What's a "reading page"?

Let us begin with a laugh: the winners of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, featuring fros on giraffes, frogs in mid-flip, and all manner of happy and angy poses from the natural world captured at exactly the right frame.

Surprising only people whose view of masculinity is sufficiently calcified that it lacks both flexibility and strength, there are plenty of heterosexual men who enjoy reading the romance genre. They can't do a lot of talking about their love of romance, except to others who have already accepted that part of themselves, usually on Reddit or similar semi-private enclaves. Which feels a little bit, the way the article puts it, like men are not asking other men if they are familiar with The Premise, and checking to make sure the other person understands what's being sought before letting them into the clubhouse.

Also, I should mention that I'm still looking for a few more spots for you to fill in the tail of the statement "thank you for having a conception of masculinity that…" for this year's December Days.

A utility to create a hybrid typeface of different sources all hammered together at various intervals. For those times when you would like some form of cursed typeface or to see what you can do with cursed typefaces.

Significant files and programs that are ubiquitous across open source software, Internet servers, and such are maintained by a very small number of people, often one, sometimes two. That xkcd that gets referenced a lot is correct, except for the Nebraska part, and some of the people in charge of those utilities and files need both funding and additional people to assist them in their work. (Because, after all, at least one of them, xz, has already successfully had someone commit malicious code to them from someone who was posing as a person to relive some of that commit burden. And also, there's always the possibility that the sole maintainer will win the lottery tomorrow and decide they would like to pass on the stress and responsibility of maintenance to someone else.)

Margaret Hamilton, proving that Software Engineering is a discipline and art, and that women at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were able to do more than be calculators, has passed on to her next mission at 90 years of age. An iconic photograph of her shows her placing the last book of the printed source code that powered the Apollo computers that took astronauts to the moon and back. Hamilton also took a strong interest in making sure that the code was robust and could recover from errors and faults in the hardware, or appropriately route computation and systems so that mission-critical functions could still perform, even if other systems were currently experiencing problems.

( And what are these fools up to now? )

Last out, Be human and make human art. No, it doesn't have to be perfect. No, it doesn't have to make money. No, don't let the plagiarism machine do it. And try not to hurt people or make the world worse with it. All in there, all of them are good ideas. And no, you don't have to be omnidisciplinary, either. I am learning, slowly, with each compliment and each attempted deflection, that "bad" art is still enjoyable, and also, the primary way I get art out into the world, regardless of whether someone else publishes it in their own place, is by accepting the possibility that it will be bad art, and that it won't go anywhere, and that will be fine. (The fact that I have so many markers of success at getting my art in front of others is still something I don't like looking at directly. If I say I'm doing it for a lark, I can get it done. If I'm doing it because I want it to be good, then it gets weaselbit.)

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)