Claire @45: Oh, umm...right. RSS. That thingy I keep forgetting to use. (Which prompted me to see if Darths & Droids has a feed, which it does. I should check into this for the handful of comics I still read.)
Webcomics have a tendency to go dormant and/or die off, story-driven or no. Even way back in 2000; I think it's just the nature of the medium.
Dresden Codak is one of many comics that has, as my husband puts it, gone on "the walk." It updates too irregularly to bother bookmarking, but I'll check out an individual comic if someone links it.
However, when someone linked that Advanced Dungeons & Discourse comic (a few months back, not this time)... Well, the punchline I took from it is that the group embeds philosophy in their dungeon crawling, but lacks the common sense to kick out a problem player (a repeat offender, at that!). Am I just weird for reading it that way?*
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*I'll admit bias, since I've been in a group that once had a problem player much like the one in the comic. Five years later he remains persona non grata.
Habitat for Humanity ReStores. Kind of like Goodwill for housewares, and you can find all manner of things, though it varies from store to store (the one near us has furniture, appliances, building supplies, doors and windows, blinds...just to name a few). And as the name implies, the proceeds fund HfH construction.
The local ReStore even helped put me in touch with someone selling her old sewing machines, back when I was looking for one. (The local store sells them, when they manage to have them on hand, but back then many that were donated were unusable and the ones that were sold quickly. Don't know if sewing machines are just one of those things everyone's trying to track down or what...but it doesn't change the fact that they were immensely helpful, and this seems par for the course for them.)
Part of the problem with the Walkabout site is that it has no knowledge of the actual level of function of local businesses it cites.
Yes, there's a library .22 miles from my front door. It's open two hours a month, and you're out of luck for anything genre (and a crapshoot for anything that isn't romance or aimed at the early to mid elementary school crowd). I've been told that it's basically closed without completely shutting it down, and now it's part of the town museum (which has similarly limited hours).
Several places come up at well outside walking distance -- including a pharmacy (that's just a bit important, isn't it? And what about emergency facilities? WalkScore doesn't take that into account at all, which worries me) which makes me wonder how it squeaked out a 58.
Where we used to live scores a 94 -- but what sent us away was the insanity of trying to find a house for our family, and that our apartment was too small the instant I moved in after getting married. One year and a newborn later was well past the breaking point. Crazily enough, my husband and I tried to find a place priced within our means that was big enough for us. This necessitated moving out of the county entirely. An apartment would be more expensive, and a house comparable to the one we're in now would still run approximately double. The area is known for being absurdly overpriced, though that's changed a little as the bubble burst finally caught up to them.
I still do most of my shopping there instead -- there might not be a used book store or FLGS in the hole in the road* where we live now, but that doesn't mean we can't patron other independent businesses. However, I also do almost all my grocery shopping there, even though there's a small corner store here in town. Why? Because almost everything's marked up 50% or more, and even with the price of gas at its peak this past year it was substantially cheaper to go half an hour distant and shop at a non-Wally World** store. Patroning local businesses is one thing, but fifty percent feels like gouging. (And when it would mean paying fifty percent more than our mortgage in food costs, it feels even more so.)
I know my mindset isn't helping places like that survive -- and maybe that's part of why costs are so inflated. But it ends up being a vicious cycle, and I don't know how to break it.
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* In fairness, the main drag running through town isn't a hole in the road. What the town did to the culverts scattered along the handful of roads, including one right next to our house, on the other hand...
So while we don't live in a hole in the road, we do live right next to one. Funny how that works.
** I avoid that place whenever possible. My husband doesn't understand why, and argues that the typical starting wage there is an actual livable wage ($10-11/h is a livable wage in that area, if you're single and reasonably frugal -- but from WAL-MART? The mind boggles,). In my mind this is roughly analogous to one of the Evil Overlord's many faceless captains petting the dog rather than kicking it. Besides, genre savvy folk know how such captains tend to end up.
I thought tetanus was every ten years? (Moot for me, I got my booster last year, but I may need to ask the spouse about his last one...)
I remember hearing about the 'vaccines cause autism!' scare around the time my son was born, nearly three years ago; whether there was a sudden flare up in scare activity or if it just came to attention because I was a new mom, I don't know. The husband and I wrote it off as bunk and followed the state's immunization schedule. It's reassuring to see we were right.
Just out of curiosity, and on the topic of vaccinations: is the requirement of two flu shots, administered a month apart, at some point between the ages of 18 months (may be 6 months, don't recall) and 8 years unique to South Dakota, or part of a broader standard?
Annalee @22: Working from a burst of inspiration here...
Directions for Use of Pencil and Paper:
1. Place paper on a flat horizontal surface.
2. Grip pencil in dominant hand. If you do not know which hand is dominant, facepalm, then grip pencil in the hand you used to facepalm.
3. Sharpen pencil. You should see a trail of wooden shavings coming from the sharpener. If you see a trail of rubber bits, remove and reverse the pencil. If you have accidentally sharpened your own finger,seek immediate medical attentionorder our special blessed bandages! $10 for a pack of 5! Guaranteed protection against phantom platelets!
4. Apply sharpened tip to paper. (If you sharpened the eraser in step 3, make sure it's the gray pointy end.) If you can't write, well, we can't help you there.
"B. Hussein Obama"? Are they so desperate to drive up the "Ack! Muslim!" fear factor that they can't even be bothered to mention his first name?
...Oh. Right.
This is also an oblique approach to stripping the 'enemy' of their name, and taking them one step closer to (perceived) inhumanity, isn't it? At least, I think that's what's going on there. It's sickening. These guys are way out on the fringe, right?
@33:
If Palin is indeed going rogue, she'll need to remember that sneak attacks don't work against shambling hordes of zombies. (Tell me I'm not the only one whose brain went that way at the word 'rogue'?)
Here in SD the main issue on the ballot I'm concerned about is Amendment J to the state constitution, which will repeal the 8 year/4 term limit on serving in the state Senate and House. Call me crazy, but I think periodic infusions of new blood into government is a good idea -- especially since one of the people running for the House in our district is probably doing so because he's hit the 4-term limit in the Senate. Everything else on the ballot seems likely to resolve itself -- the controversial initiatives look like they'll fail, and the US Senate and House seats look secure for their (Democratic) incumbents.
Long time lurker, first time poster:
A few days ago I was talking politics with my dad and, while we agree on most things, there was one point on which we could not agree -- whether McCain is, in fact, a decent guy.
Thank you for posting these links. I'm definitely passing some of them his way later.
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