HSU IT Department

All kinds of fun things that fall under the general rubric of "nerdy" today :)

1) Soon-to-be world's first African-American female chess master is only seventeen. You rock, Rochelle Ballantyne! Here's hoping that budget cuts don't kill your chess program.

2) I'm a big WWII buff, particularly the code-making and code-breaking, so this is pretty damn cool: A Bletchingley man renovating his chimney finds the tiny bones of a pigeon, with a little capsule strapped to its leg. Turns out it was a WWII carrier pigeon, with a coded message for...whom??

3) All five Star Trek captains on stage together. Best quotes came from Sir Patrick: "On Star Trek we are wearing costume, and just like Elizabethan costume, no pockets. Sometimes actors would stand awkwardly because they didn’t know what to do with their hands, but if you’ve spent half your career acting in tights..." and "All those years sitting on thrones of England were nothing but preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair." Yessssss...

4) How many of you remember Omni magazine? I had a subscription starting when I was about 12 and I loved every issue -- big and glossy, with its strange and gorgeous cover art. It gave me a passion for science fiction and sci-fi art which has never left me, with authors like George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison and William Gibson; artists like H.R. Giger and Rallé. Well, guess what? The entire run of Omni is now available online for free! ::does happy dance::

5) This last one is for the truly nerdy among you: Watch nine big-name sci-fi authors -- including one woman! -- rediscover their inner high-school geek as they play an old-style game of Dungeons and Dragons. Not only did they voyage to The Keep on the Borderlands (D&D Module #2), they recorded it, edited it, added some clever Terry Gilliam-style opening animations, and put it online for your edification and jollification :)

As a reward for having finished my story for the first week of SSIAW on Friday, Mr Psmith and I went out to hear lovely traditional Irish music on Saturday -- fiddles, penny whistles, bodhrans, tambourines, tight harmonies and singable tunes and step dancers. There was rain but it passed leaving a double rainbow, so all was well and all was well and all manner of things were well. Today I did my readings for class -- more Gargantua and Pantagruel -- and answered correspondence (for which read, not morning rooms with engraved stationery, but rather blog trolling/commenting!).

A bunch of random things of interestingness have crossed my path in the last couple of days, so I thought I'd share them.

First and foremost (and in honor of which I have created the new userpic featured in this post), Sir Patrick Stewart is on Twitter, as SirPatStew!!! This is almost (but not quite) enough to make me get a Twitter account. His first tweet? "Hi world." His second? "My brain hurts." Best so far? From Sep 4, "Scotch/Soda. Sunset. pic.twitter.com/RjSaUhmq ." I want to be the person who took this picture.

Next up, a fascinating poem by James Hall entitled Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too. Whether you're a superhero or just the girl next door, it's easy to get locked into one persona: "So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows / Maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin / Nobody can buhn der suits, dey all fwame wesistent." Who among us hasn't wanted to burn their suit and reinvent themselves from scratch? (You can also read the author's thoughts on it.)

Third and fourth are both writing-related items. (3) Yale Law professor Stephen Carter wrote a great piece, It Is to Be Hoped That Proper Grammar Can Endure which argues that precision in writing is necessary for precision in thought. He even brings in the venerable Adam Smith: "The rules of justice may be compared to the rules of grammar...Morality should be modeled on grammar...so that we may have “certain and infallible directions for acquiring it.”

(4) I stumbled across two excellent Mary Sue Litmus Tests here and here. The first one has separate sections for fan-fiction and original fiction, while the second is for original fiction only. They provide an interesting window into the various character features that have become commonly viewed as Sue-ish -- of course, each of these things individually are fine, it's just when one character features lots of them that things start to get dicey. A good reality check for my own writing!

Finally, from io9.com comes my nominee for Dad of the Year. When his daughter wouldn't eat her lunch at school, this guy started drawing silly Avengers and other superhero cartoons and putting them in her lunchbox. My favorite is Batman :)

And that's it for Sunday!

A random list of stuff that made me go "Oooooh..." today:

The US highway system as a subway map

Goldilocks Reviews the Sunshine Mary Jane Pump on Zappos

The program for the Pop Culture Association conference in Boston, with four panels on Buffy, eight on fairy tales, fourteen on fan culture (including "Girls, Geeks and Politics: Gender, Race and Identity in Fandom"), eighteen on horror, twenty-five on women, and an amazing TWENTY-NINE on sci-fi and fantasy!!

Where I want to stay when I become obscenely rich

J K Rowling's book for grownups has a publisher; title and publication date TBA

Hamlet's cat's soliloquy and Grendel's Dog: Brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow / Hearth-pet of Hrothgar in whose high halls / He mauled without mercy many fat mice...

A recipe for tequila hot chocolate - mmmmmmm....

The Daylight Atheist blog: smart, thought-provoking, honest

And my girl scout cookie order arrived, hurrah!!! They will go well with the tequila hot chocolate. Nom nom nom nom nom...

0 hrs, 0 words (monumental suckage, if only I could count the crap I write for work...)
(...46 days...)

Meme thing has infected me in the form of nursedarry Here's how it works:
A. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
B. Tag seven people to do the same.
C. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag "whoever wants to do it."

And here's the results:

List of Randomness:
1. I love to ski and have safely made it down several double black diamond slopes (ok, it was 15 years ago, but still...)
2. My favorite "guilty pleasures" book is V. C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic. I'm now officially embarrassed at having admitted that.
3. I'm a kick-a** pool player and I own my own cue named Merlin.
4. I can recite the entire Monty Python parrot sketch from memory.
5. The sound of fingernails on a blackboard makes me curl up in a fetal position and shriek.
6. I won the county spelling bee three years running.
7. I can't watch the Sarah McLachlan SPCA ad, it upsets me too much.
8 (Bonus item). I'm rubbish at putting my clothes away.

Can I tag some of the same people my tagger tagged? (That sounds way more confusing than it is...) I'm going to go with yes, therefore I'm tagging kilter and ladyoneill along with annabird, were_duck, nuclearsugars and noeon, mostly because I'm really curious what they'll say :) That's only five er, six but hey, it's quality that counts, not quantity, right?