HSU IT Department

So we have a subscription to Pandora, the "music genome project." The idea is that you "seed" a channel with one or two songs and then it extrapolates from those to play others that you might like. You can thumbs-up or thumbs-down a given song to sort of train it on what you like. Generally, it isn't bad and I've discovered two or three new groups (e.g., Oysterband) that I really like through them.

When it plays a new song, it offers you the option to query it, "Why is this song playing?" Normally you get answers like, "This song has close harmonies and a folksy sound" or "This song has a strong melody line and a complex backbeat."

This evening we queried a song Pandora played on our Pretorius channel.

The response was, "This song has amazing sackbuttlery."

I can't even bwahahahaaaaaaa type that without laughing :D

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard (6th Level)


Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-12
Constitution-13
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-11
Charisma-11

Alignment: Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race: Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class: Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?

Why am I seeing pictures of Miley Cyrus naked on a wrecking ball everywhere I go online? Is this some sort of metaphor for what she's done to her career or what?

Also, the winner of the "Best Spontaneous Reaction" contest is "Oh, sweet Jesus on a breadstick..." for this atrocious violation of a beloved classic. I'm sorry, Carrie what? And Captain von Trapp is being played by Stephen who??

Thank god for today's google doodle, otherwise I would despair of modern culture.

Reveals went up a little while ago at hp_friendship so I can now cop to being the author of "To Understand and To Be Understood," which explores the friendship between Molly Weasley and Tonks. squibstress (thank you!) wrote the most wonderful prompt which allowed me to incorporate different aspects of friendship, bits of canon, wolves in fairy tales, and some pet theories about magic, power, gender and Muggle-borns. It was great fun to write and I got some lovely thoughtful comments, which is always a joy for a writer :)

Title: To Understand and To Be Understood (on LJ) (on AO3)
Characters: Molly Weasley, Nymphadora Tonks; cameos by Mad-Eye Moody, Fred and George, Dumbledore and one or two others.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Character death (canon)
Word Count: ~8800
Summary: "One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood." -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Original prompt, from squibstress: "They appear to be close-ish in canon. What kind of friendship is it? A few ideas: Maybe Molly sees Tonks as the woman she might have been if she'd made different choices. Does she urge Tonks to pursue Lupin, and maybe get pregnant, out of supportive friendship, or is it something else? Or take the opposite approach: Molly sees Tonks making the same choices she did, and tries to talk her out of it. Or maybe Molly wants to convince Tonks that she doesn't have to choose one or the other--maybe Tonks has choices that weren't open to Molly."
Author's Notes: Thanks to my speedy and eagle-eyed beta, nursedarry, for her Britpicks and excellent suggestions. Text in bold was taken directly from Rowling's books. Molly's line about having children being "to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body" is from author Elizabeth Stone. The information about what happens when two werewolves mate under the full moon comes from pottermore.com.

Harry Potter taxidermy.

That is all.

The New York Times said, "Some novels are almost impossible to review, either because they’re deeply ambiguous or because they contain big surprises the reviewer doesn’t wish to give away."

I'm not so sure about the surprises -- other than one particular thing near the end, it wasn't too difficult to see what was coming, although some of the events were decorated with surprising details. However, there's no question about the ambiguity. (Which strikes me as a rather oxymoronic thing to say, but there you go.) Even after the last page, one still isn't quite sure what happened and what only seemed to have happened.

I have a love/hate relationship with Oates. I've read very few of her books -- more of her short stories -- because almost every one I've read has left me deeply uneasy. I read "Where are you going, where have you been" five years ago, and just remembering it still creeps me out to this day. Obviously this is the mark of a skilled writer, but I don't generally choose my books for the purpose of psychically scarring myself. In addition, she has a tendency to focus on the dark side, and as a result it's often difficult to like any of the characters in her novels. They're just not very nice people, many of them.

This book has many of the elements I love, though, so I thought I'd give it a shot. First and foremost, it's a purported history, replete with excerpts from letters, diaries (including coded ones!), newspaper articles, transcribed eyewitness accounts, and a boatload of historical detail intermixed with straight narrative. Oates does an excellent job creating the very different voices of the writers of these various "primary sources" -- I particularly enjoyed the semi-coherent ramblings of the neurotic Adelaide Burr, who refers to herself as "Puss," reads Madame Blavatsky in secret, and has some serious issues with sex. The narrator himself, one M. W. van Dyck, is great fun, an unreliable raconteur prone to digress into irrelevancies (the history of corsets, the minutiae of Princeton politics) at the drop of a hat. Like all too many writers, he clearly wanted to jam every single bit of his research into his book; in fact, he spends several paragraphs listing all the things he had to leave out.

Second, the story is intricately woven into actual history through the use of real people (Upton Sinclair, Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Jack London, various faculty at Princeton University), places (Princeton University, New York City) and events of the times (Socialists, anarchists, etc.). None of them are particularly pleasant people, but they are real.

Third, it's got solid Victorian gothic chops: a demon bridegroom, huge grand homes, a beautiful innocent young girl, a vicar with a secret, a competition with the devil (or possibly just a minor demon, it's hard to say), an exotic and mysterious European nobleman, murder, suicide, madness and more. All that and a surprisingly high body count. (Like the House of Usher, the doomed Slades don't seem to have much of a future, although that too is ambiguous.)

On the down side, most of the characters aren't very likable and the supernatural parts end up playing second fiddle to the real villains: the upper classes, who can't be bothered to speak out against racism, prejudice, poverty, hideous working conditions, the second-class treatment of women, and other societal ills (although the narrator himself doesn't seem to even notice this, which is kind of amusing).

And it's very, very long.

So be patient, Constant Reader, and expect to enjoy the journey as much as -- perhaps more than -- the destination.

The Big Reveal for sshg_promptfest went up a little while back, so I can now admit to being the author of "Poetic License," written to a very fun and clever prompt by drinkingcocoa.

Title: Poetic License (on LJ) (on AO3)
Warning(s): Pretentious swottiness.
Summary: Snape never claimed to be a poet. According to Hermione, that's just as well.
Original prompt: 1st-year genfic. Professor Snape receives a thank-you owl for the delightful logic puzzle. To show her gratitude, Hermione has rewritten his clue to make it a much better piece of verse, with earnest analyses of the flaws in his version and suggestions to help him improve as a poet.
Author's note: I'm sorry that this isn't longer, but even Hermione can only go on so long when she's got only sixteen lines to work with. I had no idea what trochaic heptameter was until she made me look it up; if there are any actual lit crit or poetry majors in the audience, I beg forgiveness for her entirely inadequate (and probably inaccurate) ripping-to-shreds of Sev's work.

Catching up on book reviews, yay!! Also, I will shortly be doing another bookshelf purge and free giveaway, so watch this space ;)

"Jane Austen with dragons" sounds like a recipe for disaster, yes? And it could have been, easily. Luckily, however, Walton does a masterful job with this weird mashup and gives us a clever, well-written and engaging tale. All the classic Austen components are there: the maiden sisters worried about their lack of dowry, the centrality of reputation and honor, the rigid ideas of class, an intra-family lawsuit (shades of Bleak House!), a missing heir, even a (slightly) dirty vicar. Then there are the dragon elements: they breathe fire, sleep on gold, eat raw meat, live for hundreds of years, and kill the runts of the litter. Instead of these things just being tacked on like window dressing, however, Walton makes them an integral part of the characters and the story, weaving them into an entertaining and diverting story.

It isn't epic fantasy by any means, but it's great fun and I enjoyed it thoroughly; if she writes more novels set in this world I would read them with relish.

Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky, another book that I wanted to like more than I did. One of the difficulties with reading older classic sci-fi is that sometimes you forget how impressive it was when it was first published -- you're jaded by all the amazing stuff that's been written since. I have a feeling this was a remarkable book when it was first published, but it fell a little flat for me.

Which is annoying, because the premise is exactly my kind of thing: a physics accident propels a group of people into another world, where they have to figure out not only the rules of their strange new world but how to escape it. And then they have to do it all over again. And again. The various worlds they fall into and out of are all very different, but each one is so short-lived that I barely had time to suss out what was going on before I was jolted into the next one; there's an abruptness to it that I found frustrating. I wanted more, and more detailed, explorations of the various neurotic obsessions that were externalized as these separate worlds.

The book also suffers a bit from being so very firmly grounded in 1957. Many little clues betray this, the most obvious being that the main villain of the piece is Communism, or rather prejudice against/fear of Communism. It's hard to grasp how enormous and looming a threat Communism was perceived to be in the 1950s; because it was a very specific enemy with a very specific lifespan, this "dates" the story a bit.

Worth a read, mostly as a psychological variant of the "many worlds" hypothesis. Plus I'm amused by the fact that the original cover shows a bunch of expendable redshirts, nine years before Star Trek made them a cultural icon :)