Beth Winter

After a year of carrying the work laptop home every day, and eight years after I last got a new-to-me computer (only a year old at that point and with extra-good specs for that time, 2GB RAM and almost 2GHz single-core processor), I finally have a new personal machine. MINE. My money, my choice, my 6+ hours reinstalling everything from scratch because silly Microsoft thinks that only people who live in English-speaking countries want English-speaking Windows. (I have not had a Polish-speaking computer ever, and I don't use one for work either, since my workplace is very much global.)

It's a Lenovo IdeaPad Y570, because I'm on my second work-issued ThinkPad and loving it.

I started off calling it just Toy. Thanks to fyrie it's now Toyoko. Svelte, elegant, stylish enough to carry off some dubious fashion choices (orange stripe around the lid) and hopefully will work for 10+ years - if the shoe fits...

Any time I try to become more active online/creatively is cue for work to come crashing down at me. You don't want to know my overtime statistics.

But! I don't know if I mentioned, but I have a public Tumblr now.

(I'm sure I'm making a mess of it. Anyone got a Tumblr etiquette primer on reblogging / liking / following?)

Yukinojou, after Maki's great role, is my place for unashamed and unedited Takarazuka and other fandom squee, basically. Pictures. I like pictures :D I also like being able to post with a touch of a button rather than composing something thoughtful (LJ/Dreamwidth) or within a character limit (Twitter).

So for now it's LiveJournal as the communication hub + creative outlet, Dreamwidth for long-form public Takarazuka posts, Twitter for being social, retweeting neat stuff and stalking people, and Tumblr for fandom squee. I think this is as much of an online presence as I can handle on 12+ hours of work per day.

Because LJ is a dolt again:

- Pingbacks means that if you have pingbacks turned on and user X has pingbacks turned on, once user X posts a public link to your entry, you get an automatic comment to this entry telling you they're done it. Nothing more. A poor man's Google Alert for your LJ's URL.

- Yes, the placement of the FB/Twitter crossposting tickyboxes sucks. I've said. Here's a temporary cure.

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.)

*facepalms* So, from the horse's mouth. Remember that Snowflake Cookie free v-gift that everyone was sending around?

It's what broke notifications, because there's a default setting of ON for "get notified when one of your friends receives a virtual gift". The Snowflake got made available free to everyone by a glitch (*cough* there's a reason I was sending them around last year at St Nick's) and suddenly everyone and their dog was sending it to people. Which generated notifications to the f-lists of people who got them. Lots of notifications. The sending system hid under the bed and refused to come out.

Notifs are getting processed now, but they're also still building up. At the height of it, the number reached 12 million ~_~ Ops are on it and have managed to kickstart the sending, but it might take a while for all of them to clear up.

So Now You Know.

*falls over* I have a newfound respect for anyone who edits wikis. Still, after over a year from my first attempt at it, and with only a little hack, the Seal of the Bourbons page at the TakaWiki is all mine :D

(I'll add the play summaries later. Falling over now.)

I'm off on Thursday morning for Berlin, back on Saturday night. Have decided not to lug the computer around, since it's just two nights and a rather busy schedule of shopping and two shows to catch. If anyone has anything urgent, speak now, or hold your peace for four whole days ;)

Incidentally, this will be the first time in three years or so that I'll be incommunicado from e-mail for over 24 hours - even when I was net-less, I monitored things via mobile phone. Wish me luck!

For the past week or so, I've been toying with volunteering on the LiveJournal support board. It's fun, it lets me practice formal business English, and I've already learned a lot about LiveJournal.

However, the fact that the Support v-gift of choice is PINK PONIES is driving me absolutely bonkers :P I've got two of them now!

Note to self: add a profile note along the lines of "Hate Pink Rar". (Appreciate the sentiment, but still.)

I've been reading A List Apart, because at some point, I do have to do something about my website. The fanfic portion is fine, but the code could use a cleanup. The Discworld site will stay up as-is, for non-link-breaking, but I should add a disclaimer that it's no longer updated. Main index, of course, needs updating. Additions

And while my Greymatter installation broke ages ago, maybe I could use another blog. This "Wordpress" thing sounds interesting, even if learning another structure and language to play with its layout will be daunting. Does anyone have a Wordpress blog and can tell me how difficult it is to design it properly as opposed to designing a non-dynamic HTML/CSS site?

And as I read about things that changed in the last four years, since I last seriously took an interest in webdesign (no 4.x browsers, hallelujah), I find myself thinking about my LJ. Style systems are a bitch and a half, but Expressive *is* CSS-compatible.

I designed my first site in 1997. I've never dabbled in anything but the simplest Javascript, but otherwise I've gone through all the phases, tables, rollovers, image maps, you name it. CSS, once the browsers are halfway compatible, has a logic and beauty to it.

My fingers itch to code something.

GreatestJournal has just cut userpics down to 10.

InsaneJournal has been down for the past hour.

I think I'll be staying with our Russian overlords for the time being.