Cleolinda everywhere

Long day, low blood sugar--tomorrow is Sister Girl's birthday (I told you December is a busy month chez Jones)--so the linkspam is somewhat compact. 'Cause I'm tired.

( In which I solve one of the great Twilight mysteries. Also, STEPHEN FRY NEEDS YOU )

Late again today, because there was MOAR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING. Which was fun, so I had that going for me.

Important: I got an email the other day from someone who said that reading The Gift of Fear hours before she attended a seminar helped her realize that the seminar was Bad News; she was able to run away, literally, out of the building, before they got their hooks into her (they immediately started telling people to ignore gut instincts, interestingly enough). Turns out the seminar was the cult Lifespring under a new name--please be aware that variations operate under the names "Mastery In Transformational Training" and "Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness," according to Wikipedia. So basically, I wanted to alert everyone to that before anyone else got sucked in, and also, READ THE GIFT OF FEAR, SERIOUSLY, IT IS ON SALE RIGHT NOW, I AM NOT KIDDING.

Also: in the interest of slimming down the linkspam entries, I've looked into using FriendFeed for the less crucial stuff. Basically, anything I post on Livejournal or Twitter will show up there, and anything I "share" from Google Reader will as well. I won't hit share on anything I intend to use on the linkspam posts--the good and/or movie stuff--so at least that way you're not getting it twice, but if it's just something randomly kind of interesting, I'll throw it up there anyway. (And you'll also see the kind of stuff I initially flag and then don't use.) And you can then add the RSS feed of that to Google Reader if that's what you use. It's a whole recursive tangle of feeds, but you know, whatever. It gives people options. I'll try it for a while, see if it works for people.

Meanwhile, the Twilight sequel trainwreck has gotten EVEN WORSE. ( Hey, can you be in Vancouver on Monday? )

( More linkspam )

I intended to be a lazy bastard today, but... that ended up not happening. So I'm still tired, and I'm only going to give you the choicest linkspam because, again: tired. And also, my inbox is on fire.

(But it's a good tired. I've still got more work to do, but I cannot tell you how mellow I feel now that I've got "Twilight in Fifteen Minutes"--something I've worried about writing for six months now--behind me.)

Big money! No Whammies!: "Also, sources say stars Robert Pattinson, 22, and Kristin Stewart, 18, will get huge salary boosts from the $2 million each earned for 'Twilight' -- reportedly $10 million more, per film, plus a nice percentage of the future movies' box-office take." Where I come from, we call this "hazard pay."

( Quick, easily skippable Twi-spam )

Oh, and by the way, I have to give a shoutout to the Geektress podcast, which discusses Twilight in general for a while and my recaps in particular for a bit, as well as a number of comics and TV shows.

Regular linkspam! ( More! )

Ahoy! Once again it be that time o' year when the Dread Cleolinda an' her crew o' salty dogs steer Good Ship Split Infinitive into port. And with us, we bring a fine haul o' linkspam from the four corners of the seven seas.

(Though with that mad wench Anna Dollerious bemoanin', "I can't believe she's doing this again. She never does Talk Like a Gypsy Princess Who Somehow Lives in a Manor Day" all the way.)

("Are we getting Captain Swann-Turner now?" BLAST YE, WOMAN, I'LL HEAR NO MORE OF THIS!)

Talk like a pirate! In German, Swedish, Chinese and French, to boot (arrrrr, le butin!).

Talk like a pirate some more!

What kind o' pirate be ye?

4. The single word that bests describes me is: Ruthless. I am without ruth in my pursuit of booty

Free Pirate Fic!; Shiver Me Whiskers!; Arrrr, avast all ye Facebook Pirates!; 5 Little-Known Pirate Stories (and a Quiz).

ETA: (From odontomachus: Be a Pirate Troper! WARNING: 'Tis a site harder to escape from than Davy Jones' locker. HERE THERE BE TIMESUCK.)

Linkspam proper! ( Yer deadlights be more important than yer famewhorin', says I )

And now that we stand safely ashore, it be time to seek out some grub. And also, me crew needs to go for walkies. Fair winds, me hearties!

Argh. Determined to finish another annotation tonight, for a grand total of two done. I had no idea it was going to be this much work, y’all. I don’t know how many I can crank out by the end of the week (because you want a certain amount of quality control), but my poor mother is freaking out because the termite people have increased our rates, we've had to pay for new car tags, and our accountant decided to charge us $800 for doing our taxes this year, rather than $200-something, because previously he was the CPA where my stepfather worked (coworker discount, I guess?), and now he's not. I am seriously afraid one of us is going to fall and break a leg, or someone's going to have a fender bender, or maybe someone's teeth will explode--anything to cost us even more money. Because it's getting ridiculous, the way everything is costing more and everything is costing it now. And like I said yesterday, I can't work when I'm tense. Stress or panic makes me freeze up, but I can't even afford to indulge my nerves now. So every time my mother starts pacing and muttering, I let my inner seven-year-old start shouting, "WHEN I AM DONE I WILL BUY MYSELF A WEBKINZ BLACK CAT YAY! AND IT WILL BE FUN! AND I WILL PLAY ON THE COMPUTER ALL AFTERNOON! MONEY IS WHAT GROWNUPS BUY CANDY WITH! WHEEEEEE!" It's like, I have to pretend I don't have grownup worries in order to deal with the grownup worries. It's a childish zen thing, I guess.

Update on Creative Commons: Apparently CC has been dropped from the lawsuit, and not everything was as it seemed in the original article.

( MOAR LINKSPAM )

Tomorrow looks like it may be a busy day, so let's go ahead and deal with the linkspam pileup before it gets even worse:

( Linkspam that somehow includes what I was doing at three in the morning )

So... I had a shitty evening last night. My blood pressure still feels a little high today. Hurrah. Here was the one bright spot: I was at TV Tropes going through the Characters as Device list when I saw "The Littlest Cancer Patient" and went, "Aww, hey, that's like the thing I used in the... omg."

Presumably, the name of this trope is a reference to The Day After Tomorrow in Fifteen Minutes, which uses the phrase to great hilarity.

I have made my contribution to the world and can die happy. You think I'm kidding, and I'm not.

(Maybe I shouldn't say things like "die happy" after the High Blood Pressure of Fury last night. And the last time I had it checked, the nurse actually said I had very good, low blood pressure. Knocking on wood... now.)

(Before you ask: yes, I voted today. Now I'm going to go scrapbook something random until I feel mellower.)

Speaking of which, from entropy_and_me: "I was so inspired by your digital scrapbooking creations that I've gotten a bit, er, obsessively into it myself now. I made a digiscrapping resource post at my blog. You might be collecting links to do a digiscrapping linkspam yourself for all I know, but I thought my little resource post might be of interest to your readership."

( Read more... )

Finished! Eight hundred and eighty-eight pages of Ray Bradbury, and I'm finished. And there's a ton of stories they didn't even include. Amazing. No idea what I'll read next, though. Possibly the nonfiction one about William James investigating Spiritualism.

Oh, and something I should have mentioned about "The Universe" show with the "dumb" astronomers: I was writing pretty flippantly about people who are way smarter than I can ever expect to be. I was in a mischievous mood, what can I say--and I don't get those moods a lot. My impression of the astronomers was colored, however, by the fact that one of them even said at one point that he was "embarrassed" that the scientific community had believed something or other (I can't recall what) back in the fairly-recent day. Did anyone see this? Can you remember what he was talking about?

Meanwhile, I've been feeling really good the last couple of days, and I think it's because I'm back on my medication. When I was down with the norovirus, I didn't take my antidepressants for about five days--first, because I couldn't keep them down, and second, because taking them on an empty stomach is a bad idea, or at least it always has been for me. I'd wanted to stop taking them early in the afternoon and move them to mid-morning, so this gave me an opportunity to retrain myself. I'm sure there were side effects (usually I get lightheaded and a feverish feeling), but I was so miserable with the flu that I clearly didn't notice them at all, so in a way, it was ideal. So I've been feeling pretty good now that I'm back on them.

"The road network [in Cleoville] has suffered several damages after riots last night." Uh. Riots?

( Quick linkspam )

I showered and laundered today, and then lay down for five hours to recover. Ah, Norovirus. Also, I managed to eat a bowl of tomato soup (garnished liberally with crushed saltines) for dinner last night; for lunch today, I had another bowl and a grilled cheese sandwich (!). Felt a little oogy, and spent most of the afternoon digesting it, but succeeded admirably. Sister Girl had a barbecue sandwich. Sister Girl is a maniac.

(Tonight: a baked potato. "You think you can handle it?" "Let's dare to dream.")

Visit scenic Cleoville! No, seriously, visit it, because visiting it (once a day) makes it"improve." Hey, you visit mine, I'll visit yours (link in comments!). ETA: And now to build industry! Wow, this is involved.

Attention: GreatestJournal is going down.

Via notsohip: Co-founder of GiveWell, a new charity-evaluating organization, tries to astroturf MetaFilter. Link goes to the otf_w report I wrote up (today's update: co-founder booted).

biblio_filia and I both want to know, each for our own writing projects: does anyone know of a definitive, or even good, Empress Elisabeth of Austria biography?

From particle_person (both links): Sony BMG drops music DRM. It is the last major label to do so. Unfortunately, they're still doing it wrong. And the EU didn't get the memo, either.

( No one can stop the linkspam )

Oh my God, I meant to post this last week and then... things happened: there's a new HP e-zine, Cauldrons and Chocolate Frogs, and I did an interview with them a few weeks ago. I haven't read over the posted interview, but a quick glance makes me think it's fairly close to the original IM transcript, so, you know, very little chance of anything I said being taken out of context. If I managed to make an ass out of myself anyway, you know, let me know. (Man, it was fun to pretend like I was actually someone famous enough to interview!)


All right, let's see if this Cloverfield footage widget works on LJ:

( Read more... )

( Linkspam proper )