HSU IT Department

...you will soon be able to sell it! Also some Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers (!), William Carlos Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Aldous Huxley, and Marcel Proust, thanks to copyright law. Wikipedia has a fairly complete list of titles.

So there you go. Get busy :)

Optimistically overlooking my inability to crank out acres of fabulous words for SSIAW, I've signed up for luciusbigbang. Eek. I have no plot bunnies gamboling about, no drafts lurking in drawers awaiting rescue, no idea what I will do, so it's anybody's guess what the outcome will be. (Sadly, I've already written my Modern Major Death Eater piece, so that's out.) I like Lucius as a character but I find him more difficult to write than Severus, possibly because he's not as complex a character. Of course, as we all know, "It does not necessarily follow that a deep or intricate character is more or less estimable..." etc etc etc.

Other Notes of Note:

SSIAW week 3 is in full bloom, but my buds thus far remain tightly furled, alas. What with words like "doxy" "perdition" and "inoculate" staring me in the face, it's going to be a hard slog. (The moderator CLAIMS she chooses the words randomly, but one can't help but wonder...)

Wrote to my newspaper today as they have cruelly disappointed me by bailing on the Doonesbury/ultrasound story arc. They ran Monday's and Tuesday's, which got my hopes up ("Yay, my hometown paper has GUTS!"), then suddenly replaced today's with a re-run from months ago. Grrrrrr.

Fab article in the New York Times about "the slam-bang world of pulp magazines" exhibit. Since pulps were the original publishers of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction they hold a special place in my heart, so I really enjoyed this piece. Hope to get to NYC in the next few weeks (Alan Rickman, my love, I know you're waiting for me!!) and maybe see it.

Finished my annual re-read of Atlas Shrugged, yay! I do enjoy spending time with Dagny and Francisco and the rest of them. I recently heard it referred to as nerd revenge porn LOL!! I suspect he has entirely missed the point. Who better to hang out with than intelligent, motivated, honest people who want to be the best they can be? Not to mention it's a great antidote to stupid television, idiotic , rabid pundits and the rest. (Speaking of pundits: I'm annoyed, but not surprised, to learn Glen Beck is also a fan of the book. I hate to share anything with that guy!)

At one point during the re-read I happened to glance at the front page of the New York Times and was startled to realize that having been immersed in that world had quite altered how I viewed the headlines in this one LOL! I should have expected it, remembering how he experience always leaves me in an interesting mood: a mixture of disaffection with 99% of mankind and determination to live my own life better. Personally I think we need more books that have that effect...

Call me a Luddite, but I'm rather pleased about this:

"Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'e-mail,' " wrote Phil Corbett, the Times' standards editor, in a memo this week, according to The Awl. But, for now, Corbett has nixed further use of the word -- "outside of ornithological contexts," he wrote.
Read full article.