August Reboot Not Running Yet

Getting back into my groove in August has not happened yet. What I have managed to accomplish: a Batman short story and a drabble set in the Dark Knight Rises. I'm glad I did something creative, but I need to spend this weekend working on chores and creative pursuits, while keeping a dental appointment and dealing with library books.

Laundry, dishes, the house needs a scrub over from ceiling to floor, website work, figure out where I am in writing projects, write, and cook; I'm exhausted by just the list. Course I'm also exhausted from eating too many carbs and not exercising enough. The ice cream was good though.

In other news, tabs I have left open to talk about. Time to clear them off.

• Headspring Press: need to read and see if they are a fit for my fiction.
• Wordhaus.com: another potential market
• The CanAm Missing Project: tucking this into the ideas folder. Possibly can work with the Piper of Shadows universe.
• New thoughts on "write what you know": I found this video interview compelling.
• Guest Blogger Starling: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced: a post to explain to men that just don't get it.
• Not So Big House: concepts I want to use in the remodel of my house.

Last but not least: Batman: Puppet Master! This fan film is set after the Dark Knight and introduces the Riddler and Scarface to the Nolan Bat-verse. Kudos on the effects and the Batsuit, I like the tweak they gave the Riddler (not so much the actor's choices) but the real power of the whole thing is Wesker. If the actor playing Riddler had brought the same chops to this fan film that Frank Birney did, we'd have one hell of a film here.

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Why Do I Leave So Many Tabs Open?

Lincoln High School in Walla Walla Tries a New Approach to School Discipline - Suspensions Drop by 85%: I sincerely agree that this approach needs to be moved into all schools.

Jezebel: Rock the Slut Vote If you're as tired of old, white men telling you what to do with your body as I am, you should be voting.

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! No matter how you feel about Stephen King's writing, he grew up poor and was a poor adult with a family to support when Carrie sold. He understands (a hell of a lot more than Mitt Romney EVER will) why people need government safety nets.

LASERs I'm providing this link so you can educate yourself what new bonehead moves the state Legislature is trying to pull. I need to find a spot of Zen and write up my coherent "I'm a taxpayer, a state worker, voter, and a reader, asshole. Don't you dare try to pull this shit!" letter to my state representatives. Zen, so I don't cuss them out. But this stance of we want government services but don't want to pay anyone to do them is bullshit. And then to tax us for the joy of working for the state government? Colbert, take over please.

Thanks.

More for me than anyone else.

The Earth is warming up. The rate of warming has increased in the past century or so. This corresponds to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when we started dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet (hence the name) — if they didn’t we’d have an average temperature below the freezing point of water. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which is dumped into the atmosphere by humans to the tune of 30 billion tons per year, 100 times the amount from volcanoes. And finally, approximately 97% of climatologists who actually study climate agree that global warming is real, and caused by humans. -- Bad Astronomy: More Debunking of the ex-NASA 49 climate change deniers

Matthew Vines: The Gay Debate: Homosexuality and the Bible He has deconstructed the argument with the Bible and it is AWESOME.

Another moment of AWESOME Caine's Arcade. This will be a charity I'll donate to when I can because this amount of ingenuity must be encouraged for the sake of us all.

Lifehacker reviewed KanbanFlow and I decided to give it a try for a few reasons. Namely, I keep looking for a GTD list tool that doesn't let me oops forgot anything and actually encourages me to finish projects but also keeps the repetitive tasks that should be habits by now but aren't at the forefront. Two: KanbanFlow has limits built into it (can only have three tasks In Progress at one time), so I must chose what I'm doing and I'm aware of the choice. Three: felt like it.

It took three days to put in all my lists, but it was time well spent. First discovery: holy crap, I list a hell of a lot on my weekly to do list and rarely accomplish a third of it. Not a new revelation, but it was time to clean off the Big Rocks list and keeping my choices narrowed down to three in progress.

Second discovery: I meant to go through my writing projects and close a lot of them out. The list says I'm still writing most, when all I have left to do is publish it at the Library. Oops.

Third discovery: I wish they had included a copy 'n paste feature, but now that all the repetitive stuff is in, I don't need it as much.

Fourth discovery: I scheduled my timed stuff by 15 minute intervals, so using the Pomodoro timer doesn't mesh well, but it has a nice loud ding that's audible over the podcast I was listening to.

Writing Projects: Now I need to set aside some time to clean off the list, but it doesn't look like it will be this week. I haven't had as much free time at the paying job to concentrate on Stellar Gift of Death and been crashing hard when I get home, 7:30 pm bedtime. Why I haven't a clue. I did find a free map making program so I can make a legible map of the city for Forget the Sun, when I have the time and brain power to learn it.

This weekend is tentatively scheduled to be spent with friends and Marvel-trademarked spandex. Plans are still unformed as of today, but I do need a break from the housework and computer work I've been doing for so long. :p

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The BookWorm

The links cover a whole spectrum

First up, a situation that pisses me off. Jim C. Hines covers it much more coherently than I can right now in his post Doonesbury and Rape.

Second, Kate and Rick: a Love Story is a review that so eloquently explains why I squee so much at Castle and refuse to miss an episode if I can help it.

Third, 1920's Batman design. What really amuses me is how many costumes really don't change that much.

Fourth, Neil Gaiman found my engagement ring while he was looking for a replacement TARDIS pin. Too bad I don't have a fiance to give it to me.

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Things to Share

Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy.:
I can't make this shit up -- Why not researching who you are talking and then name calling is a BAD IDEA. But funny for us watch the Internet unleashed.
"Surprise! Meet the Internet. It’s kind of pissed." John Scalzi's take on the situation.
And now Wil Wheaton's.

OneLug recreates the Last March of the Ents from the movie Two Towers DUDE! I didn't know that many black Legos existed. Ssh! Don't spoil it for me if they could use paint, okay?

Why Steve Jobs Matters I don't own any Apple products and I don't use iTunes, but the world is better for having had him here and we should all be mournful of his loss.

Can't decide what to read? Use this flowchart to find something. ;)

Okay I think that cleans off this group of tabs.

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And because I needed to share a laugh

Five Science Fiction Shows Turned Into Children's Books

My favorite:



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Spontaneous combustion of hair

Let's establish what we know about the subject moi. I am not a first adopter of anything. While I'm not an Luddite, I don't see any hurry to jump on what everyone else wants to do. Usually because by the time I do, everyone has jumped off to something else. But when I do latch onto something I like, I go overboard and can't leave it alone. I have three blogs, enough said. I'm bitched at work for constantly being on the Internet. My focus SUCKS when trying to ignore updates and pings, and reading what everyone else is doing and I don't write. (Probably a huge contributing factor as to why I feel I get more done with a longhand first draft.)

I think Twitter is a stupid waste of time unless you are organizing a revolution or a protest like Iran did last year. I don't care about what you are doing every five seconds. And I will strangle anyone who says I need that.

The last time I did anything with MySpace, I found it to be written to give morons access to a website and since I know HTML and code my own, I got irritated beyond belief trying to use it.

Yeah, I hear the stammering "buts." No, I DON'T see a difference with Facebook. I have email, I have blogs, I have websites. I am a person who exists with plenty to say. Until I have a published book to promote it will not help me on the job (in fact will probably negatively affect my job since I MUST play with the new thingy I found). And a vast majority of the time, I don't want to be found by people who are only interested in pestering me for more fanfiction faster, which was the reason I stopped using IM.

And despite explaining this very succinctly to people, I am flooded with multiple requests to "join Facebook." Including the latest email today, which was probably an innocent query, but my hair burst into flames.

So rather than go screaming out of my workplace and wait for the nice men in white coats to show up, I put up a poll. You have two weeks to convince me I should a) drink the Koolaid and join the damn thing that I will NEVER update (seriously if I can turn on email alerts and forget it I so fucking will) b) and joining it will not interfere with my life (but it will and I'll never get any more fiction wrote again).

Two weeks. That's it. After that point I will start using the three strikes in response to the pesters. Strike one: assuming that person does not know that I don't want to do that and politely refuse. Strike two: when brought up again, give a lowball reason as to why the answer is still no. Strike three: Get graphic because they asked for it.

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Updating Alt. BM Site State of Progress

Oh bloody hell. Well, if you've gone by the site, you have seen it is still down for maintenance and is looking rather pale.

Now I'm going to try to reconstruct the weekend. Yeah, this is a me pounding my head against the desk post, but hopefully, it'll give me a clear path to start tonight when I get home. If I get home with time or a mood to work on anything; Mondays have been running late at the paying job.

So I reread Drupal instructions on creating a test site until I finally understood them. If there was pay involved, I would seriously consider helping write their technical manuals. I got the database exported and saved to my harddrive. I could not get it imported into the new test database. Did not feel like going around with the server's help desk, so I started working on the test site anyway. It doesn't bother me if there is a policy against database imports, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

A crucial step went wonky somewhere--besides the need a new copy of the database--and I discovered the changes were going onto the live site regardless of the measures I thought I had taken to prevent that. So then it took at least another hour before I get logged in after putting the whole shebang into offline mode. This was so not what I wanted to do. I wanted to have the breathing space of a test site to get most everything right before changing the production site.

So I managed to get the whole thing updated to Drupal version 6.13, turned on the new versions of the modules already in use, turned on new modules I think will help, and created a new Zen theme but didn't make it pretty yet. I really rushed through that whole part too quickly 'cause now I'm facing all the problems and don't know where to really start.

Problem number one: the new modules wrecked the navigation menu. For some reason, the links to get to their admin pages ended up there instead of on the admin page where I've always seen them go before.

Problem number two: I lost some pages made with views and it took a few hours to stumble my way through recreating them in the new Views admin pages.

Problem number three: AcidFree albums are no longer under development. And that means finding a new gallery module. Let's just say that I'm less than thrilled with my first choice at this point. That may change if I hear back from the developer with some clear instructions on how to set things up and make them a little more automatic.

Problem number four: the cron job refuses to run. I haven't even begun to figure that one out yet.

Problem number five: fixing the theme CSS. Actually, I don't see this one being a headache, I just haven't reached it yet.

Any good news? I don't have to retag anything, all the taxonomy terms moved over without breaking. I haven't lost any data and the database appears to be running normally. I think the biggest issue I'm having is a) losing track of what I'm doing because something else that is wrong snags my attention, b) have more patience figuring things out, c) frantic to get it done before the users get disgusted.

This has hammered home the need for a secure test site that won't talk to the production site and change anything for all the Drupal sites I have now. I'm fairly certain I have enough disk space on the external harddrive to set them up, and I should do that while I'm trying to hammer out the changes on Alt. BM Site (that mostly involves waiting on FireFox to unfreeze). It took long enough to work out the kinks with FFGarret and the Circulation Desk; I don't want this snafu to happen again.

Set up a Windows test server using XAMPP
Windows-specific guidelines
Import a MySQL data dump with BigDump
Create a test Site

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The BookWorm

Year-Round school?

A year round school option that sounds reasonable. I really like the sessions that allow in-depth exploration of a topic.

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The BookWorm

Little Things I've Noticed

This is going to be a schizo post. I've jotted down a few things over the week, had a weekend trip to talk about, then BAM! when I got to work this morning. A former student worker's sister, who also worked at the Department of Insurance in another office) had gotten into a bad wreck at 1am this morning. She was on top of an Interstate overpass, was ejected from the car, and fell thirty feet to the street below. She's in critical care and I know I don't have the full list of everything that is wrong, but the medics are saying her chances are good because she is young and strong without previous medical conditions.

It hits some of my coworkers harder. Their mother worked for the Department until she died, so both girls have been raised by the working village.

So on that note, here comes my notes on the previous week.

April 22: The albatross is off my neck and the words are flowing a little more free. Only it's not official yet. But apparantly telling myself I'm going to quit is enough to get creative juices flowing again. I finally came up with credible motivation for the villain in Strix, a character trait that had elude me for months. The ethnography is pulling teeth to make the daily word count. I'm going to outline how I want to cover the details tonight and maybe that will help.

April 23: Damn, I guess Amazon doesn't worry too much about stealing identities on their accounts, I just spent ten minutes changing my email address from Hotmail to GMail. It should never take that long to do that.

Also I didn't sell any of the books I put up for sixty days. Which means I'm free to put them out at the garage sale first and see if any of them will go. So in the next two week I'll have to purge my shelves.

I just did a Big Rocks tally. Out of nine items for this week that I have to do, I have finished five including the biggest and most involved: writing out my plans for FanFiction Garret on paper. Holy crap! And I was impressed I'm keeping up with my daily word count for the ethnography. I'm downloading and reading some books from WOWIO tonight. I deserve it. Okay, I just finished all the daily MITs for today! *Happy dance*

Have I not told anybody about WOWIO? Free ebooks and free ecomic books. There is a limit to what you can download and you have advertisement in the files, but that pays the creator of the book. A lot of the webcomics I read have switched to using WOWIO.

April 27: Went to Festival Internationale in Lafayette Saturday and discovered I don't play well in herds and I feel like I'm being a total grump when my schedule is disrupted. I'll never be invited back to anything because I'm turning into a grumpy old man who yells at kids on my grass.

Then on the other hand I introduced them to Pink Five. They'll love me forever.

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The BookWorm

Revolution Money Exchange

Breaking the silence to tell you guys about Revolution Money Exchange. From their website because I'm tired and can't phrase it better:

Easily exchange money online.
MoneyExchange is the new way to send and receive money online between MoneyExchange accountholders. It’s a great way to exchange money with friends, colleagues, or online sellers. Share restaurant, travel, or household expenses. It’s easy, secure and, best of all, it’s FREE to register and FREE to send and receive money between MoneyExchange accountholders.

Secure transfers.
With so many leading-edge security features built right in, security comes second nature to MoneyExchange. A PIN is required when you send money from your MoneyExchange account and transfers are processed safely and securely. Click here to learn more about our security features.

Your wallet will thank you.
Best of all – it’s FREE

* FREE to register for an account
* FREE to add money to your bank account
* FREE to send money
* FREE to receive money
* FREE to request money
* FREE to transfer money to your bank account
* A transaction fee applies for check withdrawals, check stop payments, paper statements, ACH returns, and overdrafts. See Schedule of Fees and Accountholder Agreement for more information.

For every referal, I get $10. If you sign up before May 15th, you get $25. I already have mine and I'm planning on adding this payment method to Alt. BM Site and the new site I'm working on.

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The BookWorm

Rethinking the internet sales

I have procrastinated horribly on setting up an Ebay store. Reason one: last time I tried to use my Ebay account I could never sign in, and I never found where they sent my info. Reason two: I suck at taking pictures of items. Trust me, I've had lots of practice to know I suck.

Now Amazon lets you sell stuff through them. I don't know if I can sell clothes through them, but for the other stuff I have piled up, this may be a viable solution. At least one I can set up in less than a whole weekend.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

Oh good, only one more day to get through

Still haven't got my sleep schedule straight. I don't know if I'm not getting to bed on time, not enough water, not enough exercise, or a combination of all three. I'm hoping it's not stress and very afraid that it is. Though back muscles tightness is probably more bad posture and need to exercise more. I got to get yoga back in the schedule.

Looking at more things with AMF website and MySpace page. I think I have a question that could relate to the Library as well considering Drupal. The question hasn't completely gelled, if you're wondering why I sound so vague. However it does fall under the things to consider later after Faire season.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

Feeling Guilty About Updates

Website updates might be the source of my wiggies. I haven't done anything on Alt. BM Site, the Library, or Acadiana Medieval Faire sites. in fact, the only thing I can say I've done on this front is get feedback and buy back two domains that I haven't put to use yet.

The websites exist in in a funny place for me. With the exception of AMF's, I do them for fun. I get them to the point now where I don't have to sit on them 24/7 so I have a life. And after so long, I start feeling like I'm letting people down. Mentally, I know this isn't true--the site is up, people are happy--but I don't remember that when I get in the throes of "AGH! TOO MUCH TO DO!" And when that feeling gets overwhelming, I want to crawl out of my skin and end up watching a DVD instead of actually facing the problem.

"Which is why one must do the mind sweep and remind oneself, grasshopper."

I think I'm past it now, mostly. So tonight I'm starting on redesigning AMF's website from getting home till about 8:30 or 9pm. I've been getting home around 5:30 to 6pm, but I need time to eat. So hop online and tell me hi and save me from tearing my hair out if you're available. All times Central time zone.

8:30pm and I have wrapped up. Sorry you missed me. :p I got most of the basics done at least. By Friday, I think I'll be ready to start the actual design process.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

Posted here for any stragglers

This is a copy of a message posted at the KLCtheBookWorm's Readers yahoo Group, but I'm cross posting so not to miss anyone who may have changed email address and don't get those messages anymore.

The Yahoo Group for KLCtheBookWorm's Readers hasn't done what I wanted
it to do.

The fault is mine. I don't have the time or energy to manage an email
group and make it a lively, happening, thriving place. It's too far
removed from the homesite. So it's time to change tactics. Just in
time for 2008.

But what to replace it with? I've come up with a few ideas and I'm
open to suggestions, so please respond to the poll and suggest away in
response.

http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/KLCtheBookWorm_Readers/surveys?id=2310006

I'm not going away and I'm still writing but it's so long between
updates, I want to keep my readers in the loop. So here's a further
explanation of the choices I came up with.

Forum: Our very own virtual clubhouse (which is what I saw this place
as at first)! Pros: I host it and I shouldn't forget about it quite
as badly. Cons: Potentially redundant since a lot of us hang out at
the same forums already.

Email Newsletter: I'm subscribed to a few for website updates, and I
like that it only goes out when I have an update. It still give
Readers (those who take the extra step and subscribe) first crack at
new stories.

Announcement Blog: I'm good with updating blogs. People can comment
and get a conversation going on blogs. And new stories could be
posted to it first. Cons: I already have lots of blogs, probably too
many.

So what would you like to see happen?

Responses are welcome in the comment section.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

Revenue or selling-out?

Ever so often, ad revenue ideas float around my brain, usually revolving around the websites. J.A. Konrath has some interesting idea with his ebooks. I would like to support Project Wonderful. I really like the idea of never having to worry about renewals on the websites, that much is covered at least. It's not about making a profit.

So this is here for research purposes. I have other projects to finish up before starting on websites tweaking.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

GTD Tips, Tricks, and Articles and Creative Commons

Normally I would print these out to refer to, but I don't want to use that much paper right now. Or steal much more time from the must-reach-word-count project.

Defining Your Work
GTD & the Art of Influence
Someday Maybe List - oh I think I want to implement this list even without the rest of the system
Are You Comfortable with Space?
Start at the Beginning

Creative Commons - need more research, but I may need if I start selling stuff via the web.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

While finding quotes

And Google Books went right to the page I needed. Make of that what you will.

However one of the links that came up was this: Placet: timeline. Course I had to click around to answer the WTF?! echoing silently in my head. (Not out loud because my coworkers don't like displays of random like that.) They give explanation in Placet 101.

I need pictures to add to the blog very quickly. Words fail me right now, but I think a dumbfounded face would work. Hell, it could even be of cat.

Edit: Okay, found one.

And I suppose someone is going to say I have no write to be astonished. After all I mixed BMFM, TMNT, and Kung Fu: the Legend Continues into one universe. And sent one character visiting across dimensions so he landed with Legend of Zelda and Gargoyles.

And it not the most convuluted mash-up I've ran across. That honor belongs to a Gargoyles fanfic that mixed Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, X-Men, Highlander, and possibly a few more I can't remember. Brooklyn's kid became a Slayer triggering a prophecy about when the three races all had a slayer (Gargoyle: Arianna, Human: Faith, Fae: Buffy because she's related to a certain Scott Summers and mutants are the result of human/fae crossbreeding.)

The chorus from Monty Python's Holy Grail sprang to mind and I obeyed after just that much.

And I adore both Harry Potter and Lord Peter. Hell, I want Universal Studios to open Harry Potter World and figure out how to run a LARP in it. But meshing two worlds so separated by time and genre, I can't figure out how and have no desire to read it. Good luck with it. And I hope the Sayer estate isn't as go-get-'em when it's people who aren't selling it. Laurie R. King's story

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

Need to join

Holly Lisle's One More Word

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

My content

Websnark: Of course, this all discounts the deep joy some people get at railing against the man in as dramatic a way as possible. For those people? I say "by all means carry on."

I never really got on the Live Journal crazy. Friends convinced me to start a blog, I went with Blogger, I figured out how to do backups, and never really looked at anything else. And now after the breastfeeding pictures icky thing and now this, I'm glad I'm not on LiveJournal.

And the Right Reverend Wishlish in the comments makes a valid point about hosting your own content (or paying for hosting same difference). While I don't feel the need to migrate from Blogger at this time, I can if I need to.

But my first thought upon reading all of this was: "This is why I do Alt. Biker Mice Site." It's not the only reason, but slashfic deserves a place too. If you personally don't want to read something, that's fine. But you can't impose your taste upon everyone else, that's censorship. Art gets trickier, but you can still take steps to shield unsuspecting eyes.

And SixApart has hurt a lot of people, which could have been avoided had they handled it better. (All the same, I'm glad the fandom I'm heavily involved in has characters above the age of minority.) I'm not sure how the argument "it's their property, they can do what they want" holds water now. Contracts can't be changed online without notice, court rules. But even that doesn't change the fact that SixApart dropped the customer service ball and LJ users should be taking procautions to protect your words and images. And that's just good advice for all things online.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/

Got One Thing Accomplished Today

The update to the BookWorm's Library is done.

Here's to the next week going better than the last.

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The BookWorm

There is a new renaissance festival in Louisiana! Check out the Acadiana Medieval Faire at: http://www.acadianafaire.org/