So, yesterday I went and submitted my paperwork for passport renewal, which I had to do from scratch because I changed my name since the last one. As a public service, here are tips for others who may be doing the same.

1) you will need your parents' birthdays and places of birth (state is okay if you don't know the city), and also for your spouse or ex, if you have one. Do not believe the online application if/when it says it's okay to leave those blank. You also need to fill in prospective travel destination, even if you fill it in with "none".

2) don't try to take/print your own passport photo, seriously, just go to Walgreens or similar, it will save you hours of frustration.

3) you will want to look up whether acceptance facilities take walk-ins or require an appointment. Most drop-off points will require an appointment. My county clerk's office did not, and thankfully had extended hours on Tuesdays, which made it worth taking the bus down, but all the post offices needed appointments.

4) almost everywhere will require you to pay the passport fee and execution fee separately. Because reasons. Take you checkbook, your credit card, and cash just in case. You don't want to go through this twice. You cannot use cash for the actual passport fee, so make sure you have a check or money order for that part.

5) if you have an old passport that is even slightly damaged, write up a brief statement that it was damaged in a flood/plumbing accident/the dog ate it/whatever, to sign and include if called for.

6) take every piece of identification you own, birth certificate, old passport, marriage license, court order of name change, social security card, DEFINITELY the driver's license. Just take everything, just in case, because once again, you don't want to haul through this twice.

7) if you are doing this for a child, either both parents must be present or else you need a signed release form from the parent who couldn't come. Consider bringing along custody paperwork if you were awarded sole custody.

8) they will take away the originals of your ID, except the driver's license. Don't panic, you will get them back, but they will come in separate mailings from your passport.

9) I would not consider it amiss to take along at least a good photo of the kitchen sink. If nothing else, you may make the acceptance staff laugh, which they are surely in need of.

10) on which note: bring along your patience. There are sure to be people ahead of you in line, quite possibly people who are upset and nervous. Soothing music, phone games, a hip flask, whatever gets you through.

Personally, I'd schedule a stop by the pub in the way home, to celebrate wending your way through all that bureaucracy. *lifts her glass* Good luck!

For the benefit of my fellow Ohioans, as I research to fill out my lovely absentee-because-I-want-to-vote-by-mail ballot:

Straight Democratic ticket is looking like a pretty safe bet, this year.

For the judicial races, Judgepedia has turned out to be a very nice source. Cupp and O'Donnell were implicated in the funding scandal a few years ago and are still taking ridiculous amounts of campaign money from the Chamber of Commerce, so I'd say No on them and Yes to Skindell and O'Neill instead. Brown is listed as "highly recommended" by the bar association while Kennedy is listed as "not recommended", so I'm going Yes on Brown. And while the white, male, Republican Welbaum running for Second District Appeals is highly recommended and Ingram is merely "recommended", Carley Ingram is a black woman; so a) I suspect some bias in the ratings and b) I'd go for her anyway. Be sure to check your own district races.

I'm inclined toward Book for the state board of education. He's younger and talks about how we need to prevent the privatization of schools for private profit and make sure everyone has equal access and quality. Hiden talks about how he's done so well so far and wants to bring in a CEO to be Superintendent.

Issue One is an automatic function of our constitution. Every so many years, this must appear on the ballot, so that we can have a constitutional convention if we want one. No one seems to be set to take advantage of this, one way or the other, so I'm inclined to No.

Issue Two is a measure to stop jerry-mandering which was proposed by a bunch of people with their heads on straight but /written/ by the incumbent Republicans who engaged in jerry-mandering this election. So, that bit at the start about taking away power from elected representatives and giving it to appointed officials? Yeah, ignore that, it's typical scare tactics. There are provisions for balancing the appointees among the two majority parties and the independents, to keep the commission out of any one party's hands and agenda. Give that a Yes if you want to stop the shoddy election shenanigans that were indulged in this election.

Twenty-five is a tax levy to support services for those with developmental disabilities. Vote Yes, duh.

This has been your pre-election service announcement, we now return to our usual programming.

underground_rail is a new community born from pocketnaomi's post Underground Rail:

[...] an organization of men and women who can donate a little money, a little time, the use of their car for a weekend, or anything else, for the specific purpose of functioning as a long-distance taxi service: taking women who want or need abortions from areas where there are no safe, legal clinics to the nearest one capable of meeting their needs and returning them safely home again afterwards.

Currently looking for volunteers, supporters, and people with organizing experience.

littlebutfierce has a a love meme happening, and this is always a good thing.

For ease of loving, jjhunter is indexing it! Go and love! Get some love! Love, love, love!

*sidles away from impending Beatles songs*

For your reading delectation and exasperation: Kieth Mander, ignorant young sleeze who has no clue what kind of meat grinder he's stuck his hand into.

It's anyone's guess whether the Twilight fandom has a sufficient percentage of web-savvy to kick this intrusion to the curb, but I'm thinking LOTR probably does.

So, Fanlore (which is in no way synonymous with the Fandom History fiasco, despite the efforts of the FH creator/troll) is looking for knowledgeable people to talk about that eternal question:

What do we call this stuff?

I find myself torn, really. I mean, a big part of me says "this should be simple, Categories are like tags, so you create as many Categories as there are Kinds Of Stuff and slap all that are applicable on any given wiki page".

Another part of me says "but that will make the Category structure really unwieldy and hard to navigate!"

One thing I'm sure of is that I do not think Anime should be merged into Cartoons, nor Manga into Comics. The latter are names for specifically Western art forms, and using them for non-Western forms would, in my eyes, be a nasty sort of erasure, given the cultural history involved.

Kind of like using Manga as the Category for something that's really manhwa. Given the cultural history involved.

And so I come back to "a Category for everything". Actually, I'm not at all sure that's a problem. I don't think it would be that unwieldy, in the end. And trying to limit the Categories implicitly assumes that the world is only as big as X number of categories. Which is just plain wrong.

So, what do you think? What Categories do we need?

Let the record show that, when I link a fic-offering from LJ to my DW, I get no feedback at all. When I link a similar fic-offering from LJ to AO3, I get 3 kudos out of 21 hits. That's a bit over average response rates, normally I get around 1 in 10.

So, my take on a Ticky/Kudo/I-Read-This button on DW posts? Go for it!

Signal boost, via telesilla:

Etsy, an otherwise very congenial person-to-person handcraft and buyables platform, has done a Beacon. They have exposed your shopping history and made you searchable by email or by name; your real name, address and other location/contact info is now listed on your profile, if you ever entered it (possibly under the mistaken assumption that it would remain private). You can set your favorites, shopping history, name, and email to Private in Account > Settings > Privacy, but every member has been, as of now, automatically opted in at the Public setting.

Personally, I think a very stiff note to the owners is in order. As soon as you've fixed your settings.

Signal boost.

LJ is eliminating the "unspecified" gender option, and from Thursday or so on will require that the gender field be filled out (with male or female) upon account creation

Link has some links to the lj profile page and the feedback page.

ETA: LJ has rolled back the code in question! See, if we catch it early enough, sometimes we can have an effect.

Of course, the replies to concerned citizens are pretty well lying about the particulars, in that Corporate-speak, ass-covering way so near and dear to all our hearts after previous go-rounds.

So... has anyone else noticed that gwaddiction.com has been invaded by malware? You can't even get to the site itself; the script is a random redirect.

Oy, Tyr, get on the ball, here. That archive is the only place a lot of those fics are available.