Category Archives: personal

Merchandising Fail

internet, personal, politics, shopping, television, videogames Leave a comment

Tis the season and all of that, and no blog of mine on the subject is complete without a gratuitous link to my Amazon.com wishlist and a semi-serious plead for you to buy me stuff. Now that that’s out of the way, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with this time of year, coming from a family without any Christians that still went through the gift-giving ritual most commonly associated with Christmas in this culture. The whole gifting thing, along with the hilarious “War on Christmas”…

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Bound to the System

books, kink, music, personal, sex, teaching, writing Leave a comment

“Fifty Shades of Grey” sparks marketing mania (Reuters) Thanks to its inclusion in a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic online video anthology, I’ve had the Lonely Island’s song “Threw It on the Ground” stuck in my head on and off for about a week. (Let me add here, as an aside, that I’m majorly bummed that I couldn’t make the pony con that’s going on in Ohio this weekend.) As I teach and encourage my students to question their assumptions, and not to let those…

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The Weight of a Library

books, computing, personal Leave a comment

About a week and a half ago, I took one of my classes to visit the campus library to learn how to do research there; like everywhere I’ve taught, the librarians there hold special classes where they teach students how to use the online databases the library subscribes to, so I have an opportunity to sit back and just add little tidbits and anecdotes to what the librarian has to say. I don’t think I’ve ever had one of these library instruction classes go so…

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Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights

personal, toledo, weather Leave a comment

If you haven’t heard, there’s been a massive heatwave going through this part of the country for weeks now, resulting in some very high-power storms. One particular wave (one of the “bow echoes” you hear so much about) went through the central part of the state over a week ago, and some parts of the state are still without power. That storm passed south of us — we didn’t even get a sprinkle here in the northern part of the Toledo area — but on…

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The Artistic Brain

arts, personal, writing Leave a comment

The other day I observed that, following a reformat and upgrade of Yggdrasil Mark II about a year ago, I still hadn’t transferred my old away messages onto my IM programme. For as long as I can remember being on IM software that let you set custom away messages — I want to say back when I used ICQ you could only select from one of a handful of preset messages — I kept a list of different away messages based on song lyrics or…

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