jducoeur

This week's LinkedIn links contains a delightful piece from Business Insider, on the subject of Facebook's IPO, taking the whining investors to task. 

A quick note or two:

As many of you know, Niki is moving to the area this coming weekend.  She's bringing up a medium-sized truck full of stuff, which we're going to move into my storage unit for the short term, until she has an apartment.

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If it tastes funny, look at your ingredients.  If an ingredient should have been thrown out in the previous century, you have a good candidate for what went wrong...

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I'm not really cranky today, but man - the afternoon was full of Stupid.  So while I wait for Niki to arrive, a few thoughts.  First topic: DC Comics.

I finally did this month's Previews yesterday, and as threatened, it was full of preening about DC's exciting new venture.  52 new #1 issues!  Don't worry about any of that boring old continuity - we're going to throw it all out and start everything fresh! and new! and keen! and full of exclamation points!!!

My reaction, predictably, was somewhere between "Yawn" and "Again?  Seriously?  How many times is it now?"

I confess, they've done me a favor.  I've been getting tired of much of DC lately, buying too much of it out of habit.  Some of it I liked a lot, but of course all those stories are now over.  And it's been crowding out potentially better new stuff.  So fine, this makes it easy - I'm now dropping *all* of DC.  I'm sure that some of it won't suck, but most of it will, and it's all too interconected - it's just not worth the effort.

So all of DC goes *plonk*.  This actually gives me a fighting chance of catching up on my back reading, and maybe, eventually, trying some new stuff.  Probably not what they intended, but it works for me...

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Thank you to whoever left the flowers.  I couldn't be here for her birthday proper, but just had lunch graveside.  Took a minute to find it, until I realized that the pot of red flowers was sitting atop the marker.  I still need to get the headstone - a project for this week, to get that properly designed and going, but I have it laid out in my head.

A bit somber now, but grateful that she's allowed me to move on and start building a good new life, better and more quickly than I'd imagined possible.

Love you, dear...

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One highlight of the day today was the sending to Pelican vigil of Master Robyyan, an old friend from the dance community.  In his vigil book, I mentioned Rule #1, which I cite frequently these days:

Do what's Fun.
Don't do what's not Fun.

And it reminded me that people have challenged me on that several times, citing the necessity of unfun.  But I want to push back on that a bit.

Unfun can be a necessary evil, but it's less necessary than often believed.  If something is unfun, see what you can do to change that.  Sometimes that's a matter of finding the joy in what you're doing.  (For instance, the discovery of the cameraderie of doing dishes after the event for an hour.)  Sometimes it is changing the task to be more fun.  (Kobayashi Maru cheats can be a blast.)  Sometimes it's finding the person for whom it *is* fun to do it instead.  (Remember, delegation in a good thing on many levels.)  Sometimes, it's challenging your assumptions and saying, "Why are we doing this unfun thing anyway?"

And yes, occasionally you have to suck it up and just accept the unfun stoically.  But you'd be surprised how often one of the above techniques can be applied if you're willing to put some imagination into it, and how much healthier you'll be for it.

So don't just accept unfun.  Rule #1 matters - it's the heart of survival in the SCA or any other organization, and it's worth trying to live by...

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