My journey to the Gabycon was delayed in starting as it took longer to pack than I'd anticipated. I shoved things in bags for days beforehand, washed clothes, even ironed them, not worn favourite things because I would 'need' them. It seemed getting the kitchen sink in the boot of my car and then sticking a bike rack on the back took longer than....oh yeah, I've done that bit.

Well, I hadn't seen my friends and former roommates, Griff and Danny since November so when we got together yesterday, we yakked for about 5 hours and talked about everything.

Then I went home and went to bed a bit early.

I had a very strange dream, a science fictiony one.

In it, Griff was the leader of the household troops of the king of some almost-medieval country and I was his science advisor because the science was all more than up to date.

The great powers had passed our little kingdom by and we had become sort of like England was during the Cold War.

The BC server in Los Angeles is having problems with its power supply. This may cause the site to go up and down unpredictably for an hour or so until they get it fixed. It was down for three hours before I woke up and called the techs. Sorry about that.

BTW Wednesday set a record for unique visitors at 3842 for the day. YAY! :)

Hugs,
Erin

In today's Guardian newspaper (23.5.07) (www.guardian.co.uk - under life & health, story titled, 'Mistaken Identity'); one of the leading gender psychiatrists was censured by the General Medical Council for inappropriately referring 5 patients for surgey. He didn't stick to the rules regarding referral so the censure may be appropriate, but I won't comment upon the case directly.

Hello I've just opened the door to the Big Closet as a registered user and I'm buisy finding my way around the place. I've been into TG fiction for years mainly the reading of it and I've found the Internet an Aladin's cave of some good TG material. I'm very fond of reading Petticoat Punishment stories as this has been a favourite fantasy of mine for many years and I would like to write about it.

Bob called to point out something, we had over 85 visitors on BC at the same time. That meant some special load balancing software kicked in, turning off the right column stuff and the ability to make new blogs or forums. After a bit of twiddling, I decided the limits were too low so now the "throttle" won't kick in until we have about 95 visitors at one time. :) Thanks, Bob and thanks to everyone that was here between 11 and 12 EDT, today to give the system a workout.

Thought at first we had a harvester chomping at things but no, just people reading and maybe downloading by hand. :)

Just had to ban some addresses in Slovakia and Seattle for trying to access the admin functions of this site and running up a metric assload of "no access" and "page not found" errors.

Over the past few days, I have been giving a lot of thought to the recent unpleasantness. Usually, I send my comments to authors privately. I have said before and maintain that I don't like to post comments that might be seen as negative in a public space.

I have somewhat of an issue with that, though, because a free exchange of ideas in a public forum is one of the tools that can help our community grow. It is paradoxical that we are unable to offer positive criticism without risking censure of our own.

It's strange, I've posted over a hundred episodes of stories elsewhere, all fiction of course, but this is neither fiction nor a story, it's about me.

I have been conflicted for a long time about the appropriateness of commenting on authors' works for whom I don't 'work'. There is no question that I have a particular style and set of standards and it may not be compatible with every author.

Yet, I also want to help others grow in the craft and that can not happen without constructive criticism.

It seems, though, that some may have misunderstood my goals and intentions. I truly regret that.

There's an aspect to post-op life that not too many people talk about... depression.