Speaking of radio, that music meme was going around recently and one of the questions was "How do you listen to music?" and I realized the answer for me is FM radio. I've gone through phases of cassettes and LPs and CDs and MP3s and streaming services, but it's always most consistently been broadcast radio, because broadcast radio just plain works with zero effort or decision-making required on my part.

(Even for long roadtrips, I like to see what quirky radio stations I can tune into instead of listening to music I brought, which unfortunately tends to work best when there is nobody else in the car to annoy with it.) Thirty years from now, we will all be listening to whatever thirteenth-generation media format is out there on our cyperpunk implants from our undergrounds bunkers, and I will still be listening to broadcast radio (because I guarantee there will still be broadcast radio.)

Anyway, here are my current radio presets. If you live in the DC/Baltimore metro area, these are mostly recs. If you don't, uh, this is me being smug about living in a place where I can pick up about a dozen noncommercial FM radio stations without trying very hard. :P Also most of them have internet livestreams I guess.

( links to livestreams coming if I get less lazy )

Do you still listen to radio? What are your go-to stations?

First, two general notes:
My laptop power cord/socket have reached the point of non-working that it's generating more heat than power, so in the interest of not setting another motherboard on fire, I am going to be opening it up this afternoon and attempting to replace the parts. I have never sucessfully soldered on a motherboard before, so if I unexpectedly go silent, it is probably because I have melted my laptop, jsyk.

Also, I will be going to Boston at the end of this week, and then bringing stellar_dust and her cats (and all of her stuff) back to Maryland after. Any Boston people want to hang out or go see Avengers again or anything? :P I'll be free... um, Friday. I will even have a car and everything this time!

Five slightly more interesting things:

1. I fixed my radio yesterday (the power of rubber bands!) and turned it on just in time to discover that Jim Packard had died. ): The world of radio quiz comedy shows has lost a luminary. (I had to change the channel while I was waiting for the radio to wind down, I couldn't take listening to Michael Feldman trying not to cry anymore.)

2. I have read Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, courtesy of a very kind person who loaned me a copy of the e-ARC! It is ( general, but no specific, spoilers )

3. Oh and speaking of writers who should definitely keep listening to the fans, one of the ways I know that I have assembled a very good network here is that when I go to my network page, I always find interesting things based on what you all are reading. Yesterday, I learned that dduane ships Nita/Kit/Ronan.

DIANE DUANE HOW ARE YOU SO AWESOME. (not going to follow her tumblr though, tumblr still scares me.)

/me continues to believe that bit at the end of Spock's World where Spock and McCoy head off to bed and ask if Kirk is joining them really was intended to be what it sounds like.

4. Speaking of poly ships, somebody at the poly panel at con.txt (I think it was viklikesfic) recommended the Polyamory Weekly podcast as a good source for people writing poly fic who wanted to learn more about the ways people do poly in RL, and I've started listening to it, and really enjoying it.

It's exactly what I wanted - not advice or how-tos, but a glimpse inside a wide cross-section of the poly community - because when I think about poly fic, I often want to write people who identify as poly, and not write them in ways that would make poly people cringe; but all the people whose poly lives I know anything about are in fandom, which might skew things a little. Poly Weekly give me that! And "from a kink-friendly, pansexual point of view" which is even better.

Anyway, highly recommended, and it has me thinking about poly ships in fandom, and that one of the reasons I like explicitly poly fic (and in a different way than plain OT3/OTTeam fic) is that to be good at polyamory, you are expected to communicate openly with your partners, to be self-aware and responsible for your own feelings and needs, to be adult and compassionate, to think in terms of networks of many kinds of important relationships instead of One Person Who Matters.

Because yes. Yes please to all of that. And you don't have to be poly to have that, but you have to have most of that to make poly work.

...which on the surface makes it kind of hilarious that I am having so many ( polyamory *feelings* about Avengers )

5. Oh and speaking of stuff from con.txt, I posted about the QUILTBAG on the new contxt_lounge community. I was going to post a general crafting update here that included all that, but just the QUILTBAG part got way too long, so I threw it up there instead.

Also included in that post is the current draft of the Dalekling crochet pattern from two years ago, if anyone was still waiting for that. :P

Here's the photo and basic description, copied from that post:
( QUILTBAG )

( Also here is a picture of me in the Sufferer cloak I altered for con.txt )

I was going to save this to post after I had done some of the other things I am supposed to be doing (finishing up yuletide, making those two recs posts I owe people, answering comments, etc and so on) but it is becoming increasingly clear that I need to post this now so that I can at least attempt explain why those other things aren't getting done.

So, here it is:

How melannen Gets Into A New Fandom

( A Case Study using The Dresden Files )