I will send cards even if they are postcards and they get sent in February. (Things are about to hit the level of CRAZY here, so seriously, expect a postcard of a tobacco barn with a HAPPY SOMETIME IN THE SPRING! written on the back. Or something. But still! I will try!)

All comments screened, leave me your addresss. Also, is there something peculiarly Southern/American you've been wanting? Poor-quality chocolate? (Snobby foodie chocolate?) Microwave grits? A picture of a tree growing out of a car? Bluegrass music? Triscuits? Do tell me, for if it is small I will send it to you. Otherwise, expect a random selection that may not make much sense.

... I am really good at promoting my holiday plans.

There were two people waiting outside the Gamestop this morning when it opened. One was a young man waiting to buy Assassin's Creed, and one was me.

Clerk to Assassin's Creed Dude: Oh man, you should have been at the launch party at midnight, this is pretty much the best thing to happen all year. ::carries on::

Clerk to me: Sims 3 expansion pack? I think we have one in a box somewhere around here. ::wanders off for a while::

Sometimes I wish I played real video games. Wtf-ever, though, I'm counting the hours until I can go home and take my sims on tiny twee vacations.

Note that I am only through 2x23.

I'm not watching in a particularly fannish way (I found all the fic, mind, but that's just what I do) but since this lj/dw has pretty much devolved down to what's at the forefront of my brain during any given moment, who wants to hear what I think about the oh-silly-nerds sitcom? ( Trust me, I can't not blah blah blah about feminism for any show I watch, I just usually do it in IM instead of here. )

( Now I will talk about other things! )

Yes, this is a massive wall of typing for a fairly silly and lightweight show (look, do you know how excited I am that someone in tv-land has seen Babylon 5? We're one Farscape reference away from true love here) but I am using writing this entry to put off driving across the state in the rain. Which I need to do now. Have a nice Friday, everyone.

I bought I Know How to Cook (the first English edition of Je Sais Cuisiner) on sale on Friday, and so far I have made three, count them, three recipes, which I think is as many as I've made out of Sundays at Moosewood in six years of owning it. It helps that there are about eighty recipes that are essentially just eggs. ( Cut in case you aren't interested in eggs - no pictures. )

This concludes my ramble about my new cookbook. For now. I am so excited about this thing that I actually called my boyfriend and read him a list of all the different sorts of teas made by the French over the phone. This is something which he endured with good grace, which means I will let him have half of those cheesy eggs next time.

( I rant on for a while about hating soulbonds! )

It's kind of twisted and indicative that of all the things involved in the new Sims expansion pack (yes, I know, already) I am mostly excited about 1) more modest clothing - though still no hijab, all I want is a sim in a styling headscarf, is that too much to ask? and 2) growing grapes.

Yes, the ability to construct fantastic Indiana Jones-style puzzles for your digital people means nothing to me, but I will gladly drop $40 to have baggy shirts and a greater selection of grape varieties. As a gamer, I lack a certain oomph.

Also, may I choose this moment to say that the new pay-as-you-go downloadable content scheme kind of sucks? There's a lot of really attractive official content in the EA store, but if you look in the background of the screenshots for the expansion pack what you see all over is the same damn base-game folding screen and row of sunflower pots over and over. I know that the expansion pack Adds Powerful New Gameplay Options and so forth, but the reason the Sims is my game is because I like arranging digital furniture, and I'm ... not expecting World Adventures to have much at all. Sigh. Ahem it is, then.

and I definitely shouldn't watch Snapped (the True Crime show about women who just crack and then their fiance is found in a pond with cement shoes on). But somehow I am?

There was just this case on where the prosecution was sincerely arguing that because this woman danced in a strip club - wait for it - for money, she probably committed murder for, yes, money. I hope if I am ever accused of murder they will use that argument! She updated a database - for money! - so she probably killed this dude also for money. That's what you get for having employment!

Sigh.

I am picking poor phnelt's history-major brain, and I don't think she even watches True Blood. I know there are medievalists who try to keep us from embarrassing ourselves when we write historical fiction, but is there anybody who's well versed in things Viking? So far I'm reading a lot of SCA websites, and I'm not sure if I'm getting it right.

HOMG MY PEACHES, WHERE IS THE FIC, WHERE IS THE MOTHERFLIPPING FIC. ( Spoilers? )

( I went to a health care town hall meeting! )

I came home completely jazzed from talking to strangers about health care. I love talking to strangers about health care! It's a pity I'm not interested in nursing, because I was also this excited back when I was asking people (in another language) if they had any funny rashes they needed to talk to a doctor about.

Then I argued with my brother about feminism for an hour and a half over pizza, good times.

I wish the New Yorker article had full digital text, but here's an NYTimes editorial that leaves out the parts where if you criticize him, according to the New Yorker, he will 1) arrest you for disorderly conduct 2) stage a midnight raid on your home and 3) if you know anything about conditions in his jails, you know that being arrested by him is actually taking a chance on either dying of dehydration or being beaten to death by his goons before you go to trial.

I've been following the Honduran situation as closely as possible from here, and my contact-to-contacts-on-the-ground is talking about sending a delegation of "observers", i.e. Americans to stand there in case something happens so it will make the US newspapers. But I have to say that the way things are going down in Honduras so far is very 21st-century (negotiations and dispersed police brutality of the confused sort), while what's happening in freaking Arizona really starts to look like Olancho in the 70s.

Yes, everyone cares about my incisive political blogging. I will post about Draco Malfoy later, I promise.

Because I want to go on about how I'm reading one of those stories where Our Heroes do the dance of unexpressed attraction for hundreds and hundreds of pages and I can tell the writer's a tasteful creature and is going to resolve this not with the ten-page romance-novel-style heaving-busoms treatment it deserves but with a pg-13 makeout followed by a fade to black.

HOW YOU TEASE ME, AUTHORS. Argh.

It's not like I'm getting any vidding done these days anyway, but the whole "Pandora will help me build musical tastes in case I need vid songs!" thing is, so far, backfiring, and there seems to be one central reason:

For a song to be effective for fanvidding, I feel like it has to have at least some drama and musical variation, and it helps if the lyrics talk about feelings. It turns out that I like songs that are monotonous and talk about zero feelings if possible. I will accept some abstract metaphors about boats if necessary.

On the other hand, I've finally been able to own up to my love for overintellectual 90s electronic music. Oh yes, Hybrid Sound System. Entertain me more with your pretty and somewhat emotionally vapid progressive breaks. Because whatever "progressive breaks" means, Pandora tells me I enjoy it.

What is with the banana bangs and mullets? I am from Appalachia. Salon ladies kept trying to give me banana bangs and mullets well through 2002. It is not far gone enough to be retro; please stop.

Also, rattails on boys just makes me feel like I'm back at middle school in tobacco country in 1997. I'm just saying I would have chosen to retrocycle through the thirties, forties, and fifties another couple of times before everyone I saw at the coffeeshops made me feel faintly thirteen again.

1) Leerescuchando.net seems to be, essentially, volunteer-read podfic of public domain stories in Spanish. I am so, so happy, as Spanish-language audiobooks of everything except The Secret are painfully hard to get here. I spent all yesterday listening to The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist. I mean, I still don't know who did it, but I learned some verb tenses! (Registration required, in Spanish, but so far they have sent me zero email, which is good). Stories are available streaming or to download. Warning for autoplay on their front page.

2) It just now occurred to me to listen to BBC Latinoamerica podcasts (again, download or streaming, no registration required) and that is how I learned that today we, if you can trust science reporting, now live in the Huxleyverse. (Stem cells are "maternal cells" in Spanish! Fascinating!). This also makes me happy because I like to listen to the BBC Theme whenever I'm sad, and this way I hear it three times in fifteen minutes! Seriously, so happy-making, I have no idea why..

I am so exhausted by this thing. I am pretty sure we are all really exhausted by this thing.

If anyone else needs to know, I usually warn for a whole bevy of things, mostly because to me "warnings" is pretty much a self-important name for "tags".