Raithe

To be fair, I think my Harley Davidson jacket has that many zippers on it, and that's from the early 2000's....

Condolences Hurl. When you can make those memories personal, they'll always last. I've been feeling fairly out of sorts, not sure if it was the A/C on the flight back, but I picked up the ticklish throat that's turned into a full blown mucus cough, which induces headaches and terrible sleep. Thinking I'll end up having a quiet New Year's eve ignoring most things and possibly reading while avoiding hacking a lung up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fMEaj7kkDA

OpenCulture - Ayn Rand helped the FBI identify It's a Wonderful Life as communist propaganda

Caught Ocean's 8 on the plane. Hm, okay, the acting is good, the chemistry between Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchet, Anne Hathaway, and the rest generally work, it's all slick and smooth, and it does have a nice bit of twist towards the end. But something seemed missing, there just weren't enough playful twists in the process, it was quite straightforward right up until the end. It's like it has all the ingredients there, but something failed to rise in the oven. I would watch it again, but more as a lazy evening, on tv kind of way.

I think it's a perspective thing in my mind. The romance that occurs is never central to the plot of the story, it just happens to be a natural aspect of character evolution and interaction. To me, a a romance series , the romance and relationship is first and foremost, and everything else hangs off that. When it's a sidenote, when it's part of character growth that just happens alongside the actual plot and story.. That's not a romance series.

Ilona Andrews can be enjoyable - They started off their Kate Daniels series with no intention of it being considered "romance" , although as is the nature of any long-running series of books the relationships between characters can become plot elements. What's kind of amusing is that because the books would keep getting put in the romance section of book stores before "Urban Fantasy" got its own section, they ended up writing a few romance urban fantasy stories just because people thought they already wrote them. You might like to try Simon R Green. He's done both a fantasy world style urban fantasy in his Hawke & Fisher, while his Nightside is very much that otherworldly realm in the center of London where fantasy and reality share renting space and the sun never shines. Jonathan Moeller's Cloak Games is kind of the Dresden Files meets Shadowrun, set in a near future earth where Elves invaded from another Dimension and are firmly in control. The story of one woman trained to be a covert thief / agent for a manipulative Elven High Mage. Depending on how much pulp you like, (and swerves into sci-fi), check out Michael Todd. And if you like both humor and spice, check out Elliot Kay's Good Intentions trilogy - The guy just finished high school, starting college..and ends up bound to an Angel and a Succubus at the same time, finding out that life is a whole lot more complicated then he ever realised.

Not strictly a celebrity as such... Richard Overton, USA's oldest man and WW2 vet dies at 112

Juggling the jetlag after arriving home. Vegas was an interesting mix of things. Although finding out that what I thought was meant to be a father-son trip turned out to include a friend of my fathers (a recent divorcee who he used to work with for 20-odd years) and her 15 yr old daughter was something that threw me. Got a few things ticked off the list of Vegas stuff to be done. Including the jumping out of a perfectly good airplane around 15,000 and having a glorious view of the Hoover Dam, the Mojave, and the Vegas sprawl.

Gizmodo - First photos and voice cast released of Netflix's Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

Now that's a quotable answer: At the end of 2012, according to EOO, a “rich list” for Chinese literature was revealed, and 31 year old Zhang Wei (who writes using the pen name Tangjia Sanshao) was listed as the richest man in the world of Chinese online literature, with earnings of 33 million yuan over the preceding five years. Of course, to earn that much money, Zhang pumps out an average of 10,000 characters per day. And when asked what it was like to write 26.9 million words over that period, he simply replied, “My hands are sore.”