This one seems worth spreading around:

Fair Phone, the socially conscious smartphone.

Europe only so far, but a cool idea. A fully featured Android smartphone built by workers who are treated fairly and with "conflict-free minerals."

But they need 5000 preorders to get the whole thing off the ground.

(Crossposted to signalboost)

BTW, if anyone is interested, the original Extremis storyline written by Warren Ellis (which made me appreciate that they named the President after him, since I doubt he got any other compensation for the movie) I'd available as a motion comic. (The art, with limited 2D motion, with the dialog voice acted.) Netflix has it in their streaming library. (At least, they did a couple of months ago.)

Surely a petition to scrap Congress and start over can do better than the nutso conspiracy theory ones, right? ... Right?

I mean, I know we can't actually do that. But there are reasons Congress is less popular than pond scum right now, and reinforcing that might just actually have an effect...

Just woke up from a strange and exciting dream. It kind of jumped around, actually. (I'll tell you about it, but there's more to this than just the dream itself.)

First a girl wandering alone through a city (I held my breath as I watched her, as if in a movie) having to escape the three men who followed her around the subway station. She ran into a couple of other girls and they made it to safety together.

Then she was younger, in her early to mid teens, and I was her babysitter for the night. We were supposed to be walking home, but she ran ahead in a different direction. Breathlessly, I chased after her. Until we got to a breathtakingly beautiful landscape of rolling green hills. She promised we would just be there for a quick visit, and could still be home on time.

She ran ahead again. I watched as she got to a house on a hill. Below, in the valley, was a sprawling mansion, almost a castle. She told me she just wanted to see if the good witch or the bad witch appeared on porch first, as that would be an omen for the coming day.

It turned back into a movie as the good witch appeared and then fainted. Someone had sprinkled the landing site with coriander, she gasped! She had had some training as a witch herself (plot point: we'd surely find out more about that later, with the likely result of her becoming apprenticed to the good witch, if not taking over for her entirely).

She ducked into the house, and stumbled onto... Gasp! A jar of coriander! The house's owner walked in. I held my breath as the girl stumbled to explain, and then escaped from the room (as I stood there to back up her explanation).

Then it was two male friends in the road. I was sometimes an observer, sometimes in the head of one of the pair. We stood outside the house. The wicked witch walked out. We started to run. She got ready to throw a spell at my friend. There was only one thing I could do. I secretly had some magic of my own, but I had never used it. I prepared a shield, the one spell I could (maybe!) cast. I had to time it just right! I held my breath, waiting for the right moment.

She threw her spell. I cast the shield. She was aiming for my friend, not me! I shifted the shield. Would it work? My breath caught. But yes! The shield formed! It protected him. I even managed to push it back, knocking the witch momentarily off her feet! "Run!"

We ran. The witch got up, intrigued by this new and unexpected magic. She got ready to cast again. Running as fast as I could, I desperately threw a half-formed shield behind me. I didn't even turn to see if it had done any good.

My friend was ahead of me. He'd already gotten to the train station. It was on the second floor. The witch was right behind me. A breathless moment.

A sudden, desperate idea! I started throwing shield bubbles behind me with both hands, as fast as I could. Everyone watched, amazed, as I flew through the air, jetting bubbles. I managed to maneuver to the second floor and drop between the ceiling and the railing. It was a glorious, scary, breathless moment.

Behind me, the witch stopped to examine one of the bubbles, which remained intact on the ground for a short while. There would be a price to pay for my escape. She would learn about my magic, likely more than I knew myself.

With that realization, I woke up, gasping for air.

My CPAP reports zero breathing anomalies in the five hours I managed to sleep.

I have an appointment Thursday morning. It can't come soon enough.

I'm thinking of starting a text/story-based RPG on a message board I frequent.

(Basically, people create their characters and post what they want those characters to do. Then I, as GM, decide what happens and post the description. And things go from there.)

I want it to be a superhero game. I'm thinking along the lines of Wild Cards, actually. An event occurred which gave some small number of humans super powers, and now they're running around using them and it's a different world. So not so much the tights and capes (although there is some of that).

I can get into details in another post or privately. That's just background. Thing is that I want them to be able to run freely around the city making their own decisions and creating the plot that way. To make things easier on me, I've chosen modern NYC as the setting. (Specifically, Manhattan.) I'm already reasonably familiar with the city, and it gives me a ready-made map with familiar locations and existing neighborhoods and so on.

But I need help fleshing it all out. In part because the creative part of my brain hasn't been the same since fibro fog shut down most of my high-level cognitive functions. In part because I've never been that good at creating whole casts of new characters. In part because having an ethnically diverse city means including cultures and neighborhoods I don't know very well.

1. I need help creating characters. I have a good start on several of the major players, but I need a lot more people to properly populate the city. And there are whole neighborhoods where I just haven't decided what's going on.

2. I need help worldbuilding. Brainstorming. Figuring out the timeline and what's different and what might be cool to add. I have ideas, but I need to develop them.

3. I need to figure out how to handle the Black, Latino, Italian, Chinese, and other neighborhoods. I don't know the cultures well enough to get them right. I want to include them. It would be wrong to sweep them under the proverbial rug. How do I include them and create characters without being racist? (Hello, Luke Cage...)

Marathon runner lost both legs in one of the blasts. When he woke up in the hospital, he provided crucial information about the suspect to police. Despite having health insurance, his bills are expected to reach into the millions. He's crowdfunding it. His employer, Costco, has pledged to match donations. Currently up to about $250k. Which is a lot, but a drop in the bucket compared to $9 million.

The health care system in this country is a national disgrace.

Thinkprogress has the story. It also provides a link to the crowdfunding page.

I have a cold. With my awesome kick-ass immune system, this almost never happens. Which is fortunate. Because even a mild cold can really screw me up. Basically, I have a stuffy nose. Which, for reasons I won't get into right now, means I also have a sore throat. Also a little queasy from time to time. But mostly it's the stuffy nose that's the problem.

I have sleep apnea. I don't breathe well when I'm dreaming, which wakes me up out of the dream until I start breathing again. Which means that even though I'm asleep, I'm not really getting the actual restorative benefits of sleeping. The treatment for this is to pressurize the air I breathe, helping me to keep breathing so I can get some real sleep.

The problem is that the apnea machine I have works through a nasal mask. And I have a stuffy nose. Even with a combination of decongestants, my nose is pretty stuffy. My apnea index (number of incidents per hour) has tripled. I'm waking up a few times a night. And the congestion is worse today than it was yesterday. Right now, I can't breathe through my nose at all.

Which means... tonight is going to suck.

Also, today has sucked. Also, tomorrow is going to suck more.

The good news in all this is that my kick-ass immune system generally gets rid of this nonsense relatively quickly. Should hopefully be back to normal soon. And then I have to try to catch up on sleep and deal with the pain and exhaustion associated with that.

Shorter version: This week sucks.

The Goblins webcomic is one of my favorites. I've met the author, and he's really cool. If you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it.

But there are those who hate the comic. They are known as 4chan trolls. One of them made what, by 4chan standards, is a brilliant "parody" of Goblins which gets circulated around 4chan. It's poorly drawn and very stupid, but Thunt, the author of Goblins, finds it hilarious. He cracks up every time. He'll draw a scene that reminds him of this "parody" and he'll start laughing. Specifically, the "punchline" of the parody, "I'M SAD," makes him laugh.

And so, for April Fool's, I want to swarm him with postcards saying "I'M SAD." You can add a drawing or some other words or whatever you'd like, but it must prominently include that phrase.

Thunt lives in Canada. I don't know about other countries, but a postcard from the US to Canada costs $1.10 to send and should arrive in about 7-10 days, more or less. (The address is a PO box which is not checked daily, so a bit of variance shouldn't matter.)

Will you join? Will you ask others to? It's just a postcard. A minute of your time and a couple of bucks. The more we get, the more fun it'll be.

The address is at the bottom of this page. (I don't think there's any problem with posting it in plain text, since it's a snail mail addy, but I'll err on the side of caution.)

My annual dilemma approaches. It's just about my least favorite week of the year... and Dad's favorite.

( Cut for griping and religion. These are my personal thoughts and feelings, not intended to tell anyone else what to think or believe. But if you're not in the mood to see the Bible criticized, this is not the post for you. )

So, yeah, I suck.

Nothing's happening. Nothing's new. I've got nothing to say. I'm just tired. And pretty much everything else is stalled. (The people I'm working with on the bakery have been sick and also had to move to a new place, so they haven't gotten anything done, either.)

But hey, I did make myself a pair of slippers. From scratch. With no pattern whatsoever and only the vaguest of plans. So that's something. They're based on the awesome Goblins webcomic which you should totally read if you're not already.