Waiting till the last minute to see if we go to work on Monday.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

On National Public Radio, right now, there is a program on (insert female name here), Woods Hole oceanographer, and her "encounters with giant Pacific octopusses," to which tagline she repied, "And I have the hickeys to prove it."

Meaning, of course, from the suction cups where the octopus was holding on to her.

DAMN IT JAPAN! I CAN'T LISTEN TO THIS SHOW IN FRONT OF MY MOM! It's ABSOLUTELY innocent, talking about the sophistication of octopus intelligence and emotions, and ALL I CAN THINK OF ARE NAUGHTY TENTACLES!

See for reference, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_ ... n%27s_Wife]The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife and many later works. (Link NSFW despite historical significance)

- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

So, some time back I picked up Fourth Edition and figured I should find a good home for the Third Edition books I've got. Their condition varies wildly; the Basic Set I've got is almost falling apart, but most of the rest are in very good condition. In total, I've got around 40+ different books, so if there's something you're looking for, let me know.
--
"Remember, the truth is out there." —Johnny
"It is? Oh, I hope it doesn't maul anyone this time." —me

This is the story of The Cat Who Came In - And Decided To Stay.
It goes like this:
In the fall of 96-97, there was a scratching noise at the front door of my sister's house. A beautiful male Siamese cat walked in the house when my sister opened the door.  He looked around the house and my sister game him a meal. He ate, slept in like he owned the place, then asked to be let outside. This went on for a week. She attached a note to his collar stating what has been happening. There was a an answered note the next time the cat showed up. It read "I thought he belonged to you guys. He has been showing up here also". My sister was in a quandary at this point. I advised her to take the cat in, since it already regarded her as an owner, if not as a food source. My sister was hesitant about it, since she believed no owner would let a cat like him in the wild. She settled for feeding him outside in the inside yard, but not letting him inside. this went on for a month or three, until the cat dragged himself to the house with an infected wound in the butt. The size of the wound indicated a dog bit him. My sister took him to the vet and finally decided to take the cat into the family.
My sister's family led a discussion on what to name him. They finally settled on the name "Ming", because if his bright yellow coat. I thought of it as apt, because I thought it was short for "Ming the Merciless."
I'll explain further. Ming has the characteristics and disposition of what would you expect of a Siamese. He is smart and he gets bored easy. Unfortunately, when you dangles a piece of string for him or toy for him to go after, it's your hands he goes for with claws and teeth. I decided to arm myself with a pair of thick leather gloves. Ming upped the ante and really let the claws out. The furry Utahraptor ripped open the gloves trying to get at the flesh!.
He got along better with my sister though. I'ved seen them chasing each other in a game of hide and seek. But even she had call Ming "The Cat From Hell". It took 2 years for Ming to adjust to no more going out, but he accepted his fate in the end. Then fate took a cruel turn for Ming. My siser took him to the vet to get his teeth cleaned. The vet decided to place Ming under anesthesia, but something went wrong and Ming went into a coma. The managed to resuscitate him, but Ming lost his hearing!
This had a profound effect on him. He started to caterwaul in the middle of the night. He has a loud voice for a slender cat. The cries echoed throughout the house in the dead of night. My brother-in-law ended up throwing shoes at him to get him to shut up.
Ming had one endearing characteristic, despite his quirks. He was absolutely loyal to my sister. He did not leave her side when my sister was ill and was bed-ridden. My brother-in-law finally had to bring him to the kitchen after 3 days of not leaving my sister's side. There was also the time when they first tried boarding him when they went on vacation. They got a call from the boarding cattery that Ming refused to eat. They hurried back home and when they came to get him, he was so happy to see them that he started crying and purring at the same time. The family either left someone at the house with Ming or left plenty of food and water in the house for those short weekend strips after that. Or I would sit the house.
The vet figured that Ming was about 7 years old when he came in from the cold, though she warned that he could be much older than that. The kids where still in grade school when he came in and decided to stay.
Time went by quickly...too quickly at times. The kids now had either finished college or are in college. I had moved away. My sister called me to express here worry over Ming last year. His health had started to deteriorate. He was turning skinny and he started smelling bad. My sister wanted to put him down, but his appetite was still healthy. She felt that she was being selfish for wanting to keep him by her side for as long as possible. I pointed out to her that we don't put down members of the family just because they had become a burden.
Unfortunately, the time had come. My sister texted me this afternoon to tell me that she finally had to put Ming down. He couldn't stand anymore. She had been crying since last night. The funny thing is that Ming was trying to comfort her, even as his health was failing. She texted me later to say that the deed was done. And she had wept as bitterly as if she had lost a child at the vet.
I'ved been fighting tears all afternoon and wrestling whether it was all right to cry over the loss of a cat. I decided that if one of my literary heroes can cry over the loss of his cat, so can I!
Ming is being cremated and his ashes buried in the garden. I just hope that my sister remembers to tell him to go into the light when he did pass over. He might decide to come back as a ghost, though I think my sister wouldn't mind.
So ends the story of The Cat Who Came In - And Decided To Stay. Unfortunately, he decided to leave again to wander off, but that's okay. We will see him again, one of these days. 
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

Some of you may now I have a Dell Optiplex 360... if you don't, you do now.
It came with a single SATA 250GB hard drive, and Window 7 Pro 32 bit. (Love Dell for not supplying the 64bit version) Needless to say it got a little... crampted.  So I put a second hard disk on it. 500GB disk... That gave me a little room to 'live'.
However, my computer is getting a little full, so I went an bought a 2TB hard disk. Yes, I managed to find one despite the recent flooding in Thailand.
Back up everything to a external hard disk... check.
Any tips or suggestions before I go yanking my computer innards?

• General files... dump everything to external hard disk
• Thunderbird backup... use MozBackup
• Steam... ?
  
• CoX... dump to external hard disk
• Other games... dump to hard disk
• Other apps ... disk
• Word  ... disk
• Anything else
  

The thrill is gone.
I have been soaked, frozen, starved, ignored, overworked, and treated poorly. I am currently seeking other employment.
Wish me luck - I'm headed over to a local ISP to submit a resume package for their Network Technician position.
"No can brain today. Want cheezeburger."
From NGE: Nobody Dies, by Gregg Landsman
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5579457/1/NGE_Nobody_Dies

I was doing a Yahoo search looking for public domain photos of Spacesuits, Supertankers and Earth from orbit when I found this web page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w...ain_in_the_United_States
The above site has a lot more than just cartoons, but the cartoons caught my attention.
Most of the links found in the above point to wikipedia articles about the movie,
but many of the cartoon articles usually also have a link that leads to
a web site to download the film.
I noticed over a dozen Loony Toon cartoons as I went through the list and thought of Bob.
Since I was looking for cartoons anyway I also noted every Loony Toon link.
Below you will find a Links to Loony Toons, Merry Molodies, wartime cartoons that used Loony Toons characters.
I've also tried to include every public domain cartoon by artist that did Loony Toons characters.
Public Domain Cartoons.

----------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...n_and_His_Wonderful_Lamp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackiki_Wabbit

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...All_This_and_Rabbit_Stew

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Combers

http://en.wikipedia.org/w..._Boom_%281936_cartoon%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...as_Comes_But_Once_a_Year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Corny_Concerto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daffy_-_The_Commando

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_at_the_Zoo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Hare

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_Hare

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...Goopy_Geer_%28cartoon%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/w..._Travels_%281939_film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...e_You_Got_Any_Castles%3F

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Capers

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...27re_Dead_You_Rascal_You

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Jitters

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...d_Doctor_%281933_film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Man

http://en.wikipedia.org/w..._More_Time_%28cartoon%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantry_Panic

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...he_Plumber_%28cartoon%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Cinderella

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...i_Baba%27s_Forty_Thieves

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...Meets_Sindbad_the_Sailor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrap_Happy_Daffy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile,_Darn_Ya,_Smile!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snafuperman

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...ow_White_%281933_film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_%2743

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Kitties

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Duck_or_Not_To_Duck

http://en.wikipedia.org/w...abbit_Who_Came_to_Supper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackiki_Wabbit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Whoa
-------------------------------
There is a lot more in the list than cartoons, including some movies that I would never have thought of as being in the public domain.
By the way still I've not found the right Spacesuit that will work for my Superman Unbound website If anyone knows of a large collection  of public domain photos of futeristic spacesuit I'd like to see it.
hmelton
Merry Christmas

So apparently there has been a stuff up.

CoX new page tells us what happens in the Next Who will Die arc.

Mainly, who's dying.

Not saying who it is here due to spoilers, but go have a look if you want to know.

I've noticed a few FenWiki entries with infobox or text-body data mentioning something along the lines of "a Fen company, but not one of the usual suspects". Here's a thread to list some of those companies.

The list, so far, is bare-bones - company name, field of interest, and source material - unless I thought of something that might make for the germ of the core of the beginning of a plotbunny.

These shouldn't be added to the FenWiki as-is; they're only here to serve as suggestions.

Companies that aren't yet mentioned in Fenspace (but should they be?):

• Tyrell Corporation - makers of the Nexus-6 and other models of Replicant bio-roids (Blade Runner)
  
• Domesticon - Android servant manufacturers (Sleeper)
  
• Weyland Corp. - Terraforming & Evil Trans-Systems Giga-Corp. (Aliens) Becomes Weyland-Yutani Corp. (Aliens Vs. Predator)
  
• Cyberdyne Systems - Computer systems & software development (Terminator 2)
  
• Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems - Weird Red-Lectroid Science (Buckaroo Banzai)
  
• Planet Express - Delivery/Courier corporation (Futurama). (With JMC and HUD already active, we don't really need a third big courier... but there's always room for a niche player.)
  

• The Dictatorship of the Air - H.G. Welles Fen with megalomania, from the group exercising empirical control of the world in The Shape of Things to Come.
  
• Diplomatic Order Of Planets ("DOOP") - either what the Futurama Fen are called when the speaker wants to piss off the Trekkies in earshot, or what the Futurama Fen call the Trekkies.
  

So, late last spring I asked around in channel if anyone knew any good artists offering commissions. At this time, I honestly can't remember who pointed me at him, but I decided to hit up http://totmoartsstudio2.deviantart.com/.

The first picture I asked him for was a full portrait of one of my wife's PFRPG characters named http://www.flickr.com/photos/_/6496356265/player/. He did a pretty good job, I think. The only complaint I had was that I said her ears were *slightly* pointed, not full on Elf mode. But, other than that, it turned out wonderfully, and my wife loves it.

The second picture I commissioned in late July, on the subject of my main blaster, and her Praetorian counterpart. Unfortunately, with the artist's school and other delays, he wasn't able to work on it until just last month. Yesterday, though I got the finished product. Now, when people wonder what and Glorien Jr. look like, I can show them. Again, my only problem with this one is the ears. Both of them should have pointy ears, but just like the first one, I didn't catch it in the draft phase, so- oh, well. Its still an awesome picture. So big that flikr can't hold the full HD pic (16.3 meg .jpg!).

I like 'em, though. And I wanted to share.