Dream with Our Eyes Open

I'm not even 100% certain why, except that almost 40 years after they first recorded it, Cheap Trick could still do this song (with a sing-in from host Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates):

This is from a web video series called "Live from Daryl's House." I'm actually spending time watching a lot of videos lately, mostly music of some sort.

Some SFF/pop/media website had a yearly tournament bracket feature where they pitted characters against each other and had someone (sometimes someone pretty good) narrate how it would have played out, at least for like the final four. Readers vote to advance their preferred opponent to the next round. The tournament featured all kinds of characters: I know Ged from Earthsea showed up one year, for example.

I cannot for the life of me recall where it was, and it's making me nuts. I *think* I saw Gideon Nav in it last year, and I'm re-reading Gideon the Ninth, which I had not read at the time. I have a vision of the little stylized image of her with her cropped red hair, shades, and big honkin' sword, from the site. So now I want to see who she was slated to fight and how it worked out.

Anybody recognize what I'm talking about? If so, can you point me to the site? I usually can find this stuff for myself, but I'm getting NOWHERE.

A New Study Shows How Mushrooms Could Save Bees. Yes, Mushrooms.

Neuro-Wonderful: Ask an Autistic Video Channel by Amythest Schaber

If something is tagged fandomedit, where fandom is (duh) a fandom, does it refer to photo-edits (such as finding a photo that looks like a character and then editing the photo somehow)?

Or am I totally off base, and if so, what does actually mean?

Damn, I keep missing people's (and communities') posts on LJ/DW! I can't really figure out why, either. They have both slowed down enough that it should be easy to click through a day's posts.

I think part of the part of the problem may be the behavior of the things I have as feeds on the two sites. Sometimes they won't post for a day or two, and then they'll dump a lot at once. The result is I'll be flipping through my reading list/friends feed and hit something I know I've read already, and then I'll stop. And in some cases, I've read it already at the source blog or site itself (like Scalzi's Whatever) instead of on LJ/DW.

I'm going to try to do a better job of combing though these things more carefully. I keep missing beta requests on Fan Grammarians as well as posts on things like the Weiss v. Saiyuki writing challenge comm.

There's a new DW perfume comm called smellsgood. Generally, I assume that I can't wear most of what will be discussed, but given my reaction to the recent rash of perfumery reviews going around (rapt attention), I'm sure I'll enjoy what's posted anyway.

I have two new baby dragons! One is very flashy, the other rather goth:

They're both of a breed called Tundra.

With what's happening in my life lately, playing Flight Rising is one of the few things I feel like doing. I have two more clutches of eggs incubating, so more hatchlings to come.

Two very different things, in fact:

SF critic james_nicoll lives to stir up his readers. Today, he asked "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Fantasy or SF?" The ensuing discussion, both serious and snarky, is most enjoyable.

Writer Madeline Ashby addresses a topic of great concern to a number of us: Periods, and how to write them. I like the cut of her jib. (Warning: very frank talk about female body functions.)

"[I]t seems to be an issue with alter.net, which is run by Verizon."

And if I try searching for recent messages online about Alter.net and communications problems, I find, for example, this: "The host google-gw.customer.alter.net (alter.net is part of Verizon network) is experiencing horrific packet loss, sometime upwards of 50%." That means that along this route, communications on the Web, which is broken up into a stream of chunks called "packets," is being compromised not only by the loss of the packets themselves, but by the fact that if the sending server (the host) knows that a packet has gone missing, it will re-transit the packet, and so traffic bulks up again.

It seems that playing Youtube videos is where the major slowdown is seen most often. There were several recent postings at various message boards about this issue.

I tried doing a "traceroute" myself, and yes, I can see where the communication runs through Alter.net.

On the other hand, response this morning is pretty sprightly. Either things have improved, or there are just fewer people online (and downloading chunky stuff like videos) at 8:00 a.m. U.S. ET!

So yeah, if your connection to DW runs through Alter.net, you may be seeing (or have seen - let's be optimistic) this issue, and if not, you likely won't.

In response to a comment on a Fandom Grammar draft, I have discovered there is an HTML character entity for a thin space, which is useful for things like setting nested single/double quotation marks.

It's