AP: You guys have introduced me to Heidevolk. More folk metal, and what a wonderful thing it is...

Speaking from some experience with that sort of thing, from the male side of it anyway... Be supportive, and wait it out. When you *know* it's purely a chemical thing, and she does too, then you need to hold onto that and wait 'til the chemicals balance out. Don't make any permanent decisions based on how she feels right now. Also, in a few weeks when she's back to 'normal', maybe suggest that she talk to her doctor about various birth control (and other medication) options to stabilize her mood/hormone levels. I can't remember where you live, but I know here in the US, the doctors (at least, the ones we go to) have an honest to goodness entire book of different birth control options, each with different hormone levels and dosages throughout the month. There're also options that involve having a period only once every 3 months, which may be more appealing to her- limiting the 'crazy' portion of the cycle to only four times a year can be very helpful.

Think of it like this; it's no fun for you on the outside to be subjected to that, but imagine how much worse it is to be the one going through it. You and I literally cannot know that one. So just be supportive and ride it out. Even if her feelings did change for some reason, I'm sure she at least needs and will appreciate a friend.

Danke. I'm not sure if we'll pursue an actual relationship given the distance between us, but realizing our feelings for one another has made us feel quite good.

It basically comes down to whether or not you two think it's worth pursuing. As you can imagine, I don't feel that distance is a reason not to go for it

PP: Ever-increasing shipping costs. We try to keep costs reasonable, and then the postal service jacks up their rates like $4 per package for overseas shipping... Now I have to completely reset all our shipping code to better handle these higher prices.

related AP: But hey! I've got a lot of orders to ship, and that means people are gonna get merch they (hopefully) like

*aaaaaaaaand if you want to get anything at the lower shipping costs, the new shipping will be going into effect in our store here on Sunday. So today's your last day with the current shipping estimates.

The hell of it is, we're STILL using coal. Probably in those same plants from the 1800s. And oil. And it doesn't matter that we have an abundence of easy-to-harvest solar energy dumped on our heads every day, we still have a large industry dedicated to digging shit out of the ground and setting it on fire, so that's what we do. Hell, our industries are so dead SET on finding things to set on fire that we've got corn lobbyists who are like, "you know, we can use that sunlight to GROW THINGS, and then you can set THOSE on fire!"
At least with nukes you can limit the contamination to an area the size of my apartment, if you dump enough concrete on it. Plus, using the plutonium-based reactors would let an individual reactor core last for like a hundred years, IIRC. So we could do that more efficiently.... not that we would ever want to do things efficiently!

The big issue with fracking is that when you break up the layers of rock, you start introducing contaminants into the water supplies. You basically have layers of ground, where your aquifer sits on top of rock which sits on top of the shale that these guys want to harvest. So they drill down, through the aquifer, through the intervening layers of rock and clay, and into the desired layer of rock and natural gas. Then, they inject a shitload of chemicals and water under pressure, which breaks up all those strata, and then the drilling company can get at the natural gas or whatever.

But now the gas and the like can also escape through those cracks into the local aquifers. As can the (millions of gallons) of contaminated water that the drilling pumped in to do the fracking in the first place. So you get places where everything in the streams dies from the chemicals, and you get explosions in well heads that are *meant* to be pulling up drinking water, but wind up filling with natural gas... and you get lots of people who can set their tap water on fire, in rural areas where people have their own wells.

Also, cancer, hair loss, etc. from the chemicals. All in all, it's got to be one of the dirtiest industries of recent years, in the US. The industry spokesmen like to claim that this will result in cheaper energy for all, but most residents (or at least the vocal ones) in areas with fracking say that they haven't seen their natural gas bills go down at all.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand then I ranted.

We look toward the future, then do our best not to think about it.

Well, dystopia does seem to be our lot in life, until our elder, moneyed generations die off... but then, why, we could do simply marvelous things!

Sorry man, I keep trying but real life gets in the way of my writing time.  That and my crippling video game addictions.

To you I say, blah!

PP: Just found out that the veto on fracking in NC was overturned. Yay, pollution. Also, the areas they want to frack are right under our most densely populated areas, including where Jenny and I live.

The stupid, it burns. As will our water, eventually.

Okay... I just finished Tom Kratman's "A Desert Called Peace".

It's just more of the usual right-wing pap that Baen's current crop of 'authors' shovels out. Poorly edited, pausing in the middle for screeds about how "TORCHUR WORKS DAD GUMMIT THAT'S WHY MAH CHARACTERS GOTTA HAVE A TORCHURER T' GET TH' INFERMASHUNS FRUM TH' TERRISTS", lots of awkwardly inserted sex scenes, the villains are all terrorists, liberals, homosexuals, muslims, the educated 'elite', and the heroes are all wealthy, well-to-do white males who are glorious and terrible in war and have trust funds and inherited wealth and get paid to go to war and just fight all the wars against the eeeeeeeevil turrists...

If it weren't free, I'd not have read it. Having read it, it just disappoints... as do all of Baen's newest authors that I can think of. I'm really disappointed in the company as a whole- they no longer edit *anything*... or if they do, I'd hate to think what the original manuscripts looked like.

I enjoy well-written military SF. I was in the Army, I'm male, etc. ... the genre has its appeal. But I'm *not* seeing any new authors that write like they know a damn thing about it. *especially* the ones that claim to have been in the service, like Williamson, Kratman, and especially Ringo. Christ, those three are bad. That said, Williamson at least can write, for all his writings are frequently taken over by soapbox rambling. He's the sort who would benefit from editing... but by the time the editing was done, his works would be adventure sci-fi. Well done, but adventure sci fi all the same.

I'm looking for another author like David Drake. Someone who has seen the elephant, or at the very least done a really good job studying it. War is not, and never will be glorious. Combat is a different manner of experience than these new authors write about, and the way they write merely showcases that they have never been there- that, in fact, they're the sort who profoundly WISH they had been because they're sure they'd have been GREAT at it, and way better than everyone else. The blind egotism infects every aspect of their writing.

In the same vein, I'm looking for someone who can envision a future as more than just "Today! Like, in space!" Whatever social pressures and conflicts a spacefaring civilization has, they will by necessity be different than what we do today. They may be caused by the same steps on Maselow's heirarchy of needs, and in fact I'm sure they will... but they will not be the exact SAME sort of stupidity. People of the future will have their own NEW stupidities.

I want an author who hasn't got his head so far up his own ass he's getting acid burns on his chin. That'd be nice.

Seriously, where are my generation's authors? Do we not look toward the future any more, and speculate on what might be?

hallelujah! Now that I know where the script came from, let's see what I can do about it

PP: Malware... My computer got hit with some on Wednesday, while I was in the can, OF COURSE, so Microsoft Security Essentials shut down everything, rebooted the computer, and murdered the malware. I got back to find out that the malware had run off with all my start menu icons, my desktop background, and then got killed by MSE. So that was irritating but not too damaging, and after a few hours of running scans to make sure everything really was dead, etc. I got to spend my time putting back shortcuts and the like. No big deal, except for the time wasted, or so I thought... Then I found out that when MSE rebooted my system, I lost all my unsaved work that I'd been doing on the translation project.

Blarhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

The translation project has had way more setbacks than it needs 

This is the best thing ever. We're all going to die in a feathery apocalypse now... but it will be so COOL.

Oh, good! I didn't want to seem like I was ignoring you, but building a test rig got put behind the other infrastructure changes. I've had to rebuild several sections of the back end of the site to accomodate a better archive system as well as a new translation feature that we're hoping to put out relatively soon.

PP: Discovering that the Thursday update was accidentally put in as Monday.... AFTER I gutted the site's strip and content manager for a weekend overhaul, and thus having to fix all the dates and database entries etc. by hand.

I live in Canada, eh. xP
But yeah! Military has been something I've considered. Problem is I need to get fit first.

If you're serious about it, talk to a recruiter

Here in the US, at least, the point of training is to get you into shape. Granted there's a minimum standard, but it's pretty minimal.

AP: It's a complete non-sequitar, but the talk in the PP thread reminded me of a gal I knew who had enlisted in the Army thinking that this would somehow get her into the peace corps. I'm still not sure how on earth she wound up in the Army- no recruiter in his right mind would've told a lie that big, as I'm SURE it would've been legally actionable...

Despite that, she was a pretty cool person. So the AP is for good memories of good people