AHAHAHA:



More here. I just wish it was organised better? LJ's tagging system has made me very lazy.

Also, hello.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/why-all-lettering-is-getting-smaller.html

I'm flying out tonight to the UK. I'll hole up in the middle of nowhere with my children and ex-wife and my mother as well, and probably be off-the-internet the whole time. There will be no TV in the middle of nowhere, so I will miss Doctor Who and miss "Statuesque" on Sky1 (10 pm Christmas Day).

Unfortunately, my DSL connection at home was cut off a few days ago, and so I am even unable to send individual e-cards or v-gifts for the holiday season (thanks for the beautiful red ornament, lady_branwyn, by the way!). Therefore, a quick and slightly early stealth!post from the office will have to suffice.

I would like to wish you all Happy Holidays, a Merry Christmas to those who indeed celebrate it, and a Wonderful New Year 2010!

You will all be in my thoughts.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I was wondering if I should post this...but I really want to rant about something as stupid as this story I heard a couple of days ago, so...

My mother's boss has a 6-year-old grandson who goes to some kind of a Catholic school. The family were very happy about their choice, and the boy loved it too, until they got a new teacher of Christian Ethics (I believe that's what the class is called).

A couple of months ago she got this brilliant idea of telling the kids about afterlife, choosing to concentrate on hell. In great detail. Resulting in the poor boy scared stiff that he should definitely go to hell one day, because he sometimes doesn't behave perfectly. It took the family a great deal of reassuring to calm down the poor kid.

Okay, so maybe that could be viewed as a way of disciplining children, and the little guy is just too impressionable...but what the stupid woman did before St. Nicholas' Day makes me want to strangle her.

See, it's a huge day for Ukrainian kids -- this is when they get their presents, hidden under their pillows, and they all know the story of St. Nicholas who helped people by secretly leaving money at their doorstep, and it's very, very exciting. :)

So guess what the teacher did...she told the kids that St. Nicholas was a saint who in fact died a long, long time ago, and can't possibly be the one who comes and brings them presents. I have no idea what she was hoping to achieve by this, but she was quite successful at traumatizing a bunch of 6-year-olds (the boy I talked about spent the rest of the day wailing) by killing one of the sweetest holiday stories ever...

I've always known there are a lot of idiots around...but it's especially maddening when they're the ones teaching children. *sigh*

but it's still not actually porn, so i'll post it here. :peers:



( upstream or down without a thought )

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/nakedly-commercial-post-sweetened-by.html

Just a quick post to let those interested know that both Amazon and Barnes and Noble are doing extreme Christmassy discounts on ODD AND THE FROST GIANTS. It's available for 50% of the cover price...

The Amazon.com link is http://www.amazon.com/Odd-Frost-Giants-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0061671738

The Barnes and Noble link is at http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Odd-and-the-Frost-Giants/Neil-Gaiman/e/9780061671739I got to amaze and impress my daughter Maddy the other day, using http://us.akinator.com. You may enjoy impressing someone with it. Or perhaps just learn to demonstrate your telekinetic skill (I wish I'd known how to do this when I was twelve. I would have conquered the world with it).

I'm baaaack in Singapore for about 3 weeks. It started snowing in Manchester literally after the last person had boarded the plane and sat down - the stewards had even shut the overhead compartments. It lasted about 30 minutes, after which we were informed that the airport was closed for another 30 minutes (to clean up the snow, I guess). And then we were told it would be closed for another 1.5hours (!) - so everybody was sat on the plane thinking wtf. In my personal experience of these past 4 years, it's never snowed this close to Christmas, and the snow has not been so frequent or long-lasting. I will be slightly annoyed if I end up missing a white X'mas in the UK. ;)

Anyway, the plane ended up boarding one hour short of the time frame given us. I had to catch a connection in Paris Charles de Gaulle, and I had no idea if the connection would be delayed, but so many people on my flight were going to Singapore as well, and it's a long-haul as well... I had to run, catch a little tube thing, run somemore, go through yet another security check, run a bit more (encoutering an airport staff person who yelled at me, "The gate's closed!" I turned to look, and then they just said, "Singapore flight's that way!" So don't know what that was about).

But I got on the plane a-ok, and had to go through First Class and Business Class. Bloody hell! Those guys were lounging in luxurious seats with so much space, possibly giving me dirty looks. Going into Economy class was even more of a shock - and I swear, it was a lot more cramped than my short-haul Manchester-Paris flight. You'd think the long-haul planes would be set up more comfortably...

I watched Julie & Julia, The Boat that Rocked and 500 Days of Summer. I enjoyed them all, but possibly in an average sort of way... I'd rank the second film as my favourite of the lot, just because I found it quite funny and a nice look at pop culture in the 60s.

Now I'm home and the massive TV (and DVD player) that used to be here has been sent off to our old flat that's being rented out. Gutted! I was looking forward to having some background noise going while study. But I had some dosai with my mother's chicken curry for dinner, which was awesome.

Dean/Casthulhu
entirely the fault of architeuthis
um, somewhere between 'pg' and 'not safe for work' because other people draw full frontal tentacle rape and i just draw established relationship!tentacle!fluff
mucho thanks to uselessplayback for hand-holding earlier



( thisss way )

Eleven inches already on the front porch.

Edit, 12:01 pm: Snow depth now 13.5 inches, and snowing harder. Birds at my feeder so far today: chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, goldfinches, purple finches, Carolina wrens, cardinals (male and female), white-crowned-sparrows, juncoes, Red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker.

Edit, 7:14 pm: It's been snowing for almost 24 hours now. Current snow depth: 16.5 inches.

Today, the repairman returned with a new controller for the dishwasher which had been running verrrryyy sloowly. Immediately after he left, we discovered that the dishwasher now doesn't work at all. It runs for two minutes then stops. The second replacement for the controller should arrive some time after Christmas. In the meantime, Lord B. and I will be washing dishes the old-fashioned way. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that I still have Christmas cooking to do plus we have company coming over on Christmas morning for brunch.
I took the day off from work to shop and cook. My cheesecake recipe has relatively expensive ingredients (about 8 bucks a batch), so I decided to try splitting it between two smaller pans instead of making one huge cheesecake. Also, I no longer own a 10-inch springform pan (the old one started corroding so I threw it out), and I didn't feel like buying a new one since I rarely used it. In its place, I used two 8-inch cake tins with removable bottoms and cut the baking time by 10 minutes. So we will see how they turned out. After I finish my coffee, Lord B. is going to help me make pizzelles. He is much better at gauging how brown they are.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/xmas-roundup-with-some-good-links-and.html

How the hell did it get to be December the 18th? Ohhh. All the links I meant to post. Arghh.

For a start, I want to repost this little true thing I wrote, from last year's Independent: it's about being an eight year old Jewish kid who really wanted a Christmas tree...

До сих пор ком в горле, когда читаю эту сказку - http://lib.ru/GOLIKOW/boy-kib.txt.
Плывут пароходы -- привет Мальчишу!
Пролетают летчики -- привет Мальчишу!
Пробегут паровозы -- привет Мальчишу!
А пройдут пионеры -- салют Мальчишу!

A totally cool though of course humorous observation I bumped into today while reading some anecdotes today (translated from Russian by me):

"Of all the impressions of Egypt, you get your strongest one from the pyramids of  Khufu and his son Khafre, near Cairo. When we were told about the Egyptian pyramids at school, I remember thinking what a cruel folly it was to force hundreds of thousands of slaves, for decades, to build those stone monstrosities, made of two million slabs weighing more that 2.5 tons each, just to preserve one's name in eternity...

But now I think differently: there was not a ruler in the entire history wiser than the pharaohs, who, having built those giants defying nature and time, ensured their people's daily bread for many thousand years after their deaths, as the international tourism which prospers in Egypt, largely thanks to this Wonder of the Ancient World, accounts for more than 40% of the budget of this poor country."

:)

Dean and Castiel catch up with some funtiemz reading.

Because I am the albatross around spacefragments's neck. (She drew an adorable pic of Castiel and Sam reading, and then I went, "Ohh that reminds me!".)



( Leisure )

Ok now back to ~original~ arts.

Happy birthday, przed! Here's a little something in honor of the day.
Title: Enthralled
Author: Just_ann_now
Fandom: Swordspoint
Characters: Alec, Richard
Time Frame: Swordspoint
Disclaimer: These lovely men belong to Ellen Kushner, not me.
A birthday drabble for przed. Shamelessly stolen from Inspired by edoraslass's gorgeous Boromir/Theodred ficlet, "Enthralled", as well as by heartofoshun's equally lovely "Made To Touch Me". I don't know that I'll post it to the _riverside community right away - it's sort of looking like The Ann Show over there - so feel free to steer folks this way if you like.

( Enthralled )

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/late-night-mystery-post.html

Hullo everyone. I took a week off from Blogging, then didn't have a second during the whirlwind of the last few days.

As a result of which I have dozens of open tabs and dozens of letters to the FAQ line that I've marked as things I should answer. I'm not going to try and do them all now (Maddy told me that I'm taking her to school at 6:30 am, as she's got her first period of Driver's Ed). But there are a few things I should say before I sleep...

The first one is to congratulate Henry Selick and all the Coraline team (and Laika, and Focus) on the wonderful way they are being recognised by Awards. Yesterday, for example, we learned that Coraline is nominated for a Golden Globe award.

There's a great website at http://awards.filminfocus.com/#/coraline/awards which is a bit out of date right now. My favourite of the recent awards is that the Alliance of Women Journalists gave Coraline their Best Animated Character award, although the biggest honour is Coraline being on the American Film Institute's list of the ten most important films released in 2009.

I went to Atlanta. It was foggy and thunderstormy and I signed for 1,050 people. (Here's the Atlanta paper blog on the event. And Little Shop of Stories said Thank You so very nicely.)

I went to Winnipeg. It was cold outside and I signed for 869 people. Here's the Winnipeg Newspaper article. Just behind me, in the grey shirt, is the wonderful Elyse Marshall, publicist from HarperChildren's, who looked after me on the Graveyard Book Tour and who can now run a huge signing in her sleep, which is great, because it means I don't have to worry about any details or disasters. I just do my job and sign and meet everyone.

(How bad can it get? Well, there was the time Terry Pratchett and I were signing in, er, I think it was Leeds, when the people who worked at the shop saw all the people who had turned up for the signing and got scared enough that they locked themselves in the staff room at the back, leaving Terry and me to climb onto tables and shout at people until they formed some kind of a line. The staff didn't come out again until the people had all gone.)

Strangest moment in Winnipeg was getting back to the hotel room at 1:30 am to notice that, beside my bed, a framed photo of my children had mysteriously appeared. I assumed that this was a cool thing the hotel had done. Elyse, on the other hand, was convinced it was the action of a crazed stalker, and insisted I deadbolt and security chain my hotel room, and was enormously relieved, a few hours later, when she knocked on my door and I removed the chain and was obviously still alive.



Before we left the hotel I took the photo out of the frame and left a thank-you note in its place.



Flew back to Minneapolis. I stopped off at DreamHaven on the way back from the airport this afternoon, and signed more stock for Greg (http://neilgaiman.net/). Theoretically enough to see him through Xmas.

Several people wrote asking me to express my outrage at HarperCollins joining several other publishers in delaying the release of books on the Kindle or e-book format to some months after the hardback comes out, as detailed at http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/harpercollins-now-also-thumbing-nose-at-e-book-industry-with-dig/ but after I read the article I couldn't manage any outrage at all, no more than I could manage for people who demand that paperback books come out at the same time as hardbacks. It seemed a legitimate way to publish, anyway.

And, for those of you who want to learn exactly how an author should not respond to an Amazon One-Star review, we present an author named Candace Sams, who begins by pretending she's not the author, just someone defending a good book, then, when outed as the author, claims she's part of a noble group standing up against an evil one-star reviewer, and then informs everyone on the Amazon Comments thread that she's reported them all to the FBI. The Amazon Thread is here. Teresa Nielsen Hayden comments on it at Making Light, here. (Via Cleolinda's twitter.)

And yes, it's a horrible car crash, and I post it here not because it's funny in an Oh God Make It Stop kind of way, but because, if any of you are ever tempted to respond to bad reviews or internet trolls etc, it's a salutary reminder of why some things are better written in anger and deleted in the morning. (Also, if you're an American Games company, don't sue a British blogger in the Australian courts for a bad review.)

Oops. I have started blogging. I will stop now, and sleep for a little while.

...

Before I go: Sky has a website for the Ten Minute Tales series, which includes Statuesque, my film starring Bill Nighy (which goes out in the UK on Christmas Day) : http://sky1.sky.com/10-minute-tales. I wish I could have been at the screening in London on Sunday, more so when I saw my old friend Paterson Joseph stars in one of the films.

Worst Double-Date Ever
under 500 words of crack
Dean/Castiel, totally random Sam/Gabriel implied (IDEK, OK)
epic naughtiness implied

( It lives here )

По долгу службы хожу на встречи между разработчиками и тестировщиками, вот недавно вернулась с одной такой, "заседали" 1.5 часа. Потешные ситуации бывают всегда, но в этот раз смеялась в голос с одним из разработчиком на пару, а тестировщики пыхтели и злились, потом было наоборот - я смеялась с тестировщиками, а разработчики сидели красные и злые. Скоро надо мной будут смеяться :) Я не буду в претензии, обещаюсь.
Взрослые такие мужики, пузатенькие в очочках, а разве что за грудки друг за друга не хватают, доказывают, убеждают, машут волосатыми ручками. По-доброму, конечно, полюбовно, потому без смеха за этим наблюдать нельзя. Все мечтаю снять одно из таких заседаний на скрытую камеру и показать видео участникам, то-то будет потеха.
Сознаюсь, люблю всех этих пузатых недисциплинированных мужиков в очочках :*