Your dating personality profile: Intellectual - You consider your mind amongst your assets. Learning is not a chore but a constant search after wisdom and knowledge. You value education and rationality. Adventurous - Just sitting around the house is not something that appeals to you. You love to be out trying new things and really experiencing life. Liberal - Politics matters to you, and you aren't afraid to share your left-leaning views. You would never be caught voting for a conservative candidate.

Your date match profile: Intellectual - You seek out intelligence. Idle chit-chat is not what you are after. You prefer your date who can stimulate your mind. Conservative - Forget liberals, you need a conservative match. Political discussions interest you, and a conservative will offer the viewpoint you need. Adventurous - You are looking for someone who is willing to try new things and experience life to its fullest. You need a companion who encourages you to take risks and do exciting things.

Your Top Ten Traits 1. Intellectual 2. Adventurous 3. Liberal 4. Practical 5. Outgoing 6. Big-Hearted 7. Stylish 8. Traditional 9. Wealthy/Ambitious 10. Sensual

Your Top Ten Match Traits 1. Intellectual 2. Conservative 3. Adventurous 4. Shy 5. Traditional 6. Practical 7. Big-Hearted 8. Sensual 9. Stylish 10. Wealthy/Ambitious

Take the Online Dating Profile Quiz at Dating Diversions

NOT the result I expected. Conservative? Really?

GAH

STOP FAILING ME WHEN I NEED YE, WRITING SKILLS

I got sent an invite code to be a correspondent for SPIN Magazine's spinoff community site (pro bono, alas - still, huge potential audience, yeah?), specifically to write about the Iran election crisis.

Guess when my inspiration decided to take a vacation?

orz

Waugh. Wrote too much. Up to 21 stories published, more waiting for edits, MORE finished just now, and grabbed another ten assignments to do over the course of the week, more yet to come as I finish them and find more interesting stuff.

And I'll be restarting the blog too. Shite.

That's it! Tired! Playing video games! Done writing for today.

In the last two days alone, I've written over eleven articles, effectively doubling my output in one go for this freelance writing gig. Admittedly, the pay scale on this set massively varies, with some of them being only five a pop (easy, no-brain-required sorts), and a large chunk of which are shared revenue types... which... haven't exactly been paying dividends. But most of them are decent moneymakers, and /all/ of them are to be published.

It may not pay well, but it sure as hell pays. Not bad for hack writing.

Massively dissatisfied with life right now. Not completely sure why, but it's been bugging me all last night, and appears to have lingered heavily. I think I need to save up for a roadtrip, or at least get involved in something now that my editorial position's ended for the year.

So I'm taking care of cueballex's puppy right now, and he's already chewed through three of my baby sister's toys.

COMPLETELY her fault, after the first one. We told her not to give him anything unless she wanted it to be chewed up after he punctured her swimming tube.

Guess what she insists on doing?

Toddlers are even less sensible than dogs! Who'd have thought. >___>

If wormhole travel between tens to hundreds to thousands of lightyears is possible, what about billions? What's keeping somebody from aiming it at, say, the galaxy next door?

Well... excepting authorial fiat, nothing.

Technically.

Wormhole generation - and the generation of contragravitic fields used to survive the journey through them - are, effectively, the folding of the fabric of space and time. However, again, the setting for this particular universe gives no cheap shortcuts to even the mother of all shortcuts: it takes a developed post-orbital infrastructure just to get to your closest neighboring star, linking intimately the relationship between power utilized and distance traveled. While technology, innovation and interstellar commerce makes this cheaper and cheaper (established multisystem polities actually has legitimate tourism amongst their member planets), there is a floor to how cheap you can get it. Nobody has, alone, the infrastructure to link whole galaxies.

At least, nobody around here.

Rumors trickling down amongst the multispecies grapevine suggests that this may merely be one of the poorer, lesser-developed reaches of just this galaxy - that vast empires of untold wealth and near-godlike abilities exist on the far side of the Core. Of course, such tales are familiar to all civilizations - even we Humans had tales of cities of gold and vast, unknowable civilizations during their own eras of terrestrial exploration. But there might be grounds for such talks - out amongst the great void, amidst the countless billions of galaxies, one or two are showing... unusual behavior. Gravitational oddities unexplained by the now extremely mature fields of cosmology and physics, the barest, faintest radio signals that hint at the characteristic footprint left by wormhole use... if enormously more energetic than any system used by known polities.

And that's just the less exotic of rumors - mundane, in fact. "Bigger and better than what we've got now" is probably the least of concerns about what may be out there in the eternal night.

Meanwhile, though there is a rough tech parity in the local neighborhood, there's definitely a distinct difference between a civilization just recently utilizing antimatter as primer for wormhole generators and one that's parked their national capital around a black hole, exploiting its monstrous, ravenous appetite for matter, light and spacetime for their own gains. Most everybody else hovers somewhere in the middle, the fierce competition in the interstellar marketplace driving technological progress at a steady clip.

But technology isn't everything. And the market isn't the only place where conflict is held. The galaxy is a dangerous place, where tens of thousands to even millions of years of divergent development makes it sometimes impossible for individuals, cultures and entire species to see eye-equivalent to eye-equivalent. There's not one, not five, but dozens of known civilizations whose default stance on interspecies diplomacy is demand conversion, then shoot. Often, even those that convert are shot. Sometimes, even those that don't convert are shot. Species-centric ideologies tend to go beyond suspicion of strangers and past even paranoia - when the governing criteria for respect and mutual gain is that you think, act and look like the People, those that fail the extremely specific Turing test equivalents are treated as obstacles to a manifest destiny.

There are peace-lovers aplenty in the universe, to be fair. But there's no such thing as pacifism. Nobody can afford to pay for that.

I suspect that my friendslist will find this particular LJ entry's picture vastly amusing - and appropriate.

Whoa, why haven't I been using Last.fm? Awesome stuff, great bands I've never heard of before. Even has my favorite doujin artists on it already.

Also, freaking plagiarism filters. Demand Studios is great for a quick buck per article, but the fact that there are so many stories with overlapping purposes - say, how to get a GED in (insert state here) - means that the easiest ones also give you the most hassle. There's only so many ways you can tell a person to contact their local testing center without sounding like a putz!

...what a beautiful idea! For my trans-Atlantic friends, a way to legally screw with the BNP