sapote

1) Since I started listening to Pandora and trying to actually have feelings about music, I've noticed that the music I tend to like is a) almost never on the non-college radio at all b) is all over the TV shows I watch. My guess is that, first, I like music that works well in the background, and second, people who select music for sitcoms are probably basically college radio people. It's funny though because my basic criteria on Pandora is "songs where no one makes much noise or has many feelings at me."

2) ( I am going to talk about existential problems surrounding the approach of my birthday. I am also going to just go ahead and be hella pretentious, possibly in public. )

I enjoyed the fanservice very much. Also enjoyed sitting next to K, to whom I could flail madly at the screen every time the movie became a tragic love story. I am listening to the Arthur Conan Doyle stories on audiobook now. phnelt tells me not to be fooled, every bit of it is canon.

As of right now I have my dyed sheep arranged in pens in a perfect ROYGBIV. This took me four days to accomplish.

I just want to go home so that I can sort more sheep by color.

Re-edited to cut out rambling:

I've worked in, with, near, and around a couple of nonprofits in my life, as well as studying them academically. I am by no means an expert, but I know some experts. In my experience, communities, together, make the nonprofits within them work. Successful nonprofits are partners and collaborators with the communities they seek to serve.

Nonprofits are the amalgamation of a lot of peoples' work and time and love, and every last contributor deserves to have their resources and time respected, tended, and stewarded. Unfortunately, perfect management of resources, time, and labor is more of a goal than an accomplished fact for pretty much every nonprofit I've ever seen or been involved with. Also, I have yet to meet any small group ever that managed to check personality conflict and human drama at the door.

Listening to the concerns of contributors and participants has yet to be unimportant in any group enterprise I've ever seen ever.

That said, few things in the world piss me off as much as people whose basic grudge is that someone decided to do something and doing things is irritating, and it's awfully easy to write off all concerns as that kind of naysaying, which in my personal experience at least gets hazardous. I wish I had a perfect way of distinguishing between curmudgeonliness and less-than-perfect useful concrit.

I am extremely pleased with some of the AO3's legal work. I use and enjoy their archive. I don't volunteer or give money to the organization, but I am part of the community that it serves and appreciate the good work that it's done. I don't view being part of the community a nonprofit participates with as a one-way endeavor. I don't have any particular insight into the structure or operations of the AO3, any more than anyone else has seen, but we all seem to be talking about nonprofit structure and goals right now, and I am throwing some feelings out there.

Thank you, all of fandom, for the work you do to bring us all delight. Thank you, everyone who does imperfect work because there's no perfect work in this world and the alternative is not doing cool stuff; thank you, everyone who works and speaks and tries to make the imperfect a little better every time. I love being part of this community; thank you for being part of my life.

Yeah, Troy/Abed/Annie is the canon of my heart now.

So in a fit of mourning for laundry facilities, I ordered one of these washer plungers. I will report back! So far my primary finding is that it's not very ergonomic to use - the motion is much like a butter churn, so I'm thinking that finding a way to sit and put the bucket between my feet might be best.

The best thing about it is honestly the Emergency Essentials October Specials flyer that got mailed in the box with it. Did you know that Latter Day Saints are supposed to keep a year of stored food on hand? Here is a pamphlet about it! (pdf). I learned about this back when I read the Lathe Family blog regularly. Anyway Emergency Essentials is a company that seems to be founded with this mission partially in mind and they market a wide and I mean wide variety of shelf-stable foods to that end. Freeze dried ham chunks! Freeze dried marion berry! Nuclear winter getting you down? Good thing you laid in the ingredients for taco night in the fallout shelter! Sure, the Earth's skys have been blackened by a supervolcano, but this stir fry will never go bad!

I wish I could say that my interest is purely ironic but my adolescent fascination with survivalist novels surfaces pretty quickly. One moment I'm making distressed faces at the freeze-dried roast beef and the next I'm eyeballing closet space and wondering how much shelf-stable pancake mix I could fit in behind the shoe rack.

Anyway I will probably get back to the internet about the washer plunger eventually.

Okay, there's nothing like news comment threads to make me feel like a huge commie. Apparently now the given theory of wealth creation on the American right is that wealth is made by investors? I know that dollars can be invented by investors, but I honestly thought that everyone who thought about it would arrive at the theory of surplus labor eventually, given that there's a real world with real things in it in which the formula goes labor + land = not all dying of starvation.

I am trying to get my head around this in case I'm actually wrong, and I was never very good at Marxism anyway (there was a class offered in my department, but I didn't take it.) I guess in our current economic milieu in the US even farming is a complicated uniting of intellectual property, investment capital, and a large, underpaid body of wage labor, but I guess I still assumed that the wage labor was responsible for the actual potatoes? Hm. Thoughts, better-read friends?