COA voting round two

OK, some of my stories failed to make the cut, as did many of the stories I voted for... I'm left with:

The Return - nominated for Best non-Buffy crossover (NCIS / DC Universe / West Wing / Bones), my big Supergirl story.

Grounds For Divorce - nominated for Best Highlander Crossover - Buffy / Highlander, it's a prequel to a couple of other stories.

Deeds of Maidenly Unkindness, nominated for Best Movie Crossover; Buffy / St. Trinians. It's also nominated for a moderator award as best crossover based on a British source, but this doesn't get voted on.

Lots of other good stories nominated, as well as some real stinkers. If you're eligible to vote please help to eliminate the dross...

The ones that failed to make the cut were Kafkaesque and Forever, both nominated for best multiple crossover, which convinces me that in future I won't accept more than one nomination per category.

I now have to sort through the remaining stories in nearly half the bloody categories - since I was scraping the bottom of the barrel with my first vote in some categories this will NOT be easy.

Speed issues

OK, having played with Ubuntu Linux for a while, I like quite a lot about it - but for some reason it seems to be significantly slower than Windows XP, which I really wasn't expecting. For example, using Celestia and rotating the Earth, there is a delay of 2-3 seconds before the rotation occurs. A first-person shooter game was unplayably slow to respond to the mouse and keys. And so forth.

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong, but I suspect that something is giving speed a hammering, and I have no idea what. It's a 2.8ghz processor with 1gb RAM and a 128mb graphics card.

I really want to try Linux, so any suggestions on go-faster stripes would be appreciated.

Later - now sorted thanks to turol and pengshui_master

You might want to ban...

...elianaabel447

I have no idea what that little star is doing there, it isn't in the name when I type it. She's posted porn link comment spam to a community I belong to. Can't show this since it was deleted, but his/her journal is just more of the same.

The perils of game design

I'm trying to describe a submarine being blown out of an asteroid via a convenient ice-ammonia geyser without it sounding like an elaborate sexual metaphor.

I've already had to modify the diagram of the geological structure that does this because it looked a bit too penis-like.

Any suggestions on synonyms for "squirted" etc.?

Another linux question

If you are using Celestia on a linux computer, is it showing the moon as cratered etc. or a featureless grey disk?

On my PC and iBook it's cratered, on the linux version it's featureless - but other satellites etc. are cratered. Some sort of file error, I assume, not sure what. It may have something to do with Apollo 11 being in the package as a satellite of the moon or something.