Arduinna

(If you're just stopping by to see if anything's been added, you can go straight to the final additions based on suggestions from the comments)

In the unlikely event that people haven't heard about Google's new privacy policy, going into effect on March 1: it will merge any Google accounts you have and link them into one account under one privacy policy. (Er, obviously I can't see them being able to link accounts that don't already have some point of connection between them, like a contact email addy -- but if they can find a link, they'll merge them, as far as I can tell.) ETA from comments: Google may also just be looking at cookies left on your computer, and linking accounts that have no visible connection - they consider it a feature, not a bug. Joy.

ETA more, as we inch into March 1: And a clarification on the merging thing: by that I mean that if you sign up for two products using name@example.com, and pseud@isp.com, Google may well decide those addresses belong to the same person, because it's working off cookies on your computer, and will treat them as one identity. Google will not merge name@gmail.com and pseud@gmail.com into one identity: It's not possible to merge two Google accounts (per Google Help documentation). So the safest way to have multiple identities in Google's eyes is to use Google identities. /ETA

( The new policy and what it means for you )

( How to keep this from affecting you -- much )

------------------

ETA:
More suggestions from the comments; I didn't want to add them to the body of the post at this point, so people don't have to re-read the whole thing. So:

More browser extensions to help with security:

Do Not Track Plus Another extension to stop trackers (Mac or PC; Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE)

HTTPS Everywhere Sends you to secure URLs whenever possible (stable for Firefox, beta for Chrome/Chromium; no other browsers)

Collusion Opens a tab that creates a steadily updated view of who's tracking you across the web as you browse. (Experimental, Firefox only)


Prevent G-chat logging:

From moonplanet: "If you are chatting on gmail chat, it logs your chat conversations. If you install a chat client like Pidgin and install the OTR plugin ("off the record") on both sides (so you and the person you're chatting with), the chats are logged as unreadable text. Adium (for mac) also has the possibility for OTR."

If you haven't heard yet, AP is reporting that the feds have shut down Megaupload and arrested its founder and several employees with violating online privacy laws.

For the past couple of years, I've been clearing stuff out, slowly; I'm a packrat by nature, so there's been a lot to do. I've donated somewhere around 2,000 books, hundreds of CDs, bags and bags and bags of clothes, furniture, lamps, electronics... you name it, particularly over the past year.

The one thing I haven't touched is the old computers. I have several, and they've been piling up in corners for over a decade -- partly because it used to be so expensive to buy new computers that I wanted to keep a backup around in case my new computer died, and partly because recycling them was a pain in the ass.

Best Buy has a pretty good recycling program now, though, so a few months ago I asked therienne to remove the hard drives for me so I could recycle the systems. But the drives didn't want to come out, and we had to be somewhere, so I said screw it, let's finish this later, and that was that. The two half-pulled-apart computers took up residence in my bedroom under a blanket so I didn't cut myself on the metal edges sticking out, and I put them out of my mind till a more convenient pulling-apart day.

( That day was yesterday. )

And now my apartment is that much cleaner than it was. \o/

Once again this year, despite some reservations about whether it was really a good idea for me, I signed up for Yuletide and stuck it out, and once again I'm happy I did. Beyond just giving and getting stories, Yuletide gave me something positive to focus on during what was otherwise a fairly crappy holiday season, and that made a world of difference.

Also there were stories!

I got an absolutely lovely Invisible Man story, which I have read multiple times now. It was everything I could have wanted, and if you like Invisible Man, you will like this story, trust me.

Taking the Waters (3002 words) by Lydia
Fandom: Invisible Man (TV 2000)
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Darien Fawkes/Bobby Hobbes
Characters: Bobby Hobbes, Darien Fawkes
Summary:

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Call them crazy, but Bobby and Darien are going to try the water park again. Water gun fights and sunburn ensue -- among other things.

It's warm, playful, affectionate, and bantery, with a little touch of underlying angst that adds just a perfect fillip of h/c to the whole thing. The whole thing makes me kinda flaily with joy. *hugs story*

Go, read, leave a comment or some kudos. ♥

---

I also wrote a story, as one does. I basically fell over laughing when I got my assignment, because once again I'd been assigned dorinda, just like a few years ago. Heeeeee. We matched on two fandoms, Peacemakers and I Spy, but as it happens, we'd just been talking about Peacemakers a week or two before, and what kinds of stories we were in the mood for. So I figured it would make it completely obvious that I'd written it, but hey, you can't beat having such a clear notion of what someone's looking for right at that particular point in time.

And this is what I came up with:

Shelter in the Storm (4529 words) by Arduinna
Fandom: Peacemakers (2003)
Rating: Explicit
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Larimer Finch/Jared Stone
Characters: Larimer Finch, Jared Stone
Summary:

It's warmer upstairs.

Many thanks to marycrawford for the beta, and to both her and mollyamory for cheerleading in the midst of my inevitable panic and keeping me going. <3

I went through a bunch of permutations on how to get them where they wound up, but eventually decided that something sort of quiet and low-key was the way to go. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I suspect dorinda suspected that I wrote it, but I refused to give it away, even if it meant avoiding IRC a lot this past week. *g*

---

Also as usual, I keep intending to do a recs post; I am now about three years behind on recs posts. But I've been trying to remember to bookmark and click rec on AO3 as I've gone along, at least to a minimal degree; there's so much to read that I haven't really been stopping to fill in the notes field with why I'm reccing things, other than a sentence here or there.

If you want to see what's struck me so far in YT 2011 (I am not remotely done -- so many stories!!), you can check out my recs here. It currently includes about 30 stories in 19 fandoms:

Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery, Are You Being Served, Boston Legal, Burn Notice, Circle of Magic - Tamora Pierce, The Closer, Dark Is Rising - Susan Cooper, Elfquest, Haven, Here Come the Brides, I Dream of Jeannie, Invisible Man, I Spy, MASH, NCIS: LA, Newspaper Games Anthropomorfic, Sports Night, Tangled, and Young Wizards - Diane Duane.

(A given fandom's bookmarks aren't necessarily together, since I was reading across multiple devices over the week at random times. They're not alphabetical by fandom, either, as I was skipping around deliberately. But they do have author names on them now, because the AO3 is awesome like that. <3 No having to remember to go back and add them in after reveal, woo!)

This will be added to over the next several weeks/months, as I keep reading; there are a lot of fandoms I haven't even looked at. And maybe someday I'll manage to pull together a proper set...

The final scenes of my favorite Thanksgiving episode of a tv show ever:

(eta: argh I have no idea why there's a scroll bar there, and I can't seem to get rid of it. If you can't see the whole thing, here's the page with the original video.)



♥

(... omg, that was 33 years ago. How is that even possible!)

If you're doing deadline-based writing and you have an iPad, you have a new option: Write or Die has a new app out. It's $9.99, which is wincy, but that's how much the desktop version costs, so fair enough, I guess.

It has some features the free web app doesn't:

- save to various places, including email (put the account you want to email to in your Settings first) and a clipboard so you can paste it into another app (after doing some testing, this is the best of the two for preserving your line breaks). Eventually you'll also be able to save to Google Docs and Dropbox, but they're not active yet (Gdocs) and not working yet (Dropbox). Don't even try Dropbox yet, it'll freeze and you'll have to force-quit out. (I think he maybe pushed this out for nano a skosh earlier than he should, but hey. the writing part works!)

- a nyan cat punishment level (don't try this one in a real document; it worked but then I was stuck and had to force quit out)

- a storySpark section that randomly offers up three words or short phrases for inspiration (currently visible on mine: toy store, zen, peasant), and you can tap to get three more random things if you want something different

- autosave to a files section, so if you have to force-quit out you haven't lost everything, and you can go look at your files later and copy or send them elsewhere (you can't get back in to edit or add to them once you've quit out or hit "done" on a project).

- deadline countdown -- you tell it when your deadline is, and it tells you how long you have to finish. (hey, the entire point of this program is to scare you into writing.) You could set it for, say, the day before you would absolutely have to have your YT story out to beta... (someone out there must actually finish before the last possible day, right? /o\)

I think that's it for extra features; other than that it's regular Write or Die: you pick the word count you want to reach, the time limit you want to set for yourself, the grace period before the program starts nudging you, and the level of nudge you want, from a gentle popup to a horrendous noise to something that eats another word for every second you don't write to nyan cat.

In turn it will panic you into writing without stopping to edit and second-guess yourself, and will give you a word count as you go. Win!

First, and VERY IMPORTANT:

Everyone should check to see if they actually got transferred; I know at least one person who signed the agreement in the last allowable day or two whose bookmarks didn't make it over. (And now I've found two whose accounts moved, but whose bookmarks didn't. wtf.)

If yours didn't, there's a mailto link for migration issues on the contact tab of the Help page. Sooner is probably better than later for contacting them; even assuming Yahoo has held on to the old database for problems, they're probably obligated to dump it sometime soon as a condition of the sale.

Okay, on to the actual content of this post:

I started seeing posts on my droll about the new delicious and how awful it is, and went to look.

( Wow, that's pretty freaking awful. )

And all that is just on an initial poke around the site. I am just baffled that they rolled this out with so many existing features broken or missing. It makes the site effectively useless, at least for now. I don't understand why they broke every existing social feature in an effort to make it more social.

The one thing that does work is sitewide search; you can type a word into the search box at the top and bring up pages of links. But with the site's layout, it's hard to actually find anything, between the oceans of white space and only ten links showing up at a time anyway. And to get to them, you need to scroll past your own links first, then past any "stacks" that people created with that search term even vaguely associated with it (e.g., a search for SGA brought up four stacks: two for SGA fic, one for Darren Criss [because the URL for one of the youtube videos in the "stack" included the letters SGA], and one for Tanzania [I have no idea; I couldn't find "SGA" anywhere on the page]. Yeah.).

And apparently the new "stacks" function works, but even if I wanted to use it, the way the site is physically set up now makes that unbelievably painful to do. "Find three or more links and add them to a stack!" -- well, great, but I'm only allowed to see ten links at a time. Out of my thousands of links. The only way to find them is to click page after page after page after page after page, yet again.

Which has just led me to realize -- of course. They're going for page clicks over actual usability or accessibility, to look more appealing to advertisers. Awesome.

But hey, they're promising "buttons" and "badges", so, you know. Woo-hoo. Because that's what I really want on a social bookmarking site.

(Okay, I admit, I am an old fogey of a cane-waving dinosaur; I do not understand the obsession with buttons and badges. Icons/avatars on posts/comments to show who you are, sure. But images that exist just to clutter things up that provide no actual information? No thanks.)

( *Deep breath*. Okay, I will attempt to end on a semi-positive note, at least. )

I guess for now I'll wait it out and see if they can manage to get the site fixed to a level where it's at least functional again -- and meanwhile I'll start copying my last year's worth of bookmarks over to pinboard, just in case.

I got this from my brother: an interactive map of Irene's predicted wind effects, by location, on boston.com. You can either click on the map or type a zip code into the search box, and it will show an hour-by-hour bar graph of what the winds are expected to be in that location through 6pm Monday.

It lists seven cities, but isn't restricted to them. As far as I can tell, it's a U.S. national map that will show you the expected winds for anywhere (I just scrolled it around until I hit San Antonio, Texas, and got a graph for it -- for the record, if you're in San Antonio, your winds will be about 3-10mph for most of the weekend, but creep up to ~17 mph by late Monday afternoon. *g* It doesn't work for Canada, though -- sorry, Maritimers!)

Clicking one of the listed cities will change the bar graph, but won't move the map itself; you have to drag/scroll the map manually, or type in a zip code, to see the place you're asking about.

This is pretty cool.

Some of you have met my cat Frodo, or have heard tell of him the years; he was small and brave and smart, and cute as could be. He lived a ridiculously charmed, and charming, life, and up to the day before he died, vet techs were looking at him and saying "he's how old??" He made it to 20, and never looked it.

But chronic renal failure can't be stopped, in the end, and this weekend was the end.

He was my cat for almost my entire adult life; I got him a few months after I moved into my first solo apartment, and we'd been together ever since. He was the best little guy ever.

( pictures under the cut )

Three days ago, he was crashing around my kitchen trying to catch a mouse that had gotten in. Poorly, mind you, because he was unsteady on his pins because of other illnesses (yeah, on top of the kidney disease; one way or another, this was going to be his last summer), but he was bright and alert and ready for action. I miss him like crazy already, but I can't regret a death that came so fast and fairly peacefully, letting him live his life right up to the end.

♥

Okay, so, the "share by email" thing to generate invites seems to work reasonably well, as I got an invite under a RL gmail acct that way and promptly parlayed that into a self-invite to my fannish gmail acct.

(I was feeling all caught up to fandom and modern and suchlike last week when I got myself a tumblr to see what that was all about, and then google-plus shows up. Oy.)

I am poking around in other people's circles to find people I know, while at the same time trying not to just randomly add people because they happen to be there - I never know if that seems weird or not. (Er, likewise on Tumblr, actually.)

I'm Arduinna on Google+: https://plus.google.com/109908241133158620610 -- I think that's the right URL, if I parsed the way astolat did hers correctly. They really have to move to names instead of numbers for those, that's wretched.

I'm aka-arduinna on Tumblr, because some chick in Denmark who goes by the name "Arduinnas" cybersquats on "Arduinna" (without the s) all the damn time, argh. Anyway, this is me there, very exciting I'm sure: http://aka-arduinna.tumblr.com/

I am very amused and grateful that the first thing people seem to be doing is uploading their default icons, and have obediently followed suit, in both places.

And now I'm all caught up to the fandom of right-this-second and will go watch White Collar.

(p.s. my RL one is under my first name and last initial, and currently has no profile pic attached; you can find it with that much info if you know me. I'll be keeping that fannish-pseud-free in case it turns into an actual Facebook replacement that I can let family know about, so I won't be adding any obvious pseuds back. And probably won't be saying much there. But it's there, anyway!)

Even though I didn't manage to write anything but a last-minute amnesty story last time around, I figured I'd give this a shot again.

( My hc_bingo card )

Choices, choices...

There are lots of places to find prompts these days:

fic_promptly - Multi-fandom, for commentfic. Every day is a new theme, and anyone can leave up to six prompts per fandom per day (that is, you can leave as many prompts as you want, but no more than six in any give fandom). The mods also collect all the prompts on a delicious account for easy browsing to find things to fill or read.

fringe_kinkmeme - What it says on the tin. *g* Looks like this is only a couple of weeks old.

jackdanielpromptfic - Weekly prompts for Stargate SG-1 Jack/Daniel fic.

leverage_flashfic - New Leverage flashfic comm!

storycubes - Any fandom. Low-pressure prompt community, where you request a set of story cubes (a picture of 9 dice with various images on them), and you use all the elements on the dice to create a story. No deadlines, no pressure.

winter_deaddrop - Weekly Burn Notice prompts, to inspire flashfic.


Fandom comms:


fortheusers - For Tron fans, of both the original movie and Legacy.

fringetv_at_dw - For Fringe fans! I'd love to see this take off more; Fringe should have a bigger fandom presence, dammit.

leverage - For Leverage fans, natch.

theboathouse - For NCIS:LA fans; another show that should have a bigger fannish presence. Hmf.

tortall - For Tamora Pierce fans (this includes Emelan as well as Tortall). scrollgirl is currently doing a 30 Days of Tamora Pierce for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, with answers going into the comments of the posts.