Madeline L'Engle's a Wrinkle in Time was my first SciFi book, also introduced to me by a librarian, after which I voraciously read every book she ever wrote, wrote a paper on her in both third, fourth and fifth grade, and made her a pen pal as part of a class project (she wrote back several times AND sent me a bookmark!) I read Z is for Zachariah and it made me so very sad. I reread it and it again made me cry. I hope for so much more of us. I read so much now I don't quite remember all the authors names, though every story is written forever in my head, and I can recite back to you . If you haven't yet, may I highly recommend reading ALL of William Gibson. You'll love them as much as I, my friends.

Um, you are awesome, and you rock, and yay Kitty! but dude um - throne - okay? -Madrigorne

I am so buying this, framing it, and hanging it on the wall in my computer room. Its just so awesome. How much you wanna bet the pegakittycorn is all stretched out sleeping in one of those sunbeams? And I just bet that somewhere off to the right (follow the point of the sword) there is a double rainbow in the distance...

Hawesome, just hawesome. On another note - I too want a TARDIS purse.

Okay so I had to go to the google cache to read this. And it was a very dumb article, written by a lameass who thought himself clever. I bet his mom tells him he's clever. Anyhow - so I told my best friend Alissa that I follow you on Twitter and that you are awesome, and she quite literally turned pink. She blushed! Then she asked me if I could get her an autographed picture of you. If I send you a SASE + cost of photo, would you send one back to me?

I am a long time gamer girl, been playing D&D and other RPGs since 1982. 4th edition's an okay game, but its not really Dungeons and Dragons. I still game with the same groups of friends, and we still try to have fun - but I am finding this to be an entirely different game, and not altogether a good one. I am not sure why they had to change every aspect of the game system;some of the names are the same but the rules and mechanics are not. They let you keep your dice and gave you a new character sheet, they kept levels and experience, but they took the game and gave back something very much like a paper version of a video game with a strange embedded cardgame subvariant. Feats are a concept they stuck into 3rd edition/carried over to 4th. I unabashedly hate feats. I either ignore them entirely, which annoys the GM, or I take the ones that permanently change some attribute of my character - like an initiative modifier, or a constitution score, so I can write it down and ignore it. The rest is just fluff and paperwork - which bogs down play for me - and I hate it. Magic items are pretty worthless now - not really interested in an item that will give me an additional +1 to my jump/climb/athletics check. Spiderclimb items don't let you spiderclimb - they only give you a slightly better chance to climb - if you roll high enough. If my climbing skill sucks, the spiderclimb slippers are not going to help. Rope works better. Waterwalking only gives you the ability to wander out atop the water until the end of your move - when you submerge and swim or begin to drown. I can drown just fine without magic, thank you. I will use a boat instead. You can still get + 1 weapons/armor, those are really the only things worth having. The rest of the items - you could just rip the pages out of the book, they are not worth the trouble. Magic is no fun now. None for me thanks. Healing surges are an interesting idea - but they have pinioned the healers to only being able to heal 2x/encounter - and that's great if you have a group of only 3 people gaming, and only if the non-clerics each need to be fixed up only once in combat and only if they have any healing surges left. Even healing potions rely on your surges - except the really really expensive ones. That's more cardgame+tokens than I'd like, shades of magic the gathering. If you do not meet each and every part of that criteria - you are dead or you have to go sit that combat out at the bottom of the discard pile and stop having fun until everyone agrees to go back to the campsite/inn/half collapsed cave to take a nap and start again the next day. Diety forfend some wandering monster come to eat you during the night. Its a whole lot of paperwork just to keep the game fun. The whole point of the game is to have fun, right?

I am a long time gamer girl, been playing D&D and other RPGs since 1982. 4th edition's an okay game, but its not really Dungeons and Dragons. I still game with the same groups of friends, and we still try to have fun - but I am finding this to be an entirely different game, and not altogether a good one. I am not sure why they had to change every aspect of the game system;some of the names are the same but the rules and mechanics are not. They let you keep your dice and gave you a new character sheet, they kept levels and experience, but they took the game and gave back something very much like a paper version of a video game with a strange embedded cardgame subvariant. Feats are a concept they stuck into 3rd edition/carried over to 4th. I unabashedly hate feats. I either ignore them entirely, which annoys the GM, or I take the ones that permanently change some attribute of my character - like an initiative modifier, or a constitution score, so I can write it down and ignore it. The rest is just fluff and paperwork - which bogs down play for me - and I hate it. Magic items are pretty worthless now - not really interested in an item that will give me an additional +1 to my jump/climb/athletics check. Spiderclimb items don't let you spiderclimb - they only give you a slightly better chance to climb - if you roll high enough. If my climbing skill sucks, the spiderclimb slippers are not going to help. Rope works better. Waterwalking only gives you the ability to wander out atop the water until the end of your move - when you submerge and swim or begin to drown. I can drown just fine without magic, thank you. I will use a boat instead. You can still get + 1 weapons/armor, those are really the only things worth having. The rest of the items - you could just rip the pages out of the book, they are not worth the trouble. Magic is no fun now. None for me thanks. Healing surges are an interesting idea - but they have pinioned the healers to only being able to heal 2x/encounter - and that's great if you have a group of only 3 people gaming, and only if the non-clerics each need to be fixed up only once in combat and only if they have any healing surges left. Even healing potions rely on your surges - except the really really expensive ones. That's more cardgame+tokens than I'd like, shades of magic the gathering. If you do not meet each and every part of that criteria - you are dead or you have to go sit that combat out at the bottom of the discard pile and stop having fun until everyone agrees to go back to the campsite/inn/half collapsed cave to take a nap and start again the next day. Diety forfend some wandering monster come to eat you during the night. Its a whole lot of paperwork just to keep the game fun. The whole point of the game is to have fun, right?

can't...stop...screaming...oh great now they're sending me home from work...

can't...stop...screaming...oh great now they're sending me home from work...

IRL my name anagrams into 'An Alien Toy' - which is really really funny...to me anyways...

IRL my name anagrams into 'An Alien Toy' - which is really really funny...to me anyways...

Yay! This is on Fark now too! Woohoo! That crazy PandaBee was snuffling you.

Yay! This is on Fark now too! Woohoo! That crazy PandaBee was snuffling you.

*heavy sigh* I have missed Sarah Jane. I grew up in the time where you only got 3 VHF channels and then UHF - where you had to have the rabbit ears and the circular wire to catch the briefest glimpse of either - when cable just came out, but was too expensive for a single mother. There was no internet, there was no cable, there was only ABC, CBS, NBC and grainy PBS. I grew up treasuring every sci-fi moment I could snatch from the television, clogged with mindless sitcoms and movies of the week. We watched alot of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers when Dad was still around, but after the split - all Mom watched was Threes company and other uninspired gorp that would send my mind into torpor. Having Doctor Who surface on PBS for an hour and a half on Sunday afternoons was amazing, and you have NO idea just what happy hell I had to endure just to get left alone for that hour and a half - having to run and do stupid unnecessary errands during the middle of the show because Mom thought it was a boy's show and would turn me lesbian. As If! Tom Baker was my first love. I wanted to be Leela, to be Sarah Jane, to be Nyssa, or Teegan, to save Adrick. I still do, even now. When there was no Doctor Who, I read copiusly, compulsively, devouring as much Sci Fi as our school library held, and then on to the public library when those books ran thin. TNG was proof that there were other people like me in the world who still wanted to see something intelligent on television, besides Nature Documentaries. I cannot believe what changes the world has wrought. Cable is almost everywhere - or you can get your signal sent to you from a satellite...from space! There are hundreds of channels now, we have the internet, we can stream shows we want over cable into personal home computers, we have shows like Lost, and Heroes, there are THREE flavors of Doctor Who now (Sarah Jane, Doctor Who, Torchwood), we can watch all the Star Trek or whatever show we want, buy the whole collection on DVD, there are entire networks set apart specifically for encouraging the imaginations of Sci Fi fans. We have the Matrix Trilogy. We revamped Star Wars and added some pretty awful prequels. We have the Lord of the Rings movies, we have the Terminator movies - and now a pretty awesome Terminator TV series. Battlestar Galactica has come back from the past. We have Firefly, and Buffy, and Angel. Wesley Crusher is part of what gave me hope, when the rest of the entertainment industry wanted to force feed me Urkel. That TNG writers could not intelligently write child parts is irrelevant. The truth is that actor who played Wesley Crusher is cool, intelligent, who loves comics and science fiction, who is a wonderful writer, a great dad, and geek like me seriously rocks. Tod Emko is an uninspired dick who cannot seperate character from actor. I have never heard of Tod Emko before today. And as I sit here, in the wee morning hours, in the dark, at work, doing technical support on satellite data uplink technology - technology in space! - I can tell you that your words mean far more. Tod Emko can DIAF. Seriously.

*heavy sigh* I have missed Sarah Jane. I grew up in the time where you only got 3 VHF channels and then UHF - where you had to have the rabbit ears and the circular wire to catch the briefest glimpse of either - when cable just came out, but was too expensive for a single mother. There was no internet, there was no cable, there was only ABC, CBS, NBC and grainy PBS. I grew up treasuring every sci-fi moment I could snatch from the television, clogged with mindless sitcoms and movies of the week. We watched alot of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers when Dad was still around, but after the split - all Mom watched was Threes company and other uninspired gorp that would send my mind into torpor. Having Doctor Who surface on PBS for an hour and a half on Sunday afternoons was amazing, and you have NO idea just what happy hell I had to endure just to get left alone for that hour and a half - having to run and do stupid unnecessary errands during the middle of the show because Mom thought it was a boy's show and would turn me lesbian. As If! Tom Baker was my first love. I wanted to be Leela, to be Sarah Jane, to be Nyssa, or Teegan, to save Adrick. I still do, even now. When there was no Doctor Who, I read copiusly, compulsively, devouring as much Sci Fi as our school library held, and then on to the public library when those books ran thin. TNG was proof that there were other people like me in the world who still wanted to see something intelligent on television, besides Nature Documentaries. I cannot believe what changes the world has wrought. Cable is almost everywhere - or you can get your signal sent to you from a satellite...from space! There are hundreds of channels now, we have the internet, we can stream shows we want over cable into personal home computers, we have shows like Lost, and Heroes, there are THREE flavors of Doctor Who now (Sarah Jane, Doctor Who, Torchwood), we can watch all the Star Trek or whatever show we want, buy the whole collection on DVD, there are entire networks set apart specifically for encouraging the imaginations of Sci Fi fans. We have the Matrix Trilogy. We revamped Star Wars and added some pretty awful prequels. We have the Lord of the Rings movies, we have the Terminator movies - and now a pretty awesome Terminator TV series. Battlestar Galactica has come back from the past. We have Firefly, and Buffy, and Angel. Wesley Crusher is part of what gave me hope, when the rest of the entertainment industry wanted to force feed me Urkel. That TNG writers could not intelligently write child parts is irrelevant. The truth is that actor who played Wesley Crusher is cool, intelligent, who loves comics and science fiction, who is a wonderful writer, a great dad, and geek like me seriously rocks. Tod Emko is an uninspired dick who cannot seperate character from actor. I have never heard of Tod Emko before today. And as I sit here, in the wee morning hours, in the dark, at work, doing technical support on satellite data uplink technology - technology in space! - I can tell you that your words mean far more. Tod Emko can DIAF. Seriously.

A Pansy is a sweet, cute, delicate flower. You should get Nolan with your chicken liver nose gun - and watch him scream like a little girl "Get it off! Get it off! Eeeeee!" when he realizes the chicken liver leeches have attached themselves to him... and then ask him who the pansy is. Personally I like flavors other than pain... Hope you feel better soon, that particular coughing brand of misery has washed over us here too - and I tell ya its no fun for anyone.

A Pansy is a sweet, cute, delicate flower. You should get Nolan with your chicken liver nose gun - and watch him scream like a little girl "Get it off! Get it off! Eeeeee!" when he realizes the chicken liver leeches have attached themselves to him... and then ask him who the pansy is. Personally I like flavors other than pain... Hope you feel better soon, that particular coughing brand of misery has washed over us here too - and I tell ya its no fun for anyone.

That's not my nose...its a carrot...

That's not my nose...its a carrot...