why, by the time they reach a tantrum - I have just remembered the bit in The Bone People where Simon has tried and tried and tried and tried to get people to understand what he needs to say about his recent trauma, and eventually flips out and smashes things in an effort to communicate his desperation.
It doesn't work.
But tantrums are like that. Babies - and children - and, come to think of it, some adults - reach a point of communication failure where they can't express themselves moderately any more. They want something and it's not fair, on that deep Peter Pan level of unfairness, that they can't have it. The phrase we use in this house is "The Universe is wrong."
I have never seen a child put themselves into a tantrum deliberately as a manipulative tactic. Tantrums are no fun to watch, but it's abundantly obvious to me that they are far less fun to be inside of.
Ignoring tantrums mainly works to stop the adult's temper fraying irretrievably. It doesn't solve the child's problem. It doesn't prevent future tantrums; some children don't have many, and a very few pretend to have one in case it works, but the difference is obvious - a child in control of themselves isn't having a tantrum.
I used to give Linnea words - one chant was "I hate Mammy, I hate Daddy, I hate everything unhappy," which worked well. So far, Emer responds more easily than Linnea did, to cuddles or sympathetic noises. Disagreeing with them has never worked; if it's not fair, it's not, and if it's nasty, it is, and that's that.
Losing my temper doesn't help either. I put myself in time out far more than either of them.
But they don't do it much; I might feel differently if they did.
(I'd love to know why they are so very naughty when I am hungry and have PMS though. That's cunning.) |
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| Testogel Questions |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|09:05] |
Hey guys!
I have some questions about Testogel, now considering it a possibility.
So the leaflet I have (and Boots pharmacy) says that Testogel is 50mg/5g. Is this just one sachet? How often do you need to use Testogel? How long does it last?
The price list I have says it's £45 from Dr. Curtis (London Gender Clinic), but I need to know if that's £45 per week, fortnight, month.. Or what. Really changes how cheap or expensive it seems. I mean I found one online pharmacy that does 30x50mg(/5g) sachets for £59.00 That seems too cheap, unless of course you need to use the gel like.. Daily for 30 days.
Also, what bases the slight negativity towards Testogel? Is it purely that it is known for starting the progress a little later than other forms of Testosterone?
For those on Testogel - do/did you find that the progess started out slow, but eventually caught up once all of the changes had settled into place, like any other form of T?
Any experiences/opinions on Testogel would be highly valued!
Thank you! C: |
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| Paragon Net Burner is a unique utility to “share” a CD/DVD/BD burner over the network and remotely m |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|07:00] |
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http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-net-burner-2-0/ http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/?p=7826  Paragon Net Burner is a unique utility to “share” a CD/DVD/BD burner over the network and remotely make a CD/DVD/BD recordable device available for use by other networked computers. It gives users the ability to record CDs/DVDs/BDs without having a local burner device. This solution is extremely helpful for notebook users without CD/DVD/BD burning devices onboard.
- Easy-to-use even for inexperienced users.
User-friendly wizards will help you to mount (or remove) a remote optical drive in only a few clicks. Access the mounted drives no differently than your local devices.
- Extremely useful for notebooks without optical drive.
Paragon Net Burner is a great solution for notebook users who have no optical drive onboard (subnotebooks, netbooks, ultraportable laptops). Mount a CD/DVD/BD drive located on another machine in your local network and grab, record or master CDs/DVDs/BDs without having these devices locally. Net Burner is must-have for home users who have both subnotebook(s) and PCs – now you can forget about tiresome transferring of files from one PC to another to burn them. With Net Burner, if you take your subnotebook on a business trip, you can burn CD/DVD/BD discs using another PC.
Detailed Product Information is available at Paragon Net Burner website.
Technical Support:
During the Giveaway period Paragon Software provides technical support at http://twitter.com/paragonsoftware. Please, post your questions if you have any troubles while downloading, registering and using the software. Paragon Software’s support team will reply you as soon as possible. |
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[Jul. 15th, 2009|01:07] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  owwww | ] |
i had a question about injections:
firstly, i don't give myself injections, my brother does it for me. he gives them to me in the backside. sometimes, the shots are nearly pain-free, and then sometimes they hurt like hell. could it be that a pain-free shot is hitting fat, and a painful shot is getting down to muscle, or visa versa? does anyone have a definitive answer on this? if T is injected into fat and not muscle, does it affect the body adequately? |
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| Readercon, authority, and models of readership |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|23:37] |
This weekend I went to my first Readercon. There's a lot to like about Readercon, but there's also a lot to dislike. To start off with, the name is false advertising. This isn't a con that centers itself on or meets the needs of readers, or enables readers to talk to each other. This is a professional networking conference that also meets the needs of a small set of fans, most of whom seem to be white, male, and over 50. It is designed, in many ways large and small, to reinforce the status of professionals--particularly writers, but also editors, paid critics, and academics--above that of people who are "just fans" or "just readers."
The con's setup (everything from the programming to the hotel selection) allows and encourages this group of people to talk to each other, and fans and readers to express appreciation to this set of authorities, but does very little to encourage literary conversation as a conversation among equals. Readership, audience reaction, is strongly encouraged to stay within strict bounds; criticism and participation in the discussion are treated as privileges accorded to a few, not the basic rights of every reader.
This description is probably startling to many of you, since many attendees praise the con for the high level of its discussion. Indeed, many of the panels are a joy -- panelists tend to be intelligent, erudite, and witty, with a deep knowledge of the panel topics. The problem is, they all tend to have the same kind of deep knowledge. There are a number of perspectives which simply do not appear--particularly those of people of color, but also those of younger generations, queer people, women, young professionals, poor or working class people, and fields of literary criticism developed since 1968. (HINT: Harold Bloom, b. 1930, most influential work The Anxiety of Influence [1972], should not be the youngest nongenre literary critic anyone on a panel can cite.) The con is missing out on a huge richness of diversity of experience and thought; it is missing out on some of the greatest pleasures of reading, not to mention the chance for writers and critics and "just readers" to challenge and change each other.
These lacks are not due to individual program participants, who seem in general eager to talk and welcoming to newcomers. Rather, they stem from basic assumptions shaping the con's programming practices.
( Programming )
( Race )
( Accessibility )
( Miscellaneous )
I'll try to get up something on alternative discussion models tomorrow, but I'd like to separate it out because it's a general sf con issue even if Readercon is a particularly extreme example. Even the smaller sf cons seem dead-set on the panel discussion model. I don't honestly see Readercon as likely to change its practices, but I think there's some stuff we can experiment with at Wiscon.
This entry was originally posted at http://coffeeandink.dreamwidth.org/1021385.html. Please comment there using OpenID. |
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| closing. |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|22:48] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) deadbrowalking will close this sunday night july 19 at midnight hawaii time.
if you want to apply, please follow the directions in this post.
lots of people who have applied have not heard yet, we will try to get back to everyone in the next couple of weeks. |
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| ~*Updates*~ |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|22:57] |
Boxer & Rice
- Bad Temper Boy (Pharaoh x Jonouchi, Seto x Jonouchi, Yugi x Jonouchi) Yu Gi Oh Doujinshi by Teikokudo
- Twilight (Future Trunks x Future Gohan) Dragonball Z Doujinshi by Morikawa Ryu
Fateful Encounters
- Railroad ch 1 by Yoon Mi-Kyung
Kamibana
- I Won't Last a Day without You (Sweden x Finland) Hetalia Doujinshi by Cobito [Cobitodou]
Lady Phantomhive
- Lies and Truth (Cherry x Rayflo) Vassalord Doujinshi by [Fighting Kids]
Yuri
Dynasty Scans
- Love Cubic ch 1 by Tanimura Marika
Lililicious
- Sweet Blue Flowers ch 26 by Shimura Takako
Wings of Yuri
- Tonari Atte Futari, Mukai Atte Sannin ch 3 pt. 2 (Yuyuko x Youmu) Touhou Doujinshi by [Personal Color]
__________________________
Man I'm chatty lol. Ok so since I get done with the updates pretty late *midnight anyone??* lol, from now on I'll respond to messages/emails sent in the morning. Less strain on my sleep and A LOT less typos \(^O^ )/ ...I hope lol
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| Is it just me... |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|00:04] |
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...or does Evony have the worst ads in the history of web advertising, barring possibly X10? They're definitely well into the "boycott" range for me, and I'm very much the sort of person who would have otherwise given the game a whirl. (I'll have to compose an e-mail to them at some point, because of course boycotting someone silently does no good at all.) |
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| Ball dress/introduction |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|15:28] |
I've been sewing since forever, but only just discovered/joined this community. My normal sewing tends to be within the lolita fashion (for example, this is my most recently completed project) but I've been looking around for somewhere to show off my non-lolita work.
My little sister had her ball recently (high school prom, for the Americans) and I had promised to make her dress as her birthday present, with the caveat of "No satin, and made from a single pattern" (this was to be sewn in a weekend between uni and work, so having a pattern to work from rather than drafting something from scratch or altering a pattern seemed like a necessity). So off we trotted to the fabric stores to pick out patterns and fabric.
Then she wound up choosing two patterns, neither of which I wound up sticking to completely, and gradiated satin for the dress. Ugh. Nevertheless, I persevered (and unpicked an entire evening's work when she came over for fittings and decided that she didn't like how it fit. I swear, never sewing for her again.)
( Draped gradient-dyed satin formal dress with cross-over back feature and diamante buckle detail... ) |
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| "When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience" |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|22:47] |
A FLASH OF MEMORY
By ISSEY MIYAKE
New York Times
13 July 2009
IN April, President Obama pledged to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. He called for not simply a reduction, but elimination. His words awakened something buried deeply within me, something about which I have until now been reluctant to discuss.
I realized that I have, perhaps now more than ever, a personal and moral responsibility to speak out as one who survived what Mr. Obama called the “flash of light.”
On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on my hometown, Hiroshima. I was there, and only 7 years old. When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape — I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure.
( Read more... ) |
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| WebAuth 3.6.1 |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|20:17] |
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http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2009-07/008.html
Since the first release of WebAuth version 3, we've forced a click-through
confirmation page whenever a user first visits a site that requires
authentication. This was partly for consistency with the login behavior,
where a confirmation page was required for versions of HTTP prior to 1.1,
but I think it's a useful security feature to have transitions between
unauthenticated and authenticated space flagged.
Unfortunately from my perspective, others do not agree. It also does make
things hard for portal sites that want to display lots of other sites in
<iframe> or an equivalent. The word has therefore come down to get rid of
that confirmation page.
Suppression in some circumstances was already supported due to work
contributed by MIT, but this release also suppresses the confirmation page
after the login form entry if the browser supports it and supports
displaying the confirmation page only if tickets are potentially delegated
to the remote site. We'll keep using the latter, since we want users to
know when that happens. There are also some other accumulated fixes,
mostly affecting the WebLogin server.
As of this release, WebAuth is also maintained in Git.
I was hoping to do a general coding style cleanup and bring WebAuth in
line with my other packages with this release, but I ran out of time to
meet work deadlines. This is therefore only a partial modernization of
the build system and coding style. The build has switched to Automake,
but it isn't yet using rra-c-util or
C TAP Harness. I hope to do another
release fairly quickly with those additional improvements and more
cleanup.
With this release, I finally got around to giving WebAuth a
presence on my web pages with my standard
software page and HTML versions of the documentation. The primary WebAuth
site is still webauth.stanford.edu,
which I also maintain, but having this page on my own web pages appeals to
my sense of symmetry. It also has a few links and bits of information
that aren't (yet) on the main site.
You can download the release from either my
page or the official site.
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| Harry Potter line at Tysons |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|23:51] |
Wraps around the entire third floor
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| More about next year's Readercon |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|23:38] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Handle With Care", Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat | ] |
Remember how I said I was wary about next year's Readercon? You may have seen some rather...spirited...discussions of the issue elsewhere on LJ, also.
I'm feeling much more reassured after sovay's post about Readercon:Let us all agree that "This is your father's Readercon" is a really bad slogan. It has a deskful of negative associations and nothing to do with the current plan for Readercon 21, which is a temporary simplification of the program to something whose creation and coordination will not cause nervous breakdowns among members of the committee. Note that I do not mean simplified intellectually. The only issue is the density of program items. The dealer's room will contain its usual stacks of books. The traditional events—Meet the Pros(e), the presentation of the Rhysling, Shirley Jackson, and Cordwainer Smith Awards, and the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition—will all take place. And please, if there aren't parties all over the place in 2010, something has gone terribly wrong with the whole de-stressing idea. Further information will be forthcoming as soon as I have it, i.e., after the committee has a chance to check its e-mail, breathe for the first time since mid-April, and perhaps water some of its plants or pets. For now, please repost and link as you see fit. And if you have any concerns about Readercon, ask.
Don't Panic. This says to me that the concom knows there's been a screw-up, that they want to address it by fixing the communications channels, and that they're listening. This is a huge improvement over how things looked earlier. I'm still concerned, but even at the nadir I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt as much as I could, and this...this helps a whole lot.
I'm looking forward to the promised FAQ, which (while I don't expect it to answer everything or solve all the problems) should be another important step toward the better communication/better transparency side of things. |
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| Small Worlds |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|23:32] |
I talked to ![[info]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) custardfairy a little tonight on Skype, which was fun, even though her audio kept cutting out. In an odd coincidence, we discovered that she lives just a few doors down from where I used to live when I was eight years old, back in 1980. That's really sort of a cool coincidence.
I left the Google Maps satellite image up on my screen, zoomed in on the house I used to live in. It's been sort of strange. Almost all the features that I remember of the neighbourhood are still there. Seeing it right there in photographic detail... I dunno. I have some fun memories of the area, and it was fun pointing the landmarks that I associate with those memories out to eeyorerin and clawfoot (well, more the former since clawfoot and I were trying to hash out plans for tomorrow before she headed to bed). On the other hand, bad things happened there too, and those get concretized by the pictures as well. I can look at them and think, "That's where this happened, or that happened," and it makes it so much more real. The things I have in my memory of those events are really there and are still there. I have never been certain if those memories, if any of my memories, really, are real or not. This doesn't provide any additional actual proof, but seeing the things I remember just where I remember them makes it *feel* a lot more real.
This is it -- I think I've cropped it closely enough to remove any telling details for anybody's privacy.
The second unit from the top, if my memory serves. That straight laneway in the back that went to the carport would have been in our backyard, and that bit of trees just above was part of what I considered a forest as a child. My bedroom window was in the back of the house, overlooking it.
It's been... weird, for sure. Sometimes technology evokes more than we expect it to. |
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