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Here's a list of my personal stories, along with relevant tags:
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The first time I ever visited Wicked Grounds (a BDSM themed coffee shop in San Francisco), I was going to a small writers' meet with a friend of mine. He ended up being delayed by some personal stuff, so I ended up getting there a couple hours before he did. This was the first time I ever went as myself (female-presenting) to /anything/, and so I was a bit nervous. I hadn't changed my name yet, had just barely started therapy, and was very, very nervous.

Eventually, I went up to get a refill on my drank-far-too-quickly mocha, and the barista happened to ask me if I wanted to open a tab, since I looked like I'd be there a while. (I had my laptop, etc...) I said sure, and handed over my card, just as she was asking my name. Thinking she was doing a quick check on the card, I reacted instinctively with, "My name is <deadname>." She looked at me, sadness in her eyes, and said, "No hon. What's /your/ name?"
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So a few years ago I had a small NAS, serving as my main filesystem for all sorts of video and audio contents, packages, etc... It contained a lot of personal photos, etc, that I really would have hated to lose, and so I always kept a backup... of at least some of it. I couldn't quite afford a large enough backup unit at the time, so there were some things that only existed there.

One day, I came home from work and my NAS was off. "That's odd," I thought, since it ran 24/7, and I proceeded to try the power button. Absolutely nothing. Not an LED or anything else at all. Well, this NAS had a slightly odd internal power supply that ran off an external 19V brick, so I decided that I'd worry about the rest of the system later and just pop the drives out of the front and hook them up to my media center PC to try and check if my data was at least intact.

Montage ensues, pulling the media PC apart and placing the drives (still in their hot-swap trays) upside-down on top of the media PC. I hook everything up, plug the PC back in, and hit the power button. INSTANTLY, A THREE INCH FLAME shoots out of the top of one of the drive's controller boards where the hot-swap tray had shorted to the drive! Apparently, over time, the metal bottom of the tray had bent and made contact, and while the dinky little 120W NAS PSU tripped out and saved anything bad from happening, the old 750W PSU in the media PC was happy to just power the fuck through that short. Needless to say, that drive was toast, but my data survived to live another day thanks to RAID5, and now I keep backups all over the place.

Notes on easy off-site backups:
1. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your car's glove box.
2. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your bank safety deposit box. (Two or three 3.5" drives fit perfectly in a 3x5 box, which runs about $100/year most everywhere.)

Obviously, you'll have to rotate them periodically, but that's a good start at least!
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Father Benedict

So when I was in high school, we had this awesome priest by the name of Father Benedict. He was a science teacher, and taught among other things biology (evolution, not that 6000 year old nonsense). He was an interesting fellow. Quick with a joke, kind, and unmistakable, because during class, his pet hedgehog would commonly end up sleeping in the hood of his habit! In addition to this, he wore paratrooper jump boots, which apparently have special sloped soles so that they don't catch on the airplane hatch and snap your neck when you're jumping out of the plane. I don't know what happened to him in the end, but he was quite a gamer and ended up the hub of the local file-sharing circle at the school. I should reach out and find out what happened to him some day.

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Mrs. Fletcher

Mrs. Fletcher was a grumpy old Nun who I had the misfortune of having as my teacher for Catholic Morality class. She basically turned it into "Why Abortion Is Bad 101", which had me wondering why on earth I should care since it wasn't my body in the first place. (I hadn't realized I was trans at the time, and even now I can't exactly bear a child.)

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Biology Teacher

I don't even remember her name, but she came in to teach a semester of sophomore biology after the normal teacher went on maternity leave. She came in with overheads... hand-written overheads that she proceeded to draw over to try and make more legible, which... did not work. Not my favorite teacher by a long shot, and given I all but passed out during a dissection, that was not my favorite class either. I cannot handle gooey sticky biology bits, and even the smell of formaldehyde makes me nauseous.

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Mr. T(aska)

Mr. T, as we called him, was a fantastic physics teacher and had all kinds of bling his loving students had given him over the years. He was very white, but went along with it, and was often quite funny. Among other things, I'll never forget his exhortation the first week of lab work, when he said something to the effect of "I know you are all very smart people, and they you can break anything you set your mind to. Please do not (intentionally) break anything in my lab!" :D

Mr. T also went on to push me to attend Fermi Lab's Saturday Morning Physics, which is a series of 9 three-hour Saturdays at Fermilab. You get two hours of lecture followed by a one hour tour of a different part of the facility. As a result, I've actually been /inside/ portions of that facility you can't even normally access, as the accelerator wasn't running while I was there.

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Dr. LeCompte

Oh boy, this guy. Nerd that I was, I was a member of Math Team, Science Olympiad, and Computer Club (and ended up running the latter two my senior year). Dr. LeCompte, though, was special. The guy didn't even work for the school. He just came in and taught probability and statistics for Math team when he wasn't flying over to Europe for what I later learned was involvement in CERN. He actually runs the bloody ATLAS detector over there, which I guess explains why his card counting problems were so fucking difficult! I learned probability from a /particle physicist!/
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This is the story of a bug that baffled a room full of engineers (some of whom weren't EEs, so it's more understandable) for more than a week.

The product in question is a very low-power device with a radio, a couple of sensors, nothing really special. It had an MSP430 running the whole show, and had to run off battery power for multiple years in a harsh environment. In the lab, with debug builds, everything worked great, but as soon as we dropped the production code onto the board, things would start jamming up and not operating properly. This was weird, because all of the various devices were on their own isolated power planes, with MOSFETs controlling the power to them to cut off even idle draw when not in use.

It took a while, but I eventually figured out the problem, and it was that we were being too clever for our own good. You see, in a SPI bus, you have four lines:

  1. SCLK: Serial Clock (clock signal from main)
  2. MOSI: Main Out Sub In (data output from main)
  3. MISO: Main In Sub Out (data output from sub)
  4. CS: Chip Select (used to select which chip on the shared bus you want to talk to)

Because some of the chips we were using didn't have safe tri-state outputs on MISO with the power cut, the engineer who designed the board had inserted a cheap directional buffer in-between the MSP430 and the various chips that were to have their power removed. The buffer, however, only covered the first /three/ lines. He didn't consider chip select a problem because it wouldn't affect any other chips, which turned out to be wrong!

What he forgot were the ESD diodes in the sensors/radios, which 'happily' (they weren't quite designed for this) passed power from the /active low/ chip select line up to the isolated power plane. They didn't pass /enough/ power to bring up the (3.3V) chips themselves, but that sneaky directional buffer was operational down to 1.2V and would happily, and /completely/, jam the MISO line for everything else on that bus.

Easy fix: Just software toggle the CS line to low after cutting power.



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Referenced photo link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wGiUvFtASJFRSqnujrxaQm49MkCs7HTX?usp=drive_link

$city had a flood that broke the 1000 year flood line in $year while I was an intern at $company. It was pretty crazy. Couple of bullet points:
  1. The flood ended up being really really bad, ending up at 37.5 feet above the normal banks of the river. This flooded... everything, for miles and miles down the Cedar river, especially $city itself, as it sits in the middle of multiple river bends.
  2. We initially used a Dairy Queen as a water marker, but had to give up on that when it went completely underwater. We then switched to using the main transformers at the downtown substation as our water level markers. I could be wrong, but I don't think that's what those are meant for?
  3. The five-in-one bridge over the river in downtown has a small dam, a utility corridor, A avenue deck, F avenue deck, and then I-380 on top. It ended up flooding up to a few feet below the top deck.
  4. The bridge in #3 was the only one open for a very long ways up and down the river, and we almost ended up trapped on the wrong side (work was north of the river, apartment was south of the river) one day. The approach road we took to the one other bridge still (20ish miles out of the way) open literally had water just lapping across it as we made it to the bridge itself and closed minutes later as the water was rising.
  5. The local railroad put trains on the bridges to weigh them down so the buoyant force of the water wouldn't lift them off their piers as the water flowed over them. However, they used an empty train on one bridge and lost both the train and the bridge???
  6. All but one of the pumps for the city were flooded, and the last was only saved by a last minute heroic effort (this is the isolated round building surrounded by sandbags) in the photos). We ended up on 20% water for the city for a few weeks, and things were a bit stinky without the ability to bathe.
  7. At the height of the floods, the square mile or so our apartment building was on was actually an island for a few hours, though we somehow didn't lose power or cell during that time. (We did lose cable/internet, though.) That was a bit freaky even though we were well above water level and in no danger at all.
  8. The local-ish power utility had their main HQ in downtown, a smaller secondary call center in Ohio, and a third even smaller facility elsewhere (can't remember where). The basements and first two floors of the downtown HQ skyscraper flooded, and the Ohio facility was wiped off the map by a tornado two weeks before the flood peak, so they had a really bad time. They literally had generators on the roof and helicopters flying interns into the helipad to man critical calls and equipment. (I know this because some $company interns had shared housing with theirs.)
  9. $company had to close their main plant elsewhere in the city when it lost power one day during the height of the floods. It got power back a few hours later, and as /people were losing their houses/, they attempted to force everyone to come back and complete their shifts. I did not come back after my internship despite a job offer because of this. :(
  10. I got these photos from a co-worker who was a private pilot. ($company designs and builds a lot of avionics and actually pays for ground school for their engineers so they will have experience with what they're designing.) He went up with a CNN photographer and got a copy of the photos, which I got from him. These are the ones you are looking at. :)
Misc additional stories:
  1. The internship had a rough start, as $company brought on many more interns than their IT department was prepared for to the point where they were pulling random computers out of conference rooms (including mine) to cover the gaps. Mine ended up giving endless trouble, was super under-powered for FPGA compilation, and had a monitor with a burnt out green electron gun or phosphor. I discovered this last one when trying to view a Powerpoint template on my screen, which showed as black, but was bright green on my teammates' monitors. My computer was also totally non-functional for two weeks after the internship began, which made it hard to do work. The network was also so overloaded it was common for the VOIP phones to be down so you couldn't even call for help. :(
  2. The entire internship project itself was a disaster, though in a positive way for the company. $company had started a number of projects over the last few years with the Analog Devices Blackfin DSP processor, a dual core DSP. This chip had all kinds of bugs and /absolutely horrible/ cache coherency issues at the time (hopefully fixed now) to the point where $company had created a common wiki internally for folks to report issues and workarounds between the /seven/ major projects using it. One of the projects just gave up and re-spun their PCBs, putting two chips on the board and disabling one core on each, which says a hell of a lot about how bad that must've been to deal with. My project (team of three of us) was to test out a new technology by Altera at the time, the C to H (hardware) compiler, /before/ it was potentially adopted by a larger project (shocking idea, I know). The idea was that you could drop a NIOS II soft-core processor on an FPGA and the compiler would be able to generate a co-processor for complex math functions (FFT in this case) and automatically hook it into the processor and call it when the code was due to be executed. The goal was to have normal software engineers be able to write FPGA code, saving the money on specialized FPGA engineers. Not only did compilation take as much as /40 hours/ on our underpowered machines, but you basically had to write your C knowing what hardware it would likely create, meaning you were just taking an FPGA engineer and having them write less efficiently (C vs Verilog or VHDL) with less predictable results. The compilation chain was built for Linux (okay), and ran Java and Perl (for a compiler???) on top of Cygwin, further slowing everything. Needless to say, this technology was not adopted for wider use at the time.
  3. One of my team members refused to indent his C code for whatever reason. I still don't know why. I ended up scripting a linter that would run before code commit on my system (and the third team member also copied this) to clean everything up. Later on in the project I got to chose a scripting language. I chose Python. ;) I still smile a little bit every time I indent a line of code because of this. :)
  4. There was a night where /every/ car (approximately 50) in the apartment parking lot (interns were in shared housing) was broken into with the exception of mine, because I left no visible electronics or anything else worth stealing in the car. I was quite unpopular for a couple weeks even though I had nothing to do with it, and ended up with at least on dent on my car likely due to that.
  5. I don't remember what all of their password policies were at the time, but I do remember two things about them:
    1. The password policies were so constraining, including restrictions on length, to the point that the default password they gave you was basically the most secure password you could actually use.
    2. They had the most ridiculous password restriction I've ever seen: Your password could not be a palindrome. What the fuck hashing algorithm were they using and what was so horribly wrong with it???
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So I have a friend, who I love more than life itself. (I in fact have many friends like this, probably including you!) His name is Lon.

Lon is /special/. He is hysterical, and smart, and funny, and more than a little cute, but that last bit is outside of the range of our story! What is relevant is that he's absolutely, hysterically, and totally, insane!

You see, I met Lon when he was a live-in dorm tutor at my college, two years ahead of me. He helped folks out most nights (maybe every night), and could be commonly found in a large room in the basement with many many whiteboards, built specifically for this purpose.

Now, whiteboards have a common problem, and I'm sure you've all experienced this before. It goes like this:

1. Walk up to whiteboard.
2. There's no marker!
3. Oh there's one!
4. Oh no, that's dead too. Damn!

Lon, obviously sick of this like the rest of us, hits upon a solution only Lon could think of. He proceeds to buy a huge marker set in all the colors of the rainbow, and then goes to Walmart, one of the only real stores in downstate Indiana, and buys a shotgun shell bandolier! He proceeds to insert said markers into said bandolier and proceeds to wear it, using markers at will and making life much easier! (This is honestly genius???)

However, this is not the /end/ of the story! Later that year Lon was interviewing at $defense_contractor (a place I would later work, and which features in several of my other stories)... $defense_contractor is a somewhat small business (~100 employees at the time) and the CEO personally interviews every potential hire, diagramming for them the company structure and who they'd be reporting to. (Can you see where this is going? I can!) CEO proceeds to walk up to the whiteboard, and, shockingly, there's no marker! Lon opens his suit jacket, with a huge dumb smile on his face, and goes "What color would you like?"

I... I have tears of laughter crying out right now, even after telling this story 1000 times by now!

And /even better/, Lon told me this story at work, in front of another co-worker. Said co-worker had been working at $defense_contractor at the time of this now infamous event and immediately blurted out, "Wait, we /hired/ you!?!?!?!" XD

God, I love this man! XD

----------------------------------------

Addendum: Lon is also awesome in general and would regularly do things like bring italian ice to the office, have an entire floor-standing popcorn machine inside his office, etc... I don't know what to do with this man, but I love him dearly. XD
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Content warning: Police interaction, concerns about bodily harm, mention of firearms. Fairly anxiety-inducing.

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So this story took place a few years ago in Tucson, when I was heading home from work. I had nearly gotten home when I turned onto the small side road that led to the house, at which point I was suddenly pinned into the center of the lane by police cars on both sides, stretching down an entire block (approximately 1 mile). Police quickly came up to my window and escorted me to my house, telling me to go inside and lock the doors and not answer for anyone who wasn't a uniformed police officer. They didn't tell me what was going on, and I'm pretty sure I forgot to even ask, but I obviously did this and hid inside, wondering if I would be less likely to be hit by stray bullets on the first or second floor, a though I'm quite sure has never crossed my mind before or since! Such was the density of the police that they ended up with an officer in my backyard, one in each side yard, and one in my front yard. There were helicopters and SWAT teams, and everything else under the sun. I have no idea what happened, but someone must've done something very very bad.

Weirdly, everything eventually quieted down and the officers just... left. The helicopters moved off to another area, probably still looking for whoever it was, and I had zero success trying to find out what had happened in the news the next day. It was super weird and unsettling. I no longer live in that house/neighborhood, but Tucson is pretty mixed as far as good and bad areas (probably a good thing since it forces us to deal with problems rather than ignoring them)... Either way... ;_;
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Content Warning: Police response, unintentional self-swatting. (No serious injuries or deaths, just a /hysterical/ amount of poor decisions and a few traumatized kids that legitimately could, and probably /should/, have died.)

----------------------------------------

Personal disclaimer: This story appears to involve sensitive information, but actually does not, as you can find everything but the story itself on the company's website.

----------------------------------------

So this story comes to me from a co-worker a number of years ago, and took place a year before I started at this job.

At the time, my coworker was (and later I would be) working at $defense_contractor, a defense contractor in the city of Tucson. Said contractor handles a lot of intelligence work, which is extremely highly classified! Now, if you've ever watched a movie involving a contractor out in the desert (Terminator, other random sci-fi or action movies), you've probably noticed that these places all usually have /significant/ private security contingents. There is a reason why, and that reason is that if you have a security incident at your facility, you (legally and obviously practically) need to have a serious response very very quickly, scaling with the type of incident and type of information you have at the facility. Keep in mind that intelligence information is basically protected by the highest classification that US government has, again for obvious reasons (losing a war, troops and sources being killed etc).

So, with that background, our story begins.

It is approximately 10:30PM on a Saturday night, and my coworker is coming down the stairs of $defense_contractor's office building, about to head home after some significant overtime. He pops his head out into the lobby, and sees a bunch of people running around with assault rifles with ski masks on! Freaking out completely, he slams the door, runs upstairs, and puts the entire facility into lock-down, calling 911 and everyone under the sun to come help with whatever is about to happen!

Cue one third of the police force of Tucson showing up outside the building within 15 minutes!

What my co-worker does not know at this point is that those rifles aren't actually real, nor is anyone trying to kill anyone or break in, despite the cameras showing them trying to tamper with locks. What's actually happening is that $defense_contractor only rents 4 of the 6 floors in the office building (having built out their areas to the appropriate specifications - SCIF), and there are multiple other businesses in the building, including an insurance company. Said company has a guy working for it who has a kid in highschool, and he and his friends are trying to make an action movie for class, including some filming in a commercial space. Dad has the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, and tells his kids that they can absolutely do it in the lobby late on Saturday night when no one is around, which brings us back to current events.

Eventually, the SWAT team throws flash-bangs in, storms the lobby, and tackles everyone to the ground, scaring the everliving shit out of all of these people. Lasting trauma ensues for absolutely no good reason, especially since these fine individuals had both /removed the orange tips from their airsoft rifles/ and /were actively hunched over a lock looking like they were trying to break in for the purposes of the movie/. In what is frankly a miracle, no one was shot or otherwise injured in a serious way, though I'm sure quite a few people learned what tile floors tasted like without meaning to.

Everything immediately de-escalates, but everyone is /absolutely/ going to jail, as taking the orange tips off your fake rifles is a crime in most states, including Arizona. (Can't imagine why that would be important. Perhaps it would help prevent a situation like this?) Unfortunately, though, the incident lasts basically the entire day, since they have to clear the building room by room and everyone has to be debriefed and sign NDAs for any classified material they may have been exposed to. Utter, fucking, disaster.

Shockingly, no one was killed, but even if this guy contacted building management, and they had contacted $defense_contractor, and $defense_contractor had sent an email out, and even /if/ they had had orange tips on their rifles, this was a /shockingly bad idea/. The sheer amount of stupidity that somehow resulted in no one dying actually makes me quite unreasonably angry, as I have no idea how one makes decisions this stupid. Even if it had been a normal commercial space, this would have been a /terrible/ idea, but with $defense_contractor there, this was just horrific beyond description.

Fuck, even telling that story gets my heart rate up. XD

Recommends

Aug. 30th, 2015 11:53 am
zetasyanthis: (Default)
[This is a non-dated recommendations link post.]
 
This page serves to document some special links and stories I though are worth a look.  I'll be linking it off my sidebar and updating it frequently, so be sure to check back! Also, if you look and see too many things to check out, know that I've ordered them roughly (within each subsection) by how much they touched my heart.
 
Books
 
Glory in the Thunder is really damned cool. I'm still having a hard time explaining exactly why, but it fits in really well with my inclinations towards magic/spirituality. My Goodreads review can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1504895871

Short Stories

This one is special.  It tastes like rain.  http://365tomorrows.com/08/30/lastly/

Heavily Emotional Comics and/or Webcomics
 
Dumbing of Age... Man, this is one that absolutely leveled me, multiple times. It's a slice-of-life comic about a group of friends going through college together, and living in the same dorm. It's beautiful, and heartbreaking, in ways that will make you wish you could hug the characters right through the page. You'll fall in love with them, hurt with them, and laugh and love with them too. More, you cannot ask. [And since I don't quite know how to segue from that, several of the characters are LGBT, or have PTSD/anxiety/depression/etc... If you struggle with any of those things, this may help you. This comic is also similar in feel to Questionable Content, which is just a little farther down this list.]
 
Rain... Wow. This one hit my like a ton of bricks.. From a transgender protagonist who is absolutely adorable, to an aunt and friends I'd probably fight to the death to protect, this story will warm your heart. You'll cry too, but never for very long, and you'll be happy to trade those tears for the joy this will bring you. Bisexual, transgender, genderqueer, gay... whatever your stripe of rainbow, and even if you're straight, this comic has a way of making you smile. I think it's the artist's love shining through. <3
 
Black Tapestries is probably the most heart-wrenching comic I have ever read. It is also probably the hardest read on this entire list. It takes place in a world where Kaetif (anthropomorphic animals) are looked down upon as vermin by most humans, and follows the story of a drifter, a mercenary for hire, as she attempts to assassinate, and then later, to find out how to reverse, what appears to be a curse. I cannot even tell you how much this comic means to me, especially since I found it so many years ago, but it is a brutal one at times too. You are hereby warned that there is an on-scene skinning as well as a rape that take place as part of the plot. I do not recommend it lightly, but it should say a lot that I recommend it despite that at all.
 
TwoKinds is a very similar story to Black Tapestries, though it does not veer anywhere near as dark (at least not directly). This is a lot more lighthearted, but the Kiedran (similar to the Kaetif from BT above) are essentially separate from human society most of the time. They aren't always looked down upon, but they are considered potentially dangerous, and are even enslaved in some cases. There is so much love and loss in this one I find it hard to adequately describe. Suffice to say that I've purchased copies of all the published volumes to support the artist.
 
Questionable Content is a story about a group of friends in the northeast US who move into an out of relationships with each other.  All of the characters are 'real' in the sense that they all have issues, some of them very serious.  Running the gamut from anxiety to control and OCD, to outright grief, this strip will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.  And all the time you'll be learning, about both yourself and others. UPDATE: There's a transgender character, now, too! And she's awesome! ^^
 
Venus Envy is recent find, but one I wish I had found ages ago.  Both the artist Erin and the main character Zoe are transgender, and though Zoe's struggles take place way back in high school (well before I managed to break out of *any* of my shell), they still mean a lot.  If you've ever wanted to understand a transgender person's desire to just fit in, be normal, and be accepted, you'll want to read this.  Beware though, it's not an easy read.  Lots of tears ahead.
 
Sunstone by Stjepan Šejić is another recent find.  I've actually never considered myself to be interested in BDSM-related material, but this comic caught me a bit by surprise.  The way it portrays an alternate lifestyle in such a positive and loving way, with no fear or judgment, is absolutely huge.  Learning new ways love can be seen and experienced is never a bad thing, and as much as it surprised me, I think it might surprise you.
 
Misc Comics and/or Webcomics
 
Blood Vigil is another fantastic comic by Stjepan Šejić. I don't even know how to describe this one, but it's fucking awesome. Quoting from an Amazon review: "Funny, dark, violent, quirky characters, elder gods, feathered dinosaurs, necromancers, and death herself. What is there not to love about this comic?"
 
Ms Marvel... This one is cool. I'm not usually one for superhero stories, but Ms Khan caught my eye. Specifically, her words did. "Good isn't a thing you are. It's a thing you do." I love her, the art, and the wonderful middle-eastern background she brings to the table. She's the first Muslim superhero I've ever seen, and seeing her family life echo my own Christian upbringing is kind of hilarious in a way that makes me wince. :P
 
Related Blog Entries:
http://zetasyanthis.dreamwidth.org/26094.html
zetasyanthis: (Default)
I just caught up on the latest bits of Sunstone, and that was pretty heavy stuff.  Still wouldn't trade it for anything though.  Just beautiful.

I wanted to add another thought here today, for a short short I recently discovered.  This one is special.  It tastes like rain.  http://365tomorrows.com/08/30/lastly/

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