Beth Winter

One of those days, LiveJournal will learn to talk over their announcements before springing them on the populace. Today is not that day.

The revised wording in this announcement says that inactive accounts will be deleted and purged (all contents removed permanently, name available for renaming another account to the purged account's name), but only if they fulfill both the following criteria:

- no activity in the last 24 months (for personal journals - logging in, for communities - a new post)

- the journal or comm has only the one automatic welcome post

If you haven't created a journal lately, the automatic welcome post is Private and says something like "Welcome to LJ, here's how you can do stuff". No journals with any entry content will be deleted for inactivity.

So the only way RP journals are in danger is if you only used them for posting in an RP comm never even bothered to delete that first post and replace it with something like "This is account X for RP Y, move along". You may want to do that now.

I'm glad I was asleep for this kerfuffle...

Happy Tanabata, everyone :)

七夕おめでとう

(And yes, I get a birthday Google logo again.)

I love Steven Moffat.

That is all.

I'm strangely lacking in addresses of sites and blogs about interior decoration. Can anyone recommend some?

(Preferrably ones that present ideas rather than things-to-buy, and are not concentrated on whole-house tours of places over 100 square meters...)

This is fyrie's birthday present :) Totally inspired by the 25th Anniversary Tour, but it can also work in a book context.

Summary: Enjolras and Grantaire, in the night before the dawn

( Paris at night was not silent. )

Even though I got home at 1PM, yesterday was a day of nothing but travel - mainly because I had to get up at 3.40AM, so the rest of the day was spent sleepwalking until it was time to finally go to bed. Today I'm a bit more upright, hence Les Miserables (which deserves more than one entry, so look forward to eventual program scans as well).

( The show in general )

( Les Miserables 25th anniversary tour )
( Cast )

( The stage door )

And from the horse's mouth - after their London stint in October, the anniversary tour will be going to the US, and probably to Europe later on. If it's within any feasible distance of any of you - run, don't walk. Utterly masterful theatre.

So, if anyone is planning to visit the Scottish Highlands for tourist purposes, I heartily recommend MacBackpackers. That is, unless you mind:

• Driver/guides who are mad as biscuits *waves to Graeme*


• Masterful storytelling


• Getting places via the scenic routes very, very fast (and low on diesel)


• Whisky, ale, and all sorts of delicious things


• Being allowed the right amount of time in all the right places

Oh, and sheep. But if you mind sheep, you'd better not go to the Highlands at all.

As we got off the bus (to tearful hugs and secret handshakes over having survived), we walked past the bus of a competitor tour company. The driver had a polo shirt and a lanyard with a badge. We looked at each other, then back at Graeme, and just about fell down laughing.

Now, for mad Welshmen playing crazy French people...

Safely ensconced in Edinburgh hotel :) Sun! There is Scottish sun! (For the moment, of course.)

Dear volcano gods: thank you.

The plane carrying the Polish president, his wife and various officials just crashed in Smolensk, due to fog while landing

I'm... numb. I didn't vote for him, but oh, he loved cats (and Cats the musical), couldn't stand dancing vampires, during a visit to Japan his wife got dressed up in a kimono and squeed like a teenage girl showing it off to reporters. The military bishops (Catholic and Orthodox) were there too, and the guy who was the last president of our government-in-exile during Communism.

Past tense, already, and I hope, hope so much for survivors...

EDIT: Confirmed no survivors. Head of the National Bank of Poland, too, and top three or four of the major opposition party (which the president was part of). And all due to an ancient Russian plane that they were to replace ten years ago and got bogged down in public procurement. 87 dead.

As a backup for when I have neither newspaper nor a physical book on my commute, I have MobiReader installed on both my phones (the personal Toodo and professional Lucheni). I have a variety of free e-books to tide me over, and I tend to pick things that are either not too engrossing - like Dickens - or that come in small chunks, since each time I'm looking at my 10-minute commute or a similar period of waiting for someone. The other factor in favour of short reading times is the smallness of the phones' screens, especially Lucheni's.

Guess which phone I loaded up with Helen S. Wright's A Matter of Oaths.

The thing is, it's her only book. She published it in 1988, and she's only now gearing up to write another. (She's arkessian@Dreamwidth.) I. Can't. Wait.

A Matter of Oaths is a space opera without infodumps, a political novel with a spare cast, a tapestry condensed into the one thread of weave and one of weft that still conveys it all. There's the man who broke an oath, but he cannot remember why he broke it, because the punishment is taking away your memories. There is the woman who refuses to acknowledge age, weakness, or anything but the strength of her will. (Rallya, incidentally, is awesome.) There are all those mysteries that - just like in real life - pass by on the edges, and you don't have time to look because of how fast you're rushing by. My eyes hurt, significantly, from staring at the small screen once I was done.

(And there's definitely something for the slash fans. And for fans of strong female characters not defined by either their sexuality or reproductive potential. And both romance and platonic friendship and everything in between.)

And best of all: it's out of print, but Helen made it available as an ebook, for free, in PDF and e-Pub and MobiReader.

Helen S. Wright, A Matter of Oaths

(Mind you, after this much fun out of it, I dropped a few quid in her PayPal tip jar. And if it were reprinted, I'd buy it. In a heartbeat.)