**giggles**

There's a new blog on the Cheezburger network where people get posted while making very unintentionally silly faces...

Costume for Kaltenberg -- check!

After we'd seen large groups of 'Scots' at the medieval market here in Munich in early May, the Nazgul and I decided to go Scottish this year as well. All the more as the Nazgul found these forum threads where these hypercorrect and very German medieval costuming purists mocked the Scots fashion and/or earnestly demanded they ought to be banned from any serious event for the sake of historical correctness.

Well, we don't go to that sort of serious event with historical correctness anywhere, so we went ahead with the Ren Faire fashion type costumes that were generically influenced by this page the Nazgul had found.

Yesterday, I did my costume, and as the Nazgul popped by to lend me a tool that she has and I don't, she took pictures afterwards.

Here's a bonus one with surprise!ninja!cats. I honestly didn't realised they were there when I stood there. Mephi's under the chair in the first one, too, which you can only see if you know it...

Paywall fail

Putting the online edition of what may have once been the most prestigious newspaper on the planet behind a paywall (hoping that old reputation would finally make people shell out the money) seems to have failed abjectly.

Not only does nobody read it, the articles can no longer be deep-linked, quoted with a reference, or listed on the page of the freelancers that wrote them. Signals can no longer be boosted. Behind that paywall, a newspaper goes back to being what it was before the advent of the internet: - a monolithical entity talking to itself, instead of part of the worldwide web of professional news sources and bloggers that process and amplify breaking news and background information. And yes, each of us is a part of that.

Only The Times no longer is.-

Are we missing it at all? Will we quote it again when it takes down the paywall?

I never quoted it much; I recently tried to because that's where quote from the snarky statisstics professor came from, but when I got to the paywall, I simply turned back and found something else to link to. Cursing the paywall as I went, and writing off the Times as a potential news source...