OK, I'm in Maine now. The house we ended up getting is great, but it is not the one with the in-law apartment (which needed too much work for our timetable); the across-the-street neighbors seem nice; the birds had a rough drive up here but are doing great in their new space; and getting internet was a hassle for no good reason but is done, successfully. I'm basically ready to start the new job next Wednesday, give or take setting up the office space. I don't have all of my stuff—a lot of it is back in Pittsburgh, with Dale, who I am trying to convince to let go of some of his (entirely reasonable and understandable) desire for control and let professionals pack it—but I have enough to make myself meals, do my job from home, and generally be OK for a while.

If you need an updated address, email me. Or post here if you don't know how to email me.

Also, since I now live in a small town, and everything is done on Facebook, I gave in and rejoined, sigh. If that's a thing you also do, please feel free to find me. My public post is "as good as a DNA sample" for identifying that I'm the owner of the account, says Dale, and my user icon is the QR code cross-stitch I did in 2012 or so.

The title's a bit tongue-in-cheek. OK, a lot tongue-in-cheek. ( Books (and other media) that might help some men learn to be affectionate/romantic/considerate in a way that many of us learned through our media choices and upbringing. )

If you’re looking for a fun and educational thing to do this weekend, you might consider attending the second quarterly(??) Online Unconference of Niche Interests (“OUNI” for short), scheduled to run from 2pm until a bit after 5pm Eastern Standard Time, this Sunday, November 29. We have a set of volunteer presenters who will each talk for up to 15 minutes about a niche topic they’re into. Sign up here if you’re interested in this or future OUNIs, and we’ll send you a link to the Zoom session, the talk schedule, and the Discord chat space.* You are welcome to drop in and out of the Zoom, if there are only a few talks that interest you; of course, you’re also invited/encouraged to stay the whole time!

Our list of topics for this Sunday:

• Knitting but Scary
• Making Herbal Salves
• Fanfiction: the Sometimes Sensational World of Transformative Fiction
• Magnificent Moose: Animal, Culture and Representation
• All the Fair Dice
• Glass Sponges: Delicate Aliens
• Post Office Trivia You Will Enjoy, and a plug for writing letters and postcards

The schedule, with full session descriptions, is here.

I know, I didn’t ever actually blog about the First Online Unconference of Niche Interests, sorry. The recordings we have permission to share are on this playlist, though. (Yes, the one about owls was me. :)) Topics not in the playlist included adaptive clothing, birdwatching, capture the flag (security games), octagon houses, and approval voting.

I mention the previous list of topics in the hopes that they give you ideas. :) We do already have 2-3 talks pre-proposed for the next OUNI, which is very exciting! The form for talk submissions is open now, and we’ll schedule the third OUNI around the availability of presenters. If we get more talks than will fit in a nice 3-4 hour block (with breaks!), we’ll do community voting to decide which ones run. Or we’ll schedule multiple weekends in a row? Whatever, this whole thing is designed to be flexible and fun, and if we’re going to err, I’d really prefer to err on the side of including more people, not fewer.

* We promise not to share your email address or to use it for anything except OUNI announcements. (“We” is my spouse and me. I don’t foresee other volunteers needing email address access, but if this thing grows, I promise we’ll continue to be cautious and opt-in with everything.)

Rather than paste the whole thing here, how about a link?

I made some friends at WisCon, yay! WisCon folks seem to use Dreamwidth a lot, so, it seems like a good idea to have a Dreamwidth account where I can be myself, but an unprofessional version thereof.

Put another way, I need a space where I can make public posts, attributed to myself, that maybe don't belong on my professional blog. (I'm not committing to not posting a long run-down of tabletop RPG systems on my so far semi-professional blog, but I'm also not sure I'm going to do that. This gives me the freedom to decide when I actually write the post, which probably won't happen before next weekend, June 8th or so. If I post it there, I'll re-post it here. If I ever go back to posting about librarianship, data, and/or tech on that blog, I may not re-post it here, except maybe in link form, for anyone who is interested.)

Anyway, look for two posts over the next couple of weeks: 2) a list of all the things that were recommended to me that I felt confident enough that I'd be into that I wrote them down (we will think of a catchier name) and 2) a big post about all of the tabletop RPGs one might want to check out.