Hitler reacts to the Warehouse 13 season 3 finale
“Don’t listen to him; Myka and H.G. are totally canon!”
Pondering feed readers
Do people use feed readers anymore? It seems odd to me that this never quite caught on in a big way amongst people I know. I use a feed reader and I know my wife does, but other than web geeks, I’m not sure many other folks do. Maybe it’s not simple enough? How do people keep up with blogs and other regularly updated content, though, without one?
My feed reader categories for various syndicated content
I know there are some sites – Boing Boing, Jezebel/Gawker/io9, and others where I don’t bother with a feed; usually because their content is updated too frequently to keep up and I know that I don’t want to see every post because their content is in the range of ‘skimmable’ and not ‘deep research’.
And then there are some sites that don’t publish their full posts to their syndication feed — I purge them from my feed reader immediately for that reason. If they’re pretty good they’ll get a bookmark, but they’re usually on probation for being traffic whores.
I should probably investigate people’s use of syndication feeds; it seems like I read that this was on the decline somewhere, but I don’t recall the link. I know that Twitter and Facebook have buried their RSS feeds. I can still usually construct a Twitter one based on the ones I had in my reader before they hid them, though. Facebook has pretty much wiped theirs out.
2022-03-12 Update: Twitter and Facebook obviously killed their RSS feeds because they needed their algorithms to filter you news for maximum effect on your psyche. And we all got hooked into social media and stopped blogging altogether. This is such an interesting post in hindsight.
Recently Read for October 11, 2001
Happy National Coming Out Day! I’ve been out 24 years, as of this date. I’ve been a very lucky woman – able to be open about my romantic life with everyone, happily married to a really wonderful woman. I’ve faced approximately my fair share of homophobia, but not for many many years. For those still coming to terms with their sexual orientation, GLSEN has a wonderful guide on how to prepare and plan for your own coming out.
A couple of things I’ve seen around the interwebs the last few days:
ANTHROPARODIE
A parody site of the Anthropologie clothing store. You will laugh your ass off; I guarantee. And I especially like that I get an Anthropologie ad on my site from this link.
Husbands: The Series
A very cute online series about two gay men who get drunk in Vegas and get married, and then decided they need to make their marriage work — written and produced by Jane Espenson.
File under: “Companies I’m no longer buying from” is this little gem:
Dr Pepper Ten: ‘No women allowed’
“To appeal to men, Dr Pepper made its Ten drink 180 degrees different than Diet Dr Pepper. It has calories and sugar unlike its diet counterpart. Instead of the dainty tan bubbles on the diet can, Ten will be wrapped in gunmetal grey packaging with silver bullets. And while Diet Dr Pepper’s marketing is women-friendly, the ad campaign for Ten goes out of its way to eschew women.”
Lovely. I hope you get at least one new client from this ad campaign to make up for losing me as a regular Diet Dr. Pepper drinker.
Speaking of Stupid Male Tricks, here’s another:
Wonder Woman’s Origin Story Re-written
In DC COMICS-THE NEW 52, Wonder Woman will have a new origin, in which she is the daughter of Hippolyta … and Zeus! In recent interviews, writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang have teased that readers should expect the unexpected in this edgier, horror take on the superhero genre and the king of the gods will ensure that nothing goes as planned for his defiant daughter.
Why is this a big deal? Imagine if Superman were not raised by the Kents, or if Batman hadn’t seen his parents killed as a young boy. What if the iconic defining characteristic of your favorite superhero were re-written completely? Wonder Woman is one of the Big Three in DC – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. Nobody is messing with the origin of the other two. And on top of that – Wonder Woman is a feminist icon: a child shaped of clay (lots of early Greek mythology precedent for that, as well as Hindu mythology) and infused with a soul by the female Greek goddesses, she was born of parthenogenesis and raised in an idyllic society of women – all specifically with the goal that she have the characteristics to stop violence directed at women and children as well as to bring humankind peace and justice. Now all of the sudden, she has a sperm donor? What happened to the “tool born of women to save women?” This sucks, DC Comics. I’m still going to read the book, but there better be some really compelling reason for doing this.
Some Personal Highlights From Geek Girl Con
A summary of a cool convention I didn’t previously know existed from Gail Simone, the current author of Batgirl, and former writer of Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman and a whole bunch of other DC comic books. Girl Geek Con isn’t specifically a comic book convention – it’s for girl nerds of all types and sounds like a blast, from every account I’ve read online. I seriously need to go next year.
We totally put this flag on the mailbox
We did a bunch of cleaning and repair work at the rental house over the weekend. We had thought we were done, but the property manager came back with a big fat list of stuff they wanted done before they would agree to list the house. So back over there we went to knock out a bunch of them. One of them was putting a new flag on the mail box because the last renters ripped it off. Who does that, really? How odd.
Some people don’t like books
As much as I do. Who puts books on a shelf like this, even for clearance? I would buy your books if you wanted to sell them to me.
Bearding the lion
Also been doing a bit of this lately:
Bearding the lion in his own den.
I know – cryptic references are annoying, aren’t they?
Bike Trailer Cart Project
Hell, now that I have to blog for real instead of just saving links, I may as well go for broke. Here’s something I’ve been working on lately – making a cargo trailer for my bike out of an old kids bike trailer. I picked one up for $3 at the Goodwill Outlet. That’s a nice price if you’ve ever gone shopping for kids bike trailers – even if they are beat up and crappy, people generally want $20 bucks for them on craigslist.
The first thing I did was strip off the ragged cloth cover stuff to expose the frame.
Then I started looking at how the upper supports worked. I didn’t think I needed all the framework on top, and I wanted a wider area for the wooden deck, so I flipped some of the frame to the outside of the cart.
The frame, dismantled and reassembled. I kept a couple of upright supports to attach some side panels of some sort to.
We had some scrap tongue and groove boards in the garage from when we had our balcony porch floor repaired, and they were the perfect size.
So I fitted some together.
I ended up taking a brief detour through the basement to assemble various tools I’d need to put the wood deck for the trailer together. If you are interested in starting a tool business, by Clicking Here you can learn about various tools and run your business effectively. Stephanie’s dad has given us lots of tools over the years; he’s very concerned that Stephanie be able to do things for herself, so he has basically outfitted our basement with every power tool a gay girl could desire. He’s kind of a lesbian dream dad, actually. Here are some of the things we’ve been given:
These are all various drill bits and screw driver bits for the 7 drills we own.
Chisels, files and planes.
Box 1 of 3 boxes of clamps. For the sake of brevity, I’ll refrain from posting the other two pictures of clamp boxes.
For all your cuphook and eye hook needs. I will need some of these for cargo nets.
Every size of vice grip you could need. We can certainly get a good grip on our vice around here.
Tool detour finished, I screwed together the deck boards and sanded them down. I thought about trimming some of the boards to get them all exactly the same width, but decided it looked sort of cute with ragged edges. I also cut out slots where the upright pieces of the frame will fit in.
After sanding everything down, I put a coat of water sealant on the boards to help preserve them since they’ll be out in the rain.
After letting the water sealant dry for a week, I started painting. I don’t know if I really needed to paint it, but I’ve been dying to paint something this bright blue color I found in the basement; Cerulean Blue, according to the can.
And that’s where I am on the project – I have one more coat of paint for the wood and then I’ll be able to attach it to the frame. After that I’ll have to figure out exactly what I want to do about side panels. I have some plastic lawn chair webbing from days gone by that I can create a frame for, or I could attach wooden slats for the sides. I may go with the webbing to avoid extra weight; I want to be able to pull the trailer easily.
UPDATE: the mostly-finished cart is here…
Basically, I just strap everything down with bungees right now. I still haven’t figured out how to finish the sides.
2022-03-12 Update: I never actually attached this to my bike, and I sold it to a guy in 2019 through Facebook Marketplace, and he was delighted by it.
Oh darn – delicious links auto-publishing died
Shoot. My blogging crutch went away. For the past five or six years I’ve been using a little-known and not very well supported delicious links tool to auto-publish the links I’ve saved to my site. It was easy because I could hit a bookmarklet when I was on an interesting page and delicious would save the page title and link and I could enter a description of what was interesting and tags about the post, and the tool would aggregate all the links and post them once a day. Easy, short, sweet, lazy. I knew when delicious got bought out that the tool was in jeopardy, and sometime after 2011-09-27 they finally turned off the functionality.
Damn damn damn. Now I have actually BLOG stuff. On my blog. That sucks.
I’m checking to see if there are other tools out there that can do the same type of thing. I’m thinking someone should have come up with an Instapaper.com tool by now, right?
So, here are some interesting pages I’ve looked at over the last few days….
Cultural Faux Pas: What are some cultural faux pas in New York? – Quora
“Stuff not to do in New York.” I’ll just keep that in mind… no, I won’t. I don’t care.
Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard – Lapham’s Quarterly
“But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
Stop Honour Killings
“The International Campaign Against Honour Killing is a project started by Diana Nammi Director and Founder of London-based charity IKWRO which provides support and protection to women faced with ‘honour’-based violence and forced marriage. The project was established in the aftermath of the murder of Heshu Yones, in a climate of growing awareness of ‘honour’ as an factor in women’s subordination. It was out of this awareness, and the understanding that ‘honour’-based violence, and oppression against women justified in the name of ‘honour’ are widespread, and not confined to any particular group, that the movement towards an international project, to inform journalists, academics and the general public and provide a platform for activists to discuss their methods, opinions and experiences, and to share their campaigns within a community.”