We've made it past the solstice! Those of us for whom this is the winter solstice, YOU GUYS YOU GUYS, this means we get MORE SUN EVERY DAY, from now on out!

(Those of you for whom it is the summer solstice... um. Sorry.)

Those of you for whom this is a festival, I um. Meant to wish you a happy one. Yesterday.

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Eggnog in French is "Lait de Poule" ("Milk of chicken," or maybe, less awkwardly, "hen's milk"). I cannot think of any name less likely to entice one to drink a beverage.

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A REPORT ON TVS I HAVE WATCHED, By Betty, Age *coughcoughcough*

This isn't everything people recced me in these posts, but it's everything I have assayed so far I AM ONLY ONE WOMAN. Sorted semi-alphabetically, but don't let the spurious air of methodology deceive you into thinking I was methodical in my approach to assessing them; I basically just watched enough to find out if it was suitable for my purposes, ie. "watch for fun."

( Castle )

( FlashForward )

( Fringe )

( The No. 1. Ladies Detective Agency )

( Sanctuary )

( The Unusuals )

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( Fortune and Fate (Twelve Houses, #5), 0 stars )

( Tinker (Tinker, book 1), 3 stars )

( Banner of Souls, 4 stars )

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In September 2006, in feedback, Six Apart said:

We know that a percentage of our userbase doesn't fit into the binary gender construct, and we think that's just another awesome sign of the diversity on LJ. We don't want to force anyone into making an uncomfortable choice or self-identifying in a way that they don't feel fits them, which is why we'll always at the very least offer the "unspecified" option.

Two days ago, in changelog, this code floated past:

     ### gender check
-    $from_post{errors}->{confirmpass} = $class->ml('widget.createaccount.error.nogender')
+    $from_post{errors}->{gender} = $class->ml('widget.createaccount.error.nogender')
         unless $post->{gender} =~ /^M|F$/;

The key bit is right at the end. You can no longer create an lj account without declaring a gender, which must be either male or female. I'm not certain if existing users are grandfathered in, but honestly I recommend going to Edit Profile, and selecting unspecified while you still can.

Why would lj do this? ADVERTISING, BABY. Advertisers like to buy your eyeballs in narrowly defined slices, precise, if not accurate, and 'undefined' are harder to sell and target.

See synecdochic's post for more information, copy and paste letter-writing templates and addresses, and code analysis. (No, really, see her post. She's the one who caught this code floating past. I basically took everything in this one from there.)

ETA - 15 DEC - LJ is backpedaling from this one like a circus clown on a unicycle. Anything you heard was a mistake, the code was a mistake, and besides, they've rolled it back anyway.

It is never okay to disregard a transperson's preferred gender identity. Not if he's a compulsive liar, not if he's a demonstrated con-artist, not if he's dragging down the name of fandom, not if he's the worst person on the internet.

Let me recontextualize, with a hypothetical: "It is never okay to slut-shame. Not if she's a compulsive liar, a demonstrated con-artist, dragging down the good name of fandom..."

Clearer now?

(Betty, I have no idea what you are talking about! you say. You lucky bastard, I say.)

ETA: Please watch yourself carefully in discussion so as to avoid framing this as a hypothetical or abstract issue, and remember this is a discussionn about real people (people as well as VB) who must constantly defend their right to a minimum of human decency. These discussion are painful to my friends, and maybe yours too.

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So, back when I was all "Flist, what TV should I watch!?!,"* rivkat recommended Fringe which I was initially suspicious of due to its association wit JJ "LOL Continuity!" Abrahms, but on giving it a second chance, am quite enjoying, provided I don't allow myself access to memory of episodes < C - 5 where C = current episode. But that's not the point of this post. The point is, I just watched an episode with the following dialogue.

Dude: "The server has been wiped!"
Lady: "Were you able to get an IP address?"
Dude: "There's no sign of a DOS attack."

It's not that the science on Fringe usually has much to do with reality, it's that... oh god, where to even start? This is sort of like saying "He has pneumonia! Did anyone get the license plate of that snowflake?" The phrases do not bear any relationship to each other, although each individually is fine.

So this is me offering to consult for technobabble. I can take your technobabble from "offensive to 10 percent of the population who will notice" to "Offensive to < 1% of the population who will notice." (Er, at a guess.) DO IT FOR THE CHILDREN.

---

* Does anyone want the results so far of this experiment? I can babble on at length.

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So, I was watching Warehouse 13 the other day, for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, and Joe Flanigan popped up as a guest-star. I recognized him from fannish osmosis, but I didn't realize I'd never seen him live, so to speak. That thing he does instead of acting?

I find it actively terrifying. My god, SGA fandom. I didn't know.

Respect.

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I am not in any way down on doing one's research on fic: research! I am in favour!

But here is a partial and in no way made-up list of things which threw me out of a story I was reading, which the author could not sanely have anticipated:
* Author seemed entirely ignorant of existence and benefits of a post-hole digger.
* Author was unaware of ways in which curling ice materially differs from figure-skating ice.
* Author was unaware of behaviour of snow at -30 degrees celsius (or else very confused about how snowmobiles work, and I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out which.)

So, in order to keep this conversation totally not serious, please share the least predictable thing which has ever thrown you from a story.

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Urgent! Do Strikes!Batman and Go!Titans live in the same universe?

Relatedly, does anyone want to join the AO3 DC tag-wrangling team? There are spread-charts!

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Has anyone written the story where Lex Luthor (Smallville) hires Faith (BtVS) as a bodyguard/chauffeur? She's perfectly his type, in that she's named for a virtue and likes punching things, although it might have to be early Faith who hasn't already learned the hard lessons from the mayor.

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I have seen some people wondering about why some of the tags on some of the fic they've uploaded to the AO³ are showing up as not 'common.' (Don't panic. Your tags still work pretty much exactly like you expect them to. They're just not magically linked to everyone's tags.) Here is an unauthorized, incomplete, and at several points wildly inaccurate list of reasons why your tag hasn't been 'wrangled.'

• You haven't given the wranglers enough time.
• The wrangler who knows about the fandom you wrote in is in another time zone. Give her some time!
• None of the wranglers know anything about the fandom you wrote in. Would you like to be a wrangler?
• All of the wranglers are sipping margaritas around the pool, and can't be bothered to wrangle your tag.
• All of the wranglers have been driven mad by grappling with the unholy art of the wrangulator. They're locked in various padded rooms.
• Your tag had a typo in it, and the wranglers tactfully decided to let you correct it.
• You put "Chlex" in the fandom field. The wranglers have tactfully decided to let you correct it.
• Your tag, through no fault of your own, has come up against a limitation of the programming. The wranglers have filed a bug report.
• Your usage of tags is too fabulous and inventive for the wranglers to contain it within their puny system. They are staring in awe, though, and have begun leaving offerings for your tag in a sort of primitive shrine.
• Your usage of tags is orthogonal to the way wranglers understand tags. They are giving your tags a wide berth, with mutterings and superstitious signs.
• Your usage of tags has traumatized all the wranglers. You do what with peanut-butter? Does hydrostatic pressure even work that way?
• Meta-tagging. Don't ask.

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Yesterday, as I was typing, literally mid-word:

• Keyboard stopped working.

So as it was not easily fixable, I decided to upgrade Thecla to 9.10 in the hopes of a magical fix. Specific problems encountered in trying to upgrade to 9.10

• fstab stopped working, mounted / as read-only as a fallback
• making it very difficult to edit /etc/fstab
• on editing fstab, still could not mount swap
• on running update-grub, encountered kernel panic
• on updating grub manually, could not mount /

*beats Thecla about the head and shoulders with peripheral keyboard*

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So the other day I got a pm on my goodreads account from Stephen Kent, titled "I learned a lot from your review," which I am afraid I initially took for some sort of minimally site-customized spam. (I didn't recognize his name either, but in my defense, I have a name-thing, and it's not a tremendously memorable name, like Sven Bloodwort, or Revena Lutefisk.) In it, he said he'd happened upon my review of his book, which had made an impact upon his latest book, and he'd mentioned me in his authors' notes. I was immediately mildly flattered, suspicious, and alarmed, since, in order, I've never been in anyone's authors' notes before (okay, anyone who isn't karenhealey or revena,) vaguely suspected he was trying to entice me to buy his book (although he assured me in his message that he wasn't,) and couldn't remember what I'd said in my review.

Upon checking out my review, I became even more alarmed because a comma splice immediately leapt out at me. Also, although it's certainly not the most brutal review I've ever given, it didn't really go through my tact-filter. (I have one. Stop laughing.)

So obviously I had to check out the authors' notes. I skittered down to the book store, and what to my wondering eyes should appear:

( photograph 462x589 )

I surreptitiously took this photo (I don't think it's illegal to photograph one page of a book, but if someone came along and asked what I was doing, I felt it might be awkward,) reshelved the book, and came to report my fame to you: I am internet famous outside the internet.

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