Today I cleaned all the things.

[sofiaviolet]

And by that, I mean I Organized All The Books. Next step is to get them into LibraryThing.

Ellie suggests that the best place to hole up during the zombie apocalypse is a strip mall with a home improvement store and a Super WalMart that share an interior wall. Then you have materials for fortifications from the home improvement store, plus food and guns from WalMart. Just knock a hole through the interior wall and you're golden.

But if you have to choose, pick the WalMart and use random merchandise to block the doors. Ellie suggests filling shopping carts with slashed-open diapers and watering them to create a kind of sandbag thing.

• staranise: Notes towards a new way of doing art

  I grew up reading books in which an Artist of whatever stripe writes a book or sings a song or unveils a painting which is so brilliant and transcendent, everyone in the vicinity is deeply touched, is moved, has the same thought or feeling or experience. After a while, I began to think--really? What about the people who wanted a soap opera instead? What about the people who are more intent on getting to the snack table? What about the people who disagree? Who don't think it's good art?

• elspethdixon: I debated posting this at all, because I have nothing to do with Vividcon and am not a vidder, but..

  For some people, contacting relative strangers to ask for something is paralyzingly intimidating, and it is a real accessibility issue. Obviously, the rest of the world can't magically know what people need without our ever having to say it, but you can make it easier to ask. If nothing else, you can make it clear that requests for help are expected and welcomed, and not impositions.

• toft: oh fandom

  I've found recently that reading fandomsecrets makes me happy. I mean, obviously there's some stuff there that's depressing and icky, but there's also so much lovely stuff there. I love being reminded of the hugeness and diversity of fandom - books and shows and games I've never heard of, people being fans in so many different ways. It's nice to feel part of something so big, sometimes. I love being reminded of the fact that people are weird, and ship themselves with different people, and find random things sexy, and find inspiration in places that other people might think are stupid but fandom is a place for those people.

• charmian: More on Interop vs. Site Culture Preservation

  Huh, it seems a lot of people are quite interested in the issue, as there are sixty comments (admittedly, a lot of those are mine, but anyway.)
  
  Some highlights:

• thingswithwings: A Podfic Travelogue

  As general_jinjur wrote so beautifully in her recent post, podfic is a strangely (and wonderfully) intimate medium, not just for podfic artists but also for listeners – I listen to podfic in all sorts of places and in all sorts of moods and for many different reasons (to cheer up, to get involved in a story, to pass the time, to fall asleep, etc) and in all those situations listening to podfic makes me feel like I have a compatriot, a co-conspirator who comes along with me and helps me get through the difficult walk or the boring hours spent photocopying or the insomnia that shows up some nights. And in this case, podfic was a part of my trip, part of the scenery I looked at and part of the ground I walked on; so here is a travelogue by podfic.