Signups are open for fandom_stocking! \o/ It's the only holiday fandom thing I'm doing this year, but I always look forward to it hugely. I'll link to my stocking when it's up.

If you haven't done Fandom Stocking before, you describe your fandoms and your likes/dislikes in a comment to the signup post, using the given template, and then your "stocking" will be posted by the mods as an individual post to the community, so people can "fill" it with fic, art, holiday wishes, etc. There is no pressure to post fills if you have a stocking, which makes it ideal if you might like to receive a treat, but don't want the pressure of signing up for a holiday exchange (which is very much me this year).

Fannishly relevant for some: Captain America: Civil War trailer vid made by gwyn. (I am still avoiding the trailer as best I can, so no vid for me.)

I was thinking today about how the Internet, while it is the world's greatest research tool in many ways, is not a replacement for certain references of a more old-fashioned type. Like an in-depth book on a particular subject, or, as was the case today, a good road atlas. You'd think Google Maps would work just as well, but it actually doesn't for things like trying to figure out the general relationship of one place to another, or looking for the names of towns in [x] vicinity, at least not without a bunch of extremely frustrating zooming in and out.

I should note that this may not be true for everyone. But my way of mentally organizing data tends to take place in a "big picture" holistic kind of way, and the inability to easily view large-scale and small-scale data at once on Google Maps makes it more difficult for me than just looking up the relevant areas on an atlas that doesn't change contextually like that.

Admittedly Google is far superior at figuring the distances and travel times between places, however.