Edit: It took more than a week, but dA is back to normal for me at work, so I'll be returning to my customary levels of slacking. Which will still be less than they were, since I have a deadline or two to meet.

First, I have to be honest. Much of the time I'm on dA, I'm at work and slacking when I should be doing something else. Not that I absolutely haunt the place, but it's a good distraction when the problem at hand is threatening to turn into a headache.

But either my company has adjusted their content filters, or dA has done something to the tags on its pages. The main page loads, and (while the links still displayed) individual Deviations would load, but not thumbnails, avatars, or -- this is what makes the site really unnavigable -- CSS.

dA's front page without the CSS behind it looks really strange.

It might be a temporary hiccup, or it might be a permanent situation. If the latter, I'll be forced to restrict my activity here to that little time I have between getting home and getting on with other things.

Second, I've recently learned that the hack fantasy writer mentioned in my current sig, David Eddings, passed away a few days ago at the age of 77. Seeing as I'm quote someone else's remark about him I'll change it if he no longer wants it enshrined in everything I post, but in the meantime I see no reason to. I've made fun of his work and criticized it a fair bit, but it gave me a lot of pleasure back in my college days when D&D was our main weekend entertainment and a good, fluffy escapist adventure fantasy was just the thing to de-stress in what was a very high-pressure academic environment.

I can't say I'll miss him for anything he's produced recently, but had I ever met him I would still have had something to thank him for.

Requesicat in pace and Вічная Память.