I wrote a short story! An entire one! Well, the entire first draft of one, anyway. I’m always starting them but never finishing. I’m basking in the feeling of accomplishment. It’s a ghost story, so it’s not really like anything I’ve written (or tried to write) before. I even wrote the first draft all in one day. I just knew what was happening next for all of it.

Gonna sit on it for a week or so, then revise it. Then, if I’m satisfied with my revisions, I’ll ask a friend or two to read it. Then, I’ll probably revise some more, but once it’s really, really finished, I’m going to enter it into the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. Wish me luck!

It snowed! They were calling for it, and I laughed. Shows what I know. Apparently it snowed in all 50 states. Of course it was all melting today, though we did lose power for a while and there’s a tree down in the driveway. Note to self: call the property manager on Monday if one of the other tenants hasn’t already. (So glad I parked by the curb Friday night, instead of in back of my apartment building.)

I took pictures:

So I’m posting this here so I don’t clutter up my Facebook and twitter with my whining. Otherwise I would be updating every half hour with “Waaaah, I’m sick. :(”

I’m sick with the flu and I haaaaaaate it. I can’t breathe and I’m all achy and trembly and this is a lame long weekend. I guess the bright side is I don’t have to miss any classes. Also, I don’t know if it’s swine flu or not, but I’m not a high-risk group and I don’t feel good to drive, so I’m not going to go to the doctor unless I take a turn for the worse.

This is the first flu season since ‘03 I haven’t gotten a flu shot, because they always make me sick, but I am definitely sicker now than the nose-spray vaccinations make me. (The injected ones are just as bad as getting flu the normal way, though.) I guess I’ve learned my lesson.

At least the worst of it is past. Yesterday sucked so hard. I was going to be productive this weekend, but that’s not going to happen. I have a couple of products to review over at The Cheapest Girl Around, and a new comic to update, but I don’t feel coherent enough for the first and my hands ache too much for the second.

Okay, whining over. For now.

Some auction site was hotlinking an image from The Cheapest Girl Around. This angers me for a couple of reasons.

First, everything on TCGA is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This means that people can repost my work. I’m all about sharing information. However, it’s not permission to use it without attribution (which was missing from this site), or commercially (such as using it to advertise a product you’re auctioning off.) It also means you have to license it with the same CC license, which I did not see. (Of course, I had to babelfish the page, so I might have missed that.)

Secondly, they were hotlinking the image, and thus stealing my bandwidth. That’s beyond rude. Bandwidth isn’t free. Not only were they violating the (pretty generous, considering) terms under which my images are copyrighted, they were doing it in such a way as to cost me money. (Well, I have unlimited bandwidth under my hosting plan, but there’s know way they could have known that.)

I considered trying to find contact info to make a complaint but there’s a language barrier and I’m not familiar with Chinese copyright laws. They might not even care. (Does China even follow the Berne convention? I guess I could google that.) Fortunately, hotlinking is a double-edged sword:

This is now the image on the auction page. Does anyone who speaks better Chinese than babelfish want to tell me if I got the translation right?

Here are the auctions as they originally appeared.

New posts at The Cheapest Girl Around and Not Your Parents’ Basement. Hopefully this will become a more frequent occurrence, but school is keeping me pretty busy.

Also, #whenwewereyoung is trending on twitter, and I don’t know what it’s referring to, but I keep reading it as #whenwewereveryyoung and getting excited that A.A. Milne is trending.