softpixels

People writing College!AUs or, for that matter, anything with roommates.

( It's not as simple as you seem to think it is... )

⌈ Secret Post #921 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

101.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 09 pages, 231 secrets from Secret Submission Post #132.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 - too big ], [ 1 2 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

At long last. 

Used the Google Site platform to upgrade my website a bit -- check it out HERE. 

Let me know what you think.


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Regular readers of this space know how much I love baseball uniforms in general, and '70s uniforms in particular.  With that in mind, enjoy this team photo from the 1977 All-Star Game.  They don't make 'em like this anymore.....



Enjoy the All-Star Game tonight.

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Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia raised over $200 million for Ethiopian famine victims (1985)

SKULL & BONES

Established in 1832, Skull & Bones is a secret senior society at Yale University that each year "taps" 15 juniors to join its ranks. It is likely that Skull & Bones would have piqued little curiosity outside Yale had not many of the "establishment" been members including three Presidents: Taft, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. The 2004 presidential race was given added spice, for conspiracy theorists at least, by the fact that Senator John Kerry is also a "Bonesman." The exact nature, purpose, membership, and intent of Skull & Bones are little known and much debated. As Lyman Bagg, himself a Bonesman, wrote in 1871: "The mystery now attending [the club's] existence forms the one great enigma which college gossips never tire of discussing." Over the years, a plethora of rumors has dogged the society, alleging bizarre initiation rituals and dark, fraternal codes of loyalty.


DEBAMBOOZLE--to undeceive or explain
"He had his lawyer Caroline debamboozle the small print."

This probably goes without saying, but I hope all of you will keep your reviews and comments on "Half Blood Prince" as general and spoiler-free as possible over at least the next two or three weeks.  Please give everyone a chance to see and enjoy the movie before getting into too many specifics.  I'm sure at some point, many of us will want to debate certain aspects of the series, and this sixth film in particular.  But let's try to control ourselves. 

I have noticed a great deal of restraint in other fandoms on this issue...Star Treck, Transformers, etc., have all been very good about this.  I hope the Harry Potter fandom will be equally thoughtful.

Preaching to the choir is now complete for today.

Guys. May I point out something?

Loath is not the same as loathe. Loath (or loth) means unwilling. To loathe means to hate. You're confusing two utterly different parts of speech - when you say I was loathe to do that, it's the same as saying I took a ride on my hoarse.

For a long while I thought I was just confused, or that it was an American vs. English difference, like humor and humour, but I'm getting pretty convinced that people just don't understand that the two words are different.

So now you know. Loath =/= loathe. Thank you for your time.

"President Obama's job approval rating has fallen over the last two months, prompting two questions for pundits and pollsters. Has most of the decline occurred among independents? And what is responsible for the change?

While the significance of the shift among independents may vary, depending on what poll you look at, the decline in Obama's numbers during June and July has a clear culprit: A spate of bad economic news over the last 10 weeks."

Duh.

The economy coming out of eight years of the Bush era was what gave him the victory over McCain/Palin - not outrage over Bush policy, not outrage over Iraq and Afghanistan, not fear for our safety - it was the shambles the economy was in.

They elected him to fix it. It's not fixed. He'd better hurry his ass up - the general public is stupid and uneducated, and for the most part just cares about whether or not they can afford to indulge in their recreation of choice.

Bread and circuses. Humans haven't changed much since the Romans invented Entitlement Programs.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/mp_20090710_2090.php

Happy Bastille Day! Today the French celebrate the event that sparked the French revolution. In honor of our Francophone friends, what is your favorite French thing? Bonus points for answers en Français.

La seule chose que j'aime le français, c'est que les Anglais ont donné à quelqu'un de battre la morve de la grande majorité des Français l'histoire.

((Translated - The only thing I like about the French is that they gave the English someone to beat the snot out of for the vast majority of English history.))

And of course, they gave us Dumas and Rostand.

Really enjoyed this one -- as with all anthologies, the quality varies a bit from story to story but all are fun pastiches of Doyle's work. My favorite story is the third one, with the great detective investigating a murder that took place in 221B before Holmes and Watson called the location home. As with all Airship 27 books, there are author essays throughout and some of those are just as entertaining as the stories themselves!

Or "Why Robot Jox is one of the only giant robot stories that makes sense."
( Meandering behind cut )

In my rant about queuing etiquette a few days ago I mentioned that Aldi needed a post of its own. Now, since I'm not prepared to speak about anything else of note that's happened over the last few days but don't want my blog to stagnate, I figured I'd supply that post.

Aldi is a supermarket chain in Australia and, I think, New Zealand. It is designed to be no frills. Almost every product they sell is made by them. They don't provide plastic bags - and if you buy one from them (as an independent product) or supply your own, they don't fill it for you.

However, their checkouts are a bit different in order to accomodate this kind of thing.

Even if you're only buying a few things, you're supposed to use a trolley, and there are signs around the stores reminding you of this. Each checkout has a groove into which you can slot your trolley so that it is easily within reach for you to stuff your goods into it as the checkout operator scans them. If you're not buying anything fragile, the checkout operator is usually willing to toss your stuff in for you as they scan. You can then move over to a long bench and pack your stuff into bags or boxes.

But...

Women, usually those in their late 30s or early 40s, have a tendency to totally miss the point. They'll stand at the end of their checkout and bag their stuff, which is annoying because you then have to wait; it is even more annoying because nine times out of ten the checkout person just keeps scanning even though there's no room to put your stuff because the woman is still there! (Unless it is the one at my nearest Aldi who I suspect has a huuuuuuuuge crush on me. He's always lovely.)

It is so annoying. What makes it worse is that the place is laid out to standards of efficiency, so your entire shopping experience is Go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-g-g-o-og-ogog-og-go-go with the "g-g-o-og-ogog-og" part being where the manky bitches get in the way.

(Pardon my language, but, you know, seriously. If you don't have some sort of mental illness or physical or cognitive disability, you've got no excuse here.)

Just... gah!

And Aldi's pasta salad is spicy. Double gah!

What is it with perfectly fine, especially really original, stories going sour from one chapter to another? They either suddenly have a chapter that's so confusing that I simply can't get through it or go so far beyond anything believable (to me at least) that I can just shake my head and close the window! I hate it when that happens to stories that I actually enjoyed reading until that moment, stories that held me captive and made me sit on the edge of my chair, hoping that there is just one more chapter available already.

It's not as if they all use the same plot device either - sometimes it's things that just seem too much to be possible (e.g. trunks in the Harry Potter fandom that contain so many rooms that it might as well be an entire house as if magic didn't have a limit) or flashback after flashback that make me wonder how they fit into the story or the n-th setback/drama in a row just as the previous was about to calm down and about to be resolved. It's not just bound to one fandom either.

I guess the point at which you just can't read on is YMMV, but it's not so much about what makes me stop reading... it just frustrates me that a fic I loved is going into a direction I just can't follow coupled with annoyance about the recent frequency with which that happens. I can't really bring myself to enjoy reading fic if nearly every fic I read is either abandoned (or it's been ages since the last update) or just reaches a point that just makes me go WTF.