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| this is what r/tldr is for... post about that ridiculous 50,000 ton press in Grafton and other places. Do they give tours? Their website is sad and I suppose they make enough money not to need to worry about supporting themselves with tourism, but wow.  Also some interest in tagging all domestically related posts with a "clean while you go" icon. | |
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| things to post about: tarot party ( I have a new deck and I haven't mapped everything to the usual cards yet ) Airplane movie showing? local fix-yer-bike party, with tools and experts and parts. paperbecause.com, seen on the back of a national geographic magazine. Their YouTube ads do not leave me impressed. | |
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| The Giver (of course there are spoilers; it's Wikipedia) was my earliest introduction to dystopian fiction. I've been pleased to learn that it's not just me - some other friends have had the same experience. On the other hand, several adults I know have never heard of it, never mind read it. Now that Jeff Bridges has been cast as one of the main characters for the 2013 film adaptation, I'm looking forward to talking to more people about it. Maybe a quick book group read... | |
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| I have prescription sunglasses from Zenni! They make a big difference in my morning commute.
Also yesterday was for capris and today is for shorts. I kind of want to be a girl and wear dresses and skirts, but don't really know how to do that at work without feeling weird.
How are you celebrating today? | |
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| I'm posting to link to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92) yuki_onna's recent piece about how crazy this all is. | |
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| I have paniers! Still need to make time to play with them. Big thankses to entrope and srl for their generosity in passing them along to me. I am looking at getting a convertible jacket-to-vest getup in "screaming/killer yellow". Currently staring at this Canari Tour Jacket and this Pearl Izumi Barrier Convertible Jacket. Have you spent money on something like this in the past? Do you have recommendations? (Do you have one you'd like to sell to me? ;) | |
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| Anyone doing anything next Wednesday evening? Seems like a fine time for eating circular pastries and savory dishes, and drinking from glasses with circular openings. Yes?
ETA: Also Einstein's birthday. | |
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| I'm going to see the Cowboy Junkies show tomorrow evening with underwatercolor, our friend Sarah, and my dad. It's from 7:30 to 10:30, with Joe Purdy. I haven't found a really good site for the even, but there's a minimal Facebook page. I have a spare ticket. Would you like to come with us? Comment screened. EDIT: Taken! | |
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| from The Bridge of San Luis Rey... He divided the inhabitants of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not. It was a horrible aristocracy, apparently, for those who had no capacity for love (or rather for suffering in love) could not be said to be alive and certainly would not live again after their death. They were a kind of straw population, filling the world with their meaningless laughter and tears and chatter and disappearing still loveable and vain into thin air. For this distinction he cultivated his own definition of love that was like no other and that had gathered all its bitterness and pride from his odd life. He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge pale and wrung but ready for the business of living. | |
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| So, what does the future look like to kids these days? (does it still involve flying cars?)
Who has the best handle on what society and the world will look like in 5, 10, 20 years?
Also, I kind of want to watch Minority Report again.
No one told me when I was in school that I probably wouldn't actually need to use a card catalog or physical encyclopedia when I was older. They taught us to use the technology they had available at the time, and that they were familiar with and qualified to teach. | |
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| Dear Internet,
Is there a way to create a new local user on an XP computer that's bound to a domain?
love,
minerva | |
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| I have constructed my future morning to have coffee brewing when I wake up, and eggs, bacon, and english muffins should be more attainable than usual. | |
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| Thinking about books like Quest for a Maid, The Moorechild, Patricia Wrede and Susan Fletcher's dragon books, and the Hall Family Chronicles. And I got into a conversation about series like The Boxcar Children and The Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew. This whole article about the Stratemeyer Syndicate is fascinating. The Stratemeyer Syndicate was the producer of a number of mystery series for children, including Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the various Tom Swift series, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and others.
Stratemeyer's business acumen was in realizing that there was a huge, untapped market for children's books. At a time when most children's books were aimed at moral instruction, the Stratemeyer Syndicate specialized in producing books that were meant primarily to be entertaining. In Stratemeyer's view, it was not the promise of sex or violence that made such reading attractive to children; it was the thrill of feeling grown-up and the desire for a series of stories. This desire for a series of stories could, Stratemeyer believed, be harnessed for profit. In founding the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Edward Stratemeyer aimed to produce books in an efficient, assembly-line fashion and to write them in such a way as to maximize their popularity.
Series books were considered to ruin a child’s chances for gaining an appreciation of good literature (subsequent studies have proven this not to be the case), and to undermine respect for authority: “’much of the contempt for social conventions ... is due to the reading of this poisonous sort of fiction.’”...Psychologist G. Stanley Hall articulated one of the most common concerns by asserting that series books would ruin girls in particular by giving them “’false views of [life]... which will cloud her life with discontent in the future.’” None of this hurt sales, however; Stratemeyer was unperturbed, even when his books were banned from the Newark Public Library as early as 1901, writing to a publisher: “’Personally it does not matter much to me. . . . Taking them out of the Library has more than tripled the sales in Newark.’” | |
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| The original Federal Express logo took some searching.  | |
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| meh. Can't find phone. Not at Kendall theater. Maybe at the Think Tank? May drive back down there at 4p, or find someone whose phone I can borrow. Phone is amazingly important, it seems. boo stressors. | |
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| I have a female friend who is having trouble finding a suit she likes. Any advice? | |
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| I am 27 now. Tell me about the number 27? What significance does it have to you? Since this is now how old I am, do you have any stories to tell from when you were my age? Advice? Ponderings? Who were you, where were you going and how did that go for you? And many other similar questions. Thank you to the people I've seen this weekend and to everyone who has wished me a happy birthday. I have spent the day in good company with people I love and who make me feel loved and welcomed, and received many thoughtful gifts from friends, family, and small children who put great effort into their art. Shoutouts especially to goddessfarmer for bringing us eggs and fresh bagels and doing lots of driving to be here with us. To starphire and underwatercolor and oxytocin_junkie for being kitchen gods and stabilizing influences, and again to oxytocin_junkie and merinslips for coming out here from NY and reminding me of what home feels like. | |
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| Someone sent me the first of what appears to be 12 months of tea and coffee. I'm very intrigued by the whole thing, and curious who was oh so nice to think of this for me. Also, this Friday the sun set as it does every day, and it was glorious. I stopped to take pictures.   | |
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| Arisia has a Preliminary Schedule! I have many many reasons to be there at 10am on Saturday, but only one me. | |
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| A few days ago a friend's reading night inspired me to reread Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, which takes place on a plant that experiences darkness in its sky once every 2049 years. (Imagine a world where you never see the stars...) Last night, underwatercolor and I watched the earlier (better) Riddick movie Pitch Black, in which a similar setup results in nightfall every 22 years. Had sort of forgotten that they focus around the same plot device until I sat down to watch it. Apparently there are a novel, radio adaptations, and movie adaptations of Nightfall. :) | |
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| I've realized that I've not actually triple-booked myself for Friday night, but I responded to an invitation on Facebook after checking my Google calendar and seeing that I had nothing else scheduled. In fact, there are at least two other things I would like to go to, and I can't be in three places at once and so on and so forth, but..
Facebook doesn't have a calendar interface. It has a list of events, if I remember to check it. RSVPing to one does not bring up a reminder that I have a temporally-nearby or conflicting event on the list.
Facebook does not have an "Export to Google" or similar setup that I am aware of, and even that is a bit manual. I want all of my tools to work together, dammit!
...Of course googling it brings up several matches, so I'll go see. I've run into this issue a few times and I want to stop it from happening and relying on my meatspace memory is a terrible idea. | |
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| Last night underwatercolor attached my projector to the ceiling, and abigezunt arrived with gifts, and we all sat down to soup and cider, and starphire had some and we watched the last half of the movie Home, which I think is more effective when I am sober. Also I have a bunch of root-veggie soup now, and the cookie dough that redheadedmuse gave to me makes an excellent dessert snack. | |
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| Recent adventures! Do you recognize the thing in the first picture? What's it for?    | |
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| Anne McAffrey wrote so much of what I read during high school. I went to the library, bought books online, and stayed up way too late reading her work. She will be missed. | |
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| So I was at the SOS kick-off meeting last night and was wondering about having something like a NextBus app for the three trolleys they'll have. There are programs that will sell you a device or charge a monthly fee, but we have smartphones and the system only needs to work for two days. Can I step on a trolley with my phone, enable Google latitude, and share it publicly as "SOS trolley 1" so anyone who wants can watch my progress around town? Is there already an app for that? What's the easiest way to let other people see this information? eta: instamapper or any of these for the andriod market seem like good starts. Have you tried any? | |
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| Happy last binary day for about 90 years. Someone told me today is corduroy day, given that it is the date that looks more like corduroy texture. :) | |
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| Thanks to starphire's dedication and hard work yesterday, I now have speakers hooked up and a projection screen hanging from my ceiling. We tested things by screening some of Home, which I really want to show to more people. Need to figure out the best configuration for the projector now... having it sitting on the couch and shifting every time I move is amusing but distracting. | |
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| A bunch of people have already posted Hyperbole and a Half's entry on depression. I do not think I have ever found myself laughing/crying in quite that way before. | |
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| I think I just dropped $60 somewhere by putting it in the wrong pocket. No time to retrace my steps while at work. This is not my day at all.
et: Found it in my car. But, I should not have pockets that easily lose cash when I do something innocent like sit down. | |
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| Happy Mole Day! I was not up at 6:02am to celebrate. :p | |
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| The Minuteman Library appears to have only one copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Maybe you have one you would loan me, instead? | |
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| Friday, November 11th, at my new place in Somerville! | |
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| Anyone have or know of an extra Playa Del Fuego ticket? | |
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| I really can't tell if this is worth reading. I'm 150 pages in. | |
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| Today I am grateful for the rain, which convinced me to take the T, which means I did more walking today than usual, and passed this gorgeous plant. It grows at the same house as the boxwood on Brookline St in Cambridge. Anyone have an ID? Click for a larger version:  ETA: this is porcelain berry | |
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| Planning on Cowboys & Aliens, 7:15pm at Somerville Theater. Anyone else? There's ice cream and wine... | |
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| Hanging out in Seven Hill Park until noonish, with sidewalk chalk. Come visit! | |
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| Today we went swimming at Wright Pond and ate at Chung Ki Wa in Medford and watched Amélie and the new Doctor Who (god dammit, Moffat. I would like to ever watch these alone on my couch.) and when I got home I remembered that spiders are nocturnal, so went to look at the garden orb-spider that I'd moved onto the tree and sure enough there she is sitting in the middle of a brand new web. She didn't like the light from my headlamp, though. Also I will be getting newer better batteries for my camera soon. ^_^ The ones I have run out in minutes of use. | |
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