![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Write now.
I am back from the first open mike night of the year, and I am all froofy, so I have a lot to say, but I promise to make liberal use of cut tags.
First, I havepower! the responsibility to spend hours every week doing hard work and making difficult decisions at a largely thankless job! That's right, I have my FA coder training tomorrow! I am extremely excited. Now I will have an excuse for never getting around to reviewing any fics. *cough*
Second, web page update! Fanfic page finally made, including some that have never seen the light of day, and some that have never seen the light of lj! Hopefully more tomorrow, including triage on the webcomics list. Also, while trying to get messenger working, I went ahead and signed up for a Yahoo! e-mail account, as melannen, and I think I may try to move my fandom stuff there, especially as *something* is going to happen to the umd unix accounts sometime this semester, although I haven't got a clear story yet on *what*.
Real life? What's that? I've been to all my classes twice now, and I'm sure you're all quite interested in a summary.
Beekeeping: We haven't actually gotten to play with the bees yet, since it was rainy today and according to my book of bees that makes both bees and beekeepers bad-tempered, but I have seen inside the apiary now, and the beeyard out back, and we got choose and put on bee suits. The school bee suits are made of paper and most of them are repaired with duct tape and they are huge, so I swim in them. The teacher is great; he gave a description of what happens to drones at the end of autumn (hint: it involves gory death) that had the entire class laughing out loud. Fun, fun class.,
Structural Geology: The class is in the basement of the math building and the teacher has a thick chinese accent, conditions practically engineered to send me to sleep. If I can stay awake I think I'll like the class; we got paper blocks to fold and assemble today, and I've always been good with maps and cross-sections. Wait and see what the lab's like.,
Chemistry: I think will be much better than last year. The teacher is actually following the book, and seems to be willing to test us on chemistry knowledge rather than how well we listen in lecture. Plus, I'm going to actually put in actual effort, which should make all the difference. Being first semester helps, too, because it's all people who got the first half of the course elsewhere.,
Geochemistry: Should be awesome. Two days, and we're already handling meteorites and discussing the life cycles of stars. Behind the scenes tour at the Smithsonian, enthusiastic female prof, small class all of whom I know, and interesting subject matter. Yes. And to think I thought this class would be boring. However, she did tell us that she's giving us four credits worth of work, no matter what the catalog claims, so it shall keep me busy.
,and Writer's House. We haven't actually had a class yet, but the opening/first speaker/open mike was tonight, and they gave out free t-shirts, which by itself justifies the whole thing, really. Although I've already got a chocolate stain on mine.
The speaker was Dr. Zita Nunes, who gave a talk about the cannibalism metaphor as it applies to cultural and literary borrowing, touching on the related interpretations of borrowing as identification, rejection, and communication. A good summary of her speech: People write lots of Mary-Sues, and lots of plebe-fics that butcher the source material without trying to understand it, but in the best case the fanfic *is* the discourse. Only she talked about the sociology of race and 19th century psychoanthroplogy and Brazilian Moderns instead of Harry Potter, so it wasn't actually all that interesting.
Then I read the mink poem at open mike night, and it got a laugh at the right place, which I guess is good for the first time I've read at one. But it was sorta eclipsed by Daina's story about the girl who was saved by the ducks, fed them bread to thank them, then shot them and ate them all up. And by the guy who played really awesome, what did he call it? hard acoustic rock guitar?
I suppose I could have actually done some homework, but it's hard to accomplish anything when people keep talking to you. Every meal I've made it to, somebody's started a conversation with me. Really.
First, I have
Second, web page update! Fanfic page finally made, including some that have never seen the light of day, and some that have never seen the light of lj! Hopefully more tomorrow, including triage on the webcomics list. Also, while trying to get messenger working, I went ahead and signed up for a Yahoo! e-mail account, as melannen, and I think I may try to move my fandom stuff there, especially as *something* is going to happen to the umd unix accounts sometime this semester, although I haven't got a clear story yet on *what*.
Real life? What's that? I've been to all my classes twice now, and I'm sure you're all quite interested in a summary.
Beekeeping: We haven't actually gotten to play with the bees yet, since it was rainy today and according to my book of bees that makes both bees and beekeepers bad-tempered, but I have seen inside the apiary now, and the beeyard out back, and we got choose and put on bee suits. The school bee suits are made of paper and most of them are repaired with duct tape and they are huge, so I swim in them. The teacher is great; he gave a description of what happens to drones at the end of autumn (hint: it involves gory death) that had the entire class laughing out loud. Fun, fun class.,
Structural Geology: The class is in the basement of the math building and the teacher has a thick chinese accent, conditions practically engineered to send me to sleep. If I can stay awake I think I'll like the class; we got paper blocks to fold and assemble today, and I've always been good with maps and cross-sections. Wait and see what the lab's like.,
Chemistry: I think will be much better than last year. The teacher is actually following the book, and seems to be willing to test us on chemistry knowledge rather than how well we listen in lecture. Plus, I'm going to actually put in actual effort, which should make all the difference. Being first semester helps, too, because it's all people who got the first half of the course elsewhere.,
Geochemistry: Should be awesome. Two days, and we're already handling meteorites and discussing the life cycles of stars. Behind the scenes tour at the Smithsonian, enthusiastic female prof, small class all of whom I know, and interesting subject matter. Yes. And to think I thought this class would be boring. However, she did tell us that she's giving us four credits worth of work, no matter what the catalog claims, so it shall keep me busy.
,and Writer's House. We haven't actually had a class yet, but the opening/first speaker/open mike was tonight, and they gave out free t-shirts, which by itself justifies the whole thing, really. Although I've already got a chocolate stain on mine.
The speaker was Dr. Zita Nunes, who gave a talk about the cannibalism metaphor as it applies to cultural and literary borrowing, touching on the related interpretations of borrowing as identification, rejection, and communication. A good summary of her speech: People write lots of Mary-Sues, and lots of plebe-fics that butcher the source material without trying to understand it, but in the best case the fanfic *is* the discourse. Only she talked about the sociology of race and 19th century psychoanthroplogy and Brazilian Moderns instead of Harry Potter, so it wasn't actually all that interesting.
Then I read the mink poem at open mike night, and it got a laugh at the right place, which I guess is good for the first time I've read at one. But it was sorta eclipsed by Daina's story about the girl who was saved by the ducks, fed them bread to thank them, then shot them and ate them all up. And by the guy who played really awesome, what did he call it? hard acoustic rock guitar?
I suppose I could have actually done some homework, but it's hard to accomplish anything when people keep talking to you. Every meal I've made it to, somebody's started a conversation with me. Really.
no subject
Congratulations! You have been assimilated. :) You'll still be reviewing fics, it will just be a little different than before. ;-)
no subject
no subject
The first is mail@umd which is a new email system that can be accessed by webmail or IMAP. I just migrated today because I was having trouble using IMAP over SSL with glue (probably because of the new root certificate. This will eventually replace email on wam and glue, but you'll still be able to /read/ mail on wam and glue - it just won't be stored locally. Supposedly mail service to wam and glue will be stopped one year after users have been migrated to mail@umd - it's hard to say exactly what that means, but it definitely won't be this semester. New freshman are being given mail@umd accounts and anyone can migrate themselves now, but most departments aren't using it yet.
The other thing you might have heard about is an update to the glue infrastructure, but this is probably still a LONG way off and it's hard to say exactly what it would even consist of. Probably it's not even anything to worry about before you graduate.
no subject
hello
I assume this is sally, but maybe i'm wrong.
Warm regards,
Jonathan Roehm
the "hard acoustic rock guitar" guy.