Today's temperatures: Started below 20, "feels like" in the single digits. But not to worry, within a week we should be in the 50s!

And they just said that, with no commentary, like it's not absolutely bizarre to go from 19F - 56F within a single week in December.

And it's not just the high temperatures that are bizarre, the low ones are too. I can't speak to the decades before 1990, I guess, but NYC weather used to be temperate - we got more snow, but that's because the winter temperatures were in the snow range - close to the freezing point, not so warm it melted, not so cold that it just didn't happen.

and I had to take a car, which I can not afford. At least the corner store hadn’t shut down and the cashier let me wait inside. Either he’s very friendly and chatty or he’s flirting with me, but the important thing is I still have all my toes.

Also, please take a poem

Edit: Also, also, two videos

"He took the Walkman out of his pocket and flipped through the songs in the cassette."

Oh, sweetie. That's... that's just not how cassette tapes work. Not even overseas. You fast forward or rewind - literally winding the tape again - and hope that your timing is amazing. I mean, with practice I guess you can get pretty good, but still.

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I don't quite relish the idea of going out in it, and god knows where our shovel went, but gosh, I love looking at the snow!

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The goal is to herd all the "What do you call this?" posts into the comments there. It never ever works. However, they do occasionally get comments like "Here are the answers to the questions you asked rhetorically as an example" and "Why do you keep posting this and asking the same questions" and "There is no such thing as a pork burger".

Yes, Virginia, there is a pork burger. This is why I have a picture of pork burger patties on my phone, so I can post it every time somebody says that those don't exist, or that they "really" mean a breakfast sandwich or a pulled pork sandwich or a ham sandwich or a BLT.

I always want to ask these people who, I guess, don't get out much why they're so sure that anything they haven't personally heard of before must not exist. It's a big old world, but apparently, not so much for them.

(I suppose I can be forgiven for being a bit snippy this time around, I mean, given everything.)

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And one email and voicemail later, my pay didn't come in and nobody has responded yet. (I did wake up pretty late, but seriously.)

I'll call again in the morning, I don't care if it is a weekend, but....

*headdesk*

I don't know what I'll do for groceries if this isn't resolved by Monday, but I'll wait until Monday to worry about it.

You'd think we'd get snow, but no. Tomorrow's forecast thus far calls for a "wintery mix". The only wintery mix I want is cocoa and marshmallows, not whatever the hell happens to fall from the sky like soggy doom confetti.

19F, jesus. At least it'll be warmer tomorrow. Warm enough to get a fucking wintery mix instead of snow, which is what we really want.

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So much awful stuff happens to the protagonists in the last third of the show that I often don't make it all the way through. It's worth it, though - my favorite character suddenly gets enough growth to become my favorite character, and the villain dies in a very satisfying way, allowing me to say ( Read more... )

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so this is my last year managing the Super Happy Fun Sell. The SHFS is AWA's garage sale/yard sale/used anime merch/swap meet sort of event, we sell tables to fans who want to unload their unwanted anime and manga and etc.

I honestly can't remember the first year we had it. I know AWA had been trying to find new events to fill up Thursday night to try and get people to show up early and get their badges so as to relieve the Friday lineups. I'd been doing some Thursday night panels before then.

Some of the other conventions had been doing swap meet type things, I know we weren't the first. It's my recollection that Lloyd - one of the other AWA founders - actually said "let's do this" and I think he came up with the "Super Happy Fun Sell" name, which is a play on the old Saturday Night Live fake commercial about Happy Fun Ball, Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.

Anyway I heard about it, and was immediately like, "this is a great idea, I wanna run it" and there we were. And that was at least twenty years ago. I'm glad I ran it because I got first crack at the weird old merchandise people didn't want any more, and because I got to sell my own unwanted merch at my own table, which I did not pay for, because Staff Hath Its Privileges.

Also, it's an event people love, people love the vibe, people love bargains, people love cleaning out their closets and making a little scratch. Putting smiles on faces is the best thing.

So, if I love it so much, why am I stepping away? Well, this kind of event that involves registrations and table layouts and conversations about lines and scheduling, that event really needs someone in Atlanta who can go to staff meetings and really be involved in the planning and make sure the event is integrated well with the rest of the schedule. And that person is not me, I don't live in Atlanta any more and I don't have the, shall we say, the spoons to keep up with this event long-distance, alongside all the other things that demand my attention throughout the year.

Don't get me wrong, things usually turn out OK, but that's because I'm on site hours in advance, making sure all the tables are where they need to be (if not, I gotta find somebody to fix it), someone's controlling the lines (if not, I gotta find staffers to do line control), someone else found the event signage (if not, I gotta find someone who knows where the signage is), and making sure somebody else is moving all the tech equipment out of the room because there's usually tech equipment sitting around in the room when I get there. There's always someone I need to find, and I don't know where to find them or how to find them or who they are, because, again, I haven't been to staff meetings in twenty solid years.

Usually there is someone on staff or staff-related who was promised a table by somebody else on staff, and that information never gets to me until the day of the show, at which point I usually don't have any tables left. Somebody in Atlanta would probably get that memo.

When you add this kind of thing on top of the pile of things that already need to get done for the SHFS - sending out confirmation emails, printing maps, answering the same fifty questions every single year about "what is a used item" and "can I sell my own artwork or plushies or keychains that I made" and other already-answered questions, well, it gets kind of overwhelming. And overwhelming is not a thing I need, particularly at a convention which by its very nature already has me amped up and on edge, at a time of year when I'm also amped up and on edge, and also have a ton of other things to do that are grabbing more and more of my bandwidth.

So, I'm not gonna do it any more. I still intend to show up and try to get in there early to grab the weird old cool stuff, but I'm sure AWA has staffers that can take over and run the event perfectly well.

I can see you're not a cook. You can't exactly dice thyme. The leaves are pretty tiny. If they're fresh, you just strip them from the stem. I suppose you can then chop them more finely, but dicing? You'd have more luck trying to dice time.

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The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

And that's not the most alarming thing about it.

Which, good for her, but she's not going to make the big bucks in social work, which is what she's getting her BS in. Well, best of luck to her anyway. (She does have her eyes wide open, because everybody has told her that. Unsurprising.)

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so now I'm spending some part of my evening with another coworker instead of by myself, which means I can't just summarily turn off the TV. Other people are weird when they want the TV on even if they aren't watching it, but since they think I'm weird for preferring blissful silence I guess sometimes I have to compromise.

Which means that the other day my entertainment choices were either a long and frankly tedious piece on the JFK conspiracy theories, or HP1. Welp, JFK won't get any deader, and practically speaking, JKR won't get any richer. The choice wasn't really very agonizing, is what I'm saying. I feel like maybe it ought to have been, but no. (That place does not have enough channels. If I'm going to be stuck watching TV for even part of the night I really need to figure out how to get my phone on the screen.)

All this led me to realize something that I somehow don't think I ever thought about before, which is that the plot of book 2 doesn't make any fucking sense, like, right from the start. How exactly did Lucius set it up so that he'd happen to bump into the Weasley family? What if they hadn't gone shopping that day? There clearly was a lot of planning that went into this, so what was his backup? Really, none of those plots hold together if you look at them too hard. And that's not too unusual for fiction, but I'm not particularly inclined to be charitable about it.

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But never fear, he no longer has a bear living in his crawlspace. He now has two bears.

Honestly, if you ban somebody it ought to warn you before you comment on their posts so that if you forget or don't realize you don't end up in an awkward situation.