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Showing posts from October, 2016
Hi, all. Sorry for the radio silence. A bunch of stuff piled up on me all at once. I had a phone interview for a job I really want, and might get yet. Yay. Circlet is re-running several pieces of serial fiction, which means I have been sitting here queueing up several hundred blog posts for them. The Prince's Boy  (M/M, BDSM, NSFW, intensely smutty from about chapter 5 on out) is currently running on Wednesdays; Capricious  (mainly M/F with visitors of all genders, paranormal, intensely smutty from sentence one) will run on Tuesdays, starting November 1; Incubus Tales: A Thousand Words (M/M, light and fluffy, the porn pretty much is  the plot) will be on Thursdays, starting in December. We hope to also start Chocolatiers of the High Winds  (M/M, proper romance, adorably Final Fantasy -esque and full of airships and chocolate) in January 2018, but we're waiting on the author, H B Kurtzwilde, to present us with some bonus material he can't stop chattering about. If you'

Satuday Serial: 12 Creepy Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

01. The Tell-Tale Heart 02. The Facts In The Case of M. Valdemar 03. The Black Cat 04. The Fall of the House of Usher 05. The Masque of the Red Death 06. The Cask of Amontillado 07. The Premature Burial 08. Berenice 09. Ligeia 10. Hop-Frog 11. The Raven 12. The Pit and the Pendulum Courtesy Librivox.org / Archive.org

Saturday Serial: "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"

" The Adventure of the Copper Beeches " (59:24) Courtesy Librivox.org / Archive.org

Miscellaneous administrivia

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I'm not sure what exactly broke about a lot of my If This, Then That redirects, but I unbroke them. Things I read, listen to, and watch are again being thrown to my tumblr without me having to like or link each of them individually as they come out, as God intended. My blog is also auto-echoed, so if you hang out on tumblr a lot and prefer to read there, follow me! It's coming up on International Dress Funny AWESOME Day, so I hunted you up a bunch of makeup tutorials from some of my favorite weirdos. I also answer costume questions for free this month, so comment here, Ask on tumblr, or email me for help in your efforts to disguise yourself as someone covered in much more glitter and/or stage blood than your quotidian self. Did you know I have a Patreon ? I do! For as little as a dollar a month, you can improve the lives of four young, hungry, embarrassingly domesticated rats. They would send you letters of thanks, but they're too busy hiding their treats in the back of

Saturday Serial: "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"

" The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet " (1:00:25) Courtesy Librivox.org / Archive.org
I don't often buy CDs anymore. With media I'm generally only interested in the main content, and the hard drive stays the same size no matter how much I load onto it, so digital services are easier. It's rare that I want some part of the packaging enough to store it, and pack it, and move it from house to house when I am eventually forced to be itinerant again. Placebo released a 20th anniversary retrospective, and I paid to have them mail me one. I like them enough to give them money, and their website asks a very reasonable $11 for a 2-CD set, in a hardcover gatefold. I wanted the pictures. More accurately, I wanted to know which pictures the two of them thought were relevant. Knowing what people want to remember is sometimes more interesting than the events themselves. There is a brief introduction to the album by Brian Molko in the front of the book. I have seen very little prose from him, but it all has the same curious quality of standing by itself, hanging over t
Someone on reddit recently posted the question, "What was the thing that made you realize you were living in the future ?" I'm not sure if I had an exact moment  for that, but the other day I had to dig through my room to find where I had put down the phone that was actively streaming music to the earbuds I was wearing at the time , so 'the future' is probably here. I expect it's going to involve me misplacing a lot of things that are no longer physically tethered to my body and/or the wall. Detangling headphone cords is a pain in the ass, but at least I always knew where the wire led. The turning point where tech became truly impressive and magical, rather than just a new and improved version of a thing I already knew about, was sometime around when everything suddenly went wireless. I'm not entirely sure why. My family had cordless telephones so early that I don't remember the main house phone ever being any other kind. Television and AM/FM/short

Monday Mystery: "Cracks"

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It's been a while since I did one of these. Let's have a look at something less depressing than American politics, shall we? A simple piece of animation, with one closed mystery, and one open one. On December 31st, 1975, the children's television show Sesame Street  ran a short animation called "The Crack Master". Here it is: Doesn't seem all that mysterious, does it? But it was lost for a long time. In 2008, a lady named Jennifer Bourne posted recollections of the clip on  her blog . The entry is short, and looks like one of those things that surfaces from the muck in the back of your brain when you're trying to sleep at night and won't go away until you figure out what it's from. She's an illustrator herself, and drew a couple of sketches from memory. She asked around on the snopes message board , and while she did find a lot of other people who were creeped out by various things on Sesame Street , and other people looking for the sa

Saturday Serial: "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"

" The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor " (44:52) Courtesy Librivox.org / Archive.org
I recently applied for something that required me to pony up some written samples, showcasing my analytical abilities. The person who tipped me off to the opportunity is a reader here, and seemed to think quite highly of things like linguistic and profiling essays. This all looks much more impressive on your end than on mine. You only see the things that hang together well enough to write about. The world is full of scattershot gibberish that deserves, at best, a two-line post on /r/ShowerThoughts. Those don't get 1500-word essays. I once turned in all fifty pages of a twenty page research assignment to one of my college professors, and even I can only pad so much. There are two main reasons I look like I am some kind of mad genius with a crazy-awesome hit rate: Confirmation bias, and an overblown sense of drama. The confirmation bias is down to the reader. Human brains -- mine, yours, everyone's -- are built to ping whenever two ideas connect, especially if that connecti

Saturday Serial: "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"

" The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb " (42:03) Courtesy Librivox.org / Archive.org