Wonderful, booming thunderstorms out there. Lightning. Thunder. Hard rain. The dregs of Isaac, that storm come all the way from West Africa to die above New England.

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Now, COMMENTS!

Yesterday, I spent hours searching for a story for Sirenia Digest #81, and found "Our Lady of Arsia Mons." Then I wrote a mere 596 words. But I'll do better today, now that I know what I'm writing. Also, yesterday, my comp copes of Paula Guran's Ghosts: Recent Hauntings (Prime) arrived. It reprints my story "Apokatastasis," which was last seen in To Charles Fort, With Love, way back in 2005! For dinner, Spooky made ham steak, black-eyed peas, and mac and cheese – comfort food. Later, more House M.D., the beginning of Season Two, and I read from Donald R. Prothero's After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals (Indiana University Press; 2006). I sent a bio to S.T. Joshi for an upcoming anthology.

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There was more GW2. I think I'm falling in love. Against my better judgement. Of course, we always fall in love against our better judgment.. I got grumpy that I'd not put the accent over the "o" in Millasdótter, so I painstakingly recreated the character and began releveling Saga. I reached Level 7, which is where I was before ditching the first version of the 'toon.

I have realized something cool about GW2. At least in the forests and canyons of the Shiverpeak Mountains, there's actually a believable ecosystem! Unlike WoW and Rift, where one will encounter mostly carnivores of one or two species and maybe a token herbivore, here we have numerous herbivores (in actual nature,usually occurring on a 10/1 ratio with predators): moose, deer, buffalo-like dolyaks, rabbits, "longhorn" sheep, and squirrels, along with omnivores like raccoons and bears (brown and polar). There are quadrupedel "minotaurs," which I think are herbivores**, but I'm unsure. There are snow leopards, "moas" (actually, phorusrhacids, dromornithids, or gastornithids), snowy owls, ravens, a semi-aquatic reptile known as river and snow drakes (they look like sail-backed Permian pelycosaurs), and dire wolves. Salmon. Even the forests are diverse, with several identifiable species of hardwoods and conifers. Very cool, this whole gaming biodiversity thing. Well, it's cool if you're me, and I am.

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In response to those who have doubted my claims that LJ is dying, I present to following two area graphs. Well, they may not be evidence that LJ as a whole is perishing, but they say a lot about my LJ's traffic:



So, there you go. beginning in April '04, a general decline in traffic (which was never good). By the way, I can account for all those anomalous spikes: 1) and 2) Neil Gaiman and others coming to the rescue during the two worst periods of my trying to deal with a seizure disorder minus the money to do so, and 3) my foolish attempt at heavily promoting The Red Tree via LJ (sales did not increase significantly, relative to my other novels*), and 4) the very recent taking to task of the censorius Outrage Brigade on August 13-14 over "trigger warnings." By the way, ignore those dates on the horizontal axis, as plotting on such a longterm rendered them irrelevant.



Detail of late July '12 through earlier September '12, highlighting the spike created by pissing off the Outrage Trolls. This does, at least, prove ellen_datlow's suggestion that I'd see more traffic if I made the LJ more controversial. Unfortunately, I see no evidence this spike had any bearing on sales, and given the immediate return to the usual trickle, it also led to no expansion of the blog's reader base. Hard evidence, people. Hard evidence.

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I have NOT forgotten about Aunt Beast's Salt Marsh Home Companion, even though we're a month past the projected launch. In fact, the website's even up. I'm just negligent. But soon, promise.

Negligently Yours,
Aunt Beast

* By the way, the trailer for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir also appears to failed to produce any noticeable increase in sales. Despite all the effort and expense and skill and time that went into it.

** Last night I confirmed the "minotaurs" are, in fact, herbivorous "bovines."