Entries tagged with future watch

Current Mood: Vague and harried
Current Music: Robots in Disguise - Turn It Up

Entry tags:

June novel-reading, and what the kids call a plug

It's too hot (but cooler today). Whoops, here I go being tardy.

Pamela Dean, Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (reread)
CJ Cherryh, Conspirator

I actually started a lot of books that I didn't finish in June, and may still go back to some of them; it's interesting what gets recorded and what doesn't. If I didn't have this paragraph I probably wouldn't remember that later and would have looked back and gone, "I guess I was just reading slowly!" In fact I was reading quickly, but without follow-through.

My girlfriend Joanne will be on co-op radio tonight at 9 pacific interviewing and eliciting music from the startlingly interesting

osmie; she used to be a regular host of their women's storytelling show, but this is the first time she's done it since I met her, so I'm looking forward to it. She says she likes to pretend that nobody's listening, but she probably won't see this entry in time to be self-conscious, so you guys can feel free to check it out, too (thus Edit: and an archive).

We Live In The Future Watch: Speaking of segues,

osmie linked on facebook to this physics paper on the grandfather paradox. It's not my field but I guess we're experimentally testing questions about time travel now.

Current Music: The Dears - Disclaimer

Entry tags:

August novel-reading

It's the space between terms -- three weeks long, in my case, of which two are passed -- and I am celebrating by prioritizing and passionately applying myself to things which are not important in any time-dependent way. I've finally finished Final Fantasy 6, reactivated my City of Heroes account, and read several very good novels, one of which was especially long:

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Nnedi Okarafor-Mbachu, Zahrah the Windseeker
Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting (reread)

And yes, that's year three done. I'll do stats later.

All the other mammals in the house left today on a trip to Saskatchewan, where my sister lives now; I didn't go in part because my school will be back before they are. Since I've never been here on my own for this long (it will be a fortnight), it will be interesting to see whether the solitude gets weird; it hasn't had time to yet, except that I keep turning around expecting the dog to be there.

We Live In The Future Watch: 'antigravity gardens' (that is, vertical ones). I would also accept this as "We live in a Miyazaki movie."

Current Mood: Mosquito-bitten
Current Music: The Grapes of Wrath - All The Things I Wasn't

Entry tags:

June novel-reading, school-focused et cetera

Whoops, this is late!

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (reread)
Steven Brust, Dragon
Steven Brust, Issola
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Samuel R. Delany, The Ballad of Beta-2
Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

When I hit exactly fifty after six months*, I thought perhaps naturally that I might therefore turn out to read exactly a hundred in a year, but it doesn't look like that's going to be the case: this list and last month's together contain fewer books than that for last September, even though the Rowling and the Brusts are each the sort of books I can get through in a single day. This lessening is presumably going to be the new norm, thanks to a certain new school that sort of rhymes with 'QED'; my fall courses won't be as intensive as the summers were, of course, but I'm going to be averaging five (or equivalent) per term, whereas at Langara, since I wasn't aiming for anything in particular, I generally kept to a comfortably conservative three.

(* Insert Stan Lee-esque reminder here, true believers.)

Speaking of UBC (and that should help out anyone who was stumped by the rhyme puzzle), I got my marks back for that summer term and they were gratifyingly up to my usual standard -- well, the Philosophy of Religion grade was the lowest I've ever received for a philosophy class, but still high enough that it would be unseemly to complain. This is nice for soothing my anxiety about whether my ability to handle college at Langara is a fluke that won't hold up at a gigantic and intimidating university. I'm also now properly a third year student and registered in the honours program and confirmed that I don't have to retake the basic symbolic logic course just because Langara's transfers weird, plus registered online for all my winter courses, so I don't really have anything to worry about until the fall.

For the interim, I have acquired one job, which is to pull big stacks of the Georgia Straight around on this cart they gave me and deliver them to businesses along Marine and lower Pemberton, every thursday. I am gradually, by trial and error, figuring out everywhere I need to put on sunscreen. Slotting a term for working between my school terms like this kind of makes me feel like a character from Princess Maker; I'm not sure which stats this is lowering, but it's definitely raising my strength.

We Live In The Future Watch: Marilee's friend Palle, who gave me a ride downtown from her party yesterday, has a car whose windshield fluid (if I understand correctly) leaves a special residue so that you don't have to use your wipers when it's raining; the rain just slides off. He says that there are other, more expensive cars which don't even have wipers, and accomplish something similar with an electromagnetic field. I didn't get to see it working, but my suspicion is that this looks really cool.

Current Mood: Baffled at livejournal
Current Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Little Dawn

Entry tags:

May novel-reading / schoolbusy miscellanea

Scanty, scanty:

N. K. Sandars (translator), The Epic of Gilgamesh
C. J. Cherryh, Rider at the Gate
Steven Brust, Orca

The reason the list is so scanty, of course, is that most of my reading time has been taken up by the smaller and more numerous readings I've had for homework. This is also why I've been seen being social and, say, posting to livejournal even less than is my wont; these courses, as I was warned they would be, are intensive enough that two of them are enough to push me way over my usual being-busy threshold, and I've been alternating a lot between periods of swelling panic and brief, breathless periods of feeling after all in control, as long as I don't take my eyes off of anything.

A lot of the panic heretofore has been preemptively aimed at this final part of the (rather short) term, so I'm rather relieved that now I'm here it's looking a lot more feasible than it might have. Of the three important essays I need to at least mostly finish in the next twelve days, one is maybe a third done, and another more than half; it's the third one, which I can't yet begin, that's liable to cause me problems, but getting everything else done in a timely fashion can probably only help. See, that last paper for the literature class is due to be formally assigned on the evening of the 14th, and handed in on the afternoon of the 19th; which would be tight but fine, except that Rachel is coming (!) on the evening of the 15th and departing the late morning of the 19th, so actually it's totally untenable. However! So far, this professor has tended to send us the essay topics the Monday before the Thursday we are formally charged with them, and if that holds true this time than I should just have time to frantically write most of it in the half-week thus afforded. Meanwhile I am trying to be as well-prepared as possible.

(I am very excited that Rachel is coming. So is _Quinn! Coming, I mean, though he might also be excited. I get to show off my city like mad. I'm mostly going to be hogging Rachel, especially given how briefly she's here, but if you want to see us while she is then possibly something can be arranged.)

We Live In The Future Watch: the controversy over whether it's fair (to the other athletes) to let that guy with cybernetic legs compete in the next Olympics. We Have Always Lived In The Future Watch: The last person with an artificial limb to win an Olympic gold medal was in 1904. (I should probably cite the livejournal where I first saw those two facts juxtaposed, but alas, I've forgotten which it was.)

Livejournal's preview function isn't working. I guess I'll have to live dangerously. Edit: Livejournal's post function also isn't working, so if you're seeing this, I've saved the text and tried again later. Edit edit: This is Rachel. I have hijacked Andy's account. Do not try to have me followed. Come alone.

(I can't post, but Rachel can post after logging in as me! The rest of livejournal works fine. What the heck.)