I got to babysit a bunch of half-grown crows this afternoon! The family was having a tree in our yard cut down, and the arborists noticed the nest and took it down without dislodging the babies, so I was on self-assigned crowsitting duty until the commotion died down and we could take the nest back outside. Crowsitting mostly consisted of me sitting on the kitchen floor next to the nest and feeding the babies little bits of canned cat food whenever they opened their beaks, and reading one of Stephen Hawking's popular works in the intervals. Considering my relative successes at these endeavors, I must say that if I ever pursue a second career in the sciences, I'd probably make a better ornithologist than cosmologist. (We did eventually replace the nest outdoors, in a little platform on top of a six-foot tree stump, and the parent crows have discovered it.)

There have been moments when I've thought, "Hey, I'm smart and did well in school, I wonder what I could have done if I'd challenged myself a little more? Maybe I should have taken more science courses." I do like science, but I rather waffle back and forth on how potentially good I'd be at it. I suppose I'd do all right if I stuck to things like the life cycle of sea slugs, or even the life cycle of nebulae. I understand the appeal of Exploring the Deepest Secret Workings of the Universe, but sometimes I suspect that being a primarily word-oriented thinker might trip me up in disciplines that are 7/8ths math and 1/8 highly abstracted physical interactions.

Cersei Lannister is what would happen if the stereotypical fictionalized portrayal of Lucrezia Borgia decided that she wanted to be Livia from I, Claudius when she grew up, but couldn't quite pull it off.

If I want to design D&D characters, I have to pull together my ratfolk detective for Friday, but *no*. My brain wants to play around with questions like "what problems would Golarion's equivalent of Stephen Hawking be investigating?" I know that most fantasy worlds are full of "how does that even work?" elements that are ripe for chalkboard-doodling (from Westeros' climactic cycle to why all those applications of "create water" haven't drowned the world yet), but if I want to design my own module I really need to be worrying about things like plot, not what one of the minor NPC allies does in her day job.

Even if I knew the first thing about vidding, my idea for the Sherlock Vid of Dubious Taste would be nipped in the bud by an apparent lack of a really satisfactory arrangement of the song in question.

Step One: create a piece of narrative art capable of acquiring an online fan base. This is the hardest part. Give it a fairly gender-balanced cast, and a plot that includes in-depth personal interaction but is at least as focused on action as on relationships.

Step Two: introduce a reasonably attractive, somewhat butch male character with a fairly major role in the story and a decent amount of character development. We'll call him Bob. Bob is conceived and written as a biromantic asexual, but the issue of his sexual orientation is never directly addressed in canon. Bob engages in a certain amount of low-key flirting, has a few romantically charged friendships and enmities, and admires a few people's good looks in an aesthetic sort of way - and he does all of this equally with his male and female castmates. He has no confirmed love interests and never makes a serious attempt to get into anyone's pants.

Step Three: haunt the forums, discussion boards, and fanfiction sites, and see what the fandom's consensus on Bob's sexual orientation turns out to be.

"He's a manly man in an action story that isn't Metal Gear Solid and he's flirted with women! He must be straight!"

"He's flirted with men, he has an epic bromance with Charles, and he's never had a girlfriend or even shown overt sexual interest in a woman! He must be gay!"

"Won't somebody think of the bisexuals?"

*muahaha*

I know it's considered a bad thing for authors to get too interested in fans' shipping preferences, but I think it would be really interesting to see how this played out.

Spotted when googling something else entirely: "Autism researchers see hope on the horizon." My reaction: "So, they're finally working on that 'rational explanations for human social behavior' manual? I need to get one!"

(Not on the spectrum myself as far as I know, but I am an introverted nerd who comes from a family where grabbing someone by the metaphorical lapel and lecturing them for up to five minutes on some fascinating new thing you've just learned is conventional etiquette. Seriously, even my extravert aunt does this. So, apart from its practical value, a manual of What Normal People Are Up To would be of some anthropological interest.)

Who looks more like a werewolf - Michael Fassbender or Eli Roth?

The judgement call when writing non-asexual characters whose closest and most dramatically interesting relationships are platonic: do you give them some kind of perfunctory love life (which is doomed never to end well, in order not to threaten the real area of interest) or do you avoid the issue and leave your whateversexual happy with their life of epic adventure and palerom? There's probably plenty of people out there who'd be happy if action buddy shows about Two (Ostensibly) Straight Guys cut down on the disposable girlfriends - whether because they ship Guy A/Guy B, dislike shoehorned romances, or have feminist objections to the ways the narrative disposes of the women involved - but when it's gay/bi/queer characters there are a few other issues involved. There's the whole "But Not Too Gay" trope and not wanting to perpetuate media squeamishness regarding depictions of sexual minorities, versus "why shouldn't people center their lives around things that have nothing to do with sexual orientation?"

I suppose in the end, the answer is "write what you want," particularly if one doesn't expect to get paid for it.

These were based on an Almond Bar recipe I got from a friend, who got it off a Watkins bottle, with the following modifications:

* Reduced sugar from 2 c. to 1 1/2 cups. (Or, to be precise, 1 cup granulated and 1/2 cup sucanat, since we were almost out of brown sugar.)
* Since we're a bit low on butter at the moment, use 2/3 c. vegetable oil and 1/3 c. mild applesauce instead of the melted butter.
* Half white and half whole wheat pastry flour.
* Used walnuts instead of almonds, since we had more of the former.
* Instead of almond extract, used a mixture of vanilla flavoring and Mapleine.
* Too avoid potential sogginess caused by the above alterations, added a little baking powder. I may have overdone it, or possibly beaten the eggs more than was strictly necessary, because the texture of the finished product was notably cakelike.

In my experience, most mainstream (non-healthfoody) recipes for baked goods can have the amount of sugar reduced by a quarter or so and still taste fine, and possibly be improved by it. (The exceptions are recipes that aren't terribly sweet to start with, like shortbread and semi-sweet yeast doughs.)

According to an offhand remark made by the player, our group's healer has a mustache. My Sherlock!Elf may have found her Watson! (I'm not certain the player would be enthusiastic about this, but they did wind up doing a lot of the mystery-solving work together, since not!Watson has the highest Diplomacy in the party.)