Not to put too fine a point on it but there's less than four days to go in the month and we are still short about $700 of our goal. (There's known money in the mail.)

If you tweet or follow twitter, you can find BC news at the @spfn Twitter feed run by Piper. Besides tweeting links to posts and blogs on StoryPortal, it also tweets story posts from BC, automagically several times a day.

Hugs,
Erin

We may have some files that have been corrupted, perhaps during the crashes on Magda.

We hope you have noticed that things are slowly getting better as we tune the server for better performance but sometimes we blow a sour note like this morning. And the server is still a bit flakey which we are still working on figuring that out.

But we have ordered the new drives, they should be in tomorrow and so it's likely that later this week the site will be down for as much as a whole day while we install the new drives and then move the software over. And then there will be another round of tuning things to get optimum performance.

I think we may have lost a story in the database meltdown last night. We had made a backup of what was going on at one point yesterday and it seems to me that at least one story got posted after that backup which is what we just restored from. Please, I hope everyone is keeping copies of their stories before posting them and if your story posted and disappeared, you can just repost. I hope.

The site was down for a few hours today while Piper and I fought off some reaper bots. We firewalled their ISPs, all of which were in China, and while we were at it, we firewalled out some spammers, too. Took about four hours of solid work.

The rumors of BCs demise were greatly exaggerated. :)

Hugs,
Erin

We should be back up and running fine now, please PM me or Piper with any more technical problems.

The site was up and down frequently today, the problem finally turned out to be a badly behaving server on the same subnet with us at the server farm, not one of our servers. Sheesh!

Hugs,
Erin

A woman explores being a male model:

Link

Hugs,

It got down to 18 degrees F here last night. The water main has frozen and we are without water for making coffee. Oh, what shall we do in the land of bottled water? :)

Hugs,
Erin

Wolfpacks have a hierarchy of respect, obligation and deference. At the top of this hierarchy are the Alpha Wolves, usually a mated pair but sometimes a single individual. At the bottom of the structure is the Omega Wolf. The Omega eats last and is chased and bitten by all the wolves higher up in the structure.

If the Omega wolf dies or leaves the pack, a new Omega ends up being chosen quickly and is not always the wolf that was formerly the one just above the old Omega.

Two days and about $400 bucks. Might not seem like a lot for some people but this is for a tiny unit in a mobile home. Heck, in today's economy, that's about 2/3 the value of the home.

Christopher Leeson's Noel isn't exactly a traditional Christmas story. And yet, in many ways, it is the perfect Christmas story, being about redemption. It's also one of the stories that convinced me that the net was a wonderful place to discover and display actual well-written fiction and so led almost directly to the founding of BigCloset as a site for displaying and discovering TG fiction.

Simply put, because it is bogus. It's exactly like criticizing a story for having a sex change in it. "Fresh Start" stories appeal to some people but not to all, so it is appropriate to decide that if a story has an theme or element that you do not enjoy, then you weren't the target audience for the story.