Winners of the Miller & Lee Expanding Universe contest have been announced, and I recognize at least one name on there...

In celebration of the publication of Mouse and Dragon, the thirteenth novel set in their Liaden Universe®, authors Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are holding an Expanding Universe Contest! They are giving away 36 e-book copies of The Dragon Variation, a compendium of three core titles in the Liaden Universe, at Miller & Lee's Expanding Universe Contest.

The contest is open to anyone who has NEVER read a Liaden Universe novel. I know that many of you readers have read them, but if you haven't...well, these are the books whose pages I swear are soaked in crack, because I can't stop reading them. And it's not just me: at least four people to whom I loaned them report reading until the wee hours because they can't stop. saraidh, the pusher, can probably confirm more.

So click over, sign up, and maybe you'll get a fantastic free book.

If you've already read them, I'd like to note that the dead-tree version of The Dragon Variation costs only $12 and has drastically better production values than the Meisha Merlin compendiums.

If, like me, you find the prospect of this week's inevitable avalanche of frothing election coverage dismaying, you could program your browser to redirect everything to Bouphonia's Friday Hope Blogging archive. Or to I Can Has Cheezburger. Or both, at random.

Suggestions of positive, election-free online reading welcome.

Timing, she is everything.

Down by the airport, Northwest Airlines put up a billboard. Their motto is apparently "We bring you home." The picture shows the silhouettes of a parent and child, a ball in mid-air, and an airplane.

I'm not thinking of coming home. I'm thinking of five spots of paint on a garage wall. There are obviously not enough geeks at Northwest.

Someone at my office is collecting books for Operation Paperback. Many of them are requesting fantasy and sci-fi books (including series fiction like Dungeons & Dragons), mysteries, military fiction and history, Stephen King, thrillers, true crime, and "women's fiction," which I assume to mean things like Toni Morrison and Amy Tan. There are also a few requests for non-fiction, especially military history, biographies, self-help, and books on women in the military.

If anybody wants to unload some books, let me know and we'll coordinate.

Bwahahaaaa!



I score a -11, but it becomes a -16 if you choose to interpret "Doesn't like children" as "Uninterested in making her own." I don't think that purple nailpolish is any better than red, either. And I'm curious about how one manages to be properly dressed for breakfast (assumed to include hair and makeup) in the 1930s without wearing curlers to bed.

via Punkass Blog.

UPDATE: You can take the entire test for wives AND husbands!

Awesome photos of holding the sun.

I am damn lucky to know the people I do.

Case in point: Fresca

"Body-image advice for American women often sounds like advice to colonized people on how to assimilate better into the master culture: 
work harder to please, and you will be rewarded.



"And so we will, but it will take our valuable energy, and it will not be on our terms. That is a recipe for domestication, not liberation."

Sure, I could get thinner. I could put some thought into my wardrobe and get up an hour earlier to do hair and makeup. I could have an image. But those are hours of exercise and food obsession and wage-earning that I could use for something I feel is vitally important. Energy I could put into something that makes me feel good and productive, rather than helpless and ugly. Something that might make a difference in the long run.

* * * * *

An unrelated note via Making Light: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, because I have the feeling it will feed my thesis somehow.

We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.