and then I get a scary thought: that he's here means he's never lost

Drunk octopus wants to fight you.

Insert Coin. (And yes, that really is all stop-motion animation.)

The Genderplayful Marketplace has launched! What is the Genderplayful Marketplace? Well, there's a person named Sarah Dopp who envisions a different world, a world where we accept gender is fluid, and changeable, and don't pin a lot of expectations on other humans if they want to explore a different gender state. Because clothing is communication, and clothing is what we put on to reflect who we are. As Megara said on the video:

"The wrong clothes can feel like trying to speak gibberish with conviction."

Go to the Tumblr site to get more involved. They're fundraising to launch the project, but they're $950 towards a goal of $5000, which is both really, really low, and also, really amazingly achievable. There's some perks for donating, which always help, but for the most part, it's just strong community-building, and trying to raise the funds from people who want to participate in pushing it forward. Help if you can and if you want to. At the very least, it means--even if online--there's another small patch of extreme and aggressive tolerance on the planet.

What should Gawker have done differently? EVERYTHING.

The problems with the whole Gawker mess are manifold, but it all comes down to several similar points:

• People tend to keep the same passwords, for a long time.
• People use easy-to-guess passwords, more often than they should.
• People use similar--or the exact same!--passwords across multiple sites.
• No one at Gawker knows how to stand up and accept responsibility for their bad faith in all of this, or their cluelessness at realizing they'd been hit.

I tossed up an initial reaction on YouTube, but what kills me about all of this is I thought I was safe. I thought I had nothing to worry about.

I was wrong.

Gawker currently comprises Gawker, Gawker.TV, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, io9, Fleshbot (NSFW, if you couldn't figure it out from the name), Cityfile, and possibly New York Daily News. If you were signed up to any one of these services, your account name and password ARE out on the internet.

I'm not making that up, that's not hysteria--that's FACT.

If you're listed n any of these, change your password. Download LastPass, HandyPassword, 1Password (or track down your own password-protecting software) and make it something you couldn't guess in a million years. Your chances of getting hacked won't drop to zero, because hackers are inventive, but they'll at least go down considerably.

Cthulhu Legos!

Finally, there's a company out there doing Girl Genius scents--with permission of the Foglios! I can't help but think that some of the Jagerkin on the grid would adore some of those. (The one I really want to try: Jager #3.) And the one for the Baron makes me giggle.

Now, y'all excuse me, I have to go download the #@$%&(! official SL client so I can approve their #@$%&(! Terms of Service changes so I can get into #@$%&(! SL again! Bastards. Because Imprudence still can't see the Terms of Service pop-ups. Imprudence, yousuckyousuckyousuuuuuck for not fixing the approval bug.