Random promotion: I love Dropbox. It just saved my hide when I turned out to have deleted some very important footnotes by allowing me to go back about forty versions and nearly a month to find an older file that had the footnotes. If you’re looking for a convenient cloud backup service, I recommend it highly. And if you join using this link,  I get extra space and so do you (250 mb to add to your free 2 gigs; they continue to give you the extra if you pay to upgrade, as I do). (I checked out Amazon’s cloud drive and just didn’t get it. As far as I could tell, you couldn’t upload whole folders that weren’t music folders, and then there didn’t seem to be automatic backup. If you just want to store stuff that you don’t alter, maybe it’s a good idea? But if you’re constantly revising files, and if you want to move whole folders around, it didn’t seem that easy, though it’s possible I’m just used to Dropbox. I have not tried Apple’s service.)

( ignoring the obvious, the dead hand of the past, fan fiction and the law )

This article is about Scientology, but this quote is priceless in any context: “After Haggis had emergency surgery, his doctor told him that it would be four or five months before he could work again: ‘It would be too much strain on your heart.’ He replied, ‘Let me ask you how much stress you think I might be under as I’m sitting at home while another director is finishing my fucking film!’”  I feel a kinship with this man.

It's a themed post!  In that it's about stuff circling around my core interests.

( race and property; access to knowledge; the offensive internet; true porn clerk stories; the war on porn )

Free to good home: Nearly complete set of videotapes of the X-Files, seasons 1-8, medium quality. Otherwise, they're probably going to be thrown out rather than wasting the space and carting them to Virginia. I also have tapes of S6 & 7 Buffy.

Yesterday, I had fries and chocolate mousse with two of the lovely women who welcomed me to fandom, long ago and far away. It was wonderful to meet two people who'd been so generous to me when I was a wee cowering fangirl. I remain amazed by the generosity of spirit and time to be found in fandom, not to mention expertise on a variety of topics.

Also, this weekend I read the novel of a friend of mine. Though I don't read death penalty books, I made an exception for his story of law, love, and the bargains we make in the shadow of both. My favorite quote comes from a hideous senior partner's reflections on the uselessness and simultaneous necessity of summer associates, law students hired to be wined and dined in an attempt to convince them that life as a real associate at the firm will be a permanent vacation. Their inexperience means that their work can't be trusted and certainly can't be billed to clients, so pro bono work (free legal representation for people who can't afford to pay) is the perfect solution. It makes them think the firm believes in public service; satisfies the firm's ethical obligations to provide pro bono services to the community; and gives them false hopes about the kind of work they'll be doing. And pro bono death penalty work – well, here's the quote: "Death penalty cases were ideal for these purposes, something the kids could get really excited about. Each summer had one, like a class project or a hamster brought in to delight kindergartners. Like kindergarten projects, the cases typically amounted to little, and like hamsters, the prisoners usually ended up dead." Watch this space for announcements when it's published.

( nonfiction - dictionaries, lawyers, strippers, grammar, business, libraries )

I went to two John Kerry events Wednesday night, forcing postponement of SV/Angel watching. Now, the only reason my picture isn't in the dictionary defining "shy" is that I'm too shy to be photographed, so this required serious fortitude in the face of multiple strangers in close quarters. Turns out I could have gone to the sit-down dinner, but by going to the lower-level shindig in the art gallery, featuring Chuck Schumer and Cam Kerry, I ran into an old friend, so that's okay.

Schumer was funny and talked a lot about judicial nominations, in deference to the lawyer-heavy audience at the art gallery. When he introduced Kerry at the dance club (the event for people younger and less generous than the people at the art gallery), he didn't talk about judges. Instead, he talked about the Sopranos, and got Steve Buscemi's first name wrong.

At the dance club, Kerry wasn't particularly inspiring, and he wanted to talk about health care, which didn't much energize the crowd, though they were willing to cheer for it anyway. I understand why Kerry's strategy can't be to say "vote for me because I'm not George W. Bush," but that's really why I was there. I wanted him to talk about Iraq and the economy – he did get around to the deficit, and the best part of his speech was when he got to foreign relations, pointed out that we need to have some support in the other 96% of the world, and then said "America should never go to war because it wants to. It should go to war only because it has to." That was a crowd-pleaser. There were too many jokes about the young folks getting drunk and forgetting what they'd heard, and there was a six-foot tall friendly joint in a sombrero painted on the wall near where we were standing (think Mr. Butts, Doonesbury's talking cigarette, and you'll get the idea), which I didn't think was exactly the right image. Then again, there was a lot of talk about 1968 ... Anyhow, I heard Kerry, even though I didn't quite see him, and that plus finding my old friend was worthwhile.

In the last bit of politics, I thought Tom Shales of the Washington Post had the best line on Bush's news conference: When Bush said "When I say something, I mean it," he said that the reporters were too polite to call out, "Then when are you going to say something?"

Then I watched SV & Angel. Loved them – no spoilers, but if the WB persists in calling new episodes "fresh" episodes, I won't answer for my actions. Not just in the on-screen bug, but every! damn! time! they came back from commercial.

In other news, the best line from last week's viewing of Jeremiah: Rivka: Would you like little marshmallows in your hot chocolate? geekturnedvamp: Is that a trick question?

Good point.

( Westlake, SV tie-in, Macleod, Irresistable Forces, and nonfiction )

So, hypothetically, if a person were to be interested in trying this vidding stuff, and she possessed the following: (1) Apple iBook running OS X.2, (2) CD-R/DVD drive, and (3) ready cash – what else would she need? Specifically, what software to get video and what to manipulate it? What lists/journals should she be on/following?

And now, some special-interest books.( Read more... )

I had an amazing fannish day, including more promised cliche-fic and a reviewing of Pirates of the Carribean in which the greater-than-average-intelligence of the script was more clear than on first exposure. Unfortunately, I have yet to do anything about my faculty presentation on Tuesday, and I really need to circulate a paper first thing Monday, so it will be a busy Sunday. Of course, that's not going to stop me from writing the truly awful cliche-fic that staggered out from the deepest recesses of my brain like the bastard child of Frankenstein's monster and the Swamp Thing.

But first, a lot of books, most about history:
( Read more... )