I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

I discovered that my mom was even more of a badass than I had known. More to the point, Calvin Trillin knew it and wrote about it in the New Yorker! In 1967, he explained, a recruiter from Dow met a “friendly-looking, dark-haired girl,” and asked her if she was interested in working at Dow. “I’d be more interested in working for Dow if it weren’t doing something criminal,” she said. “I was wondering if a Dow employee could be prosecuted as a war criminal ten or fifteen years from now, under the precedent of Nuremburg.” The recruiter said: “I assume you’re talking about napalm.” My mom: “That, and crop defoliates.” The recruiter said he didn’t think the war crimes prosecuted at Nuremberg were analogous, and they discussed the distinctions he posited. The recruiter said the government decided how to use what Dow supplied, and “Dow made a decision to support our government.” My mom: “Do you think this is what the German manufacturers thought?” The recruiter asked if she was interested in working for Dow. My mom: “I’m interested in the moral position of working for Dow,” and she handed the recruiter a picture of a burned baby. “I’m curious what goes through the head of a Dow employee when he sees some of these pictures.”

Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags To Riches To Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes: ( immigrant story )
Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: ( so you want to be a professor )
John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: ( yep, we screwed it up then too )
Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History: ( lost connections )
Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession:( fascinated by crime )
Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: ( innovation from the government )
Lynn Zubernis, There’ll Be Peace When You Are Done: ( SPN festschrift )
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood: ( highly recommended )
John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty: ( pilgrims' progress )
Eric H. Cline, Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon: ( not exactly Indiana Jones )

Thanks to roxymissrose  for the birthday wishes!

It’s the OTW’s April fundraising drive! I donated, and I’m looking forward to my spiffy reward cup.  As cesperanza says: “Support the OTW y'all! You know you want to! Your nonprofit, all-volunteer, one stop fanworks site made by people who did NOT sell you out to venture capitalists and who are NOT trying to take a percentage of your work when you eventually make millions with your hot erotica trilogy! Ten bucks gets you membership. A hundred bucks gets you a nifty tote bag with useful mesh pockets! And a sense of goodwill and community feeling!”

crack_impala  is back! 

( memes in digital culture )

( our misguided drug war )

( youth and social media )

For serrico: Your thoughts on LJ/DW fandom vs Tumblr fandom, please.

( I'm old. )

New icon on DW from a piece of art that is way too expensive for me, but that I love anyway (because of the X-Files, of course).  It's made from a crumpled dollar bill.

I got a delightful Sleepy Hollow story for Yuletide! Three Gifts is the kind of Ichabod/Abbie pining that really does it for me.  This is a relationship with real barriers and I respect that greatly. 

Yuletide Madness also brought me the equally delightful Covert Affairs story Away, which is Auggie/Eyal as part of an established threesome with Annie. It went directly to my own personal cravings for them. 

Others: Excellent multimedia in this Galaxy Quest story, which is as affectionate towards fandom as its source. And GQ fandom also got the amazingly tender/pleasurably painful Alexander Dane story I didn’t know I needed, The Space Between,  in which there is also a reboot.

Charlie Stross’s Laundry universe: Violins at Work, from the perspective of Mo O’Brien, Bob Howard’s extremely dangerous wife. Very Strosslike: “Is there a word for an appetite and some kind of understanding without a mind to do the planning? Kind of like a cat deciding that this human will just about do as a servant, because it smells of food, but without the sensitivity and consideration for which all felines are well known.”

Non-Yuletide: my J2 story Full Service Firm now has a Russian translation, which I think is a first for me. As always, I remain impressed by the archive’s growth: the translation’s work number is an order of magnitude greater than Full Service Firm’s.

Also, randomly, anyone who really wanted to rock my world could make a Vampire Diaries Damon vid to Diamond Ring’s Wait and See. He’s chancing on situations and he’s out of his league! He just needs some provocation and he’s down on his knees! (I am so serious here: this would be my Lord King Bad Vid of great commitment if I did such things.)

Personal note: the new scar on my arm reminds me way too much of the Eye of Sauron. Or any eye really. Scars should not look like eyes, is what I’m saying here.

And finally: This is the best pickup conversation ever, and the fact that it comes from a Dean Winchester sex dream is only icing on the cake. 

Lessons learned today: (1) my hair really needs more than one box of color per treatment, and (2) Splat dye is exponentially more hardcore than dyes I’ve used previously. These things in combination are particularly funny/appalling. Sadly, I wanted red and got pink, so now I have to figure out the best correction options, but at least my bathroom no longer looks quite so much like a crime scene.

I am looking for people who have experience as nonfiction e-book formatters and cover designers. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Covert Affairs: ( Spoilers include premise of preview )

Slate on an extortion ring preying on gay men in the 1960s. Read until the end. American life is nothing but second acts.

Making money on YouTube: "A history of the entertainment business could be framed as a series of experts asking, 'Who the hell wants to watch that?' When the answer is 'more people than you think,' the definition of profitable entertainment changes."

Meowbify: Add cats to any internet site. I tried it on AO3, which seemed perfectly appropriate.

( Kim Newman's Holmes pastiche, Sharon Shinn's angels )

1. Thanks to patrese1, fleshflutter, and shoofus for the glass hearts!

2. The uncanny rock candy mountain: 3 Musketeers Cherry: two conflicting reports from my tastebuds—(a) this is incredibly artificial and disgusting, and (b) this is engineered to be delicious and I want more. I didn't know that could actually happen.

3. Hazards of used books: you may turn a page and find a carefully cut-out amateur nude shot. I tore it up, but I still feel bad for the person!

4. Sing it, sister:

I live in South London, for God’s sake; the undead stalking the streets feels more real to me than some whimsical tale of an ageing New England academic seeking to reinvigorate his muse via the vagina of an impossibly beautiful, promising young student. Likewise I am tired of watching films where a man old enough to be my father romances a woman young enough to be my child: if I’m going to be fed a fantasy, I want it to bear some resemblance to mine; if that involves shirtless vampires, why is that bad?

5. That’s some cupcake. Okay, I also like the line “Mainstream society only finds cupcake feminism more palatable because it can lick off the icing and toss the rest.”

Dispatches from the other side of the “war on Christmas”: today, my four-year-old daughter and I pass a barber shop, all decked out with Santa etc. She asks, “Mommy, are Jewish people allowed to go in that store?” I reassure her that we are. It takes a little while.

Barney Frank still has it:

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

… So none of those people [Republican presidential candidates] I would want to be on a desert island with, unless one of them, as I said, had skills in catching fish or whatever I don't know about.

My favorite Barney Frank story, because it also uses my favorite joke form: Barney Frank is on a panel at Yale with Peggy Noonan, who gets asked a question she doesn’t want to answer immediately. To stall for time, she asks, “Why is [noted conservative and killjoy] Bob Bork smiling down at us?”—indicating a portrait of him in the room. Frank instantly replies, “Because it’s a painting and not a photograph.”

Also, because it amused me, the following exchange, at the start of oral argument, between the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court and counsel for a fortuneteller who was challenging a local ordinance that prohibited fortunetelling within city limits on First Amendment grounds:
Chief Justice: Counsel, you have us at a disadvantage.
Attorney: Why, Your Honor?
Chief Justice: Well, hasn’t your client told you how this case will ultimately turn out?
Attorney: No, Your Honor, you must remember I did not consult my client for advice. She consulted me.

Also, this RPF reminds me of the glory days of popslash: a meditation on celebrity as a mask that eats into the face.

I am now 4 episodes behind in SPN.  Maybe I'll get to them on my cross-country flight.  I've just realized that through the magic of timezones plus daylight saving time I get four hours to sleep in on Sunday.  Ecstasy!

For Ada Lovelace day, I can't do better than lucyp's amazing ode to lim. But I want to add in a bit about Corynne McSherry, the Intellectual Property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Like it or not, for tech to do what we want it these days we need lawyers who understand tech, and she's one of the best. Like your DMCA exemptions in the US? We're going to have to ask for them AGAIN, because they don't last, and we have a new Register of Copyright making the calls so all bets are off. The EFF, with Corynne at the helm, and the OTW are going to be working together on vidding exemptions, and the EFF is also responsible for the "jailbreaking" exemptions that let people install the software they choose on their own iPhones. I'm grateful for the incredible work of the AO3 coders, testers, and sysadmins; I'm also grateful that we're not alone in recognizing that fanworks are worthy of respect. Go EFF!

I leave you with the image on my EFF T-shirt, courtesy of xkcd: