My computer, which I have had for three years, now runs Windows 8, is much faster, has lost all the OEM gunk, and is fun. iTunes works as well, I have to see whether paint.net is enough or whether I need to get PaintshopPro back, and GTalk runs in Pidgin which the old setu refused to do.

What I am missing is all the fonts; but I do have them on my previous computer, so when I get that out in order to screenshot the Malko!Vert version of Les Mis for the Thénardiers, I'll get my fonts from there. I cannot possible live without Gill Sans!!

... as this is working, mostly. Dreamwidth isn't really responsive the way sites can be for iPads and the like, so logging into it takes some aiming before I hit the right spots.

That sounds slightly dirty...

Anyway, this is the first post to DW from my new iPad, which is neither new nor mine.

Presently writing part 3 of 'Bag of Cats', I am very much amused by the fact that for the thesaurus/spellcheck in Chrome and Google Drive (one would assume it is the same?), 'Midgardian' is very much a word.

Firefox thinks otherwise. But then, Forefox thinks that 'Firefox' isn't a word, either...

So, as you my dear flist know, I'm from Germany, and I sometimes dredge up background stuff about European politics because I find it important.

This is my journal, and I get to write about what I find personally important, anyway.

So I'm going to explain about Stuttgart. There are several possible explanations of why Stuttgart of all places, and they happen on an IC and an OOC level both.

Spoilers are a given, as this is a srs bsns post If you haven't seen the movie yet and don't want to be spoilered -- avoid!!

So, a little multiple choice test.

Why did Joss Whedon pick Stuttgart?

a) As a very obscure slur on Loki's very wide scope of sexuality in Norse myth?
b) He stuck a pin in a map of the world?
c) Because of an Art Deco train station?

( OOC Answers )

Why did Loki pick Stuttgart?

a) Because of engineering?
b) Because of a dangerous error in judgement?
c) Because he always wanted to pluck out an eyeball to the strains of Schubert's Rosamunde?

( IC Answers )

The Guardian about how superheroes are the modern equivalent of anthrompomorphic gods as an archetype of the human condition, and provide all the tropes of the narrative of everybody's life.

Taking that into account, I might find the costumes less silly tomorrow. After all, the classical gods wore silly things as well, like winged sandals and tridents and the like.

I just learned a useful new word: 'paracosm', which means an imaginary world that's throroughly thought through. Seems we fans and RPers aren't sad nerdy escapists any more. Quite on the contrary -- the future, that article says, belongs to those that can imagine it.

Well, we can, and we do.-

japanologist pointed me to a little free program called Screamer Radio -- it's basically just a radio player for internet radio stations. It has more stations than you can possibly hope to listen to in one lifetime (and in more languages than you can possibly hope to learn), but if it doesn't have one specific station (like Heart FM from Cape Town which japanologist had been recommending on his Google+, which started my search for a way to get at its stream), it will accept an URL for the stream and open it.

Now I can listen to my beloved Klassik Radio again, can follow up all sorts of recommendations the world over, tune in to the BBC when essayel tells me about the interesting stuff they're talking about via IM, and yes, listen to Heart FM, which is really the ideal mix of upbeat music for a grey weekend in July. I can listen to celticangel76's show when it is on, and get my dose of Bhangra and fast-talking Hindi from BBC Asian Network. I can have news in Finnish and were-Balkanese party music from Ljubljana.

They have re-invented the dear old shortwave DX radio, and I can have one for free!!

Internet love letter to a blogger.

Warning: the blog itself is EXTREMELY NSFW, text-wise!

I WANT MY THUNDERSTORM NOW ALREADY!!!

It is just sitting up there in the sky, doing nothing. There are clouds, it is windy, but otherwise, it's just too darn hot.

Lucifer is lying by the french windows again, listless.

Today at work, the network fainted five times from the heat (some hardware in a node in Loonybin Village kept turning itself off), and the actual hardware under my desk (Compaq computer made in 2000 and running Win98, essentially a dumb terminal for the virtual XP computer that lives on a big server in a data centre somewhere beyond the node in Loonybin Village) spontaneously restarted itself twice.

And when I got home, the graphics board on my big laptop needed a special invitation to switch over to windows, as it sometimes does when it's too hot; but the cooler pad I bought on bigfluffball's advice is taking care of it very well now, so there's no danger of it fainting from the heat now it's running properly.

ETA at half past nine: It came! It finally came, and now is cooling down nicely. Erm. Not that way.-

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...