Map of Humanity. I'd like to think I'd be on the continent of Reason. Preferably somewhere near Answers. Or maybe on the continent of Wisdom, about the Land of Oz. (Wait a minute...Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory is actually on the map? Awesome!) Of course, the bad part of humanity is equally as fascinating.
Landmark Colors: Portmeirion, Wales. Wow. I did not know that the village from "The Prisoner" is actually real. I had always assumed it was some wacky stage set, but apparently not.
Academics: Still Totally Lame. When it comes to hobbies, people will only admit to the "hip" or "geeky" ones. No one's going to admit to a guilty pleasure that their peers and society will view as unacceptably deviant. You know, people have to consider their jobs and their reputations first. So why ask in the first place? I think the questioners are secretly hoping that somebody will crack and give them a Big Sordid Story which will win tons of readers.
Buy a Friend a Book Week is October 1-7 (as well as the first weeks of January, April, and July). During this week, you’re encouraged to buy a friend a book for no good reason. Not for their birthday, not because it’s a holiday, not to cheer them up–just because it’s a book.
What book would you choose to give to a friend and why?
Maybe this is a cop-out answer, but it would really depend on who this friend is. I would get a book in a genre that they like reading in and something that they haven't read before.
But if I were to give a book to a random friend, I'd probably choose Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Cool murder mystery with monks, puzzles, a library!, and tons of history. More people need to read that book--not just weird old guys trying to look hip while waiting at the airport.
Dirty quantum mechanics jokes done right. I had a biochem prof who kept emphasizing the SN2 reaction as "The backside attack!" in lecture. Geez, I had such a hard time keeping a straight face and not snickering.
During a small bit of free time, I was about to sit down to attempt work on an outline for the kamikaze novel I do every November, when I heard a mewling sound outside my apartment door.
This is nuts, I thought. I'm just hearing things.
The mewling continued.
So I put on my running shoes and opened the door a crack. A small bewhiskered pink nose peeked from the bottom of the door. "Meow?" I closed the door.
Crap! What do I do now?
I grabbed my keys and managed to get into the hallway without the fuzzball streaking into my apartment. I picked up the wriggling feline, a fluffy brown and black cat with a white muzzle and white paws, and it began to purr. Well-fed but no collar, I noticed.
Is this cool or crazy? The apartment building doesn't allow pets. None of my other neighbors own a cat (I know, because I knocked on a bunch of doors and asked). Since I don't have the equipment to take care of a cat (nor do I want to ignore the terms of my lease), I made the hard decision of leaving the cat outside, hoping that it will eventually head back to its owner--if it indeed has one. And if it's still there tomorrow, I suppose I'll have to call animal control*.
I guess what annoys me about the whole situation is not the cat itself, but the humans who are supposed to be taking care of the animal. Sure, it might be a stray, but if it isn't, the least the owners could have done was to put identifying information on a collar so the pet could be returned.
*I did not call animal control now because they won't come until tomorrow anyway.
Not surprisingly, my 100,000th visitor came some time yesterday via Google. Also, not very interesting and somewhat disappointing--they came for an image on Mixotricha paradoxa that I linked to but I didn't actually put on the blog.
Previously, I mentioned this. But apparently, my skepticism was ill-founded because I got the following in my inbox today:
"Now I'm here to unveil the identities of three more of this year's NaNoWriMo pep talkers. They are...drum roll please...the ferocious Garth Nix! The fantastic Naomi Novik! And the awesome Neil Gaiman!"
How crazy is that? I actually own books by all three of these authors.
And for those Nano-ers who could care less about fantasy, two other authors on the pep talk list are Sue Grafton and Tom Robbins.
I find myself getting swept up into something that I never really expected to get a glimpse of, and I'd have to say I'm kind of looking forward to it with morbid fascination. In reality, though, it might be extremely banal. While I'm imagining observing the equivalent of weird rituals of Cthulhu worshippers, it might actually be as snooze inducing as uninspired PowerPoint presentations in a board room.
Imagine that everything is going just swimmingly. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all’s right with the world. You’re practically bouncing from health and have money in your pocket. The kids are playing and laughing, the puppy is chewing in the cutest possible manner on an officially-sanctioned chew toy, and in between moments of laughter for pure joy, you pick up a book to read . . .
What is it?
I have no idea. I'd still not be rereading, but I would be game for almost anything. I might even be feeling magnanimous enough to finish some not-so-good lit fic that I've put off before in exasperation.
Onesome: "Details--are everything!", or so it is said. Are [you] a details person? ...or a big picture person?
Sometimes details are cool. Sometimes they're necessary. But the meaning of life and happiness in general? I could do without the details. In certain things, I'm more of an advocate for the conceptual rather than the detailed. There's a balance one must strike between details and big picture--and I sort of get irritated when people embrace the extremes.
Twosome: Details-- (in the military definition) can be a royal pain: what routine detail at your job/school/home would you cheerfully off-load to someone else?
I'm not up on my military jargon, so I'm guessing you mean chores. If I could off-load all of them to someone else, I'd be very happy.
Threesome: Details-- and devils: what are you willing to work on nearly endlessly until you "get it right"?
Endlessly? That sounds ominously Sisyphean. Sure, there's a certain amount of work that goes into school and lab, but if things continually go wrong, you have to decide at some point to abandon that particular approach. For one thing, you're just repeating your mistakes. Two, you're wasting your time. And three, your boss will just be pissed that you're wasting resources with no progress to show for it.
The same thing goes for creative endeavors. In writing, for instance, there's revision involved of course, but there's a point when you have to say, okay it's done, and send it off. Unlike works that require years of research or slow writing for one reason or another, chronic revising is bad. Sure, that story is your baby, but babies grow up. And you just have to let go.
Wow, today has just been--well, I'm not sure how to best describe it. A blunt pencil to the ol' prefrontal cortex perhaps? And then waffling about whether to shove that pencil in further or to metaphorically get tupped by pirate's grog.
Actually, it's not that bad. Let's just say that being a TA can get extremely hard depending on the students you get.
Baggy pants crackdown goes national. Whatever. If they're going to crackdown on pants, they should crackdown on all ill-fitting pants--baggy or no. On campus, I've seen guys and girls exposing their buttcracks because their pants were too tight. Obviously, not a pretty sight.
"There's going to be a news-dense email that will go out in the next week laying out some of the improvements we've made to the site. In it, we'll also reveal the identity of another THREE of this year's NaNoWriMo pep talkers. Hint: Fantasy nerds will freak their pants. Seriously."
I'm siding with one of the other Nano-ers when they said:
"You know, it will probably be someone you dislike/have never read."
I usually do not talk about books that I cannot finish, but in this case, I feel obligated to post something.
I received The Guardians by Ana Castillo as an ARC via LibraryThing. Maybe someday when I'm feeling particularly masochistic I'll finish it, but here's what I mentioned about it on that site:
Told from varying points of view, this novel chronicles the lives and struggles of immigrants along the Mexican border. I found myself slogging through the narrative, caring little about the characters or what seemed to be the plot. And since I know little Spanish, the code switching literary technique leaves quite a bit to be desired in the understanding department. It's at once dreamy and jarring--the first person accounts dwelling, perhaps, a bit too long and unnecessarily on inner landscapes.
Even though I'm an immigrant myself, I found it difficult to care about the book (although one could point out that entering the States from Canada is totally not the same thing). So life on the border is short, violent, and unhappy. There are always people desperate to escape their dismal lives and bad things happen all the time. However, I'm not even sure I even got anything educational out of this let alone entertaining. But then again, "literary" fiction isn't exactly my genre. I don't find that getting depressed after reading something is particularly enlightening.
I recently had a conversation with someone who seemed disillusioned and discontented with the way higher education (specifically on the graduate level) is conducted in the States. Too much academics and not enough of the practical side of things, he complains. I could only shrug and say, that's how things are here. What did you expect anyway? I could only suggest that he tough it out and get his degree--afterwards, he could do whatever he wanted. No one's stopping him even if all the professors make it out to be that academics is the only way to go.
There is more than one path than the one straight towards academia and I take comfort in the fact that if one thing doesn't pan out, there are always alternatives. But I usually keep that bit to myself. For some people, talk of anything other than academia is heresy and is grounds for the accusation of being an unserious student. Maybe it's just me, but I feel that if you admit to having a life outside of lab, everyone will start thinking that you are a slacker.
Anyways, I do understand the other student's viewpoints and complaints. He has children to care for. A student with a spouse and kids will normally place his or her family first (unless they are like those wacko people who actually brag about how little time they spend with their family in favor of all-nighters at work) and must think of the practicalities ahead of obsessive pursuits of knowledge. I'm not saying that the obsessive pursuit of knowledge is bad--there are times when it's very, very good--but the kind of lifestyle and philosophy perpetuated by those with this mindset is incompatible with students concerned with more mundane matters.
Well, you might huff, that's the reason for the decline of education in America. Students only care about getting by, not getting enlightened. People are too concerned about obtaining a job rather than learning anything. And all I can say to that is, if "sensible employment" and "learning" were on a Venn diagram, you'd get fewer disgruntled students if the two overlapped a bit more.
Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.
What do you read?
Something with a happy ending.
Addendum: Perhaps the purpose of this meme is to actually name specific books, but when I'm feeling bad, the last thing I want to do is to reread stuff.
Onesome: Right-- around the corner from where I live (or work) there's this neat little...
It's not so little. I can walk a couple blocks to visit the arboretum and botanical gardens.
Twosome: on-- the other hand, I'll travel clear across town to...
I'll travel clear across town to the next town just to go to the Safeway there. Sure, there's a Safeway in my town, but there's just something off about it. I can't really put my finger on it even though on the surface, the two stores look the same. Ambiance?
Threesome: Target-- or Walmart? Nah, no contest. How about Target or Mervyn's? Hmmm... That would limit us to clothes, but that's okay, go for it! (No, Macy's isn't eligible...)
I've never heard of Mervyn's and I wouldn't go into a Macy's because I hate the pseudo-snobbishness of department stores. I feel sort of weird going into Walmart as well--I only go when I already have something specific in mind so I spend as little time as possible in the store. As for Target, there aren't any in these parts.
Actually, it should be obvious for any longtime readers of this blog that I don't care for any sort of store. Except for bookstores.
I'm done answering the door. I've been ignoring all knocking after 5PM since the beginning of the school year. I'm not home for deliveries anyway so the only people knocking at weird hours are salespeople and religious evangelists. And no matter what sort of mood I'm in, I'm definitely not going to be receptive to any of their pitches.
A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries. (via Languagehat) Okay, so that link might not be working right now due to capacity overload, but I do hope you'll be able to see it eventually--especially if you have a bit of bibliomania. Lots of pictures of beautiful libraries in Europe and North America. (And unfortunately, I haven't been to any of them.)
Bake Me A Geeky Cake. (via Pharyngula) I am unfazed by the gaming cakes. Probably because I associate gaming with playing and having someone make a gaming cake is a lot like a kid asking for a Barbie cake or a Sesame Street cake or a SpongeBob Squarepants cake. However, I am impressed with the FACS plot cake. Even though its design is so simple that even an idiot could make it, not everyone can understand it. (Also, don't miss some of the cool cakes linked in that post's comments.)
So, this is my question to you–are you a Goldilocks kind of reader?
Most of the time, no. See below for exceptions.
Do you need the light just right, the background noise just so loud but not too loud, the chair just right, the distractions at a minimum?
There must be light. If there is no light, I cannot see anything, let alone read. I don't care about the background noise--usually I can just tune that out, otherwise that's what earplugs and headphones are for. I don't really care whether or not the chair is comfortable or even if I'm standing, sitting, or lying down in bed. And it depends on the distraction--if it's something as obnoxious as noise at a road construction site, then no, I'm not reading then.
Also, I cannot read in most moving vehicles because I get dizzy and nauseous. I'm okay on an airplane with no turbulence, possibly on train-type transportation, i.e. trains, subways, monorails (I haven't tried reading on one yet), and maybe boats (although I've been known to get sick on them).
Or can you open a book at any time and dip right in, whether it’s for twenty seconds, while waiting for the kettle to boil, or indefinitely, like while waiting interminably at the hospital–as long as the book is open in front of your nose, you’re happy to read?
I would prefer to have at least a half-hour chunk to concentrate on a book. However, if a book is really compelling, I'll take whatever time I can get.
Woohoo! I finally figured out how to implement a puzzle in I7 (refer to the last paragraph of this post if you don't know what I'm talking about). Instead of messing around with the original game in which I'm planning the puzzle for, I wrote a small test game which had just that puzzle so I wouldn't get distracted with other types of debugging errors.
Anyways, I'm sure this is all old hat to programmers. I sort of wish there was an aspect of IF which was geared more towards people interested in using the medium to push the boundaries of fiction rather than code. Sure, I7 is already light years ahead of I6 in terms of accessibility, but I'd like something more in the vein of IF programming for dummies. You know, for people who've never even looked at the source code for a web page let alone done any programming.
Drains of Canada. Wow, some fascinating urban exploration. A strange and eerily beautiful world hidden underneath our feet.
Notebookism. This is for those people who walk by the shelf filled with notebooks and journals in a bookstore, stationary shop, or office supply store and can't resist stopping to touch and stare. Or possibly even to sniff. I recently bought a moleskine sketchbook to see what all the fuss was about. Hm. It's quite possible that I could have been better off just getting some cheapo manila folders.
Planetocopia. What would Earth be like if we tweaked a couple of variables? Surprisingly detailed analysis--possibly obsessively so.
Serafini's Codex. Illustrations of an imaginary world imitating the style of the Voynich Manuscript.
On another note, I did not finish the 3-day novel. I got a lot of writing done anyway which is better than nothing at all. I also got distracted with studying Inform 7. I've been fiddling with code in an attempt to implement a puzzle that's been stuck in my head for the last couple of days. Still fiddling--for a non-programmer at least, it's quite non-trivial.
