Okay, after staring at Amazon's terrifying variety of versions of Downton Abbey seasons one and two, does anyone now which version I should get>

Link to Amazon's variety

There's the following:
Season One
1.) Downton Abbey - Complete Series 1 (Original Uncut British Version) [Region Free U.K. Import] [Blu-ray]
2.) Downton Abbey [Blu-ray]
3.) Downton Abbey Series 1 [Blu-ray] Region 2 (UK edition)

Season Two
1.) Downton Abbey: Season 2 (Original U.K. Edition) [Blu-ray]
2.) Downton Abbey - Complete Series 2 (Original Uncut British Version) [Region Free U.K. Import] (Season 2) [Blu-ray]
3.) Downton Abbey - Complete Series 2 (Original British Version) [Region Free U.K. Import] [Blu-ray]
4.) Downton Abbey Series 2 [Blu-ray] (2011)
5.) Downton Abbey Series 1 [Blu-ray] Region 2 (UK edition)

Both
Downton Abbey Series 1 & 2 [Blu-ray] Starring Maggie Smit and Huge Bonneville (2011)

Does anyone know the difference? Or you know, which one to buy? Help?

When I opened iTunes this morning, I was a little surprised to find myself flinching when I started going to the Store to stare hopefully at The Fray. I mean, I get precisely why this is bothering me, and where it's coming from, but it just hit me all at once that SOPA was partially funded by every song I legally buy, every movie I legally buy, every show I legally buy. It's one thing to in general know that this happens with all purchases, but it's also the fact that if I want this show/song/program legally, my only options is to pay people to hold me in contempt for my purchase and then use it to bribe politicians to take away my rights to use the product (and um, the entire internet).

I mean, yes, it's self-evident, don't get me wrong, but--there really isn't an alternative to the entertainment industry monopoly, is there? I can't buy anything that won't be paying for the giant legal stick to beat me with later. And when worse comes, terrifyingly, I will have funded it.

And my answer still stands.

If I had to choose between music and Wikipedia, music and the internet, music and the infinite breadth of human imagination and innovation that is pretty much what the internet is all about; that's not even a choice. That's what I would call breathing.

Okay, obviously, I have not had my recommended dose of watching things blow up. It may be a Die Hard night again.

Mr Darcy Takes a Wife by Linda Berdoll is up for Kindle at $1.99.

I did a review of the books here to give you an idea of what--you'll be getting. But now I can safely state that what this book and its sequels are that I did not have quite the right vocabulary for in 2006.

This is Pride and Prejudice erotic(ish) id-fic, by ten. This is the id-vortex itself of Pride and Prejudice spin-offs. This is also the definitive proof of the awesome of fanfic; I would not have liked this as a regency romance about random people, but Darcy and Elizabeth rock it like whoa. So I honestly get a kick out of reading something that literally could have been posted online and in fangirl context, would have probably hit the entirety of fandom like a tsunami. It's fanfic I am very, very happy to pay for.

It's pretty unapologetic about what it's doing. I mean, there is great literature and there is good literature both pro and fen and there is candy and then there is this, which is like, IDK, a eight course dinner for the id, with candy. You can't read this as a purist; if you go in like that, you will hate it. But if you read it like a fangirl id-ing it up, it'll work like you would not believe.

My grammar and sentence construction concerns continue; you will, I promise, get used to the style and it will be invisible within about fifty pages, but it is an acquired taste to want to because what the id wants, the id wants. And it's worth it. And at 1.99, I figure this is a good time to test it.

There are two sequels, Darcy and Elizabeth (AKA Darcy and Elizabeth: Days and Nights at Pemberley) and The Ruling Passion (AKA The Darcys: The Ruling Passion) and they're about as id-rompy as the first. And I will say without apology they are fun reading. Jane Austen would not have written this, no, but I think she would have laughed herself sick and enjoyed reading where this author went with her work.

I do like this a lot more than most Austen sequels--if not all of them with a few specific exceptions--because no one is Austen; her voice and her vision were extremely unique and only look easy to replicate until you read people trying and you realize how razor-sharp not only her prose is, but the mind that created this that understood that making fun of something doesn't mean not loving it, and she understood how to draw sympathetic characters and villains with a complexity and skill that the more I re-read her books, the more I'm surprised how deftly she practiced her craft. And how freaking subtle her sarcasm is.

Linda doesn't try to write Austen's style, which I mean, no, her natural style is not, um, even close. So instead, she does it in her own, and then hits the gas like she's forgotten the meaning of brakes and that shit works.

I haven't read The Ruling Passion before, so let's say I'm excited.

Currently finishing Mr Darcy's Secret by Jane Odiwe, which so far I'm enjoying a lot, though they pretty much broadcast the entire plotline and resolution fairly fast; however, how they'll get there makes me curious, and it's a very fun, light-hearted read.

My squee is very id-dy.

ETA: Id and Id-Vortex references, Slash shock, shamelessness, and a rec. by ellen_fremedon. Remember when you used to find meta on every online streetcorner and everyone hyperexamining their writing and reading and arguing genre until it was All Bellybutton Lint, All the Time and you're like, no more? Yeah. I revise my stance and encourage everyone to examine their meaningful writing thoughts right now, even if they are talking about your feelings for the use of 'and' and the second person pov as narrator stand in. I miss it. Like, after reading this, a lot.

Colbert, Cain Rally in SC

For the linkphobic, my favorite bit:

The pundits want to know if this is a joke, said Colbert.

“If they are calling being allowed to form a super PAC and [collect] unlimited and untraceable amounts of money from individuals and unions and corporations and spend that money on political ads and for personal enrichment and surrender that super PAC to one of my closest friends while I explore a run for office—if that is a joke, then they are saying our entire campaign finance system is a joke.”

Short version; welcome to Thunderdome, Republican Party.

Also...apparently I have a date tomorrow. It wasn't even an accident or anything. It was on purpose. For teh first time in twelve years--and I could tell you to the month and day if had to, and I don't know what to do or why I'm doing this or why after all the care I've taken for years not to ever get to this point, I gave him my number and y'all, I havent' carried on a phone conversation of more than five minutes with anyone but hwmitzy and svmadelyn for--let's say it again, twelve years.

Yeah. It's--I don't know what this is. I don't even know how I feel about it. Which seems a pretty good reason to do it, really.

So norabombay is responsible for my next credit card statement due to overuse of Amazon and iTunes because in a fit of what I thought was sympathy post-Sherlock, she introduced me to Grosse Pointe Blank since I hadn't seen it (don't judge), and I'm happier, but also, poorer trying to get the soundtrack by piecemeal since it's not downloadable as a whole and where is Blister 2000 anyway?

That I'm listening to Guns N'Roses Live and Let Die with no sense of irony hurts me dreadfully. Then again, I get to hum happily to myself whenever there is shooting, and there is a truly satisfactory amount of shooting. Happy.

ETA: This movie isn't on bluray? What kind of sick world do we live in?

PS: Okay, that's it, this is a night of Steve Wariner music and pre-ordering The Fray's new album. Between Sherlock and the vast betrayal of bluray technology, I really have no choice. And I'm downloading the two singles now. That is where I am. Even though I am not sure The Fighter really expresses my pain sufficiently. Or Heartbeat.

I'm assuming, anyway. Please God. News this week did not get any better, so this is a weekend of sloth and reading and carefully faking a lack of worry, which isn't working as well as one might hope.

In less depressing news, for a random pick-me-up, lanning's Identical series is currently being read cover to--more covers. Because some days you really need to read something where the universe tries to play fair. Eleven stories, ~281,000 words, still in progress.

Really.

On behalf of those of us who were and are single women on welfare with children in the South and at some point in our lives lived in a--I need to check the wording--"rural south USA in a welfare slum trailer"--and who do not think our population should be fodder for your smug little war on the word shack:

Fuck. You.

Are you fucking serious?

Are you comparing lower income women's lives--and since you used the word 'welfare', we all know you're talking about women, who make up the majority of welfare clients; women, whose choices and lives are limited by poverty and the difficulties raising children alone, without spousal support; poor urban women, a population that is statistically more likely to be battered by their male partner--to a fucking challenge using the word shack?

I suppose indywind felt it was 'problematic' to use the term 'trailer trash'; should I be grateful? Thank you. Your buddies in that thread who were so excited to read it--and that super clever "Now them's fightin' words!!!" jab--also have my abject gratitude that parts of my life--and my family, friends, and clients from when I was a caseworker who decided benefits for those renters of "rural south USA in a welfare slum trailer"--are being held up in humourous example of how southern poverty is totally like using the word shack. I feel as if social justice is on my side.

So, my night is shit. How's everyone else doing?

We are living in the future, and finally, we can be try the train stunt from Spiderman II. Coming to a Wal-Mart near you.

Researchers have tried for years to get the best of both worlds - super-strong silk in industrial quantities - by transplanting genes from spiders into worms. But the resulting genetically modified worms have not produced enough spider silk until now.

GM worms produced by a team led by Professor Don Jarvis of Wyoming University seem to be producing a composite of worm and spider silk in large amounts - which the researchers say is just as tough as spider silk.

...do we call them spiderworms? There is nothing about that word that doesn't make me flinch.

SHHHERRRRRRRRLLLLLLLOOOOOOCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!

( fifteen minutes in to forty-two )

This is a more detailed version of the instructions here to make your Kindle recognize bookcovers from Calibre. Reproducing here in its entirety. This version will work if the other didn't. I tested it a couple of times to verify.

Bookcovers in Calibre to Kindle Fire
- Go to Books->Device and delete all Calibre-created fanfic in there. If you are having problems with your regular books as well, delete all those too.
- Go to Books->Cloud and repeat only with the fanfic
- Using any file manager app, go to the Books folder, repeat with fanfic
- Using any file manager app, go to the Documents folder, repeat with fanfic
- Close file manager
- click the Settings gear at the top of your Kindle Fire
- select More..
- select Applications
- select Filter by > All Applications
- click Amazon Kindle
- click the buttons "Force Stop", "Clear Data", Clear Cache"
- go back to Home
- restart your Kindle
- make sure you are online and select Books->Cloud
- redownload your books
- open Calibre on your desktop.
- check your fanfic to make sure you like the covers. If you want to make a new one, get the Covers plugin and go to town.
- reconvert any MOBI that you haven't already if it came from AO3 and may have the [Pdoc] tag in it somewhere.
- hook up your Kindle to your laptop.
- DO NOT SEND TO DEVICE
- Click on Save to Disk->Save only MOBI format to disk in a single directory (validate this is the Books folder)

That should work to fix any problems remaining.

Happy Kindling! Every day with a Fire is an adventure.

The mods of fail-fandomanon put up a quick tutorial for a layout/custom comment page that looks like the original here. I just switched and so far it looks fine for a stopgap until livejournal lets me have my goddamn s1 style back or someone who feels they owe me their lives and wish to repay me by rebuilding my old style in s2. I swear I'd do it myself but my css is about a billion years out of date and I cannot for the life of me visualize negative margins no matter how logical I know they are.

In other news, I'm at work, and really, I think that's illustrative of my current feelings about my life and for that matter, the lives of others. Also? Gah.

That is all.

Hey, does LJ know someone hacked them and completely destroyed usability and readability on vast, vast tracts of LJ territory and the entire reason most of us like to be there; aka the comment page? It's hideous! The hacker is obviously evil and possibly made of snails, due to their myopia that would cause them to think this hideousness is okay.

Fine, yes, I knew this was coming, but holy mother of God what snail-possessed programmer thought that was a good idea?

I'm saying, we can go with a.) complete loss of interest in usability of their site or....b.) evil snail people. Who at least have an excuse not to care if the site is usable; they're snails, how many comments can you make using your amorphous lump to press one key at a time? Also, I suspect they have to replace their keyboards regularly.

ETA: For LJ users, in case LJ's a little behind in fixing this obviously horrific comedown from a truly terrible acid trip (assuming the evil snail theory doesn't pan out), DW has free account creation so you don't even need a code!

ETA HELP ME: Um, okay, can anyone tell why I can't reply to comments in my own LJ? Or comment to my own entry?

To apetslife - yes I wrote text in the box but the button doesn't enable in my LJ.

Update to that: apparently, unchecking "View comment pages from my Friends page in my own style" on My Account Settings was the problem. Because that, I'm sure, is supposed to make sense. You may or may not have to uncheck "View all journals and communities in my own style", which is directly above it as well.

I'm going to have to actually change my style. I do not like this at all.

New Update: Annnnd it stopped working again right after I replied to someone and the reply ended up as a not-reply but regular comment.

LJ WHAT THE HELL.

Update Yet Again to Comment/Reply Issue: Clicking on Insert Link and entering something and adding it enables the Post button. It has been relatively consistent on the last three comments I made, two in lj-release because while I have never done the enraged online mob thing before, by God, it's time.

Reading Roberta Gellis' A Woman's Estate, book five in the Heiress series, set during Napolean Mark I.

Okay, overall the series is uneven and not nearly as fantastic and fun as her medieval, but that fifth book is just--and I say this as a Romance novel reader--there is some terrible pre-feminism in here. I don't object at all to anachronistic feminism and anti-racism. Even when it's done awkwardly or badly, I give points for good intentions or making a decent effort because even handled badly, they're trying desperately to handle it in a genre that is not really easy to pull it off in and most people don't even try to integrate it at all, much less make a sincere but awkward effort at it.

IDEK what was going on with this one, but it was really hideously awkward attempts at pre-feminism backed against invisible-to-the-author misogyny that's not used deliberately. Gellis had an earlier book where in her notes, she made reference to blaming women for the fall of women's rights in medieval europe, so haven't read that one again, but her Roselynde books are so strong in women's lives and etc that I can just ignore that one. It was weird and the few good points (noting law that made a woman stop existing when she married; that was genuinely unsettling to read, even though I was aware of it, detailing it out like that was very well done) but then it's offset with the story's supporting the idea that her wanting to not marry again or wanting freedom or etc was all about lacking trust in her husband and a mania, which fuck no.

There was a lot of mixed messaging here, is what I'm saying, and I can't give points for what she did do because the entire thing was based on HEROINE DOES NOT TRUST MEN AND WHY. And later, how she acknowledges her own foolishness, because hello, her goddamn points were valid even in--especially in--a happy marriage. I mean, that's what made it work. EVEN IF YOUR HUSBAND WAS LOVING AND RESPECTFUL, HE COULD AND DID DO THIS SHIT IN THE SPIRIT OF LOVE AND RESPECT AND THAT SHIT WAS STILL WRONG.

(Though it did have a genuinely touching, subtle moment with the hero questioning his mother and her responses were wonderfully drawn of a woman who had a perfectly happy marriage but also the small embarrassments/discomforts of the fact that as a married woman, she was owned by her husband and could own nothing herself; all belonged to her husband on his sufferance.)

I can't figure out why she bothered with the proto-feminism at all when the text itself was arguing against it or fighting it so hard. I think she made a stab at racism, but I won't swear to it because that was just weird and awkward and uncomfortable in a bad way. Your text should not argue for the purpose of proving that feminism is awesome, but with a good husband, not so much necessary.

Stick with the Roselynde series or the Royal Dynasty series, is what I'm saying.

My day is being day-like.

Leveson Inquiry

The Leveson Inquiry, link to main page and all current information. Phone Hacking, link to main page and all current information.

James Murdoch did not read the Neville email, merely, you know, answered it. This is like Billie Jean, where Billie Jean is a forwarded email with the words "nightmare scenario" and "Unfortunately it is as bad as we feared," being thrown around. I am saying, I understand. I, too, answer email without reading it, especially when it looks vaguely important and uses terminology that may or may not imply I (my company) are terribly, terribly fucked.

Here's the thing that makes me sad. If he's telling the truth, honest to God, this is the man you want running your company? He doesn't read email with alarmist adjectives. What, an email THERE IS A GIANT BEAR THAT IS GOING TO EAT YOUR ENTIRE STAFF IN FIVE MINUTES and he'll be "Cool, call me" not aware the person will be eaten in four minutes fifty-five seconds due to that not reading thing.

Yes, I find this comforting that a multibillion dollar company is being run by or run with the efforts of someone who fails either at lying or basic literacy.

Napoleon

Napolean Bonaparte in history is not like, a subject that isn't fairly well covered. I mean, I know my dates, my island, and my Wellington. But weirdly--very weirdly, come to think--it was reading a goddamn romance novel (two actually, Roberta Gellis and Georgette Heyer, but moreso with Roberta) that belatedly made me realize how utterly terrifying he was to Europe and how borderline close he came to a really early unification of Europe. I don't know if it was my perception in history classes (and I took a lot of history classes and spent a lot of my late teens/early twenties hitting the Dewey decimal history section like a really disorganized storm of curiosity) or my selections, but the emphasis on his military ability and his vision and his unification of France and his conquering and his exile didn't quite ever get beyond the genius conqueror and into the fact that he was actually goddamn terrifying in his ambitions and more importantly, was brilliant enough at what he did to fulfill those ambitions.

ETA: So that was odd in the posting.

Per the end of Farscape Season Three (I snuck in the first four of season four and--I really don't want to talk about it yet, but I think I watched them from the wrong perspective or something? What the hell?), Child is on a Glee rampage, so we are hitting season one and two in no particular order and God do I hate Amazon Prime free streaming or I wouldn't be in this mess right now. He's scheduled in Season Four viewing sometime in the middle of the Glee medley and Sanctuary season one and SG1 season one (not streaming; sadly, I have them already).

In other words, I have a really uncomfortable feeling that I will start to expect Sanctuary to break into song if Child keeps me on this media extravaganza for any length of time.

You may now return to more interesting reading. I'm suffering from multi-genre overload.

He's...not actually joking.

Gingrich: Laws preventing child labor are 'truly stupid'


I know, titles can be misleading sometimes! So let's...

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid," Gingrich said. "Saying to people you shouldn't go to work before you're 14, 16. You're totally poor, you're in a school that's failing with a teacher that's failing."

Gingrich then proposed a system he said would help those students rise from poverty.

"I tried for years to have a very simple model. These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work; they'd have cash; they'd have pride in the schools. They'd begin the process of rising."

...what, are his servants getting old and he wants to save money and get them trained at school now instead of that uppity math and reading nonsense they've been getting?

The Republican Party, ladies and gentleman. Make the poor kids work to clean up after the rich ones. That'll teach 'em.

[Weird but true; I did work from fourth grade to eleventh grade at my school's lunchroom to pay for my lunch during the school year. It was like, an hour a day and we controlled the schools' ice cream access. Twelfth grade I was abroad, so I couldn't. I'm still grumpy about that.]

Okay, it's not like I go into any Monday with high expectations, and a Monday after Thanksgiving is pretty much a recipe for abiding hatred and a strange, surreal connection with the artistic stylings of Dilbert, but.

But.

There is staring blankly at your computer believing in your heart that despite other people's assurances that it is not evil and plotting against you, yes, it is plotting against you, and then there is this--there is staring blankly at your computer believing in your heart that it's plotting against you and everyone else sees it too because all the computers are doing this.

This is actually fairly weird. There was definitely a power outage, since all the computers were off and that does not happen, but on reboot, everything is moving so slowly it's like watching a documentary on carnal relations in the fly kingdom, or possibly, paint dry. And I do mean literally; I opened a message in Outlook and while waiting for it to, you know, open, trotted to my supervisor's cubicle to report, share our pain, stopped by with a coworker, admired her new hairstyle, shared pain, mosied on back, sat down, and the message finally thought about loading and loaded. Mostly.

On a certain level I find this useful, as God knows The Paladin Protocol needs re-reading since I don't actually have it memorized yet, but I'm very impressionable on Mondays and not entirely sane, so I don't think it's healthy to spend very much fictional time in Sheldon Cooper's head. Let's all remember Rodney McKay had me modeling The Road Coloring Problem with popsicle sticks during a particularly uncomfortable week, and no one sane whose highest math is Calculus should be reading about a.) millennium problems or b.) advanced graphing, much less c.) trying to create models with popsicle sticks. And I don't have any popsicle sticks right now. Also, I'm at work, but I'm not sure that would matter in the eventuality of popsicle sticks coming into being somewhere in my immediate vicinity.

This has been a message from Monday.

So while navigating separate pages of chapters of a fic to cut and paste into Word (that would be thirty-six goddamn chapters of copy/paste, convert to html, add to calibre, and convert to mobi), I had a lot of time to think one day about reading habits; ie, my interaction with fanfiction. Me and my Kindle did not have a hard bond on the subject of fanfic until my schedule became insane at work this summer and suddenly it was a hell of a lot easier to navigate AO3 on my Kindle to grab fics I wanted to read or do a sweep at home through the archive, add a whole whole bunch to calibre, and upload quickly.

Now with both my Kindle and Kindle Fire, the habit is set; I want it readable on one of them, and if I have time, I'll damn well make it readable, but if I don't, it's a skip. And this, retrospectively, is by far the biggest shift in my fanfic reading habits since the mailing-list to livejournal changeover, which was preceded by the usenet to mailing list (and yes, there's overlap in all of these).

And I say this with complete understanding of my own quirks; AO3's single-one-stop mobi and single-page format reading options have really fed my entitlement, to the point where I'm staring at ff.net hatefully and muttering, and yes, The Paladin Protocol was totally worth it, but still. Thirty six chapters with careful copy/pasting and everything jumping to center abruptly for no reason so I had to format did give me some moments of pure hatred.

To give some context, I was on ff.net before the NC-17 ban and did a full delete of my account when it came down. A lot of this was I wasn't trained into ff.net's structure early on so I had no reason to stay; I was trained into fanfiction in Trek when everyone was getting geocities webpages and everyone on their own pages would do single-page format for long stories (and short) I could download (fairly easily) and I only read short form in email off mailing list. And all my character codes, my pairing code order and fandom acronym and header structure were announced on ASC and pretty much everyone followed it because I don't say everyone in Trek was there, but it sure felt like it.

As far as pairing codes and fandom acronyms go, I'm really into authoritarianism; I am a fan of a certain level of rigid structuring being in place that everyone uses and then a more free-flow beneath that. I have no personal opinion and attach no deep meaning to whether Clark or Lex goes first in a pairing code because in Trek, if I remember correctly, it was based on rank followed by first appearance (see Neelix, Kes, Seven of Nine). And it took me several years in fandom to realize people did, in fact, use pairing code to express a lot more than these people were in a relationship and/or fucking. It could be--and sometimes was--a rather sophisticated expression of how they were fucking and many variations in between.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of shift? In Trek and early X-Men, I was very much save and print, because dial-up was expensive and my computer was slow and a desktop. Late X-Men to SGA, it was very much save to disk and read, because by SV I had a faster computer and by SGA I had a laptop. Late SGA to well, this summer was bookmark to delicious, so I could read it anywhere I had a connection. Now I'm back to the surreality of cut-paste to html to calibre to mobi, plus bookmark to delicious (bundles are back! And fucked up, but I can deal with that, they are still here!) plus save to disk for later mobi conversion. AO3 and the mobile archives are suddenly like, places I spent a lot of time tracking down authors in the hopes that the story they posted to LJ is archived there and trying not to judge them if they aren't (yes, I do not have my entire back catalogue on AO3 yet, but this is because I am lazy and because even after conversion, I have to go in and hand edit some truly hideous things I did in html tags back when I didn't know better. My later stuff when I became a fan of using style sheets is ridiculously easy in comparison).

Also, AO3 is faster than calibre in bulk conversion if not in fine tuning the formatting. And now I'm faintly resentful I can't find a site I can go to, copy in the addresses of a whole bunch of bits of stories, and have them deliver me a single file mobi file on the spot. Which I can honestly say like, a year ago I would have called myself an entitled ass, but that was before I drank the e-reader kool-aid and realized that this was like, the reason I was born, you understand. To clutch my Kindle in one hand and read with a flicker of my finger anywhere in the world without fuss and without bulk (this has transformed flying for me, you understand. Transformed it).

So in light of massive turkey consumption and having a glorious four days of no work and catching up on my sleep and whatnot, anyone else having a revelation in reading habits? And more importantly, and this made me curious, with the advent of ereaders and tablets and very large phone screens, is the future of fanfic archives going to shift to an equal if not higher focus on accessibility on mobile devices instead of on the current computer screen standard size and functionality?

(To be fair, this is also the result of entering a fandom read-only and falling in love with a het pairing so hard I think I bruised myself, but oh my God I love Penny. I just love Penny and I want her to have everything she wants in the universe. And after Rodney blowing up solar systems, Sheldon doesn't worry me at all. Though norabombay thinks what the world needs is support group fic where John Sheppard, John Watson, Penny, and Clark all gather for cookies and xanax to talk about how they deal with genius-teetering-on-the-potential-for-supervillian significant others and everyone sits in awe of Penny who has like, a pack of them wandering around her and she hasn't killed them all yet and how she does it. Because I love Penny. And support groups are a good thing.)

Anne McCaffrey has died. The first woman to win the Hugo and the Nebula, and her Dragonriders books, her Lessa and Brekke and Menolly, her Rowan and The Ship that Sang, Crystal Singer and the breadth of her works between I owe a debt of gratitude for that I'll carry until the day I die.

I honestly had no idea how much this would hurt, one of the women whose work built the foundation of my love of sci-fi and fantasy, dragons and starships, but mostly, the people she created in the worlds she built who embodied all the potential of what we could become.

I feel very mea culpa because I have never really understood the entire anti-adverb thing in fic. Until now, because instead of reading an otherwise really interesting fic, I get distracted counting how many times the word 'softly' is used. And soft. And all variations of that word there are.

Answer: may need to paste this into word and do it properly, as I keep losing count around 'way too many'.

I can tell what she was going for (and is actually pulling off decently), but that's why we have betas and seriously, the beta should have said "you realize you used this four times in a paragraph, right?" I can see the betas name. I may or may not be judging. Or possibly sulking because I'm still mentally counting 'softly' again. Gah.

(It doesn't actually help that every time I start getting judgy, I have flashbacks to writing Flight (link is to me hating it in several font colors) where I possibly offended the laws of adverbs. A lot. Knowing you have no high ground does tend to take the wind from your grammatical sails big time.)

...I love my Kindle Fire. Except for one tiny thing.

How do I get it to rename? I did it on my amazon page, but my Kindle is so not picking it up. Yes, that is my stress. Mostly there is cackling and no lie, Sheldon is magic and I think might be like, actually a sekrit unicorn shaped as a Kindle.

That is all.

...I'm not even home yet, but I keep obsessively refreshing tracking and disappointed it's not delivered.

Dear Amazon Fire Sheldon,

Come home now.

--jenn

Kindle Fires are to be released tomorrow, Amazon is preparing to ship. Two days until Kindle delivery for those with one day shipping and three days for two day shipping.

I am now breathing (metaphorically) in the general direction of a paper bag.

ETA: I reserve the right to sulk myself into a sulky mess since everyone in the world is getting theirs tomorrow. Sulky. Mess.

God, I am so watching more Sheldon tonight. Watching him go to war over his spot on the couch will be deeply cathartic.

ETA 2: WE HAVE SHIPPAGE. WE HAVE SHIPPAGE. Oh my God, I am going to love it and hug it and name it....

...wow, what am I going to name it?

ETA 3: By suggestion of jamie, the Kindle Fire is named Sheldon.

Huh. Anyone watching?

( hmmm )

In other news - Bella Swan versus Thor. Or maybe it's called Snow White and the Huntsman, IDK. I am just saying, Bella Swan versus Thor is how I am seeing it. With swords! here, in case you gotta know.

I do not think this qualifies as torn so much as I will take what I can get, sadly.

From ratcreature, more on the pseudo-German here. Oh, hilarity.

Much, much recommended:

The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer - I love her work in general, but this one is fantastic. Hugo may be my favorite hero since Freddy in Cotillion, being sensible, practical, brilliant, and with an impossible sense of humor. And in a lovely turn of events, the heroine is just as sensible, extremely smart, and adorable.

Also, there are smugglers. And shootings. I am all about smugglers and shootings.