LJ Charity Offer

If you weren't around this weekend, you might not know that LJ has partnered with a nonprofit organization called DonorsChoose.org. What this is, is a website where public schoolteachers can post proposals for projects and people like you and me can decide if we want to help fund them, and give whatever amount we want.

What does this have to do with LJ? Well, SixApart is giving money and *you* get to decide who to give it to. The catch is, you have until today, Monday, at 5 PM Pacific time to email them and request a DonorsChoose $30 gift certificate. Once you get the code, you go to DonorsChoose.org and decide which project you want that money to fund, and fund it.

I found three projects proposing to buy manga for classroom libraries, to tempt reluctant readers and to get manga in the hands of kids who want more but can't afford it, and set up the Manga Matsuri Challenge. Please consider donating your $30 through this challenge (Force SixApart to fund future fans!). If not, there are many other deserving projects out there. puppleball, a real-life friend of mine who is a middle school science teacher, has had three projects funded through this website.

The gift certificate offer is only open until 5 PM Pacific today, but the Blogger's Challenge I set up is open until the end of October.

Links:

Donorschoose.org
SixApart's announcement
My announcement from this weekend



ETA: "International donors too: they need to choose NY as their state and give the international zip code. see list where *=1" doire, here.

Erudite shirt

One of the shirts I bought this weekend (this one) has Latin printed randomly on it. I can't quite make out the correct spellings of enough words in a row to be able to toss it into Google and search to see if it comes from any particular text. This bothers me. Perhaps I am slightly strange.

P.S. The colors are completely wrong on that image. The purple is much lighter and there is text on the sleeves near the wrists as well.

ETA: Random words I can make out:

babituculum
lapidibae
famuli

Wow, it's hard to make these words out. I can usually get all but 1 or 2 letters.

(no subject)

New suggestion for international people who want to donate through DonorsChoose via the LJ/SixApart offer:

"International donors too: they need to choose NY as their state and give the international zip code. see list where *=1" doire, here.

My previous challenge post.

Linkblogging

Part I of a 3-part interview with Megan Whalen Turner.
Decorative Books: The End of Print from Design Observer. Not quite what you'd think.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION!!!

For those of you living in or phoning Japan, that is.

My lunchtime reading today was in The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship, which is basically an anthropological investigation of the many, many forms that Inari worship takes in Japan today, with special emphasis on the foxes that serve as the deities' messengers.

So, the question is: how do you tell if you're talking to a fox on the phone?

( cut for answer )

Cool, guys!

So far on the Bloggers' Challenge page I set up at DonorsChoose for the manga projects, we've got one project almost completely funded ($33 left - if someone gives another $30 to that, I'll toss in the $3 out of my pocket, for the hell of it), one 80% funded (it only need $88), and one 22% funded (needs $420). Considering I started on Saturday with only one of them funded to the tune of 10%, that's pretty damn good, I have to say.

Thank you all!

wooo! pictures soon!

rachelmanija mailed the SD cards from her camera to me, since I bought the card reader, and I've just pulled the pictures off. Expect pictures of the kitsune shrine we found in Kyoto sometime tonight! :D

Fanartists!

yuletart is open for sign-ups! Go sign up and publicize it so more fanartists sign up!

If you missed my previous annoncement, yuletart is a multifandom non-HP fan art gift exchange, much like yuletide is for fic.

Manga Matsuri charging ahead!

It's not charging quite as fast as the thermometer would make it seem: one or two of the projects got a bit of funding outside of this challenge, and they don't count towards the thermometer. The discrepancy between what was needed to complete the challange target and what was needed to fund the projects bothered me, so I revised to make it accurate. :D

But two of the projects are fully funded, and there's only $300, as of this posting, on the third! We're doing great!

springkink rec

incandescens has just posted a Pet Shop of Horrors/Saiyuki crossover in springkink. :D

Yo, vom_marlowe!

( Hooker!Aya! )

(no subject)

WHY IS THIS SHIRT TAKING ITS CAT FOR A WALK?

( Did you believe our story where we saw the shirt and the cat? )

MORE JAPAN PHOTOS WOO!

These are from Rachel's digital camera. She took some of them, I took some of them. The first album from her camera is on the lower right corner of the first page of the gallery, and the rest are on the second page of the gallery.

If you want to jump forward to the photos of the mysterious kitsune shrine, you can find it right here. From reading in The Fox and the Jewel, I suspect it's an Inari shrine, but Inari is sort of the one-size-fits-all of deities, worshipped under many different names, with many different responsibilities, and in many, many different ways. So there's no telling aobut this one - to find out more about it, we'd have to find someone who actually worshipped here and ask them. But that mysterious door in the back of the shrine is still driving me insane...