[updated April 19, 2012]

Hi there! If you've come across this, I'm guessing you might be interested in knowing more about me.

This space
Like many people, I enjoy conversations with new and interesting folks who wander across my postings in some way, and I've chosen to allow anonymous commenting on public entries, and other choices that make commenting easier. Feel free to join in with comment or conversation.

I am a librarian (spent 10 years as a paraprofessional and then professional librarian in an independent school in Minnesota, and am now at an academic library in Maine. Life is wonderful there.) Beforwarned I info geek at the drop of a hat. I live in rural Maine with a cat (Astra), a folk harp, and fewer books than I used to before I moved cross country (but still a bunch.)

I am inclined towards British spellings in casual writing, but not always (my father was English, my mother was born in Austria and grew up in the UK - I come by it naturally, and it's gotten more so since I started playing Alternity.) Fair warning.

My 'Net community home of choice these days is Dreamwidth, but I crosspost to LiveJournal, and am fine with comments either place. I try to make it as easy as I can for you to get from one site to the other.

Tagging came to LiveJournal, oh, 6 years after I started journalling, and I still haven't tagged most of my posts. I'm slowly working on going backwards and doing that. Really.

What you'll see here is:
Mostly locked posts, for a variety of reasons. I'm generally happy to add most people to my locks these days. (I keep a very small number of more tightly focused filters for trusted-in-person friend type conversations.)

Various posts from me about daily life:
I'm a librarian. I geek stuff by nature. Most of what I write is various bits about daily life, books, music, thinking, doing stuff, chronic illness coping, and miscellaneous other topics. I tend not to write about politics and current events.

Lots of people who keep reading me say they really like my long thinky posts, even if they're otherwise not particularly interested in the subject matter: I am most likely to do them about
- sorting out the inside of my head.
- religious stuff (not basics, but how to learn, teach, share, and explore it better)
- music (with which I have a complex relationship)
- things that bug my librarian brain. Bad history and research. Online interactions, especially around privacy and communication.

Samples of public long-and-thinky that also give a good clue as to how I work include:
- An exposition on a mix CD I made for a particular trip which is really about bits of my musical history.
- General info about how I handle access and subscription on this journal.
- A post about the movie Agora, about Hypatia of Alexandria
- A deconstruction of the history in a Bones episode that involved a purported victim of the Salem Witch Trials.
- My advice to people considering library school (Somewhat dated: since then, I have changed jobs after a year-long job hunt. I will do a revised version, sometime, really.)

And as an example of a non-public one, this one, about my father and the power of theatre and memory and the living power of words made real is one I'm still very proud of.

( You will also see some crossposts )

The current and continuing obsession
I'm one of the players in a long-running (7 years planned!) alternate universe Harry Potter journal-based game/group narrative/whatever you want to call it called Alternity. It scratches all sorts of complicated thinky itches in my brain in ways I adore.

I am immensely proud of the writing and creation we've done there and are continuing to do, am continually amazed by the work of the other players, and I periodically geek about it. I am currently in the midst of a major data and information management project related to it, and I geek about that over here.

( More about Alternity )

Other places I am online
Generally, if it's me doing personal stuff, I'm Jenett. Or JenettSilver, if Jenett was taken. I also write under that name for Pagan stuff.

I am on Facebook under my legal name, but avoid all directly Pagan (or otherwise personal stuff, like specific health details) stuff in public there (which also means I avoid stuff that adds Pagan fan pages or events to my profile.)

Commenting guidelines: Mostly common sense.
Please treat this space something like an open house: you are in my online living room, and if you want to have a conversation with me, in my space, there's stuff that makes that better for both of us.

( And if you like that spelled out... )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

As my journal is almost entirely friends-only, an explanatory note is a useful thing.

Hi! I'm Jenett. You can read my profile for a little more information about me. For various reasons, most of my LiveJournal is locked - only people on my friends list can read it. (This is for a wide range of reasons: my privacy, the privacy of people I mention who are part of my life, and the fact I spent about 18 months doing online work that increased my chance of random harassment.)

I am, however, happy to add people to my friends list. If you're interested, leave a comment on this entry. It helps me if you let me know how you know me, or how you got here, and what you're interested in.

If you're Pagan, I have a public Pagan-related blog (which has the bits I'm happy talking about in public) at http://gleewood.org/threshold

So, I made another icon. (Seriously. Ten+ years on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, and it's this year I've started making amusing icons? Life is weird.)

This one is sort of specific, but public post in case you feel like sharing it with other like minded people (and, um, if you are such a person, I suspect we might get along, so feel free to comment.)

I've been teasingly using this as a self-reference for a couple of months in IM - because, really. Virgo Hufflepuff. Good with details, alphabetise lists as a matter of course, cheerful at doing large amounts of moving data that other people find sort of tedious.

(None of which is to say I'm perfect at it. But I enjoy it, and I seem to be better at it than the average bear.)

I'd been meaning to make a "Do not annoy the Virgo Hufflepuff: she will bury you in details" tag for a while (and have one I'm not entirely happy with). But this one came to me over the weekend, and as soon as I had the "Details managed" I went Squeeee!! a lot in IM.

Feel free to share, point people at this entry, etc. I'd appreciate a credit. I may come up with other visual versions given time. And I'm definitely contemplating throwing up a version in Zazzle or CafePress or something over next weekend, because I desperately want a physical button with it now.

ETA: Now with icon uploaded to LJ, really!

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

I saw a nice endocrinologist, and started getting my brain and life back. It seems like it might be time to talk about that. I am now at a point where I want to talk about it in public, where it might be useful to other people, too.

Why I talk about this is that I want to give people who find themselves in the same place things they might consider trying. I don't think what worked for me would work for everyone: this is a "Hey, here's info" not a "Do as I do."

So:
- Today: revisit where I started from.
- Tomorrow: comments on making doctors listen
- Sunday: stuff I did that helped during the process.
- Monday: the actual recovery timeline. (short version: it took a lot longer than anticipated. I can sort of see my previous normal from here reliably now, and that's really recent.)
- Tuesday: what all of that means in practice - what it means in terms of life choice and food choices and all sorts of other things.

( Starting from )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

There may be more later, but this is a pretty decent first round.

(If you are, for some reason, going “Yuletide?”, it is an annual exchange of fiction in small fandoms. The stories are released on December 25th, and the authors are not revealed until January 1st, which gives you plenty of time to read and comment and so on without getting caught up in who wrote what. This year, there’s something like 2500 stories, of all sorts of kinds.)

What I wrote:
Not only did my recipient love it, but her favorite paragraph was the one that has my favorite sentence in it. I am so smug! (Much thanks to the friends who gave me advice, which I’ll talk about more when we get to reveals, because it’s the first fic writing I’ve shared with anyone else in more than a decade. Ritual writing, yes. Non-fiction, yes. All sorts of other commentary, yes. Fiction, no.)

My gift:
I got Chalion fic! It makes me deeply happy, because it has lots of awesome bits, and Iselle and Bergon after their marriage, and small mysteries solved improving the world. You can see it at http://archiveofourown.org/works/300197

Various recs and other notes within: recs for 15th Century CE RPF (namely Lucrezia Borgia), A Song for Arbonne, A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, A Knight's Tale, Anne of Green Gables, the Chalionverse, Center Stage, Circle of Magic, a Dr. Who/Lord Peter Wimsey crossover, Yuletide Meta, The Mummy movies, Newsflesh, Octopus Steals Camera, Shadow Unit, Tam Lin, Tower Prep, and Valdemar.

( Read within )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

(This is my first year doing Yuletide, though I’ve been reading cheerfully along for quite a few.)

There's a lot of stuff below the cut, because I mostly thing more information is better than less. I've tried to make it easy to follow. Short version: stories are awesome. You doing Yuletide is awesome. Whatever you come up with in whichever of these fandoms is extremely likely to be awesome. See? All good.

But if you're the kind of person for whom more info is helpful, amusing, or inspiring, I can do that too.

Inside, you will find:
- A brief general note
- Stuff I like in fiction
- Stuff I do not care for in my fiction
- Stuff that kicks me out of a story's enjoyment
- Prompts plus things I really particularly like in each canon.

( Much within! )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

So, I have gotten far enough in the packing process to have ye list of things looking for new homes.

[Also: my landlady is still looking for someone interested in renting this place: it is small, but lovely, and has an awesome clawfoot bathtub. Her post about it is over here should you know someone looking for somewhere to live in Minneapolis.]

Things to know about this list:
- I am mostly not up for shipping stuff, but might be talked into it in some cases. Feel free to propose something.

- Except for the larger technology items, I'm generally thinking yard sale prices. And even with the tech stuff, feel free to propose anything reasonable.

- Feel free to pass on to other friends/lists/whatever in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro. This post is public to make that easy.

Timing
My hope is for items to leave here between August 25th and August 29th (pickup to be negotiated at a mutually convenient time), but in many cases, I'm up for some negotiation.

Also available: lots and lots of books (mostly Pagan materials I'm no longer using, mysteries, SF and fantasy, but a smattering of other non-fiction). Feel free to let me know if there's anything in particular you're looking for. These will be going to used bookstores early in the week of the 18th otherwise.

( Read more... )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

As promised, both for anne and for magentamn who asked me about it a few weeks ago, which is why I had the makings in the house already :)

This bread relies on the cottage cheese for a lot of the moisture. The version I'm posting here also has two eggs in it - the combination means the bread has quite a lot of protein in it. It makes a perfectly lovely sandwich bread, but you can also coax it into roll shapes. (It's a pretty damp dough, so more elaborate shaping is not really worth the fuss.)

Makes two loaves, or loaf + rolls, or rolls, or whatever combination you want.

( Recipe )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

So, we are just about at the anniversary of my life doing a complete upheaval due to the medical foo, and that makes it a good time to do an update of what I've learned, in case it helps other people somewhere. (In other words, feel free to link to other people who might find it useful or have questions. I don't have all the answers, but might have ideas.)

(So many things are tied into November for me these days: it is a month that begins with my father's death, includes the anniversaries of my 2nd degree, 3rd degree, separation from the ex-husband, and the anniversary of the first month we lived together (our actually wedding was in early December.) And now this. Awfully complicated month.

Anyway: for those who don't remember, a year ago, on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2009, after feeling just as horrible with five days off work as I did when finishing work on the previous Tuesday, I walked into work and said "There is something really wrong." The eventual diagnosis turned out to be hypothyroidism and vitamin D deficiency (after a side trip through "Could it be depression?" and a lot of stuff I wish I'd handled differently at work, sort of, if I could figure out what 'better' would have looked like.)

This is going to get long, but breaking it up in to separate chunks seems less useful.

( Much more within )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

I've seen comments in several places expressing concern that mark is not going to be working full-time for Dreamwidth. (See his post and the news post).

One thing that might help to know is that mark was working full-time elsewhere for a lot of Dreamwidth's earlier development.

(He went full time for Dreamwidth in October 2009, so was working elsewhere full time during all of the closed beta + about the first four months of open beta. During which time he was actively involved in a whole bunch of coding and planning and other activity. You can see the post where he announces that change here. Reading news, it's very clear how active he was in getting cool and necessary stuff done.)

The goal with him going full-time for Dreamwidth was to be able to push through code reviews and other tasks more quickly that really took someone with extensive focused time to spend on them. Now that fu has had time to settle in, I can easily see that it'd be possible to step back to still keeping a hand in, but earning a salary doing something else (and continuing to let him develop his skills in other ways beyond what DW would allow him to focus on.)

He isn't specific about the reasoning for the change now, and I really don't want to speculate on someone else's reasons for their decisions, but I'm delighted the site is flexible enough to allow the people who've built it this kind of choice.

One of the things that most attracts me to DW as a project is the goal - through design, through accessibility, through code choices - of opening up choices, not restricting them needlessly. That includes mark and denise and their personal lives.

(post public, in case anyone wants to link, and I'm crossposting to LJ as I've seen some comments over there, too.)

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

I have just gotten home from seeing it (in Minneapolis, it is playing at the Uptown Theatre this week. Maybe not beyond that.)

Now, one of the problems with being me - or rather, with having my head full of a wide range of library history, clothing history, dye history, religious and theological history, architectural history, and, well, pretty much any other history one might pick up, is that going to see historically set movies can be an exercise in frustration.

This film, delightedly, gets *very* much of that right.

The story is ... well, okay, it bills itself as historical fiction, which is right, because historically, there's not a whole lot we know about Hypatia of Alexandria. That she existed, that she was a widely respected astronomer and philosopher, widely respected among her male peers at a time when women just Didn't Do That In Public. That there are a couple of legends about her which persist. That she was killed in inter-religious violence in the city, arguably. But that none of her work survived. We know that the prefect of Alexandria (Orestes) publically respected her wisdom.

But the central astronomical conceit of the movie - the development of the heliocentric model - is not historically attributed to her (the movie treats it appropriately, given that.) The details of her friendship with Orestes, ditto.

There's a lot of glorious ambiguity, and parallels of the fragility of knowledge, and the fragility of friendships, and the challenges of being a good person in a complex world. It is, as the director says, a film about the dangers of fanaticism, far more than being a film about the errors of any one particular group.

And it's a movie about what we do with knowledge, what we value about it, about whether we continue asking questions to the last, or whether we sit on what we believe and hope it will sustain us through the hard times. There are reasons that I have honored Hypatia as my ancestor-of-profession for a number of years now: there are always more questions, and I want always to continue to ask them. No one in this movie is a shining example of perfection - even Hypatia has her moments of cruelty and of blindness to the reality of her world. But the questions - the need to question - continues.

But there's also a lot of details that are just plain right, but without yelling their rightness.

There's the Pagan statues in the square, showing Serapis, Minerva, and Anubis - not just one culture, but the mingling of the Hellenic-Kemetic-Roman syncreticism of Alexandria. (The Christian churches also have appropriate details for the time period, but I find those less interesting.)

There's a lot of attention - not just in the extras, but in the main cast and minor roles - to have a huge range of skin tone, facial structure, and pretty much every other ethnic marker. Of all the details that make us believe that this is the great port city of Northern Africa, a meeting place of the Mediterranean with all that implies.

There's the fact that I could watch the movie and go "Yes, that's the right red-purple for post-Tyrian purple alternatives, for the Roman dignitaries." and "Oh, that *is* the right shade of achievable green for the period" and "Yes, that's a realistic blue" and so on and so forth. Very pleasing.

There's the little wax tabs on the ends of the scrolls indicating what scroll is which: a little historical tidbit that most people don't know. And there's the moment when they're reading from the New Testament, and it's a codex, rather than a scroll (also quite appropriate: the spread of the codex - the book - and the spread of Christianity are closely linked.) There are the moments of scrolls being tossed across and destroyed - but not tearing, because of course, they are either parchment or papyrus, neither of which tear readily.

There are the animals and the birds - local to the area (well, I had a moment with both the sheep and the horses, but I think they're both arguable.) But there's a glorious shot of what must be an ibis at one point.

And there's the fact of the Parabalani - the fanatics who start a great deal of destruction and misery, but who are also seen ministering to the poor, and tending to the dead (their historical origin.) They do have the one serious historical difference I had to peer at - they all wear very black black, which is historically a very difficult and expensive color to dye. But for cinematic reasons, it works, and better than muddy very dark browns, which would have been more likely, I think.

And interestingly enough, before distribution, the distribution company screened it at the Vatican, and they had no complaints - and made a few suggestions to improve several scenes. I like that. (http://www.scottholleran.com/interviews/alejandro-amenabar.htm mentions this, and has some other interesting bits from an interview with the director.)

Now, there is one interesting gender note here. This movie manages, despite having a female protagonist who is very firmly not romantically attached, to fail the Bechdel test, because there are no other women with speaking roles in the movie. (There are plenty in crowd scenes, and a few female slaves that she does not interact with directly.) That said, Hypatia's comfort with being female is very clearly conflicted: she refers to her fellow scholars and herself among them as brothers (i.e. "We are all brothers", not "You are my brothers"), and she is very clearly not happy with a female role in that society, and solves it by basically not seeing herself as female except in the most basic and external ways. Including menstruation, which is one of the legends about her that's continued in various sources.)

And yet, she is reliably referred to as "Lady" in a way that - if you know the Greek of the time - has an undertone of Kyria underneath all of it, the Lady set apart, separate, distinct, one-of-us-and-yet-different, the term used to one you respect, one who you see as above you in some way, whether as teacher or as mistress of the house or something else of the kind. Those of you familiar with some forms of Christianity will know the masculine of that: Kyrie, used to refer to Jesus. The 'Lady' in its repetition takes on a lot of that echo for me.

In short (or not so short) a very excellent movie, highly recommended. I should note that there's a fair bit of violence, though it mostly avoids being as gore-driven as historical events make it. (There are a lot of cut-aways and after-effects of injuries rather than moment-of-where-you-see-everything.) There's also one scene that may make anyone who's had a stalker deeply uncomfortable, and one scene of very uncomfortable sexual aggression: both have consequences in the story that are resolved in ways consistent with the story.'

Finally, I add three links for people interested in digging into the history, from author Faith Justice, who's written a novel about Hypatia, and therefore dug into the history in great detail. Part 1 is about some of the myths and legends that appear in the movie, Part 2 is about the historical background, and Part 3 is about the individuals mentioned by name in the movie.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

As I said, the history bits irked me a lot more than the Wiccan bits in this, though while I'm at it, I might as well detangle the errors in that.

I'm a relatively recent Bones watcher (I started this summer), and it is, I admit, the show (of the three I watch reliably) that I am most ambivalent about. However, I'm a cheerful cheesy forensic anthropology mystery reader, and I like the character-driven bits (well, I can mostly leave aside the shipping, but the other interactions make me smile.)

The following stuff below the cut is all about the history (and the religious issues and the practice of magic issues) in the "Witch in the Wardrobe" episode and does not mention any regular character interactions, so you can judge for yourself if you want to read spoilers.

[ETA 5/14/12: I've turned off comments on this post (despite the fact there are some awesome ones) because this particular entry is getting persistent spam (to the tune of 15-20 comments a day). I'm experimenting with seeing what disabling comments for a week or two will do.]

( Stuff below )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

Still thinking about the very fascinating conversations on my last post, about the questions of identity and disability. (Thanks all who commented, and the people who sent me private messages about bits of it.) The Dreamwidth side of the conversation has been particularly interesting: you should be able to view it via your LJ OpenID login if you like.)

Something that several people - both online and offline - have said to me, at least once a week, is "I'm amazed at how well you're handling this, given how deeply difficult it obviously is." Every time someone says that, I sort of have to blink, because .. really, that was not the calculation in my head at all. Here's my logic process

Here's the thing:
- This stuff appears to be on my dance card for the foreseeable future, whether I like it or not. I have found neither "Do not want" nor "Uninstall" buttons in easily accessible locations. Pity.

- Throwing a fit takes energy. Being pervasively grumpy about stuff takes energy. Talking about nothing else *but* the annoying foo is takes energy (and is boring, besides.)

- My religious, spiritual, and ethical foundation talks about of taking responsibility for my actions. It also talks about what I put out into the universe coming back to me. Given that I cannot, for the time being, remove the actual problem from the equation, what I can do is make choices that seem to be more in tune with what I'd like to have echo back into my life.

- Bringing as much skill and ambient knowledge to bear on the problem as I can seems to be the smart thing. Both because it might get me closer to things being better, but also because bringing skill and ambient knowledge into play tend to make me feel happy and competent.

- I have before me models of how to deal with long-term medical difficulties with grace and good humor (and recovery from the especially bumpy bits) that I find I wish to emulate.

(In particular, I am thinking of elisem, mrissa and synecdochic, but also of a range of other friends, some of whom are less public about the stuff they're dealing with. Also, I have the example of my father before me, and he was dealing with stuff that was far worse and clearly not going to end in the way any of us wanted.)

- Plus, given a choice about living my life in the world with grace and good humor, and as little grumpy as I can manage, or .. well, really most other options - why wouldn't I pick the grace and good humor option?

Ergo:
One aims for grace, good humor, skill, tempered by reason and reality. And when one cannot manage that, one goes and hides in a nice (metaphorical or physical) cave-equivalent until one is up for society again.

(One might also, perhaps, have been permanently warped by the combination of my particular variety of British parents and their emotional communication scope plus copious applications of the works of Miss Manners, especially when one slips into third person polite. But I like to think of that as a feature, mostly, rather than a bug.)

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

For driving up to Duluth and around bits of Lake Superior, I knew I wanted to put together a music mix for driving. (That it's one mix and not, say, three or four, tells you something about my levels of focus.)

I will warn you now: this post is best described as 4000 words of commentary on music and stories in my life, cleverly disguised as a conversation about a mix CD.

That I put together the mix in the first place, however, is a sign that I'm feeling enough like myself to resume the careful dance around music and Tale-the-Harp, and all the other pieces that go into that again, if very slowly and in tiny steps. (I have just done an important step in getting her properly tended and restrung today, go me. Ok. It involved sending an email, but the response is really helpful.)

I was going to say for people who are new to reading me that the music is all tangled and complicated and hard to talk about. But then I went hunting with DW's search function, and realised I'd talked about it. This post is from late 2008, and goes into the background Most of it hasn't changed much. Yet. But part of why I want to take some steps on progress is that one of the people who might be able to give me a hand is going to be out here in June, and it'd be nice to have something to work with.)

But I want to talk about the mix here, not Tale. It includes some stuff I'm going to talk about a lot (the first piece I ever fell in love with in AP Music Theory class my senior year - and not what you'd expect), a digression into Julian of Norwich and T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" and my father's gravestone, and a bit about Tristan and Iseult versus the medieval Arthurian mythos, and some other stuff that might get less comment, but point at some interesting sources.

( Music )

Let a world too tired to sing
Relearn its song

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

I avidly follow the Smitten Kitchen food blog, and she recently posted a recipe I knew I had to try - kale chips.

( Recipe! )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

So, I'm working on a series of booklists to encourage students to read and explore cool stuff over break. I'm trying to figure out which things to suggest online - they should be of interest to high school students and not likely to either overwhelm them or make their parents desperately unhappy.

Fiction already on my list:
- Shadow Unit
- The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making

Comics:
- Girl Genius
- Gunnerkrigg Court
- Leanne's Autumnside and Winterside ;)

Most of my reading tends toward the more-geeky side of the spectrum, and I'd like a wider variety.

Anyone got suggestions? General content blogs, blogs about books, etc. are particularly welcome.

(Also, in work-preening, I have just managed to get one of our sophmores hooked on papersky's books. Go us! (Jo for writing them, student for having taste, and me for putting them together, or something.))

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about what it would take to provide actual meaningful support for real health needs and issues, rather than just theoretical 'if you did this, you'd be healthier!' that tends to crop up in the news over and over again.

Discussion below is obviously more focused on my own health issues because I know those best (though there's some thinking about other issues and ways that things might be supported), but I'm also interested in general discussion from other perspectives. In particular, feel free to link this (in either its LJ or DW versions) elsewhere if that would be appropriate for the elsewhere: both entries are public for once to make that easier.

( My background, thoughts, and ideas that don't seem to be in common practice )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

Borrowing a page from keshwyn, am going to try a single entry with books I've read in 2010, and see if I can keep up with that better.

Total fiction: 64
Total non-fiction: 11
Total so far this year: 75
Total new to me: 33
Total re-reads: 42
(totals updated at the end of each month)

New to me
April
1) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks : Rebecca Skloot : the story of the woman whose cancer cells became the widely used and amazing prolific HeLa cell line, done with a lot of compassion and grace.

Re-read
April



Archive: new to me
January
1: Catching Fire : Suzanne Collins (2nd in the Hunger Games series)
2: Click here for murder: Donna Andrews (2nd in the Turing Hopper series)
3: Soulless : Gail Carriger
4: The Enchantment Emporium : Tanya Huff
5: Body Signs: From Warning Signs to False Alarms: How to be your own diagnostic detective : Joan Liebmann-Smith and Jacqueline Nardi Egan
6: The Women of Nell Gwynne's : Kage Baker
7: Every Patient Tells A Story : Medical Mysteries and the art of diagnosis : Lisa Sanders
8: The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine de Medici : Jeanne Kalogridis
9: Curse of the Good Girl : Rachel Simmons

February
1: Thyme of Death : Susan Wittig Albert
2: Witch's Bane : Susan Wittig Albert
3: Hangman's Root : Susan Wittig Albert (all three in the China Bayles series)
4: Damage Control: Women on the Therapists, beauticians, and trainers who navigate their bodies : collection of essays edited by Emma Forrest.
5: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party : Max Blumenthal.
6: Dust to Dust : Beverly Connor
7: Bright-Sided : How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America : Barbara Ehrenreich
8: Trick or Treat: Kerry Greenwood (I love this series: Australian baker solves mysteries!)
9: The Thief : Megan Whalen Turner
10: Queen of Attolia : Megan Whalen Turner
11: King of Attolia : Megan Whalen Turner
12: Tug of War : Barbara Cleverly
13: Bright Hair About The Bone : Barbara Cleverly
14: The First Year: Hypothyroidsm : Maureen Pratt

March
1) Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories : Connie Willis
2) Curse as dark as gold : Elizabeth Bunce
3) Blackwork : Monica Ferris
4) The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Kate Summerscale : a look at an infamous murder (of a 3 year old boy) in the 1860s in England.
5) Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang
6) A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia : John Piliger
7) Years of Rice and Salt : Kim Stanley Robinson
8) Oath of Fealty : Elizabeth Moon
9) Dinosaurs in the Attic : Douglas Preston
10) The Lyncher in Me: A search for redemption in the face of history : Warren Read (about the great-grandson of one of the people jailed for an infamous lynching in Duluth in 1920 and his discovery of that fact, and how it changed how he viewed his family.)

Archive: Rereads
January
1: Exile's Honor : Mercedes Lackey
2: Arrows of the Queen : Mercedes Lackey
3: The Art of Detection : Laurie R. King
4: Arrow's Fall : Mercedes Lackey
5: The President's Daughter : Ellen Emerson White (her President's Daughter series)
6: White House Autumn : Ellen Emerson White (her President's Daughter series)
7: Long Live the Queen : Ellen Emerson White (her President's Daughter series)
8: Long May She Reign : Ellen Emerson White (her President's Daughter series)
9: Locked Rooms: Laurie King
10: Bell, Book, and Murder : Omnibus of 3 Bast novels : Rosemary Edghill
11: Scent to her grave : India Ink
12: A Blush with death : India Ink
13: Glossed and found : India Ink

February
1: Ghost of a chance : Yasmine Galenorn
2: Harvest of Bones : Yasmine Galenorn
3: Legend of the Jade Dragon : Yasmine Galenorn
4: Heris Serrano (3 book omnibus): Elizabeth Moon
5: Serrano Connection (2 book omnibus) : Elizabeth Moon
6: Serrano Succession (2 book omnibus) : Elizabeth Moon
7: The bee's kiss : Barbara Cleverly
8: The palace tiger : Barbara Cleverly
9: Under a Mystic Moon : Yasmine Galenorn
10: Scattered Graves : Beverly Connor
11: Dead Hunt : Beverly Connor
12: Dead Guilty: Beverly Connor
13: A Brother's Price : Wen Spencer

March
1) Gibbon's Decline and Fall : Sherri Tepper
2) The Weaver and the Factory Maid : Deborah Grabien
3) Famous Flower of Serving Men : Deborah Grabien
4) Matty Groves : Deborah Grabien
5) Cruel Sister : Deborah Grabien
6) New Slain Knight : Deborah Grabien
(#s 2-6 are her folk songs and ghosts mysteries series, which I like a lot: each mystery is tied into a traditional folk song.)
7) Native Tongue : Suzette Haden Elgin
8) Judas Rose: Suzette Haden Elgin
9) Letter of Mary : Laurie King
10) Alone In the Kitchen with an Eggplant : edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

(I suggest reading the whole sequence before deciding what you want to do about it.)

The basic issue
New updates to LJ code are posted to the changelog community. A recent addition would have forced new users to pick a gender (male or female, no 'unspecified' option as currently available.) and a subsequent commit would have forced a choice of male or female if the user profile were edited at a later date. They've pulled the code for now, but there's more worth talking about - namely how code gets pushed live in the first place, and a particular aspect of the response from LJ's US general manager.

[I am assuming that my reading list gets why forcing binary gender is Not Cool, and why I think it's a damn stupid move, even though I personally am perfectly comfortable self-IDing as female without me going into that bit, right?]

synecdochic has a lengthy post about the basics here: http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/366609.html and elf has linkspam at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/288498.html .

There's fairly good reason to believe that the motivation for this change is better advertising targetting - obviously, not easy to prove, but it's about the only logical motivation for making this particular kind of change in this particular way.

( How this works, why I'm particularly irritated, etc )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.

[snagged from various people: the text before the cut is all standard for this one]

Step One - Make a post (public, friendslocked, filtered...whatever you're comfortable with) to your LJ. The post should contain your list of 10 holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything at all, from simple and fun ("I'd love a [fandom] icon that's just for me") to medium ("I wish for _____ on DVD") to really big ("All I want for Christmas is a new car/computer/house/TV.") The important thing is to make sure these wishes are things you really, truly want.

- If you wish for real possible things, make sure you include some sort of contact info in your post, whether it's your address or just your email address where Santa (or one of his elves) could get in touch with you.

- Also, make sure you post some version of these guidelines in your LJ so that the holiday joy will spread.

Step Two - Surf around your friendslist (or friendsfriends, or just random journals) to see who has posted their list. And now here's the important part:

- If you see a wish you can grant, and it's in your heart to do so, make someone's wish come true. Sometimes someone's trash is another's treasure, and if you have a leather jacket you don't want or a gift certificate you won't use -- or even know where you could get someone's dream purebred Basset Hound for free, do it.

You needn't spend money on these wishes unless you want to. The point isn't to put people out, it's to provide everyone a chance to be someone else's holiday elf -- to spread the joy. Gifts can be made anonymously or not -- it's your call.

There are no rules with this project, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just... wish, and it might come true. Give, and you might receive. And you'll have the joy of knowing you made someone's holiday special.

( My list )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (here) where there are comments.