Awwwww, [Poll #962089][Poll #962089]That should do it. If you have any additional comments, feel free to make them below.

Operators are standing by.

*blinks at FList*

There appears to be an NB estrogen fest on LJ today.

*dies of giggling*

Man, I love you guys.

entrenous88 has NB's tragic taste in hats covered.

crazydiamondsue has NB and his glasses of many colors covered.

zandra_x has shirtless and wifebeaters covered.

The comments are a hoot. The women are coming out in droves to giggle and drool.

Have I mentioned I love you guys? 'Cause I really, really do...

People looking for Part 4/14 of Behold, Little Padawan! posted last night, please go here.

People who want to get their paws on Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, the 1997 Live Recording with the Nixon story, please go here.

In other news, bastardsnow has an interesting questions about the decline and fall of Yahoo Newsgroups as a communication medium for fandom. Drop by and give him an answer. I think it's an interesting discussion, to be honest.


ETA: The spammers appear to have found my journal. In the past 48 hours I have had anonymous comments selling cars, "love enhancement drugs," and even one person offering to help me get rich! Unh, the hell?

It appears to be showing up in my Music from the Cube posts, but a couple have shown up in Cuckoo in the Nest.

I can see the Music from the Cube posts, but Cuckoo? There must be a keyword in there somewhere that has made it a target.

Now I'm really happy I screen anonymice. Sometimes I miss an anonymice post and it never gets approved, but right now it's my only defense against spam-bots.

soopah sekrit to crossoverman the genius behind Tommy Westphall's Mind — A Multiverse Explored:

This article by Dwayne McDuffie was published back in 2002, but I only just found it (which may explain why it's pointing to a site that's not yours).

Best. Quote. Evah! On the Tommy Westphall Universe:

All of these would help me prove my Grand Unification Theory, which posits: "The last five minutes of St. Elsewhere is the only television show, ever. Everything else is a daydream."
— Dwayne McDuffie, Six Degrees of St. Elsewhere

Still, if you really want the final authority on just how much television Tommy Westphall continues to destroy thanks to the final scenes of St. Elsewhere, you must check out crossoverman's fantastic page, Tommy Westphall's Mind — A Multiverse Explored.

This meta-filter entry is a good primer if you're still confused after reading the wikki entry on Tommy Westphall and crossoverman's web site

As you can tell, I'm a huge fan of crossoverman's work.

God knows everyone on my FList linked to this piece of Guh! (Spoilery for the BtVS comics since it's the Issue 2 cover.)

What d'ya know. It went from Web page to desktop wallpaper in .02 seconds flat.

What? Stop looking at me like that.

Still calling it comics!canon. And I'll wait on other people's thoughts on the series before I plunge into buying anything.

But, I appear to be ridiculously easy to please. The cover honestly makes me squee.

I am obviously full of squee today.

Edit: Squeeee! Lookit what ponders_life gave me!

diachrony got me a gingerbread man with his head snapped off.

Yay! I can (virtually) eat his head without guilt, because everyone knows that broken cookies have no calories.

In other news...is it sad that I was desperately trolling for Rome spoilers last night?

Although these publicity ads are making me deeply happy for the upcoming season. In order of favorites, of course.

( Shots from HBO Web site...That Darn Roman Graffiti )

Yeeeaaaaahhhh. I'm not at all in love with this show. And I won't at all be upset when S2 ends, since HBO isn't continuing it beyond S2 (too expensive to do it without RAI and BBC chipping in some cash, and the contracts for funding was for only two years).

Must go back to work now....

*blinks*

Y HALLO THAR NU UPD473 1N73RF4C3!

I actually don't have strong feelings about the change one way or the other, which puts me in the quiet non-majority. My one big problem is that it looks just a leeeeeetle too much like the Vox update interface.

Dear 6Apart: This makes me unhappy and suspicious. At least on LJ we can do our own HTML, unlike Vox, which keeps us in rich text mode for everything.

[Note: I signed up for Vox mostly to make sure I got the liz_marcs name, and as an "archive" for my music reviews. You can upload MP3s and stream them through the site, which is a nice feature. Other than that, Vox has zero ability to customize, even in individual posts. Haaaaaate.]

( Anyone else nervous about these DHS raids? )

In any case, the DHS raids pretty much had my attention yesterday, in large part because the way they were conducted was...worrisome on more than one level, especially given the legal and political atmosphere in the U.S. these days. There is, I think, an undercurrent of paranoia among people of all political stripes (although the cause of it is for different reasons). Usually, the more you know, the less likely you are to be paranoid. For the first time in my memory, this has been reversed. The more you know, the more paranoid you become.

I need a new layer for my tinfoil hat, I think.

In the course of my DHS raid-watching, I, of course, stumbled across the hilarious story of Michael Crichton fictionalizing a political reporter as a pencil-dicked child rapist. Apparently one Michael Crowley pissed off Crichton when Crowley wrote a less-than-complimentary article on Crichton's global warming denialism in The New Republic.

Even so, imagine my joy when entrenous88 posted a wonderful overview of the wank that has resulted from Crichton's act of asshole. Heeeee!

As a result of the wank, I now have an awesome icon (you have to read the wank to get the joke). More icons here.

MSNBC's Olbermann has even gotten in on the act, by naming Crichton Worst Person in the World.

Man, I needed that laugh, especially after reading about the DHS raids.

So, glasses up to entrenous88! Thanks for the laugh!

nwhepcat sent me snowman soup.

*hugs*

And an ecard.

*double hugs*

I've been away from reading the FList for *counts* 4 days or so. So I'm still catching up.

Thanks y'all for the b-day well-wishes.

Hey, nwhepcat...

How do you know when you're getting old?

When you're driving home and are singing along with "What I Like About You" by the Romantics at the top of your lungs...

And as soon as the song fades out, you find out that you're tuned to the radio station that plays the "Classic Rock, Home of Yesterday's Hits" selection.

Damn. Aren't they supposed to be playing early Rolling Stones or the Beatles or something?

Happy Birthday!*



*This birthday message brought to you by, "I need a high pressure hose to finish cleaning this office."

Note that I will be off-line this weekend, thanks to a visit from sunnyd_lite.

There are plans for local yokels me and ponders_life to walk the Freedom Trail tomorrow. Then it's the Head of the Charles Regatta, and Monday...it's looking like Haunted Happenings in Salem and Cape Ann for now.

And, ooooo, right in time for peak leaf-peeping season.

Of course, being a local, I have never walked The Freedom Trail. I've visited parts of it. I've happened to be going in the same direction as the red brick line, but actually doing something touristy and following it?

Amazingly enough, the Freedom Trail is in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.

Things like this make me blink. The Freedom Trail is cool, and I totally dig the history, but really? Something you have to see before you die? Occupying the same book as, I dunno, Versailles, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, and the Great Pyramids of Giza?

I think my brain just broke.

Yet I know — and always knew in that vague way a local does when they live close to or within the bounds of an international tourist destination — that people from all over the world come to visit Boston, in large part to tromp along the Freedom Trail. Hell, I once met a honeymooning couple from Columbus, Ohio, who decided that a honeymoon in Boston was the coolest thing ever. After you picked me, my brother, and my parents off the pavement, I'm pretty sure we echoed the big question, "Why would you do that?"

"Ummmm, because this is where the U.S. Revolution started?" came the tentative answer.

Picture us shuffling. "Oh. Yeah. Right. Got a good point there. We'll be over here. Trying to look cooler than thou."

I think my problem is I live too close to it and I've seen bits and pieces of it multiple times. It'll be fun to walk the whole thing and see it the way most people from out-of-town see it. The problem is, I know a lot of interesting spots that are around if we just walk one block this way or that. Chances are there's gonna be some serious distractions. It's only 2.5 miles long (give or take), but chances are we're gonna walking more like 10 by the time we're through.

Heeee! This'll be a blast.

marenfic has an interesting discussion here about the slowdown in Buffy fandom. I won't spoil the discussion, but it's definitely worth the read. She brings up some excellent points, and I agree with a lot of what she says.

Heaven knows I saw something of the same thing for my Dark Xander Fic-A-Thon. A lot of people honestly couldn't think of an angle, others couldn't think of an angle that hadn't been explored before. Lord knows, I complained to my brother that the direction I finally settled on (VampXander) after several false starts had been pretty much done in almost every way possible. The only way to make it new was to mix up the clichés and impose a semi-complicated plot on it.

A whole lot of people were in my boat, and I'm very sure that everyone who contributed beat their heads against the wall to come up with something off-the-norm.

I've certainly seen a lot of fandom drift on my Flist, and it's all normal and good, because nothing lasts forever. Certainly I've been thinking along the same lines myself, although truthfully I haven't felt the need to jump fandoms. My pull is more towards getting off my butt and pulling together some original fiction.

The problem there is if I do it, I wouldn't want to jeopardize a hope of publishing it, so there'd be no way to throw it open for FB and concrit the way fanfiction can be.

But the day's coming soon-ish where I need to make some hard decisions on that front, and I know it.

As for why I haven't jumped fandoms, part of it, I think, is that I suffer from "Netflix" disease. As a friend of mine pointed out, a large part of Netflix disease is a direct result of network behavior. For example:

• Shows that I tend to like get yanked before all the episodes that have already been filmed are allowed to air. I've lost count in the last two years how many shows I've started watching, only to have that show disappear never to be seen again.
  
  
• The insane burden of commercials. I timed it once. For every hour of television, you've got roughly 22 minutes of commercials interrupting the flow. I go absolutely insane with commercials now because there are so many of them. I can't count the number of times I started channel flipping and ended up watching something else entirely because Animal Planet or Discovery or the History Channel sucked me in.
  
  
• Most television series are now "serials" instead of a series of stand-alone episodes. That's good, on the one hand, because now there's actual character growth and changing situations (at least in theory). That's bad, because if the network pre-empts for a week or two, it ruins the narrative.
  

End result? I'm now watching most of my television via Netflix. I mean, what the hell, right? The DVDs literally come out within weeks after the end of the season. It may put me months (or years) behind everyone else, but I get to watch television at my convenience, without commercials, and without interruptions. It's more than worth the trade.

And that, in a nutshell, is Netflix disease. I know an awful lot of people who are suffering from it so much, that they've dropped cable down to the cheapest level so they can get the local stations and are now watching series purely through the magic of Netflix and DVDs.

That said, I'm still addicted to watching the three-hour block on the Sci-Fi Channel in real time (the re-showing of Heroes, followed by Dr. Who and Battlestar Galactica). I'm also still watching The Amazing Race in real time because they've released precious few seasons on DVD.

However, none of what I'm watching has really inspired me to write fanfic (although I've jokingly said I so want to see a wacky!hijinks story where Xander and Faith have to run The Amazing Race because one of the teams aiming for the million is a pair of demons who need to pay off debts — and they're willing to eat the other contestants to win), and I honestly don't see that particular jump happening to me in the future.

The again, 10 years ago I was writing original Battlestar Galactica and Forever Knight fanfic. When I stopped writing it, I thought sure that I'd never do fanfic again. It took years for me to change my mind, so never say never, I guess.

In either case, I'm not at the moment planning on jumping ship, so to speak. But I can totally see (and understand) the fandom drift that's happening. I'm following some of it, albeit peripherally, because I enjoy the same shows. Other shows (like Lost, Veronica Mars, and Supernatural) haven't really thrilled me enough to get beyond a *meh.*