I’m coming off a nice long vacation, thanks to my workplace having given the entire lot of us the week of Christmas off. This was as the cool kids say AWESOME, given that it meant that solarbird and I were able to have Longest Night without me having to take an extra day off for that. And that was a nice way indeed to fire off a relaxing break.

The weekend of the Solstice was pretty much given over to, aside from a special Solstice Murkjam (more on this in another post), a mighty rewatching of the entire extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are few movies I can happily watch over and over again, but these? Absolutely. Especially when Dara starts asking me questions about Middle-Earth lore and we get to Tolkiengeek. <3 Plus, this time around I started finally watching a lot of the copious extras in all three sets of discs, which I had never done despite owning these things for years now. I'm sure you all know by now, but yeah, lots of lovely stuff there and I've only barely scratched the surface of it all.

Did a lot of catchup of medical appointments during the week, and the highlight of that was getting to touch bases with both my endocs and say "by the way, I'm working on seriously trying to lose weight, just so you all know". In particular, wanted to check with the thyroid endoc to make sure I coordinate with him about how to reduce my T4 and T3 dosage as I drop pounds. I've already had to start tweaking my intake since I've dropped six pounds or so.

I dropped in on kathrynt to say hi in between some of those aforementioned medical appointments, and was treated to tea and a cookie and her delightful offspring informing us, when asked where her dump truck was, “it could be ANYWHERE!” Lillian continues to impress me with her smarts. This kid is going to be scary when she gets older. Hell, she’s kind of scary now!

Christmas itself was pleasantly low-key and featured first going out with mamishka to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Picoreview: big silly fun if you can buy that this was totally a fluffy, alternate-universe version of Holmes and Watson that didn’t bear too much resemblance to the canon versions. I did like many get a kick out of the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, and felt that poor Mary was sadly underused as a character, and that the actress playing Irene wasn’t quite up to the task of her own character’s awesomeness. But really, the thing I liked the most about the movie? The music. Especially the jigs during the action scenes and the take of “Rocky Road to Dublin”. I may have to buy the soundtrack on the strength of that alone.

Christmas evening, mamishka, darthhellokitty, and king_chiron all had dinner with us at the Murk and then we all watched the new Doctor Who, “The End of Time, Part 1″. Most definitely more on this in another post. There are rumblings of another group watch of Part 2 to come.

I closed out this past weekend with going, finally, with Dara to see 2012 before it finally vanishes out of the local theaters. We wound up having to catch it at the Alderwood Mall cinema, which was really kinda crazytalk since the place was swarming with after-Christmas shoppers and getting from our parking spot to the theater was a nerve-wracking exercise in dodging oncoming traffic. But we did manage to get there on time, and once we were actually settled in, despite being too close to the screen for comfort, we had a delightful time. I’m sure many of you already know this by now too, but yeah, this movie was awesomely bad. We’re talking epic levels of MSTable disaster pr0n, which is pretty much exactly what we were there for. Mutating neutrinos, baby!

Didn’t get a damn bit of writing or reading done, but on the whole, I didn’t really mind. I’ve been catching up on fixing broken stuff on this web site instead, and that sits well with me, since the long-undone tasks there were annoying me, and I found fixing those relaxing. I assure you all though that more writing and reading will be coming with the New Year.

And oh yes: with spazzkat coming home from Virginia on Sunday, we had our little house gift exchange. My nifty l00t: one box of Ninth Doctor DVDs (man, I do love Nine and Rose, I must say), one lovely tin of bath bombs from LUSH, one $50 Barnes and Noble gift card which I promptly spent on five new ebooks, and last but not least, this, which is pretty much the Best Possible Christmas Ornament to Give to Anna, Ever:

There’s a button on it that plays the Raiders March when you press it. spazzkat knows me very, very well. <3

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

It was pretty much inevitable that, after loving Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as much as I did, I’d have to check out Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the followup offering by the same press. In a nutshell: not as fun for me as P&P&Z, although it did still have its redeeming qualities.

I’ll say right out that unlike Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility never seized my attention nearly so much–in no small part because S&S didn’t have the absolutely amazing A&E adaptation to recommend it. (Mmm, Colin Firth as Darcy!) I do actually own a copy of S&S, but I didn’t remember a thing about it. So I went into Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters not knowing at all what to expect. Aside from, well, sea monsters.

This is a Britain where for reasons that are never revealed, all aquatic life in the world has suddenly turned seethingly hostile to humanity. Humanity has had to respond accordingly by altering social customs to place high value upon swimming, sailing, fishing, and any other skill that will improve one’s chances against oceangoing menance. In this setting, we have the Dashwood sisters exiled from their childhood home (as per the original) and embarking upon adventures involving monsters, pirates, a suitor cursed with slimy tentacles growing on his chin, and mysterious natives chanting prayers to unspeakable creatures of the deep (not really as per the original at all). There’s even a bit of steampunky interest when the sisters visit Sub-Marine Station Beta.

All of which are fun elements to throw into a story, but for me, they just didn’t mesh nearly as seamlessly as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did. There are moments of humor–and I will give this book props for never descending into blatant sexual innuendo or jokes about bodily functions, which was P&P&Z’s one failing.

But it never quite got to the point of unrepentantly sailing past stupid and all the way into “awesome”, I fear. That said? “That was pretty neat” is still not bad at all. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

It’s a challenge and a half to try to write a sequel to no less august a book than Frankenstein, and for that alone, I must give my fellow Drollerie author Gary Inbinder props. I’m also pleased to say that although there were parts of the book that didn’t work as much for me, by and large, I feel he did an excellent job at his appointed task!

The opening of the book does ask you to accept the idea that sorcery of a kind exists in the Frankenstein universe, since the entire plot only gets underway when the monster, fresh from killing his creator, is taken in by an old Russian witch. In repayment for his working for her, she grants him his greatest wish: to be human and to be able to have a real life of his own. If you’re used to the version of the Frankenstein story more popularly depicted in the movies, the presence of magic may be jarring; however, my spouse pointed out quite correctly that the original story does heavily pursue the idea that Victor Frankenstein was dabbling as much in black magic as he was forbidden science in creating his monster. So it’s not too much of a stretch for me to allow for actual magic existing in this world.

But. This is really only the start of the plot, and the greatest portion of it by far is taken up by the creature–now calling himself Viktor Viktorovich–not only winning himself a life and a family in Russia, but achieving a meteoric rise to power. In fact, the vast majority of the plot is taken up with his participation in the wars against Napoleon. For me as a reader this had quite a bit of interest, but the real heart of the story doesn’t come until the final third, when the truth of Viktor’s origins begins to come back to haunt him.

And this is also where the story ultimately let me down a bit, since I was expecting more creepiness than I actually got, and one plot device in particular that was used as part of Frankenstein’s backstory struck me as quite unnecessary. But that said, overall I did find this a gripping read, and it’s worth checking out if you liked the original. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

I’m a huge Indiana Jones fan. To the tune of Raiders of the Lost Ark remaining my all-time favorite movie ever, and collecting every one of the novels I could get my hands on. I even went to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull twice.

So this should give you the proper context when I say that I really, really wanted to like Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead. It combines two of my favorite things: Indy and zombies! Plus, it’s a story that’s set during World War II and which included Mac, the character we saw in Crystal Skull. So, cool, I thought, we can get a glimpse into what actually happened to Indy during World War II, which was one of the interesting little side details about the movie.

The big problem is, the character occupying the lead role of this story is not the Indiana Jones I know and love. He’s too prone to bursting into dry, didactic lectures, a habit we never once saw him have in any of the movies, including the last one. This character failure alone distracted me a lot from the story, and made it difficult for me to enjoy some of the other aspects of this version of Indy that I did like–for example, since this is an Indy up in his 40’s, it did seem reasonable to me that he was starting to get sensitive about his age and yet was still quite capable of being charmed by, and charming to, the young female lead.

A similar lack of character development pretty much plagued the bad guys as well, for the most part: the German and Japanese commanders. Since this is a WWII setting, it’s pretty much inevitable that we’d have Japanese forces involved along with the Nazis, and to be fair, this does add a bit of nice variety. And there’s quite a bit of plotting and counter-plotting between the two commanders as they both try to catch up with Indy and Mac to get the final MacGuffin. But none of it had quite the punch it should have had for me, and only occasionally did either of the commanders ever seem like real characters. They definitely paled in comparison to the actual primary bad guy: the voodoo sorcerer who was controlling the zombies.

And I will say that okay, sure, the zombie part of the plot was entertaining enough. But on the whole the story didn’t feel enough like a proper Indiana Jones story to me–because Indy just didn’t feel enough like Indy. Two stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Even at here at Liberator Bedroom Adventure Gear, this customer service email will go down in history. Names and numbers have been changed to protect the guilty. This is AMAZING.

From: penile_drip [mailto:penile_drip@domainname.com]
Sent: Monday, December 28, 2009 1:10 PM
To: service@liberator.com
Subject: order # 12345


To who needs this info,
I would very much like to have order # 12345, Esse Chaise for new yrs eve. I just placed the order last week. I'm not unsatified with service at all... Just really hoping.
Please try to get it to me by Thur.
We have the drugs, the monkey, and a midget, now we need the chair thingy.

Thank you,
Order # 12345
Customer # 1234567
John Doe

I had a dream I was moving forward
Floating gently to the sun
I've come to see my world rewarded
A new day has begun

A lost bird caught in mid migration
Far away to a foreign land
Offspring of a secret nation
A new day has begun

I can see the earth below me
and I can
feel it turn

Fog lifts to reveal potential
For generations prophesized
Our growth to be exponential
Our promise finally realized

I can see the earth below me
and I can
feel it turn

Feel it turn
Across the sky
The world it learns
So must I

Cut steel wired into water
Fixed link, circumnavigate
Old men see your sons and daughters
No longer, no longer hesitate

I can see the earth below me
and I can
feel it turn

-Séan McCann, GREAT BIG SEA (also known as my favourite band ever on earth)





Yup.

99% sure this will be my last year in Atlanta, and it won't even be a full year at that.

"I gotta rush away," she said,
"I been to Boston before.
And anyways this change I been feeling
Doesn't make the rain fall"

No big differences these days
Just the same old walkaways
And someday
I'm gonna stay
But not today...

-Counting Crows

I think I might be leaving Atlanta for Boston later next year.  This thought has crossed my mind several times over the past year or 2 actually, and a few confluences of events seem to be making it a better opportunity. I'll miss my friends here alot. But the whole reason I came to Atlanta was to save up to go further north to St. John's, Newfoundland. That didn't work out, but the things I loved up towards that way are still there. And I'm a gypsy rover...I've known Atlanta isn't where I'm meant to be forever.

"There isn't that much ocean between Boston & St. John's...
I'm a rover and I'm bound to sail away
I'm a rover....
Can you love me anyway?"

-Great Big Sea

So just because I can, I’ve been waking up old broken parts of this web site (annathepiper.org, for those of you reading this on LJ or DW), bits that were never properly integrated into Wordpress. Since I’ve got a handy link-checking plugin installed, this has been a lot easier than I thought it would be; I’ve just had to go through and fix a lot of broken links, and in some cases, restore content that’s been absent for some time.

Right now, this primarily means reinstating my Great Big Sea page, and a couple of its child pages as well–most notably, the Pictures page, since I found a nifty plugin that lets Wordpress easily talk to Flickr. And I do still have several lovely collections of pictures from various Great Big Sea shows which some kind folks had given me permission to post (mamishka and fredpdx, I’m lookin’ at you!). You can see a nice example of the plugin in action, not to mention some nice pics of Great Big Sea in Vancouver from 2003, here.

I’ve also reinstated the Sitemap, the Credits page (with proper updated references to nifty plugins and things I’m using these days), and the Journal section (although this is primarily a pointer off to my LJ and a place to link to posts I wrote before I ever had a proper blog).

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Undone is the first of rachelcaine’s new series Outcast Season, the offshoot from the Weather Warden books, and as series starters go it’s not bad. We’re introduced to Cassiel, a djinn who’s forced into human shape–and, as a result, forced to work with the Wardens on whose power she depends to keep herself alive. But when the Warden assigned to work with her is killed along with his wife, she must turn to his brother instead to track down their killers. And all the while she has to cope with the unwelcome side effects of prolonged incarnation in human form.

The story’s not without flaws, most of which are repeatedly played too heavily: how much Cassiel hates being human, the cute child insisting on calling her Cassie despite being told repeatedly that she prefers to be called Cassiel, how the Wardens keep assuming that if something goes wrong it’s clearly Cassiel’s fault, how Cassiel being incarnated into human form is part of a Greater Plan(TM). Taken individually, none of these quibbles are too bad, but as a whole, for me as a reader, I could have liked all of them toned down just a tad.

Also: the token appearance of David and Jo at the very beginning of the story honestly detracted from the rest of the story for me, and it really felt like a question of “let’s put them in here just to prove to the reader that this is the same universe as Jo’s stories”, since David and Jo didn’t really provide any other plot relevance to the story–and we’re not even told why Cassiel, incarnated into human shape, is dumped on David and Jo to begin with. Lewis has far more pertinent reason to show up at the beginning, since he’s the one that lays it out to Cassiel how it’ll have to go if she expects the Wardens to work with her. But much as I’ve enjoyed David and Jo’s story over in the Weather Warden books, they just didn’t need to be in this one.

All this said? There’s still a good solid story here. I liked the edgy interaction between Cassiel and Luis, still very much too edgy to be a proper romance yet, and hopefully it’ll be a relationship that takes a while to develop. The Big Bad of the story intrigued me, as did the backstory there between the Big Bad and Cassiel herself. And yeah, I’ll be checking out Book Two. For this one, three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

We get really interesting phone calls sometimes. Not from people that are going to buy anything. This was my favorite call today:

*ring*

me: customer service, how may I help you?
them: SHUT UP!
me: *click*

*ring*

me: customer service, how may I help you?
them: YOU'RE A BITCH!
me: *click*

*ring*
me: ASSHOLE!
them: *click*


:D

Michele Lee delivers a compact little horror story in Rot, a novella that goes into the ramifications of people in society being able to bring back loved ones from the dead–only in this case, rather than true resurrection, it’s the capturing of a living spirit inside an otherwise still-dead body. Yes, folks, this is a zombie story, but one where the zombies retain sentience for as long as their bodies retain enough physical cohesion for their brains to work.

And this opens up a host of unhappy results as nursing homes for the undead crop up as locations to dump your resurrected zombie loved ones when you no longer want them. Not to mention the myriad unpleasant excuses for reviving your loved ones to begin with, such as Patrick, a gay young man who’s brought back by his fundamentalist Christian parents who promise to put him back in his grave if he’ll “repent”.

With this as a background, the story’s protagonist, Dean, a watchman at one of these zombie retirement homes, discovers that certain ones of the residents are going unaccounted for–and as he’s moved to investigate, he discovers that these zombies, already rendered pretty much non-people by the sad circumstances of their existence, are helpless prey for even darker motivations than the ones that put them there to start with.

What circumstances give society the ability to create zombies is only glossed over, but really, that’s fine; this story is short enough that that really doesn’t need to be explained in depth. The focus is where it rightfully belongs, on Dean, on Patrick, and upon Amy, who is the latest of the zombies in the facility to go missing. Dean must bring himself to trust Patrick enough to take him out of the facility with him as he tracks Amy down, and the dynamic between the two is very nicely done indeed.

All in all, it’s a tight little tale and worth checking out. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

One of my fellow Drollerie authors, Meredith Holmes, unfortunately was in the hospital this week with a pulmonary embolism. So she was unable to participate in the Blog Tour this time around, and since she was scheduled to host Elisa Diehl, I’m going to take care of hosting Elisa’s post instead. Check it out, folks!

And also, stop by Meredith’s place and wish her well. ‘Cause hospitals are never fun, especially this close to Christmas.

Take it away, Elisa!

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

I think I'm gonna aim for hitting up the UK and Ireland for a visit this summer-ish, if anyone wants in on that trip. I didn't really get to see London at all the one time I've been, and I have friends there I really want to spend time with, and really desperately need to get to Scotland and Ireland. So if anyone wants to plan a field trip, let me know...I'm 110% behind shoestring travel, staying with friends, finding places on couchsurfing.com, and hostels (but only if the first 2 are unavailable), and traveling like a local. Only thing I'm not sure I'm ready to do is see Stonehenge again, so if you want to do that, you're on your own. That may change by this summer though. Maybe I should face it. It was a sacred place to me long before I had any other attachment to it involving anyone else.

The rest of the country is fair game right now though. I think I'm ready to go back. :) And I'm really proud of that. Oh, and anyone that doesn't like it can eat a bag of dicks. :D

Holiday season 2008: "It's been a long December and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last."  -Counting Crows

2009...and it was so much better than the last. Hard. Infinitely hard, but it's been so much better. Thank you.

Thank you God/dess and all my friends for all you've done. I love you each so much.

Cheers...let's keep moving forward. Love.

Those of you who know about my completed but unpublished novels will know I’ve got Queen of Souls, a Persephone and Hades story on the queue to be edited into queryable shape. So it should surprise none of you that I’m quite interested in checking out Frayed Tapestry, by my fellow Drollerie author Imogen Howson. In fact, as the cool kids like to say, her post for this month’s Drollerie Blog Tour, on the topic of dangerous writing, is Relevant to My Interests indeed.

Check it out, folks! Here’s what Imogen’s got to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Tonight, I learned that pretty much every character major and minor in the cast of The Venture Bros. has an in-character Twitter account! This came onto my radar when I saw Nathan Fillion answering tweets from @numbertwentyone and encouraging people to follow him–and then flirting with @DocGirlfriend, who was all over flirting right back.

Naturally I started following all of my favorite characters and being highly amused by tonight’s exchanges between them. Then I noticed I’d picked up a new follower of my own. And the following ensued:

annathepiper: Don’t look now, but I appear to be followed by @DeadlyMolotov. No no you fool, I said DON’T LOOK! She can shoot your eye out!
DeadlyMolotov: @annathepiper Retweeted and favourited.
annathepiper: @DeadlyMolotov Thank you kindly! Partner says to tell you “By the way darling do not forget lunch date in Volgograd.”
DeadlyMolotov: @annathepiper As long as he brings the dolphin; Tell him that. He’ll know what it means.
annathepiper: @DeadlyMolotov Partner’s a girl. Also, a supervillain! Come to think of it, this probably explains where she got the dolphin…
DeadlyMolotov: @annathepiper Oh? Even better.
mistwolf: @DeadlyMolotov @annathepiper Your partner with a dolphin scares me deeply.
annathepiper: @mistwolf @DeadlyMolotov I’m quite sure I don’t want to know her intentions for that dolphin, here OR in Volgograd. I already know too much!

I think I just had a geekgasm. <3

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

So there I was about to answer @heatheringemar’s lovely supportive tweet about my cake-resistance efforts tonight, as well as tweeting my previous post, when Twitter suddenly inexplicably fell over. No fail whale, no nothin’, just suddenly I couldn’t get through.

Didn’t think anything of it though until I saw this post show up on JournalFen’s Fandom Lounge community–from which solarbird has concluded that Twitter’s apparently suffered a name service hack. From what the JF poster saw before Twitter vanished completely, it looked like a group in Iran tried to take over the site. One expects in retaliation for Iranian students trying to use Twitter as a protest mechanism. Dara doublechecked by trying to get data off of Twitter’s nameservers, and yeah, they were reporting bad hosts and everything before Twitter just dropped completely off the net.

Anyway, y’all, if you can’t get through to Twitter tonight, this is very probably why. I don’t envy Twitter’s support team right now; they must be having a very stressful night!

ETA: Dara has more tech-oriented details over here.

ETA #2: And we’re back! We now rejoin your regularly scheduled tweeting, already in progress.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Fictionwise, as I’ve posted before, has pretty much got me right where they want me. Especially right now with their mighty end of year sale, wherein everything is pretty much 40-60 percent off. Plus, since I’m a member of the Buywise club, they have a thing going where I can get an extra 10 percent rebate for orders between $50 and $100. So I just dropped fifty bucks on the credit card tonight to stack up on the rebate goodness.

And here’s the thing: Fictionwise books you spend rebate dollars on themselves generate more rebate dollars. So I just went through five, count ‘em, five rounds of book buying before I finally exhausted my rebate amount. The list of books that resulted is mighty indeed. Here they all are in their glory!

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

So y’all know how I posted two weeks ago about using the LoseIt! iPhone app to start trying to get my weight under control? I’m pleased to report that so far, the plan seems to be working. And in fact, I’m a little ahead of the game since I had set the thing for losing 1 1/2 pounds per week and so far I’m down four pounds, not three.

I made a point of checking in with my general care doctor too so that she is aware of the Plan. Happily, she agreed that what I’m setting out to do seems sane and a healthy rate of loss; she counseled me to make sure to not drop more than two pounds a week and to be prepared to bump up my exercise later as well, neither of which were surprising. She wants to see me in 2-3 months for a physical, so we’ll see where I am in March or so.

Going to have to brief my post-cancer endoc and my thyroid doc as well, especially the latter, given that weight reduction will of course also affect my thyroid levels. Fortunately I have appointments with both of them next week during my vacation time, which will be nice.

All in all I am finding the app a breeze to use, since it conveniently combines several things I was either trying to do or was intellectually aware I should have been doing anyway: i.e., a food log, an exercise log, and managing not only what I eat but how much. Really, the idea of losing weight by eating less and exercising more is one I have known for most of my adult life–we ALL know this one. But knowing it and actually having an effective tool to pull it off seem to be a world apart, at least for me!

Having a daily calorie budget and a way to easily check against it also seems to be vital. Knowing how many more calories I have to blow in a day has already led me to decide against snacks when previously I would have had them; as I type this, I am stoically resisting cake. Because I don’t have enough of a calorie surplus yet, and I won’t until I get on the treadmill Saturday morning!

Long story short, I love this plan! I’m proud to be a part of it!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.