>VERBOSE

So what makes (house-)elf-made wine different from your common or garden wine, anyway?

Is using the verb "deduct" to mean "to reason from evidence to a logical conclusion" a British usage thing? There's a scene in the NuWho S2 episode "Fear Her" where it's used in the present progressive, "Are you deducting?" and I've just seen someone use it in the same way in a Potter fanfic. To me those sound odd and the verb for this meaning should be "deduce", while "deduct" means "subtract" (although the noun can be either - a tax deduction, a sensible deduction). They come from the same Latin root, but -- mrr?

If anyone else out there uses LJLogin, have you noticed that it hasn't been able to log in to LJ (specifically; IJ and DW work fine) for about 5+ days now? If I log in manually it detects the login and updates the status bar appropriately, but selecting a login from its own menu does nothing, it just stays at "Not logged in." I think it might be connected to the latest LJ update and/or the "Connection reset" errors people have been seeing, but I haven't gotten any response from slarti about it.

Does anyone reading this happen to know much about If This, Then That (ifttt.com)? I have a question about how to get it to put things into my Google Reader when the task trigger activates.

There is absolutely nothing here to catalog right now, so I need something to read. I am almost to the point of actually digging something out of the favourites I've spent over four years collecting (although more valuable in that vein, I suppose, is the offline saving of everything favorited, because a good deal of it isn't online anymore - but that's at home and I'm at work), or browsing back in old Snarry Games or Snapely Holidays fests. Any suggestions? As usual I want to read soemthing with Severus in it, and honestly I could go for something gen right now; the usual suspects on pairings are fine too (Lily, Sirius, Regulus, Harry, Draco), but I'm not in the mood to try to wrap my head around a rarepair (Ron, Kingsley...). Looking for something medium to longish, by which I mean about 30-60k. No heavy kink content (BDSM scenes and the like, as well as bestiality, necro, the common squicks of that sort) and no non-con or graphic torture. Dub-con and mild chan OK (younger participant 15 or older). Old stuff now canon-shafted is fine. Any rating but plot preferred to smex-heavy at the moment.

To give you an idea, I just got done re-reading perverse_idyll's When the Rose and the Fire Are One (though a tad on the long side), which she just reposted on FFN, and was thinking of going at The White Road again, which I loved in the Snarry Holidays in which it was posted (and as I recall was a breakout/runaway hit).

Is there any way to contact someone on tumblr besides their "ask" box? What I really want to do is leave a comment directly on a post (because it happens to be a photo that belongs to me, and I just wanted to provide original links, not to mention explain the subject of the photo because it is rather bizarre!), but for the life of me I can't find a way to do that either (is it that they have to have turned on Disqus?), and "Ask" won't let you include html links, which I need to do in this case. Um.

If I wanted to buy a black lace dickie/dickey (such as this or this, although that's rather larger than I normally think of a dickie being!) by walking into a physical store rather than ordering from the internet, what sort of store should I be looking in?

Can someone explain to me what the big deal is about del.icio.us and why it's so horrible that Yahoo is "sunsetting" it? I used it briefly as part of a project I was doing for work a couple of years ago, so it's not that I don't know what it does, I just don't get what's so wonderful about it. (It would seem that, like Facebook, I am not in need of the service it provides.)

I read some comments on a blog post about it which were like "noooo where will I keep all my fic bookmarks??" and I was like um, in "faves" lists in your account on whatever fic site? Or in bookmarks in your browser if it doesn't have that function or you can't get an account? (aside peeve: I wish there were a way for me to get a skyehawke account so I could fave things. I understand invite-only as quality control, but...) And "nooo how will I find fic?" really didn't make sense to me - I found del.icio.us very awkward as a discovery tool and exploring communities on LJ has probably been the best-results method for me on that (maybe other fandoms operate very differently to Harry Potter, I dunno).

Some idle speculation on this semi-plot-hole, which I've seen wondered about at various times:

How did Lily's letter to Sirius, which would have been sent to him while he was living elsewhere than Grimmauld Place (presumably in that flat of his own that he got thanks to Uncle Alphard's money), wind up back in his bedroom for Severus to find, especially given that Sirius went to Azkaban for 12 years?

I was just brainstorming about this while lying in bed last night and wondered if any of the following solutions were plausible as ways for Sirius's stuff to get out of wherever he was living at the time.

1. At the time of PoA we're told that general rumour was Sirius was a Death Eater or other supporter of Voldemort and that was why "he" killed Peter and those Muggles. We know from Karkaroff that not all the DE's knew each other. Could one of the actual DE's somehow gained access to his dwelling and spirited his stuff back to Grimmauld Place (under the misapprehension that Mrs Black, who'd be the only one living there at that point since - canon tells us Regulus is dead; the extra-canonical tapestry drawing tells us Mr Black was too) would give a damn?

2. Scenario similar to the above might also work if it was someone else he knew who was not in the Order and didn't know about it (the Order would probably want to go through his things to make sure there was nothing exposing them, and I don't know if they'd have let this letter and picture go, although maybe the damage was done at that point), and preferred to see his goods returned rather than seized by the Ministry?

3. Could there have been some kind of protective enchantments on his dwelling, similar to those around 12 Grimmauld Place itself, which resulted in everything simply sitting there unfound for 12+ years, and Sirius himself (or someone on his behalf, like Remus) was able to go fetch it sometime after PoA?

I'm currently going through my personal collection of Severus Snape art to pick out the first pool of candidates I may use for buttons. I would like to put some text on the buttons, like I wrote Severus/Lily @ Azkatraz 2009 on those ones. But somehow just writing Severus Snape @ Infinitus 2010 or something like that seems boring, and also possibly confusing with the Snapecast shindig (although I think they're usually careful to use that specific name on things). I do want to have @ Infinitus 2010, but the first part could use some jazzing up. Even tiny text of, like, (Snape. Snape.) arced across the top and then the Severus Snape @... part on the bottom would help (because no one, including myself, is tired of "The Mysterious Ticking Noise" references, I'm sure).

So yeah. Any ideas, anyone?