unsettled
we steal you away
take you from your skin
set your bones to dancing
you won’t notice
but a subtle shift
and a thread of blood
a scab on your palm
you walk these paths with us
journey through the night
your feet step softly as you dream
when we return
at early dawn
we slip bones back into body,
to where they once fit
now scattered, upside down
not quite enclosing your soul
— Oxlin
Welcome to October, everybody!
I’ve got two more hours of September left, but happy October, all! Half my residence hall has already put Halloween decorations on their doors.
October! My favorite month! The autumn month! The “godless month”! The pumpkin month! The spider month! The hay month! October! October!
Yay autumn! Leaves and Halloween and crisp air are wonderful!
I’m gonna be Dr. Horrible for Halloween! I have a seasonal job at a party store where I get a 30% discount on costumes and decorations so I’ll see what I can do.
Nice! My boyfriend and I are considering either Pokemon trainers or Pusheens.
I’m going as Velma from Scooby-Doo.
Perfect!
HALLOWEEN HAS BEGUN!!!!!!!
OH MY KOKOPELLI the “Frozen Caveman” from “Scooby-Doo Where Are You” was very likely inspired by the real-life Minnesota Iceman hoax one/two years before! How did I not realize that sooner?
(Why do I always have these revelations at 3 AM and why are they never about anything important?)
Happy October everybody!
Pie season at last!
University season! Against all expectations, I’m loving grad school so far. All but one of my classes are really interesting and look hard but manageable. This is going to be the winter of pies, pdes and particle physics. Still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do for Halloween though…
Just booked a flight to Amsterdam for a few days at the end of the month!
Has anyone ever had dragonfruit before? Specifically the kind whose flesh is such a bright magenta that you think it’ll turn you into an HPB? Because I did. It tasted like a cross between a strawberry and a melon.
Yes! But I’ve had the kind with white flesh more often.
I haven’t eaten it, but I’ve had sports drinks with it as flavor.
I had a Jamba Juice smoothie with dragonfruit in it when I was in Hawaii last February. It was indeed that bright pink color.
Survey question for current/former university students! Is/was it common practice at your school to thank profs after lectures? It seems to be fairly typical behavior here (dependent on several factors including class size) and I’m curious how common it is in general.
Depended on the class for us – there’s a very different atmosphere in a class of 25 as opposed to 300+, which it sounds like is the same for you . Small classes kinda felt too personal to necessitate thanking. I tried to regularly do so and I’m sure at least a couple others did, but it didn’t seem ~standard~ by any means. It was, however, very common for a large class (or, on rare occasion, even small) to applaud the professor after the final lecture.
See, this is the sort of thing I was wondering about, because I’ve observed the opposite—I feel at my school I’m likely to hear people thank a professor after a small class (especially my tiny Greek classes). With a larger class, which is typically a gen ed, there’s much less personal connection and people feel correspondingly less driven to talk to the prof. The class where I’ve been most consistent about thanking the professor on my way out was a seminar with about a dozen people in it.
(Other factors: people here are more likely to say something if they especially enjoyed the lecture, if the professor spent a lot of time answering a question they personally asked, and if it’s the first or last day.)
Wait- you don’t do the knocking thing?
Knocking thing?
Apparently, the knocking thing is a European thing. At the end of each lecture or class, you knock on your table to thank the professor. The better the lecture was, the longer and louder you knock.* That way, a class of 300+ can still thank the lecturer quickly and efficiently.
At the same time, it’s a way of giving feedback. If the lecture was awesome, students will keep knocking until you’ve left (and maybe a few more minutes in case you’re still in the corridor). If it was just a normal lecture, you’ll get a perfunctory but loud burst of noise. And if you just hear a few distinct knocks despite giving a lecture to 50+ students, then they hate you. Every one of them.**
*If the occasion is grand enough to merit more noise than can be created by knuckle-wrapping, you can stamp your feat as well (example: a professor giving his last lecture before retirement).
**Some people don’t knock at all if the lecture was terrible. I was raised to consider this unforgivably rude, so the worst I do is knock once (as opposed to 5+ times).
What a useful system! We don’t have anything like that in the States. Is this only a university thing, or do younger students (I don’t know what word you use for what we’d call high school, sorry) do it as well?
It’s reserved for university/academia type settings: you’d also knock at an academic conference, but not in high school. I’m not sure what vocational colleges do.
Now that I’m in my last year, I don’t have very many lectures anymore, but I typically do thank the professor on my way out of the room after each class. I also try to thank them more specifically after the last day of each course, since one of my high school teachers made a point of saying that can mean a lot to a teacher. I don’t know about big lectures, though – my biggest class here was only ever about 40 people!
I personally thank them, but in my experience it varies from person to person.
I would thank the prof if I walked past them on my way out, but wouldn’t go out of my way to thank them, which I think was more or less typical. It’s also pretty typical for students to applaud at the end of the last lecture of the semester.
Would anyone like to go to Antarctica?
http :// joidesresolution .org/node/453
Robert, that’s like asking if we want gelato.
In effect, JOIDES is giving out free gelato. To get it, all you have to do is describe how your eating it can benefit other people.
I assume the gelato is only for STEM majors? (Have not actually looked very closely at the website.)
Artists, educators, bloggers, video makers — anybody skilled and creative enough to interpret the experience effectively.
how did you KNOW I was just looking at Antarctic summer tech jobs… This one looks very exciting though!!! I like that it blends the science with outreach/creative work instead of science + manual labor like the other entry level tech jobs, heh.
I have my Velma costume all put together for ComicCon! I’m not used to wearing such a short skirt, so I’m wearing black shorts under it, and I don’t have Mary Janes, so I’m wearing moccasins (which are closer to magenta than red), but otherwise it looks just like her outfit!
It was good that I wore moccasins because I think my feet would have hurt if I’d done all of that walking in Mary Janes.
I shall now tell the story of Groundhog and the Server that Erased its Own Rules:
So I’ve been beating my head against a server issue for the past two weeks. It worked like this: Every day, at around 2PM local time (7AM Eastern), the server would slow down, crash, etc. This was a big problem, because my coworkers needed this server and the website hosted on it to do their work. I checked the server’s equivalent of Task Manager, and discovered that the whole thing was full of tons of copies of the same process. Usually this means that the site is under attack. So I tried every trick in the book to block the “attack” but to no avail.
Last Thursday, a friend of my boss suggested that maybe something on the website was creating all of these processes. So I figured that a good way to mitigate this would be to limit the number of processes that could be created. I had done this before, when the site was actually under attack (the attacker bragged about it on our voldynet page, so we knew it was an attack). But when I checked the server configuration file, all of the rules relating to process and connection management had disappeared. Which meant that the server would spawn a ton of processes any time more than a few people were viewing the website hosted on it. I knew these rules had been there before, because I had changed them due to the aforementioned attack. And I certainly hadn’t deleted them, and I’m the only one in the office that knows how to do anything on the server.
So somehow the server erased its own rules, allowing itself to run amok, and causing Groundhog to tear her hair out for two weeks.
Apologies to anyone who didn’t understand my technobabble, I’m just so relieved that this is fixed that I had to tell someone.
Bunnies repulsed! We live to fight another day.
Fellow denizens:
If you are feeling disoriented, alienated, and/or obsessed with escapist fantasy, it’s perfectly understandable. As you may have gathered by now, your sector of the multiverse isn’t the most desirable. All 9/11-Iraq_War-Great_Recession-Brexit timelines are fairly stressful for reasonable people to live in. Yours could be worse, and it might get better, with time and effort.
For those of you in the United States, the next month is highly likely to be even crazier than the previous few. After that, depending on exactly how the quantum wavefunctions collapse and making allowances for residual insanity, things could settle down somewhat.
Even in the best-case scenario, however, your reality is still damaged goods and will need careful tending for decades to come. On the positive side, it’s also vast and fascinating and offers more things to learn and explore and experience and enjoy than anyone could pack into even a very busy lifetime.
Love, condolences, and courage,
Your friends in the Oasis
Yesterday the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace museum reopened after a year and a half of maintenance. I took a tour and being pretty familiar with the story of Roosevelt’s early life, it was really exciting to realize that the episodes from it that are famous– T.R.’s childhood struggles with asthma, his construction of a natural history museum in his bedroom, the beginning of his voracious reading–all happened right here in this house.
For anyone with only the vaguest of phantasms of what seminary life is like: a generic daily schedule, with commentary:
– 5:40: Wake
– bleary-eyed
– thirsty
– do I have time to take a nap later?
– 6:20: Be in the chapel for Lauds (until ~6:40), meditation (until 7:05), and Mass (until ~7:50)
-singing at 6:20 AM is difficult
-staying awake at 6:20 AM is difficult
– 8:00: Breakfast
-coffee!
-sugary cereal!
-leftovers!
– 8:35 – 12:00: Class periods 1 – 4
-I don’t have every period every day (see attached class list)
– 12:15: Be in the chapel for Sext
-my singing voice is happiest at this time of the day
– 12:30: Lunch
-typically there will be a table reading (a Gospel verse or two and then a reading from a biography or a philosophical work or something) for about the first half of lunch, after which you can converse freely
– 1:00: Mandatory recreation (no homework or sleeping allowed)
-if it weren’t mandatory, people would probably just use this time for homework and eventually get burnt out
-this is often the most tedious part of the day, and you would much rather be doing something productive
– 2:00: Optional recreation
– 2:50 – 5:15: Class periods 5 – 7
– 5:30: Be in the chapel for Vespers
-my voice hates me at this time of the day
– 6:00: Dinner
-on Sundays and bigger feast days, there will be beer/wine and/or dessert
– 6:30: Optional recreation
-also the only time during the day to use the internet for non-homework, non-email purposes
– 7:30: Compline (after which Grand Silence begins)
-Grand Silence means no conversation that isn’t absolutely necessary, and lasts until after breakfast the next morning
– 10:00: Curfew
-I’m usually in my room and in my pajamas right after Compline anyway
– 10:30: Lights out
-zzzzz
My classes this semester:
– Period 1, MWF: History of Ancient Philosophy
-starting with Thales; we’re on Plato at the moment
– Period 3, MWF: Logic
-mainly Aristotle, especially his Categories
– Period 3, R: Roman Missal
-basically a history of the Mass
– Period 4, MWF: Natural Philosophy
-relying mainly on Aristotle and Aquinas
– Period 4, TR: Church History
-from the first century until the early Middle Ages
– Period 5, TRF: Latin
-we’re reading stuff from the Council of Trent this semester
– Period 6, TR: Roman Breviary
-an elective course about the history of the breviary
-Period 7, M: Chant
-only once a week this year, compared to…four times a week? last semester
Classes are Monday through Friday. Wednesday afternoons are free and you can leave the property to run errands, go to a coffee shop or a pub, etc. Saturday mornings are study time, and Saturday afternoons you’re assigned to various crews to clean the seminary. Sunday afternoons are also free.
Special events include a huge bonfire on Halloween, “Ausflugs” (field trips/vacations) to Colorado, Kansas City, and elsewhere, a huge party on our patronal feast day, huge parties for Christmas and Easter, potato cannons, Fat Tuesday skits and talent show, mariachi bands, poetry symposiums, weekly movie nights, soccer tournaments, Catan tournaments, homemade grappa. You work hard (I often go to bed realizing that, in a sixteen hour day, I had literally no time which I freely chose how to spend), so you play hard as well. There’s eighty to ninety seminarians here, to give you a reference, and you get to know all of them very well. Community life runs very smoothly–no politics, no cliques, no rivalries or tensions. It’s pretty awesome.
That sounds intense! But given how little I get done of my days off, I realize there’s a value in structure as well.
> Be in the chapel for Sext
So………….. uh………………………………….. could you elaborate on this?
K
aiYves,okonilly,It’s the name of a time slot on the Catholic liturgical prayer schedule. Terce (as in “tertiary”) is the third hour after dawn, about 9 a.m.; Sext (as in “sextuplets”) is midday; and None (rhymes with “moan”) is about 3 p.m.
Aha, I knew it had to be something like that. My Catholic family would be deeply disappointed in me if they knew I asked.
“MuseBlog: Averting Parental Disappointment Since 2005.”
It’s okay, I was raised Catholic and didn’t know either.
Err, Kokonilly asked that, not me.
Sorry! Korrection kompleted.
It’s “The Extinktion Of ‘C'”!
(You know, given the continued popularity of dystopian YA, maybe we should actually write that story as a parody.)
Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble Bollege Oxford.
That’s how Nigel Molesworth would spell it. (Remember him?)
Yep. From soup to nuts: Matutina (“morning”), Laudes (“praises”), Primus, Tertius, Sextus, Nonus (“first”, “third”, “sixth”, “ninth” (hours)), Vesperae (“evening”), Completorium (“complete”). Theoretically you could do Matins at midnight and space the rest out every three hours and get a nice 24-hour cycle, but that’s never actually been done as a normal practice. The symbolism of the prayers reflects the time of day, but they’re recited at only approximate times (or inapproximate, if necessary). The bulk of each hour is made up of Psalms. In fact, if you recite all the hours of a normal week, you’ll go through all 150 Psalms in their entirety, plus quite a bit more besides. They’re really beautiful poetry, even translated into Latin.
So I’m almost a week late on this, but I wanted to say that I had an awesome time at New York Comic-Con! I was dressed as Velma Dinkley from Scooby-Doo and I met up with my friend Steph who was dressed as Laverne from an older video game called “Day of the Tentacle”. It was a real embarrassment of riches– there were so many people dressed up in awesome costumes, so many booths with cool activities and interesting things for sale (or, if you’re broke like me, to look at), so many panels to go to– I know next year I’m going to have to buy tickets for more than one day, because one day wasn’t nearly enough.
A lot of people recognized my costume and some asked for pictures with me– I’d love to see if they posted their pictures online, but I’m not sure how I would find them. Steph and I saw a panel about one of her favorite cartoons that included a sneak peek of an episode that won’t be aired until the New Year, and a trivia game that was just really funny. In Artist’s Alley, I met the creative team on DC’s current Scooby-Doo comics (who liked my costume and also liked that I said those were the only comics I buy on a monthly basis, because they are), and got signed comics from them.
I’m just disappointed that there’s 350+ days until the next one…
Excited for the Vendée Globe next month, disappointed that it will be the first one in 20 years with no female sailors.
Happy Feast of Building a Fort in the Backyard (aka Sukkot)! I am proud to announce that this year, I have my own fort!
Best. Holiday. Ever.
Agreed, it sounds fun.
I toured the fort set up in Washington Square Park by NYU’s Jewish student organization today. The thatched roof let light in and everybody was welcome to come in and try the food. I’d already eaten, so I just had some grape juice and sat down at the table to talk to people for a while. What a nice tradition!
Partial sky visibility is one of the rules.
If I were designing holidays for a new society, I’d be very tempted to plagiarize Sukkoth. It really breaks the mold.
(Note to self: Resume work on holiday reform.)
Chased out of a room on campus where I thought I had found an adequate southwest-facing window once again, nuts! But this time it went much better for the Antares rocket that I didn’t get to see, and I was able to watch on my phone! The Cygnus capsule is in orbit and headed for its link-up with the International Space Station on Sunday. Next time I’ll buy tickets to the Empire State Building observation deck or something, ’cause I know nothing will get in the way from there and nobody can chase me out if I behave well.
Biting my nails about the silence from the Schiaparelli Mars lander…
I thought the ESA operations Blue Bird Microblogging Platform feed said they were getting its data through the Mars Express satellite now?
The ExoMars orbiter has pinged them now to say it’s safe in orbit but no rover signal yet, I think… I wish I wasn’t so busy today so I could stay more on top of these things…
Me, too.
The orbiter is the more important part of the mission, but I hope the lander made it, too.
But this is your job! I have to go to class and stuff…
Actually, I retired in July. My “job” now is household maintenance and cat care. But my schedule probably is much more flexible than yours.
And I am so tired and busy that that completely slipped my mind. Whoops. Terribly sorry, Robert.
Talk to us…
Parachute failure, apparently. The Ghoul strikes again!
So, is anyone watching the Orionid meteors tonight?
If I may switch hats from President Bartlet to Ms. Craig…
“We have at our disposal a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don’t go to the blackboard or raise their hand ’cause they think they’re going to be wrong. I think you should say to these kids, ‘You think you get it wrong sometimes, you should come down here and see how the big boys do it.’ I think you should tell them you haven’t given up hope and that it may turn up, but, in the meantime, you want
NASAESA to put its best people in a room and you want them to start buildingGalileo 6ExoMars 2020. Some of them will laugh and most of them won’t care but for some, they might honestly see that it’s about going to the blackboard and raising your hand. And that’s the broader theme.”A lot of the commentators on “The Space Review” need to learn this.
My next three astronomy lectures are by a guy who helped write the software for Hershel! And we got to look at some one of the simulators that’s being used to test stuff for Cheops.
Grad school- so much work it isn’t even funny, but rockets! DNA sequencing! Some weird stuff about combining macroscopic models of nuclei with quantum-mechanical models of electronics that I haven’t even begun to understand! Greek philosophers measuring huge distances and being less wrong than they could’ve been! Actually trying to measure stuff with theodolites and not being able to conclusively determine how far away the next wall is! Plus generalized functions, Fourier series, Fermi estimates and mathematical riguours examinations of “how fast do I need to chuck stuff up to stop it from coming back down”?
Grad school. I’m in desperate need of a time turner, but ♥
I didn’t get enough sleep and I was almost late to class and the printer ran out of paper while I was printing and my banana fell on the floor after I peeled it and I embarrassed myself in front of two thirds of my advisory committee because I didn’t see in the e-mail that I was supposed to lead the discussion today and now they think I’m scatterbrained/lazy, and the Schiaparelli probe failed and… And hopefully nothing else, today has been bad enough.
Lady Gaga performed at a bar down the street from our apartment and my roommate and I could just barely hear her from our balcony. Reversal of fortune.
(Wait, I realize this sounds like me still complaining because we could barely hear her. Actually the whole thing was a surprise to us so it was thrilling.)
NaNoWriMo YWP has lost it’s flare, so I figured I’d come here for old time’s sake.
Looking back on my old posts, I was extremely immature and self centered. I want to apologize for that. I was humiliated by being the youngest user on the blog, so that could’ve contributed to it.
I can be MB’s resident young person or something.
Not much has changed. I’m a human. I do human middle school things.
Welcome back, LtH! Nice to hear that you’re still human.
We’ve all been there, Lucy. I have very embarrassing early posts on almost every forum I use.
They (your old posts) didn’t seem that way to me, but whatever.
It’s nice to have young people around! In general, I think it would be great to grow the MB community a bit. And possibly lighten it up, at least for Halloween. We used to have masked balls, what happened to those?
Nice to know you’re still human. One can never be too sure, these days
I would love to have another ball, but the newer ones always seem to die.
That has been the pattern, unfortunately. It’s disappointing to throw a party that fizzles.
Haha everyone looks back at their younger selves with shame. It’s totally cool!
Ha, I remember when I first got here I was so intimidated that I kept trying to use big complicated words and write really long posts just to make every one think I was smart enough to bother with. Looking back, it turns out that a lot of my grammar was incorrect and half the words I used were in the wrong context. It is hard, I agree, to get an idea across through these comments without sounding immature or self-centered, especially at our age (you might not know, but I was new to the blog almost exactly two years ago as a 12 year old 7th grader – which reminds me, I think I missed my blogiversary just a couple weeks ago) Anyway, basically EVERYONE else feels the same way about when they were younger. Don’t worry about it, and it’s good to have you back.
Today I learned that alligators have umbilical scars where they were connected to their yolk sac, just like humans have bellybuttons.
Would anyone else be interested in bringing back the incredible morphing chameleon threads? I pop in a lot, but I can never quite think of what to say except **grad school**. Having a topic to topic drift for everyone to weigh in on might lure out some lurkers.
Fellow lurker here who might appreciate it. Not that there’s a way to guarantee anything, but it seems worth a shot!
I think the concept of replies put the chameleon threads out of commission. It was much more difficult to hold a conversation about a single topic on the random thread when replies weren’t grouped together, but now we can.
I’d love to find a way to lure lurkers out of the shadows. Clearly, all of you have interesting things to say. The problem is that there are so many other places to say them nowadays.
I actually find with having all social media at my fingertips, I am less and less likely to write things myself on any of it. Phones are great for reading but between laziness and carpal tunnel I never really want to type on them. Anyone else have that problem?
Me!
A related phenomenon is how I’m sometimes surprised when one of my close friends brings up something that I posted on social media, like a book I’d finished. Somehow it disconnects that those same people actually *are* lurking and reading what I posted, even if they don’t click “like” or leave a comment.
I think it’s a combination of believing I don’t have anything particularly interesting to talk about, and finding it awkward to constantly post about myself (on any platform). That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy discussing things with MBers!
My parents called me to say that they’re finally going to get solar panels for our roof! I have been asking them if we could do this since Middle School, and then all out of the blue they just called me randomly today when he hadn’t talked about it for months and said they were going to do it.
That’s awesome! I’ve always wanted to do that, but my parents aren’t the type. Plus our house is pretty much completely shaded by trees.
Nice! My family have had a solar refrigerator for several years and it’s so cool.
Well, I would hope so, since it’s a refrigerator!
A sunflower seed bagel with avocado cream cheese and smoked salmon is an excellent brunch.
The leaves are starting to turn here!
I wish the first thing people associated with Autumn wasn’t cheap yet gory Halloween costumes. It’s a really beautiful season, if you ignore the chainsaw murder costumes.
I have a seasonal job at a Halloween store right now and our decorations are oddly split between the “cute witches pumpkins and ghosts” aesthetic and the “BLOOD DEATH CHAINSAWS AND SEVERED LIMBS EVERYWHERE” aesthetic.
Honestly, I prefer both to the “needlessly revealing versions of otherwise unprovocative costumes” and “cheap cultural stereotype costumes”.
I don’t know if it’s the first thing… Maybe the fourth or fifth. I would say the first thing is colder weather and changing leaves, then pumpkins, and then other Halloween stuff.
Oh, speaking of which!
ANNUAL PSA: Take Back Halloween is a wonderful website with ideas for creative and historically-accurate costumes for women (or anyone else who wants to dress in traditionally-female clothes). I’ve dressed up as people like Lise Meitner (nuclear physicist) off of there, and it’s definitely worth checking out for inspiration. A great alternative to BOTH cheap/gory and needlessly revealing.
Oh yes, I’ve seen their website in the past and it’s really well put-together, the suggestions are good and the lists of what you need are comprehensive.
Also, because the new beautifully illustrated book “Women in Science” has a great page about her, I really want someone to throw an “Awesome Women From History” party so I can wear my Katia Krafft cosplay.
Who else head-canons that the alien couple who give birth to the “squid baby” in the first “Men in Black” film are members of Kit Fisto’s species (Nautolans)? Okay yeah, his skin is more green and he has humanlike arms and legs, but the brown tint and tentacle limbs could be infant traits that go away with maturity.
I realized very late last night/early this morning that the degree of scariness I want in my Halloween aesthetic can be summed up as “60s-70s youth detective fiction”, i.e. the painted backgrounds of “Scooby-Doo Where Are You?” and the original “Three Investigators” covers. It’s foggy, shadowy, often tinted somehow greenish, and yet beautiful and compelling. There’ll be some scares along the way, sometimes nail-biting ones, but there’ll also be a lot of humor to keep things from getting too dark and if we can find the clues, in the end the scary stuff turns out to be a hoax and we catch the rotter responsible and then have a laugh summarizing things to our patron or to each other at the Malt Shop.
Another one of my ideas, since Robert said I should share them: A performance where blue fish are projected on a background that’s the exact shade of blue needed to make them invisible. A performer wearing a dress that’s a lighter shade of blue performs on the stage, and the fish appear “swimming” across the fabric of her dress as she dances in front of the background.
Can we have an “Idea Book” thread like the writer’s notebook for non-writing ideas of any sort that we get?
Today, I accidentally switched my iTunes region to Australian.
They have a whole category dedicated to “American” music.
What kind of music fell under that category?
Green Day was the only one that I remember clearly, but I think Taylor Swift might’ve been there too, but I’m not sure.
They call the Blues and Jazz “America’s music” because both genres arose in the USA, but I would expect those to be seperate categories.
Most likely.
The category was probobaly referring to current/recent musical acts that’ve gained popularity worldwide, but hail from the US.
On what past thread did we play the “describe someone’s death in a simplistic way that makes it sound like they would have had to be very dumb to get into that scenario” game?
KaiYves,
About when was that thread? I don’t remember it offhand, and I’m not sure how I’d search for it. But I’ll let you know if I stumble across it.
I think around 2011. One poster’s modification was that dying from disease didn’t necessarily sound dumb, but an account of how a person got the disease could sound dumb.
Why do thermal tights cost so much? I just want to walk around Manhattan in the fall and winter without freezing the inside of my butt off.
My site has suffered another HPB attack. Am currently doing a final sweep to make sure I got all of them. (aka I found a bunch of malware on the site’s server)
I hope you get them all. Those things can be tricky.
(To quote one of the older Muse Academy threads… “[This video game] has a bug… Er, a bunny.”)
Our hero!
Is anyone here following the Icelandic election?
Truth be told I’m quite burned out on elections at the moment.
Iceland does things differently: the campaign lasted just six months and included a party called the Pirate Party. The Pirates (young “hacktivists” led by a poet) didn’t win, but they came in a respectable third — not bad for a party that didn’t exist five years ago. And the new parliament consists of 30 women and 33 men.
Hey, everyone! It’s been a while, but I thought I’d come by to see how you guys are doing.
I’m working on my second year of college, which is going great. I’m planning on majoring in Computer Science and Creative Writing, I’m taking Ancient Greek, my hair’s brightly colored now… And that’s all the newsy bits I can think of.
What’s new around here?
What colors is your hair?
Pink! It’s fading pretty fast, but it was really cute while it lasted. I think I have enough dye to recolor it once, and then I’m gonna shave most of it off again.
HOT pink?
Pale pink. I’m smarter than that, I swear!
Phew, I was scared.
Hi! I also study Ancient Greek! *fistbump*
Oh cool! Have you been studying it long?
I started this fall, we only just got to the point in the textbook where it introduces retellings of actual Greek myths, which is pretty exciting even if it’s only Theseus and the Minotaur. I’d sort of prefer a lesser-known one, just for interest’s sake.
I’m in my third semester—though, because I’m studying KoinÄ“, we haven’t really looked at any classical sources till this year (mostly Aesop; he’s fun but you also kind of want to murder him).
That was some downpour we just had here! It was cloudy but only raining a little when I left the bookstore, then it started coming down hard and fast, and even though I had my umbrella, my pants and jacket sleeves both got soaked. The wind almost blew my umbrella inside out a few times. Then it lessened to a drizzle again as I walked the last block home, then the rain stopped altogether for about an hour, and then it suddenly turned into a ferocious downpour with thunder and lightning and literal sheets of rain that I could see from my apartment window. And THEN it stopped again.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN, MUSEBLOG!