CritterKeeper

Reminds me of all the writers who talk about their characters deciding what they're going to do on their own, refusing to do what the writer wants or taking them completely by surprise. Pandora is both writer and character here. :-)

Catching a showing of The Force Awakens. ETA Bah, that other reply snuck in before mine, but I'm leaving it because of the "ray" pun ;-P

I just found out the local Renaissance Faire has *finally* put in Designated Smoking Areas, which means that hopefully the *rest* of the fair is somewhere I can finally go back to! I used to go every year, even joined Friends of Faire, but I had to drop it because I kept getting chased out of audiences, games, and even lines to get a drink on super-hot days by evil clouds of tobacco smoke. From what I've read there's a new owner who's really shaping things up. :-)

Sounds like the villain in the first episode of Sherlock.

Mutant Enemy "Grr. Aargh."

Wonder Twins ("Wonder Twin powers ACTIVATE!")

Probably a newer adaptation. I speak as a Past President of the Double-Barreled Tiger Cubs, the U of I's Sherlock Holmes club. It was mostly run by one particular staff member, with the presidency given to student members to retain access to campus facilities and give them something for their résumés, but even just being a member for four years I learned a lot. There are people who make a game out of explaining everything in the books, taking it varying degrees of seriously, and they've had more than a century to work on this. Take a look at The Annotated Sherlock Holmes some time, it's mind-boggling how much people have come up with through the years. I'm pretty sure that any inconsistencies or discrepancies have long since been explained away. Geekdom has been around a long time! :-) (The Tiger Cubs name comes from a scene shortly after Dr. Watson meets Mary, his future wife. He got so flustered talking to he that she swears he told her a moving anecdote from his war days about how a musket peeked into his tent, and he frightened it away by firing a double-barreled tiger cub....)

Tom, your theory sounds more like Elliot is the Apple of Discord, thst is, the one that everyone wants.

*A-Team intro music*

I loved when the local Ethnic Dining SIG went to an Eritrean restaurant! The bread is actually more of a sourdough pancake, made out of Teff, which is the smallest grain on the planet. We had a big platter for each table, with six different stews in little piles so we could sample some of each one. I even liked the coffee they served after, and I don't even like coffee! Unfortunately, the place seems to have closed so I can't recommend that individual restaurant, but the genre definitely gets a thumbs up here!

I refer to my current cell as an "average phone." It's got a little 2-3cm screen, not touch, and a slide-out keyboard, and can theoretically go online, so it's not a dumb phone (like those simplified models marketed to the elderly and technophobes), but it definitely isn't anywhere near a smartphone, either.

Hmm, maybe this is when she gets her Mark? I can see Catalina saving up and splurging on one of those biofeedback cat-ear rigs that move the ears in response to the wearer's moods...or maybe being given a pair by her girlfriend!

I am on my iPad, that may have something to do with it.

I see this with pets all the time. Someone has a beloved pet for fifteen years, and they tell me, "That's it, this is the last time, it's just too hard losing them." And then they show up about a year later with a new puppy or kitten. We need time to mourn and heal after a loss. But the joys and rewards of having someone in our lives far outweigh the pain of losing them. Someone who's twenty could look at someone who's sixty and feel sorry for all the people they've lost, but the ninty-year-old is looking at that same sixty-year-old and seeing all the life they have left to live, all the friend they'll make and places they still have time to go, Maybe someone who's lost their tenth spouse will mourn them for a decade or two, but eventually, they'll meet someone they click with. Love isn't something you can avoid forever. Now this I can see. If magic is constantly whispering spoilers in your ear, it's a lot harder to enjoy seeing the story unfold. Sherlock may just not have shared all of his sources of information. ;-)

It occurred to me tonight how much Pandora's life must be like the movie Groundhog Day. It's been 23 years, and I think at least the premise has gotten out, that it's about a guy being stuck reliving the exact same day over and over. And, there comes a point where he's figured out every good deed and the best way to fit them all in, has tried everything there is to try, and can go through the day doing amazing things, and be utterly and completely bored with it, because he's already done it so many times before. If Pandora can predict everything with almost-complete accuracy, I can see how that would get old. Note that, as a long-time fan of Highlander, Methuselah's Children, and Forever Knight and a number of other series with near-Immortal protagonists, I've thought about this more than I probably should, and I don't find this a likely outcome. People always say that someone with a long lifespan will have seen it all and gotten bored with it all, to the point of life becoming unbearable. I say, bull. The world doesn't stay static. It's not like a video game you've played too many times. Real life people are infinitely variable, and the world itself changes all the time. When I go home to visit my parents, after not living in that town for a couple of decades, it's a mix of old familar stuff and new interesting things, and the percentages shift further with every visit. Even if you were tied to one geographic location, that location will change around you. Given the ability to travel whenever and wherever you desire, it would be impossible to see the whole world, because by the time you reached your last destination, your first would be unrecognizable. To quote a T-shirt, "Boredom is [almost always] a self-inflicted wound." Granted it's sometimes something we choose as the lesser evil. Stay at a job that doesn't challenge you, or risk being jobless if you can't find a better one? Stay in a familiar town, or risk not finding anyplace as good when you travel? People today have so many options it's incredible!

hand mines

Granted, but they're only available on platforms you don't have. I wish for the Cubs to miss winning the World Series by one run in the eleventh inning. (They can't actually *win* the series of they wouldn't really be the Cubs anymore.)

Eh, it's not so bad, I was just trying to convey that most people have a great many areas where they don't know as much as they "should" and to be realistic, no one can know everything they "should know." We all have to try to balance varying demands.

Our first computer was a TRS-80 Model III, which my dad probably got an "educators' discount" on, they used to give such things to teachers back then. After you typed a program in by hand, from a book or magazine, you could save it onto a cassette recorder. Eventually we sent it in for ugrading, including both a floppy disk drive (Yay Random Access Memory! No more rewinding!) and a whopping 16k of RAM. I think I wrote my first fanfic on LazyWriter, about finding a clutch of firelizard eggs in the sandbox. A few years later, when my school got two TRaSh-80's, I got to show all the teachers how to use them. Now, my iPad is probably far more powerful a computer than the Cray XMP they used to do the special effects in The Last Starfighter, then referred to as a "supercomputer." Thank you, Science, for bringing us such miracles! :-)

Looks fine to me!

It chops, it dices, it makes Julienne fries!

Unfortunately, that color-change option doesn't appear to be there in the edit window, which means having to remember to change the color of your text every time you post, just in case you need to edit it later.

Heh. After that first link, I'm picturing it circled in cute Elder signs.....

The Time-Traveler's Wife It's been mentioned many times, most prominently to me as the inspiration for River Song, and I saw it on the shelf in the library and decided it was time to read it.

Literature would be boring if no one ever tried to write from a perspective they themselves have never had. Sure, you've never been a woman. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had never been a consulting detective. Shakespeare had never been a king, prince or Fae. Presumably Jeff Lindsay has never been a sociopathic serial killer and Steven King was never haunted from childhood by an evil clown. If this ever comes up again, ask her if she believes the only stories that should ever be told are first-person factual biographies, because that is the only way to avoid anyone trying to write from the perspective of someone they aren't.