All my dresses are things like black lycra with speedracer stripes, animal print miniskirts, brown suede... well, it would suffice to say that I own no dresses that are appropriate for running along the beach with my mother in a feminine hygiene product commercial.

Shrift in Natter.

And again, Shrift:

My coworker just said, "Oh, fudge."

I really want to ask him if he realizes we're not on network TV.

Weird dream. It was proclaimed that couches were weapons of mass destruction, and that we would go after them with special "couchkiller" helicopter. (Apparently they dangled really long sticks from the copters to smash the couches to bits.)

I asked if we were going after the sofa in Hell, but was told it was against strategic doctrine for the U.S. to attack anyone who could fight back.

-- Typo Boy

Miss Goth, Jilli Herself, has the kind of dream I only wish I were cool enough to have:

My recurring stress dream involves critters from the Aliens movies attacking the office (at WotC) that I used to work in. My former boss opens up a storage closet, hands me a pulse rifle, and tells me to escort people to the basement.

Me. With a pulse rifle. While dressed in my usual manner - hoop skirt, frock coat, top hat. And Clovis sitting on the pulse rifle, saying "short controlled bursts!"

Lots of flickery lights, lots of running through mazes of cubicles, lots of snarly things jumping at me and me getting to shoot them.

As stress dreams go, it isn't that bad.

And Hec's response:

Pretty fucking cool, actually. See if you can get your talented husband to draw a picture of this with top hat and pulse rifle and Clovis. Clovis is in your dreams? God, but I worship your Jilliness.

As do we all.

And one more cool dream, from Typo Boy:

My dreams are kinda demented, but not nearly that cool:

I'm in a movie theater with Albert Einstein in the seat next to me. He suddenly collapses and begins labored breathing. I have to rush him to the nearest dentist where they give him emergency treatments for his tuberculosis.

That taken care of , I end up taking part in a reality show; I am competing against Miss America, a Nascar Champion, Dr. Dre, and Ann Coulter to design a new constitution for Puerto Rico - which has just won independence, and has sold all legislative rights to Fox TV.

There was a middle part that I don't remember the details of. It involved Woody Allen.

I liked the saving Mr. Einstein, and PR selling rights to Fox. Very cool, Typo Boy!!

Madrigal in Fic:

So far I've only got two other pseuds, and I'm thinking of more, because I've just gotten this delightful email suggesting that instead of my normal crappy style, I imitate this other writer, who just also happens to be me. I could start the most pointless flame war ever, even scarier than the fight about Xena's methods of sanitation.

Michele T.:

I love the idea of scolding someone for being French. "You have a language that I get very self-conscious when I try to pronounce!" (And thank you for that, amych.) "You eat snails! You have silly politics!"

erikaj in Buffy 1 (about the musical):

I still halfway think Dawnie summoned that demon.(I do know I'm not supposed to though, cause how could somebody with hair like that be wrong.)

(If my quote above ends up in BRQD, could the snerk at amych that dates back to an incident in the Reagan era be deleted? I'd like for posterity to believe I was less petty than that.)

John H's post from Bureaucracy shows why the Phoenix Board really is like crack:

There's a fundamental point that needs explaining here -- I might err on the side of the patronising here, but it's in a good cause! -- we control this place. It's ours!

With TT/WX, there was a database behind the scenes, which we could only interact with by clicking on things and hoping the right stuff came out. The database was their secret, and the only way we could get stuff out of it was with a browser.

The Perl script I wrote, and the search engine someone (Tom?) wrote, and the number-of-times-we-mentioned-porn counts, were all done by imitating a browser and getting the stuff from their database.

It's like when you go to buy drugs from one of those places where there's a steel-reinforced door with a small hole in it. You shove your money through the hole, ask politely and hope for the best. You've got no idea what's going on. Someone can take your money and give you nothing in return, take your money and give you baking soda in return, take your money and shoot you, or just plain not take your money at all.

So when we create tools to grab content from WX or TT, we're the customer.

On the Phoenix board, we're the dealer as well.

We've got our people on the other side of the door.

So, when people plaintively, endearingly, wistfully ask "would it be possible, maybe, one day, to make a search engine which searched this site? Please?" -- yes, you should imagine ita, and indeed everyone else doing an evil laugh of total mastery, because yes, we can do it right away, in fact it's already done!

I can't quite explain why this makes me laugh so, but it did.

Dana, in Firefly:

Uh, helloooo?

Written and directed by Tim Minear.