Two items, perhaps not as unrelated as they first appear:

* I have a tumblr, which I have used exclusively as a fic announcement page until I posted this, entirely to see how it worked. As usual with social media, I seem to be missing the point because apparently one is not supposed to create original content for tumblr, instead repost someone ( Read more... )

* I actually need Wikipedia for work, so today's protest against SOPA is a bit of a PitA, but one that can be gotten around via web cache. I don't disagree with the protest; I'm all for less government regulation as a general principle and wish people felt this way more often ( Read more... )

* What is google+ and do I care that I can’t have it right now?

* Ladies on the Dark Side: the Army is experimenting with women in Special Operations. When it has really needed to, the military has long found loopholes to get around the ‘no women in the combat arms’ laws -- even as those laws get tightened. This is another example of that. Female ( Read more... )

... Rogers Cable introduces a digital TV channel with a constant loop of roasting chickens turning on a spit ( Read more... )

* Last week's snowstorm was a damp squib -- it snowed, but it didn't stick, except for that brand-new patch right next to my domicile that is now icy and treacherous despite halite. So I take this with cautious skepticism (and a genuine feeling of 'sick of this already'):


( Read more... )

Mandatory non-DoD photo post edition...

* There's a Rock'em, Sock'em Robots movie! Real Steel looks so, so awful. I'm sure it will do exceptionally well at the box office, though. And if it comes down to this and Transformers 3, this one doesn't have Shia LeBoeuf in it, which automatically makes it better.

* Still watching The Young Riders, ( Read more... )

* General cantankery: I seem to be having the 'Chanukah is not the Jewish Christmas' conversation far more often than usual this year, especially with people who really should know better than to ask if I have had fun celebrating the holiday (15 hours in) or was taking off work for it. It's the middle of the week (so I don't feel like shredding and ( Read more... )

* Celebrities as My Little Pony toys. The Lady Gaga is nice, but the Rorschach is awesome.

* Mocking the TSA, international video edition: the Canadians and the Chinese take aim.

* Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Franzen up for Bad Sex in Literature Award. "The award, run by Literary Review, is handed out for the most embarrassing passage of ( Read more... )

* Noah Shachtman's piece in the WSJ on the TSA and how not only are most of their security measures at best invasive and at worse dangerous, but they're also ineffective and the result of severely flawed logic.It's the same kind of trade-off TSA implicitly provided when it ordered us to take off our sneakers (to stop shoe bombs) and to chuck our ( Read more... )

Today's forecast (Rain. High near 50. Breezy, with a north wind between 21 and 25 mph, with gusts as high as 46 mph.) definitely belongs to a Monday. Some news to start the week:

* Oops: An embarrassing error on Google Maps has been blamed for Nicaragua’s accidental invasion of Costa Rica. Last week, Nicaraguan troops crossed the border, took ( Read more... )