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Good morning everyone! LET'S TALK RADIO FREE MONDAY.

Ways To Give:

lavenderspark's friends have a son who was hit by an IED while serving overseas. He's at Walter Reed in DC, and his family in Fayetteville, NC, are raising money for travel expenses to visit him. They've reached their goal, but I think they can probably use all the help they can get right now.

angelari linked to rosehiptea, who is facing mounting bills, paperwork problems, and moving expenses in the wake of her father's unexpected death. You can read her appeal post and about how to help here.

madripoor_rose linked to Mile High Comics in Denver, Colorado, which is donating 10% of its current online sale profits to a fund for victims of the Aurora Batman shootings.

Angela linked to a fundraiser for a family in extreme poverty who are trying to get their feet under them in Van Nuys, California. They're being sponsored by a local church, but they need a little extra help to hit stability. (the full story is at the bottom if you scroll down.)

amara1783 is looking for information on resources to help adult survivors of child sexual abuse have healthy sex lives.

chalcopyrite linked to a fundraiser for Ella, a cat who was hit by a car and needs between $1500 and $4500 worth of surgery to repair the damage done to her back legs.

Anon linked to an indiegogo for Chronicles of Syntax, a British post-apocalyptic sci-fi web series trying to get off the ground. They're also looking for volunteers in the London area, and folks can tweet @COSyntax if interested.

Help For Free:

via_ostiense is looking for advice about apartment hunting and rent in NYC, where she's moving in a month.

Doola linked me to a petition to stop a change to Colombia's laws that would allow the commercial salvage of archaeological sites, particularly by oil companies who want to remove underwater heritage sites in order to drill for oil.

bookblather linked to a Chicago-area pair of cats, Freddie and Eloise, who need rehoming after their owner's sudden death.

Just For Fun:

Claire linked to the nicest C&D letter ever.

bluejeans07 linked me to an image I THINK YOU WILL ALL ENJOY.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can always post items for my attention in comments here (or on any post) or email me at copperbadge at gmail dot com. If you're not sure how to proceed, here is a little more about what I do and how you can help (or ask for help!). Remember, brevity is the soul of RFM.

(no subject)

Here's to a calmer week than last week. Good lord, last week.

I do have two Wordpress posts to link to, before I forget: Who Deserves Your Disdain, about passion and hypocrisy, and The City War Is Coming, announcing that my novella with Riptide Publishing will be released as an ebook on November 19th, with paperback following later in the year.

In other news, 51stcenturyfox mentioned the other day that she'd like to ship Pepper Potts/Maria Hill, but they'd never met in the Avengers film. To which I replied "But they did kick ass together in the comics!" and then had to put my comic books where my mouth was.

World's Most Wanted, which was a story arc in the Iron Man comic in 2009, is the longest fucking story ever, and could have been shortened drastically by cutting out 90% of the villain's broody moustache-twirling. Intriguingly, if you cut out both the villain, Norman Osborne, and the ostensible hero, Tony Stark, it still forms an almost-coherent story of its own. A story in which Pepper and Maria commit international espionage with Natasha Romanoff, and Tony Stark shows up in cameos to provide exposition and sex.

Also there are some zombies. So you know, something for everyone.

Anyway, my point is, I assembled a .cbz (comic-book-reader) file containing about a third of World's Most Wanted, so if you want to read a comic book about the women in Tony Stark's life and how they actually do stuff while he wanders around having manpain, you can download it here. If you don't have a comic book reader program, you can change the file extension to .zip, unzip it, and read the pages image-by-image.

Ain't technology grand?

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Boss: I read something you wrote today. You're a very good writer.
Me: Thank you. *panics* What did you...read?
Boss: Oh, you know.
Me: *OH MY GOD SHE FOUND MY FANFIC* Like...not my fiction.
Boss: No! Sorry, it was an email. Do you write fiction? I'm not surprised.
Me: Oh, occasionally. ANYWAY, let's talk about this other thing having nothing to do with that...

It's awfully nice to be noticed, though. And to be rewarded, apparently; when I got home this afternoon I had a letter from work informing me that I was getting a 1% "merit" raise. It wasn't expected, given I've only been on the job ten months, but we only do salary evaluations once a year and I guess I have been a contributing member of the department. One percent after taxes and all the rest isn't much, but I will happily take what I can get.

I VOW TO GIVE 1% MORE EFFORT TO EVERY PROJECT I MANAGE!