The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by tavella:

Actually, my favorite version is that the electronic machine prints out a paper ballot which the voter then feeds into the machine that counts it. It combines the good qualities of an electronic ballot -- self checking, prevents double votes, insufficiently filled out circles, et al -- yet keeps unity between the receipt and the ballot. Separating the receipt and the ballot is going to lead to a lot of court challenges; the question of whether a recount of the receipts is valid, to start with. They aren't the ballots, can you really use them to recount?

Actually, the inability to do complex villians is the fatal flaw of the Potter books for me. The good guys are nicely complex and modulated, but the villians are so one dimensional they are incredibly dull. Draco and co are especially tedious, if only because they spend so much time on screen. I wouldn't call Harry's family villians, precisely, but they are boring in the same way.

There are occasionally tiny flickers of nuance -- I don't know which book it was in, but at least one point there was a brief moment where Harry's aunt seemed somewhat human instead of a cartoon, while talking about her sister -- but not enough to keep me interested.

She mentioned elsewhere that it's odd writing, because she can't say anything about the stuff she does for her actual job, so she ends up writing about conveys and cats. That's obviously going to leave gaps. And she's presumably being somewhat vague about any military details that might be useful to others.

My impression was that she wasn't supposed to be in combat -- she was with the governor and his staff, who also wouldn't be in combat or the front. They just got cut off. So there's nothing strange there.

And, basically -- I've read quite a way back in her livejournal, and she's not notably self-dramatizing. Kind of cranky and bitchy, maybe, but not melodramatic. And while the encounters I've had with her elsewhere in fandom haven't been substantial, she's never been nontrustworthy that I encountered. So, if someone has a history of being honest, I figure I owe them the courtesy, so to speak, of believing they are still honest.

Not that that means that other people can't be doubtful.

Add me to the list of people that have run into ginmar into other contexts. There's certainly been elaborate hoaxes in fandom, but most of them fail under even a little skeptical questioning; the crazy pair that lead the Sam portion of LOTR fandom on a merry dance last year were already revealed as hoaxers a year or two back, it's just that some people have an enormous need to believe. This would be an amazingly consistent, years long hoax requiring a collaborator actually in theater. I just don't see it as very likely.

The voice sounds authentic, the lists of wants sounds authentic, and 90 percent of the blogging has been about very mundane things. It sounds very like the livejournal of another fandom friend of mine in Iraq. And the arguments about the language, et al, being off really do remind me of the people who were convinced Salam Pax was fake because he sounded 'too westernized'.

The only thing that surprises me is that it's not friendslocked -- especially for someone in MI, you'd think she'd be aware of how much trouble she'd get into.

I can't think of anything particularly traumatic in regards to it, though. Needles in general, yes, there was the Really Traumatic IV in sixth grade (blood kept backing up it and once it slipped right out of the vein and puffed my arm up like a balloon), but I was already not having a very good reaction to having my blood taken before that. I remember my mom commenting about how gray I was coming out after having blood taken a few months before that. It was the year of Much Illness.

I've only been a blood donor once, which I do feel guilty about -- though I've also never had to have blood. The problem is I hyperventilate even when just having blood for blood tests taken.

Though I made an interesting discovery last time I had blood samples taken. After a long and agonizing period of trying and failing to find a usuable vein in the elbow, she used the back of my hand. And no nausea, no hyperventilating. So I wonder a bit if it's not my dislike of needles, but an actual physical reaction -- even having the inside of my elbows patted to bring up the veins makes me nauseous.

I have to agree with Brooks; if the bolts were indeed 'borrowed' by another team, it looks like something a lot closer to sabotage than an accident.

I'm wondering if instead, it was never bolted in in the first place? Mind you, anyone who lowered the spacecraft into place and didn't bold it in would be negligent, but it seems more likely than someone going to all the effort of unbolting them.

I'm still hoping that Franken's lawyers will move for Rule 11 and ask for costs.

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