YAY! Unexpected free afternoon!

Unprecedented news: We are being let out at 12 today. Not in honor of Halloween, of course, but because of server problems that kept our IT team here overnight and are still preventing us from doing most of our work. In my three and a half years here, we've never been let go this early, not for blizzards, not for broken air conditioning in the middle of summer, not for holiday weekends, not for power outages, not for malfunctioning equipment or failed connections necessary for us to do our jobs.

SIX FREE HOURS. I think I'm going to try to work on my Big Bang story. That, or try for a fic for karaokegal's Halloween party (nothing like a last-minute costume), although I'm at once bombarded with ideas* and bereft of inspiration and/or something concrete on which to build a story. I've been kind of pathetically sad at not having a story for the party. Or in general. Prompts are still very welcome....

(*So far have considered: trying to finish the Ali fic segment; a story without Wilson; first person POV; emo; over-the-top purple-prose-type fic parody; Mary Sue; vampire!House; something with the ghosts of House's former patients; story in a fandom I haven't written in before; a rewriting of "Ethan Brand" with House or McKay (suitably spooky); and other stuff I can't remember. Nothing that has sparked any actual text, unfortunately.)

ETA: Ladies and gentlemen, we have an idea. Now to see how long it takes to write....

6:00 - 900 words


Happy Halloween!

Public health announcement: Take a moment now and ask yourself, Do I have Death?

I love wrongdiagnosis.com; it's useful and well laid-out for the lay researcher.

But this is just funny. Here's what can happen, kids, when you display every entry in your encyclopedia within a template.

Page title: Symptoms of Death

Questions include: Do I have Death? How serious is it?

Follow some links, and you encounter such nuggets as: Estimated mortality rate for Death; 100.0% (ratio of deaths to incidence); Annual mortality rates vary with age and generally increase with age after the first year; Failure to Diagnose Death; Treatments for Death; Deaths from Death.

It is interesting reading besides being worth a few laughs.