Needles, people, needles. Avoids the snapshot roulette of cartilage damage.

Yeah, I got the cartilage done at the mall, and it hurt like hell and continued to hurt for months after.

romance novels and their Internet-era counterpart, “fan fiction,”

Okay, that right there is profoundly wrong, whether it comes from the authors or the journalist.

Yeah, Ive had five cartilage piercings, and while they take longer to heal, I'd say they hurt less than the umptybillion times I've had my lobes pierced--there's more nerves in the earlobes. Havent had anything non-ear done though

Last night st Pride we variously picked up a 20 year old, made dun of straight people, stood in line in the rain for an hour, and made friends with people from Calgary because they had umbrellas.

made dun of straight people

Ouch.

But I don't want to be dun!

I think having a dorsal stripe would be fun.

Countdown, the little Feed vignettes Mira Grant was posting before Deadline came out, is now available as an ebook. Please buy it so that one day you can read The Rising 2014: The Last Stand and Final Fall of the California Browncoats, the story of the Rising at Comic-Con.

Woo, P-C! You beat me to that post!

Also, I'm doing National Blog Posting Month on BlogHer.com (yeah, yeah, I know, but the theme is Fiction.)

I'm waiting for approval for today's post on BlogHer, but my post on My Favorite Book, the prompt for August 1, is already up at my blog. [link]

I've been reading "The Road to Yesterday," the collection of short stories by L.M. Montgomery that's kind of set around Anne and Gilbert's family. This book has yet another case of identical cousins. There were identical cousins in Anne's House of Dreams, too, and I think there might have been one more case in something else by Montgomery. Does this ever actually happen? Not just cousins who look similar, but cousins who look so similar that someone who hasn't seen them for a few years could easily mistake one for the other. Granted, everybody in these books seems to be related in several different ways, since people keep marrying their cousins, but it still seems very unlikely.

This book is also continuing my puzzlement about what happened to Shirley Blythe. In the last few Anne books, Shirley, the third son, is almost a non-entity. Sure, he's mentioned once or twice, when someone is counting the kids or figuring out where each person is, but I don't think there were any storylines set around him, and he barely said a word. In Rilla of Ingleside, there are huge crying scenes when the older boys join the army, but with him, people just wave goodbye and that's it. And at the end of that book, someone says something about how good it is to have the whole surviving family back home, and Shirley isn't back home yet. He's in Canada, but not actually at home. And in this book, most of the stories are kind of given a time and place by some reference to the Blythe family -- like a story that starts with a little boy saying that there's no one to play with, not even Walter Blythe, because the Blythes live too far away, or someone mentioning that she got a recipe from Nan Blythe, or something like that. Every kid except Shirley gets mentioned at least once, and with most of them, there's some point where someone tells a longer story involving one of them. Shirley's name is mentioned only once in the entire book, and it's a reference to when he was a baby. (Well, I've got one story left to read, so maybe he's in there. Still, it's very weird. Di Blythe isn't mentioned much by name, but there are enough reference to "the Blythe twins" that at least you remember that she's there.)