Snow day for the kids, which means not having to get them up and make breakfast and lunch all at once and get them out the door in a timely fashion. That is a relief. We get to have a slow breakfast, random lunch and probably Al underfoot as well, until the snow stops and we dig out.
OK Abby - this post's for you. Some of us have January term and copious amounts of free time. For the rest of us, I advise poking this post over the course of weeks if not months.
I present some of the things on the internets that have been sucking my time and brain power. The last time I fell into something like this, two whole days vanished into Questionable Content and the kids had to make their own suppers and I forgot to take Aerin to flute group. I haven't fallen quite so hard lately, but I have found A Girl and her Fed which has much less back story but makes up for it with political intrigue. I have always read Pibgorn, and 9 Chickweed Lane both by the same author. Pib has gone to a Mon/Wed/Fri schedule and is hard to get into without backstory, but Chickweed is easy to pick up and filled with people I wish I could talk to.
Shaenon Garrity deserves her own paragraph because she is incredibly prolific and almost every strip makes me laugh. She has clearly been doing this for a long time. I found Smithson first, but it is laughably short and I wanted more in less than an afternoon. So, cleverly following links, I discovered Narbonic which made me snort so loud Aerin wanted to get involved. Within the first week, Shaenon managed to introduce Mel, Helen B. and Dave, and incorporate "evil coffee" along with a doomsday machine and giant mutant gerbils. Aerin and I roared through the whole thing, and she's been infecting friends with it, which is gratifying. After finishing that, we started L'il Mel, one character's growing pains. Now Shaenon's started Skin Horse, which I have to wait for like everyone else. Totally worth the wait, but agonizing nonetheless.
But then, just when I had a grip on my time in front of the computer, Elizabeth Bear and three (deranged, but in a very good way) writing friends (including Emma Bull and Will Shetterly) have come up with an ongoing fiction over the internet, complete with story, backstory, character dossiers, and even (my mind boggles) some characters' blogs. They have Livejournal blogs, which they (the [fictional] characters) post to with some regularity. And a bulletin board for the onlookers to keep up, and attempt to keep it all straight. Fans of paranormal conspiracy theories should be particularly pleased. My advice is to click everything, and check to see if there are hidden links on every page.
Someone posted to the bulletin board ecstatic that they had gotten a reply to a comment from a completely fictional character. On their blog.
I completely understood the joy. After all, I'm the one that dragged my family to picnic on a completely fictional island, in the rain.
OKay. My work here is done. Go waste your time.
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