WFC XI post mortem.

WFC XI voting has closed. Congratulations to toxicfur and her superb "Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant".

Truly, friends, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And before you today are seven stories that have ventured deep beneath the city, met that beholder, and hacked off one of his eyestalks for your enjoyment.

Invoke your right as a free Husian: read these grotty, sexy, streetwise tales and then subjectivate the heck out of them in the attached poll.

WFC XI is still wide open for another week. A week is a long time in the metropolis, especially if you shift shape due to an ancient eldritch lineage. Tell us about it. Send us an impassioned pamphlet about subway accessibility for mermaids. We're listening.

The moon enfullens!

It brings the tide to the land and the blood to boil! Flesh to change, and to eat other flesh! Depending on the exact specie of change!

Bringing rushing, gurgling torrents of words. Fun words. Words splurted forth in competition. Fun competition. In writing.

Memoir writing for a consensus surreality.

I've been thinking about choices in life and paths taken. Paths that might hurt us or help us grow. And I know this is something we share as a community, and something that brings us back here, something that people are going through right now. So I thought I'd share a piece that is quite personal for me, but maybe helpful to others too. You might have read it before, in which case I ask a moment's indulgence.

Cool New Yorker article on making health costs cheaper by treating people better. Mention here as it seems like a pair with the "failure demand" in Theophile's diary recently.

"I like managing non-events," an operations manager I used to work with would say. I remember it particularly because his popularity was less than universal. He said it about the support on 31 December, 1999. It was a silicon gully firm, in the little run of Brisbane tech companies tucked between Coronation Drive and the XXXX brewery. I do recall one meeting where he got rather excited about referring to a WAP prototype we had knocked together as "a solution looking for a problem". Well, not exactly: it's a prototype, we wrote it two ways because we wanted to think through the problem. He used to nick bottles of wine from Friday drinks and go home, which is a bit dodgy and unsociable. He did do his job done though, kept the machines and networks running. I didn't work in ops but I remember his catchphrase because when he moved on to another place someone wrote on his card "Dear OM, being managed by you was a non-event."

That office was underwater a few days ago. Well, bits of it.

Non-ironic. Three strangers near trains with random nicenesses in two weeks.