Horse, barn door, too late

I suspect this may be a case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but I’ve made all my essay pages private. Why? Because an essay writing service found one of them and was kind enough to tell me how nice it was.

Um, yeah — no. I don’t think so. I’m a fan of capitalism as much as the next person, but selling original essays for students to hand in as their own? That’s more than a little skeevy, but not quite as skeevy as their assurances that their “professional writers have excellent work ethics.” Can anyone else spot the oxymoron in this assurance?

Grr. Argh.

Interesting conversation

Cesperanza pointed out this post, which I thought was immediately recognizable as satire, but further down in the comments, you see people coming in who pretty much missed the point. Skud shut down comments on that post and set up a second post to explain the first post.

It’s an interesting conversation all the way around, because really, the thing is that depending on where you are in the blogosphere, there’s a reasonable chance that the bloggers will skew toward one gender or the other. In my fannish life, bloggers skew female (best guestimate for my experience is 95% female), but more to the point is that unless I know the guy(s), I generally avoid blogs written by men, and that’s something I didn’t notice until I read the posts listed above.

Why do I avoid male bloggers? It’s a good question, and it’s one I’m going to have to think about.

So maybe…

…this blog isn’t quite as moribund as I thought it would be, but there’s an article of interest to college students (and instructors) about a textbook service that offers free to lower-cost textbooks, depending on whether the students view the text online, buy a PDF or get printed copy.

This, I think, is the way textbooks should be offered. God knows tuition costs are high enough. Adding needless textbooks on top of that cost is ridiculous.

In other news The Ann Arbor News stopped publication in July, but it appears that The Saline Reporter is one of the prime beneficiaries. The Saline Reporter has been a weekly rag since long before I was born, and it looked like a weekly rag. These days? Not so much. Aside from hiring former A2 News reporters, the paper itself is starting to take on the look and feel of a daily, and I don’t think it will be long before the paper starts coming out twice a week.

I’m happy about this, by the way, because Washtenaw county needs a daily, and it’s possible the SR will ultimately take over the role that the A2 News abdicated.

Okay. Off to do more work on cleaning up my Web site; sweet dreams when you get there.

Final post (for now)

This account is going dark until I need to use it again. It’s been fun, it’s been real, but now, it’s time for me to go home to LJ. Ciao, babies.

So apparently…

It’s okay to publish pictures of nekkid women in all sorts of sexual poses with parts showing and everything, but it’s not okay to show a man with a happy erection. Want to send a message to the printers in England? Support Filament by ordering a copy of their first issue.

Disclaimer: I happen to know both the photographer and the model, but that doesn’t change the fact of the double-standard in evidence.

Fist pumping is nigh

How much do I love The Angry Black Woman? I love her [———————this much———————-] for writing This is why Science Fiction can’t have nice things. Be sure to read her footnotes, for they are awesome and wonderful.

And as long as I’m wandering through other blogs, here’s this bit of schadenfreude to get you through the day: Health care protester gets in fight, asks for donations to cover health care costs.

Effin’ meow…

Just paid my fall bill to the tune of $2,700 and change and am feeling fairly pauperish. For summer semester, all I have left to write for class is my blog essay, and it should be fairly easy except for the part where I have the attention span of a ferret with ADD these days and can’t seem to concentrate.

*le sigh*

In other news, I’m soon to become the owner of several tens of thousands of worthless shares because I love my sister, and this is a small thing I can do to help her. Once I get the paper, I may use it to wallpaper my room. Or I may hold on to the things to see how much worse it can all get.

In yet other news, I spent my morning dinking around with the wireless network at home because my parents’ new Dell and their old Dell suddenly decided they didn’t like the base station that’s in the office. [shakes fist, flails] Haven’t I already said I don’t do Windows? Grrr. Argh. It’s fixed now, but at the cost of a morning I will never, ever get back.

Okay, work. I have school work to do and I’m really not in the mood to have failed to start the damn thing again. Catch y’all later.