I will not be crossposting anything to Facebook or Twitter. I'd ask that anyone on my flist, or reading my public posts, extend this same courtesy.

I am also going to try to figure out how to disable commenting here, and allow commenting only on DW. (I know this is not hard to do, I just to have to take the few minutes to work out the mechanism).

As noted earlier, I have DW invite codes if anyone wants them.

Hmmm. It is a little disappointing that, when I have a chance to read a couple of non-school books for the first time in ages, I end up with one very poor murder mystery, and one beautifully written litfic novel which is absolutely packed with racefail, genderfail, agefail, and stereotyping of internet users ...

But at any rate, it gives me a chance to warn y'all away from Richard Powers' Generosity, in which a mysteriously fascinating young Algerian woman attracts the fetishistic attention of all who encounter her, finally serving the all-important purpose of getting two middle-aged white academics into bed with each other on account of they both really want to sleep with her, and eventually flees back to Algeria to be Truly Happy With Her People, leaving all the white folks Sadder But Wiser.

Along the way, it may astonish you to learn that Kids These Days, they don't use proper grammar and spelling! and are only interested in cheap entertainment! and understand neither art nor morality (although now and then you see a kind of alt-reality peeking through the narrative, in which the young woman's age peers are actually the only people who treat her like a human being).

And yeah, there are interesting musings on genetics and temperament, but the whole construction of personality thing was much better handled in his last novel, without all the fetishing.

Sigh.

In spam today:

FORGIVE MY INDIGNATION IF THIS MESSAGE COMES TO YOU AS A SURPRISE AND MAY OFFEND YOUR PERSONALITY.

I dunno. There's something about this which cheers me up a bit.

Happy birthday, rachelmanija!

Happy birthday, loligo!

Happy birthday, miriammoules!

Okay, I am pretty sure that someone on the flist (tree_and_leaf? angevin2?) posted some incredibly scary pictures of statues of twentieth-century "saints", all weirdly toned and zombie-like -- "I am Martin Luther King, and I've come to eat your braaaains!" kind of thing. And I wanted to send the pictures to some friends, but now I can't find them.

Am I confused, and this was maybe on Ship of Fools instead?

If any of you remember posting such photos (or, in fact, seeing them), do let me know ...

Happy birthday tree_and_leaf!

This is a good day for birthdays, one of my best friends in RL has her birthday today also.

I left the hospital early last night, because no matter what room I went to, the only thing anyone could say was, "Did you hear that Michael Jackson died?", and it didn't seem like a chaplain was really necessary for that conversation. When you're in step-down with people just coming out of surgery, and the only thing they can say to you is, "Did you hear that Michael Jackson died?", you know the situation is just going in a particular direction and there's nothing you can do.

(Yes, in a textbook world this would open the door to all sorts of discussions about death and grief, but in the real world it just opens the door to discussions about Thriller and how his kids may have been conceived. And I'm just not the person you want for that.)

I am sad that there will be no more Allan King films ever.

Requiescat in pace. He did good work.

"Your watch will obey you like a good child."

Leaving aside the understanding of what constitutes a "good child," I had never thought that the plague of disobedient watches was really a great problem of the modern world. Always something new to learn.