Passing For Normal

1. I just donated towards the Good Law Project's trans rights fund. I urge you to do likewise.

(tags:law CrowdFunding uk transgender rights )

2. Bigots who hate one group increasingly hate all of them. (bigotry now correlated 70% with conservatism)

(tags:bigotry society USA psychology )

3. Gow long does it take to create a new habit?

(tags:habits psychology )

4. The complex origin story of domestic cats: Research points to Tunisia

(tags:cats prehistory archeology )

5. Edinburgh's second home council tax charge raises £2.7m

(tags:housing tax edinburgh )

6. The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

(tags:ux socialmedia )

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017001/Chinese Firm Used Fake UN Website to Target Students: Xinhua

Students were offered fake U.N. internships and awards for a fee, using copied websites and forged documents to appear legitimate.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017001/Chinese Firm Used Fake UN Website to Target Students: Xinhua

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017005/In China, a Sharp Divide Between Journalism and the Ivory Tower

A controversy about authorship of an influential magazine article has highlighted the difficulties faced by journalists and academics when they try to work together.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017005/In China, a Sharp Divide Between Journalism and the Ivory Tower

Hi there! We've still got a few days left of nominations (they close on 27 April 2025 11:59pm EDT); thanks to everyone who has nominated so far. Your mod team has a couple of questions and comments at this point.

To the nominator of Satisfied—do you have a specific version or performance in mind, or would you rather leave it as a general tag?

We've caught a couple of incidents where we incorrectly rejected a nomination. (Sorry!) If you have made a nomination that you think should have been accepted but you don't see it in the tag set, please comment on this post or get in touch with the mod team.

Also, if you commented with your songs/videos on the nominations post, please make sure that you also nominated them on AO3, or else they won't be in the tag set.

This year, we received a number of nominations of short videos that combined both music and dialogue. We've decided to accept them into the exchange this year, but going forward, we're considering a rule that any video has to be at least 50% music by runtime in order to be accepted. What do you think?

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Script: Tom DeFalco

Plot: Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan

Pencils: Paul Ryan

Inks: Danny Bulanadi

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The Collector has come to add Lyja’s baby to his collection.

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( Read more... )

Happy birthday, damnmagpie!

Clicky!

Also, I meant to say re: the utilities that you are all the best and I absolutely love you :)

(Still need to call National Grid and still don't wanna.)

Good night, good evening, good afternoon, good morning!  (Choose your time zone appropriate greeting as desired.)

Discussion time:  When I was in school, I was very much a "one story writer".  Every now and then, I might switch to another story if the first one hit a block, but generally, I never wrote multiple things at the same time.  After college, I continued very much in this same way, where I wouldn't even let myself think about writing something other than what my current project was (especially when it was exchange related and therefore time sensitive).

And then one day I took an arrow to the knee, I decided to write something besides my main project out of spite for myself and my arbitrary Highlander-esque "there can only be one" rules.

This did help relieve some of the stress of "I'm not writing AND I'm also mad at myself for it, so I'll not write even harder."  It also created a new issue where I have so many stories started but relatively few of them actually finished.

Which is a very long-winded way to ask:  what about y'all?  Do you tend to stick to one story/project until it's finished?  Do you hop from one to another depending on your mood/brain capacity/due date?  If you have multiple stories running at once, is there an order that you follow for when one gets its turn?  If you write one at a time, do you ever have times where other ideas try to muscle in on your time, and, if so, what do you do with them?

1. I had another work from home day. I'm about halfway caught up with my email and fully caught up with teams. Tomorrow I've got a couple meetings, so I've got to go in to the office, but I might work from home again on Thursday to finally catch up on everything.

2. When Carla was out today she stopped at Uncle Tetsu's, a Japanese cheesecake chain. They have a sakura cheesecake right now and we had some after dinner tonight and it was sooooooo good. I normally prefer New York style cheesecake to the Japanese fluffier style, but this was really good consistency and the sakura flavor was amazing.

3. I finished playing The Plucky Squire. Overall it's a pretty fun game, but it is not just a straight action adventure game. There are a bunch of (frankly not that fun) mini games for the boss fights and stuff where you have to play other styles of games and that is not what I signed up for. Like for one character's boss battles you play a Mike Tyson style boxing game, for another it's a rhythm game, and for the third it's a Puzzle Bobble type. Then there are some stealth sequences where you have to sneak past enemies who can kill you instantly if they sense you, and if they sense you there is no way to run to escape, even if you're close to a place you could get away. You're just instantly dead. And the final battle is a space shooter type. The good thing is that if you die in a boss battle you can sometimes restart partway through, not all the way at the beginning, and the stealth sequences have multiple checkpoints and you'll respawn there rather than back at the beginning. But I would still have preferred not to have that "variety" in my action adventure game. Still is a fun game, though. But if you suck at those types of games it might ruin it for you.

4. I finished editing all my Disney Japan pics, so hopefully I can get the last day's posts written up later this week.

5. Jasper is just so handsome.

When I last left off, we had just checked out the big gift shop at the Fantasy Springs hotel and were exploring the land while waiting for our return time for the Peter Pan ride.

( More DisneySea adventures! )

Title: 'тоска'
Fandom: Original Poetry
Rating: G

( тоска )

Inugami appeared in a hilarious way in chapter 3! Chouji calls him Wan-chan lmao. He's a puppy but he's trying to communicate through meows with an ally cat. Aw, Inugami's upset that Sako left Shishitouren...

It kinda sucks right now that attributes are so important but it's hard to make a full balanced team with so few characters out. The SSR versions are barred behind a low draw rate so you have to make due with one or two SSRs, some S's and the rest A's to split across attribute teams. I have one full same-attribute team but it's not balanced right, I think it's missing a striker and has 2 supporters, plus multiple A's.

Did Inugami tackle Sako?? 🤣 Oh, he though he was trying to kill himself by jumping......

This game made me realize Tsugeura speaks in Kansai-ben, guess I didn't pay attention when I watched the anime.

So Chouji challenged Umemiya, Wanijima challenged Chouji/Togame, then Inugami challenged Sako (who challenged Hiiragi), then Sako told Chouji to challenge him...oh Shishitouren.

It must've been really hard for Kanuma to leave Arima to do what Wanijima asked of him. Man, this group is so dumb, they should've done their research before attacking Shishitouren. 😅 To be fair the big brother didn't know until last minute so the younger brother is the one making him look stupid.

First time seeing Chouji look like that and getting excited! YEAH show Kraken their mistakes!!!

Wow, I got x2 of the highest ranking film rolls, 1 highest ranking notebook and 8k of the green coins for ranking in PVP!

I ended up buying the special pass to support the game and because I'm greedy and want more stuff haha.

I tried to pull for the new event Kaji but got SSR Hiiragi (which is fine), I'll just keep trying.

The chat with Kiryuu about crane games when Sakura compliments him is cute, almost made me ship it. <3 I guess I kinda of already do, in a polyam way? And the chat about games reaching end of service is too relatable. T__T

Oh, I reached the level cap at 38. :O So that's what the yellow coin shop is for... Looks like you get them in place of exp for mission rewards etc, wonder how long it'll take to get 10k.

The chat with Kaji about how the movie he borrowed from Enomoto on the rainy day wasn't as funny as usual because he had no one to watch it with. And encouraging Sakura to spend time after school with his classmates. And you can choose to have Sakura say "I-I'll...try...inviting them." :') Ugh Kaji is a great mentor.

The biggest pain about this game is matching the scene cards to the characters, some are character exclusive, some are attribute exclusive and some are card exclusive. Sometimes I'm gonna need to really sit down and save my parties. I didn't have enough to form full balanced parties before but I might now. And I need to level up more A and S scene cards to make up for some of my SSR scene cards being so exclusive... (You still get some stats if you mismatch a card but I don't know if it's worth it??)

I mentioned that last night the truck very suddenly started sputtering and running extremely rough, and the check engine light came on.

We took the truck over to a local auto parts store to get a read on the code for the check engine light. They said the most likely culprit was an ignition coil, causing misfires in one of the cylinders. That was one of the potential things I'd seen on the list of possible causes for the rough idle. Pretty firmly on the lower end of the middle of "how fucked are we," so that was a relief. (So glad it wasn't "fuel pump" money.)

So we took it to the usual shop we use. They said they wouldn't be able to get to it tomorrow, and they would have to do their own diagnostic rather than relying on the code, which was fine. They'd give me a call tomorrow morning to let me know the results of their diagnostic and talk costs and recommendations and such.

Mom loaned us her second car, since Taylor doesn't typically go in to the office anymore, so we could get around until then.

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Turned out Jaspurr was at the vet (same vet that we were at yesterday) for surgery. :( Poor boy had a lump on his abdomen, so they were removing and biopsying it.

Got the excellent news that it was just a fatty lump, and did not need to be biopsied!

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I was just about to take a nap, when the auto place called. They were able to get it in today (initially I was told it was the main tech's day off, so couldn't get it looked at until tomorrow; apparently someone else was available today!)

They did not think it was the ignition coil, they thought it was the spark plugs. They wanted to replace the spark plugs plus do an injector system service. I misheard the initial quote and thought it was super high, like four figures; it was not, haha. It was within the general range I'd been expecting. (Which I wasn't *delighted* to pay, but when I balked at my misheard price, he offered a discount to bring it down slightly, ha.)

They got the work done by the end of the afternoon, but when he called back he said the spark plugs hadn't fixed the issue... because it turned out it was the ignition coil. *Facepalm* (They say that the coil was fine when they tested it earlier, because they swapped a good coil for the potentially bad one, and the problem persisted, which was why they'd ruled it out; maybe the coil and a spark plug both failed?)

They replaced the spark plugs and the ignition coil. He gave us the coil at-cost (which was cheaper than we could have gotten it if we'd bought it ourselves; we priced them at the auto parts place when we got the code read) and didn't charge any extra labor for it. He also completely comped the system service that they did, so the total wound up only being $14 over the original estimate. In exchange for the discount, he just asked that we leave a nice review, which I did.

The truck is now running fine! It might be even smoother than it was prior to the problem starting last night; it hadn't been having issues that made me want to take it in, but occasionally a little roughness that I wasn't noticing this evening. So perhaps that coil had been on the way out for a while.

Not the best timing in the world, and I spent a good part of last night and this morning fighting through the chest pain and horrible nausea and prickling scalp of massive fucking anxiety, but I'm glad it's sorted out, that it didn't happen at a *worse* time.

In learning that I'm severely anemic and might need a transfusion (we were talking about hepatitis C and transfusions in micro) he offered me a pint of his blood if we were a match (we are) Hopefully I can avoid the transfusion but that was touching and I appreciate it and I wish all of us could have empathy like that.

I forgot to say yesterday that I was very sad to see Pope Francis passing. I grew up Catholic. He was the first Pope I actually liked. I thought he was a very good man. But since I waited a day I can add how much of a shit stain Marjorie Taylor Greene is as she's been vocally celebrating an 'evil man's' passing. People like her make me hope there IS an afterlife... I just hope that the church doesn't swing back ultraconservative again. Regardless, RIP Pope Francis, we're poorer for your loss.


Rocket is home. He looks good except his face is swollen. I think they were pulling a lot of ticks off him (so much for that 30$ tick medicine) He's already insisting on going out so good wishes for him everyone.


So fannish 50 I had something else in mind, can't remember what it is and now I'm doing this because I had planned to do this last week and forgot. Every so often I like to share the newish stuff I find on YouTube in way of fan creations. look at some of this cool stuff. Fandom is really embracing the music and animation side of things. Prior to this all we had was AMVs (which are lovely too) but I haven't see this level of music since the filk music from the 80s.

I'm in love with this and jealous too but then again I'm not an artist so no one is going to dub my art but I love it.


Axel is a fan voice actor known for doing Arackniss and someone did some more music for him.


Oh geez has a lot of music


And it's a part of this, over an hour of fan music for The Owl House


I might have shared this before but this Gravity Falls/Hazbin Hotel mash up is delightful


And I'm pretty sure this was shared but it popped back up and I love it.