renaissance poisson

how exceptional that is. after being a total slouch about it for 10 days, the last couple of days i've been back to beta-testing the new yaoi journalling site. created a new community and played around with that. then i needed to decide on the final (for now) pretty before letting users loose on it -- the look-and-feel, the "theme" as wordpress calls it. there are a large number of themes to choose from, but they don't just look different, they also come with different degrees of customizability. and of course i had forgotten which themes i had already checked out when i created my original journal.

so to atone for having been the sort of beta tester i hate, yesterday and today i went through all of them and created a table of capabilities. table of doom! it is freaking huge. i am 3/4 done htmlizing it so i can post it, but now my eyes are getting blurry. it was educational; i now know exactly what i really want from a theme (since most of them don't provide it all). maybe i make a couple myself (yeah, i need another project like the infamous hole in the head).

also baked some monkey bread today, which -- *gasp* -- even the paramour found a bit too fatty. it provides a total sugar and fat overdose, one can only eat it warm, and even then the stomach churns. not gonna make this recipe again. but the dough, at least, is nice -- warm yeasty dough always is for me.

paul mcauley has a blog. *fanpersonish squee*! and he rants! and he does it with reason entirely intact!

syndicated here as paulmcauley.

thanks to ianmcdonald and james_nicoll, purveyors of fine SFnal crack.

it's time to add a couple of new inputs to my political reading list. not "news" sources, but commentary, well-informed private individuals writing about the way they see the world.

if you know of a good conservative weblog, please share it.

how do i define "good"? it needs to be populated by people who can think outside the usual boxes -- i don't want to read rightwing rantage, i want to read thoughtful posts from a predominantly conservative viewpoint. religious is ok, evangelical christian probably not, but i am willing to be surprised.

if you're not sure what i mean by thoughtful versus rantage, phrases like "morally empty appeasement weasel gerhard schroeder", and "david duke digs mother sheehan" don't indicate thoughtful posts in my world.