canijustbejanet | Recent Entries

Today campus is open again, after two remote days. I was starting to have Covid feelings, and even though it's stupid cold out (13, feels like 7, it was -7 when I got up this morning) I'm glad to be out of our house. I also have a good heavy L.L. Bean coat and all the wool. I'm wearing my icelandic scarf today - it's kind of scratchy but super warm.

Jane's surgery went well, she's been out a couple of hours at this point.

I had a dentist appointment this morning, and my favorite hygienist has retired. I don't dislike the younger one who did my teeth today, but Lynn was always very thorough in her instructions, and I liked when she told me I do a good job brushing and flossing. Oh well.

I got to campus and my walls were where they're supposed to be! Amazing! There are tours on February 13 so we've got a little more than 2 weeks to get this place looking tour-ready. We'll see when my workroom gets a fridge and/or microwave.

Ok, one class left today. Gonna make it.

We've gotten at least 8 inches here, and Chris and I have both made short-lived efforts to shovel, before he called our lawn guys to plow. They'll get here when they get here. I've got till tomorrow before I need to leave.

My chair, in our meeting Friday, said "Now don't wait for Ivy Tech, if you need to go virtual you just do it." So I posted virtual for my morning class at 6pm Sunday, and the college called it around 6:30, so my evening class is virtual too.

My algebra class is frustrating me with new prep stuff. New prep means more work, every time.

Every day on campus reveals more weird shit about the refurbished building my office is in. They put new lab tables in all the labs, and they're all 42 inches tall, except the one table (2 seats) for ADA compliance. We have a science teacher under 5 feet tall, so that's going to be fun. There's also some question as to whether the surface is lab-appropriate. No one's taking credit for the supposed specs they're conforming to. They also put these power ports in the floors of the classrooms, which is a great idea, but the cords they got to go from the ports to the desks don't fit (the ports assume inline three-prong plugs, the desk adapters have flat 3-prong plugs so that the cord has to be bent 90 degrees to fit in the port.)

It's just so annoying that I got kicked out of a perfectly functional building, sat across the street for a year, and now they've moved me back to someplace where nothing's right, and I'm farther from a microwave and refrigerator than I was across the street. That said, I'm doing better than a lot of people who moved. My office key works, I have monitors at my desk, and my cubicle walls have power and internet. What a mess.

The NYT has a new words with friends game, completely a scrabble knockoff, and I started two games with knitting friends and thought I'd get my ass kicked right away, but I'm holding my own ok. My friend Heather started a game with me this morning with a double-word all-letter thing, though, so I've got some making up to do.

Ok, I have virtual class in 20 minutes. Stay warm, pals.

Fully stole this from

frenchroast
Esquire's 75 Best SF Books of All Time

Boldface: The ones I've read.

Italic: I've read other stuff by the same writer, just not this text.

75. The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

74. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

73. Redshirts by John Scalzi

72. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino (this one just came out in April, wow - it is GREAT)

71. The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

70. Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

69. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

68. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

67. Contact by Carl Sagan (An all time favorite)

66. Under the Skin by Michel Faber

65. Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

64. Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

63. What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

62. The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor

61. Semiosis by Sue Burke

60. Excession by Iain M. Banks

59. The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe

58. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

57. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

56. The Resisters by Gish Jen

55. Rosewater by Tade Thompson

54. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

53. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

52. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

51. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

50. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

49. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

48. The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel

47. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

46. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

45. Neuromancer by William Gibson

44. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

43. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

42. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

41. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

40. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

39. Zone One by Colson Whitehead

38. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (seriously, give me ALL the Chambers)

37. Engine Summer by John Crowley

36. The Children of Men by P.D. James

35. Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

34. The City & The City by China Miéville

33. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

32. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

31. The Stand by Stephen King

30. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

29. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

28. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

27. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

26. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

25. Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

24. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

23. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

22. Hyperion by Dan Simmons

21. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

20. Shikasta by Doris Lessing

19. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

18. Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

17. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

16. The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov

15. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

13. The Employees by Olga Ravn

12. 1984 by George Orwell

11. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

10. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

9. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Also give me all the Emily St. John Mandel)

8. Exhalation by Ted Chiang

7. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

6. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

5. Kindred by Octavia Butler

4. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

3. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

2. Dune by Frank Herbert

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

25 read, 10 read something else by the author, 14 books added to my TBR. Some of these old white dudes are never going to be something I come back to (looking at you, Asimov and Heinlein), but some look interesting. Definitely a higher hit rate than the NYT best 100 books of the century so far (24 of those plus several I DNF'd).

The path of the total solar eclipse April 8 goes right through Indiana, and Indy gets almost 4 minutes of totality. At the end of last semester, the college announced it would operate virtually all day for it. The reactions to this have been fascinating.
- my students were confused as to what about an eclipse would mean we needed to close campus.
- a colleague who teaches math seemed to think the answer to that question had to do with the sun causing some kind of technological failures.
- my office mate who teaches astronomy is actually kind of relieved, because she had been trying to plan a campus event and now she can just enjoy it as a person.

Again, my office mate is an astronomer, so we've had all these conversations over the last year or so, it's been on her calendar since the last partial eclipse here in 2017 - the one where Wyoming doubled its population that day, and there were 12-hour traffic jams leaving Wyoming to go back to Colorado. There's a lot more of the populated US that will see this one, and a lot more folks an easy drive from the path of totality. My friend who has a school-age kid was talking about what they're going to do - totality will hit here right around time for school to let out, so having school as normal seems not right. But astronomical event as tourist event, sounds fun.

My Monday afternoon class is getting a video lecture, as the eclipse will happen right during class, and I'm not missing it to teach integration by substitution. I'm a little concerned about getting back from wherever we watch it for my night class. Chris bought tickets to the event the Speedway is hosting - I think we can assume traffic back from that won't be as bad as the 500, but I'm still a little worried? The art museum's also having a "Total Eclipse of the Art" event, and my local state park announced an event just recently.

This is all assuming that the skies are clear that day, which in April in Indiana is absolutely not guaranteed. Fingers crossed!

Ok, so I re-subscribed to Netflix for a month the day Glass Onion came out, because I really loved Knives Out and Benoit Blanc is very fun. Glass Onion did not disappoint. Loved it a lot.

And then I basically went down a rabbit hole of other things Rian Johnson recommends, because why not? So far, I've watched The Last of Sheila (a movie cowritten by Stephen freaking Sondheim), a reasonable amount of Columbo, and as of this weekend, what's out so far of Poker Face, which is Rian Johnson copying Columbo with Natasha Lyonne.

I also watched the first season of Sandman, which was very pretty. I didn't love it, except for Death. She was the best. I liked the last arc with the dream vortex too, but the early stuff and the David Thewlis were hard for me.

I also caught the last season of Derry Girls, the Matilda Musical movie, and Paddington before killing the subscription last week.

This weekend I caught up on Star Trek: Prodigy, which is kids' Trek, and really good and kind and lovely. I did the math yesterday on finishing watching the last season of TNG and re-watching Picard before the new season hits next month, and I think I'll do that.

Meanwhile I'm still watching Andor over and over, I think I've gone through it 5 times now. It's very good and somehow comforting, watching rebellion rise in response to fascism tightening. Favorite bits: the last shots of Ep. 3, the Eye, the prison break, and basically everything Maarva says. Also Dedra Meero's sneer. And B2EMO. I also love the music?

I'm sitting at my desk, which is a folding table that I never used until four weeks ago, and it's partially unusable because of all the paper products, notebooks, post-its, journals, etc. piled on and around it, and my brain decides I need to search amazon for colorful legal pads.

Because the thing that is keeping me from grading efficiently is that all the paper around me is white. (It's not, but all the full-sized letter paper is. I'm also startlingly close to out of legal pads, which is weird. Those usually have just appeared in my life and there were three partially used ones in my desk area. Two have been all used now.

I guess what I'm saying is I really miss my pile of one-sided paper.

I keep thinking about things to read and watch that might be comforting, even though my attention is entirely fractured.

But somehow I still decided the other night that I wanted to watch 12 Monkeys, entirely forgetting that that was an apocalyptic epidemic movie. And then yesterday BookRiot put Leesa Cross-Smith's beautiful first novel on a list of closed-space books, since the major action (as much as there is, it's a hugely emotional novel with basically 3 characters, and only 2 are alive) happens during a long weekend snowed in. Also Emily St. John Mandel's new novel comes out next week, and if you haven't read Station Eleven, you're missing out, it's sad and gorgeous.

So here, have other epidemic media:

Epidemic Books:
The Stand is, of course, the gold standard (Stephen King)
Wanderers, I just finished a few weeks ago (Chuck Wendig)
Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)
Y The Last Man (Brian K. Vaughan) - epidemic wipes out everything with a y-chromosome except one dude and his monkey - comics!

Epidemic Movies:
Outbreak (note: I last watched this one in the 90's)
12 Monkeys (there's also a tv show, it might be good?)

Other weird apocalyptic things:
Alas Babylon (Pat Frank) - old favorite of nuclear apocalypse survival fiction
I keep meaning to watch The Leftovers, but I'm not sure that this is the time?

Quarantine/Stay inside media:

BookRiot's Closed Space Books for Quarantine Reading

Episodes of Brooklyn 99 where characters are stuck in a small place together (upside - 22 minutes max!):
Stakeout (S2 E11) - Jake and Boyle have a too-long stakeout together
9 Days (S3 E12) - Jake and Holt have the mumps and are quarantined together trying to solve a case
99 (S5 E9) - This is a road trip, but it's the whole squad in vans and rvs across the country?
Safe House (S5 E12) - Jake stays in a Safe House as Kevin's protection while Holt and the squad try to take down the dude threatening him.
The Box (S5 E14) - Jake and Holt interrogate Sterling K. Brown all night. Whole episode is in and around the interrogation room.

Note also: the 24in48 team has spun up an impromptu readathon THIS weekend. Why not, right?

Today the new Read Harder list from Book Riot came out and it looks very fun and I'm going to try and read with that in mind next year again.

So I figured it was time to review how I did with the 2018 list:

A book published posthumously - Totally missed this. Unless I didn't, and just don't know. It's fine
A book of true crime - Definitely not. Whoops
A classic of genre fiction - I was going to argue that some of the things I read by NK Jemisin (numbers 2 and 3 of The Broken Earth) and Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) were classics, but then I remembered I listened to Dan Stevens reading the audiobook of Murder on the Orient Express, which is much better than the Kenneth Branagh movie. So done.
A comic written and drawn by the same person - Relish, a memoir by Lucy Knisely is great, and also delicious. Includes comic-illustrated recipes. Highly recommend.
A book set in or about one of the five BRICS countries - Midnight in Siberia by David Greene.
A book about nature - The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel. It's about astronomy, which totally counts. Spent a lot of time listening to descriptions of stellar spectra.
A western - I have a couple of arguable ones here. I read like 3 volumes of Saga, which has some space western elements, but probably the best bet is Forbidden, by Beverly Jenkins. It's a romance, but set in boom town Nevada in the 1800's. The hero saves the heroine from a desert death.
A comic written or drawn by a person of color - My pull list is 3/4 authors of color, so I'm feeling good here. New and great are LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor, and Ironheart by Eve L. Ewing. I have trades of World of Wakanda (Roxane Gay) and Black Panther (Ta-Nehisi Coates) I need to catch up with too.
A book of colonial or post-colonial literature - I was going to make an argument for Crazy Rich Asians, which has some interesting things it could have said about how the status symbols of rich Chinese people in Singapore are all western labels, but didn't. But the Book Riot list also lists An Untamed State by Roxane Gay, which I totally read this year but hadn't considered for this! Woo!
A romance novel by or about a person of color - Oh, strap in, friends. The Proposal and The Wedding Date, both by Jasmine Guillory (love them, have preordered her third book, coming this summer). When Dimple met Rishi by Sandhya Menon. An Extraordinary Union and A Princess in Theory, both by Alyssa Cole. In Her Wildest Dreams, by Farrah Rochon. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. And the aforementioned Beverly Jenkins.
A children's classic published before 1980 - Yeah, probably not.
A celebrity memoir - The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher
An Oprah Book Club selection - An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones
A book of social science - this did not happen
A one-sitting book - Dear Martin by Nic Stone, also Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. (24 in 48 is happening again in January. Need to check the calendar and sign up.)
The first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series - Scythe, by Neal Shusterman. Really interesting
A sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author - Provenance, by Ann Leckie.
A comic that isn't published by Marvel, DC or Image - Relish from above works here, also LaGuardia, which is Dark Horse.
A book of genre fiction in translation - Nope
A book with a cover you hate - Libba Bray's Beauty Queens.
A mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author - Thought I hadn't done this, but turns out Sherry Thomas is Asian, so my two Lady Sherlock books count! (A Study in Scarlet Women, and A Conspiracy in Belgravia)
An essay anthology - nope
A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60 - I think Meet Me at the Museum, (which I'm reading now) may count. The protagonist is older, but I'm not sure she's over 60. I'll have finished that by the end of the year.
An assigned book you hated or never finished - No. Life's too short.

So yeah, 8 or maybe 7 missed. 16 done, and mostly with really nifty stuff. And there were months and months out of the year that I just completely forgot about this list.

Ok, I've been at work too long. Nothing is happening now. More later.

So, in my last post I mentioned that I was going to do this readalong detailed at 24in48.com . The idea is, you try and read for 24 hours of a 48-hour weekend, starting when Friday turns to Saturday and going till the end of Sunday. Something like 1800 people signed up on the website and I looked at the instagram and twitter hashtags all last week to get geared up. My pal Trish from Knitting Camp signed up too.

I had a pretty ambitious stack of books I was going to read from, because I know me and I know reading one thing till done happens, but I don't plan on it. My planned TBR stack had four comics trades, a poetry/essay collection, a celebrity memoir, 5 novels and a couple of other nonfiction things. In the end I deviated from the plan to add a romance novel in, but I got five novels and two comics trades read in the 20 hours of reading I managed over the weekend. One of the novels was an audiobook, so I could feed myself and do things that rested my eyes as the weekend went on.

To start, I started reading the second volume in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, The Obelisk Gate. I started that as I went to bed around midnight Friday, and dozed off with it about a half hour in. I'd been sick, so I didn't set an alarm, so around 9 Saturday morning I woke up and kept on with that. I switched to the audiobook as I put together my breakfast, and then back to Obelisk Gate. Dozed a bit around lunchtime, and decided to wake up reading comics. I'm super way behind on Saga, so I read volumes 3 and 4 of that series over about an hour that afternoon (for reference, I think they're up to 8 volumes in trade paperbacks now, so I'm about 2 years behind on a 4 year series). Then back to audiobook, then back to Obelisk, and then.

Then the audiobook got really good and I just wanted to keep reading it. It's E.K. Johnston's Exit, Pursued by a Bear, and it's terrible and lovely, about a cheerleader who is raped on the last night of cheer camp and how her senior year goes after that. Despite the terrible circumstances, the main character is smart and resilient and her relationships with her friends and family are really great. So I finished it around 8:30, knitting and playing iPad games as it went. Next time I should obviously get more audiobooks queued up, because that was kind of my favorite part of the readathon.

While all this is going on, my phone clock's stopwatch is going when I read and stops when I stop. I screenshot it every time I stop and occasionally instagram that. The readathon's website updates with challenge questions and prizes every 3 hours, and I check twitter to see what my friend is reading and what the rest of the world is hashtagging #24in48 as well.

So, not quite eleven hours in, I've read an audiobook about rape, comics about a neverending interstellar war, and half a dense fantasy novel about a planet dying of terrible seismic events. I needed to lighten up, so here's where I deviated from the TBR pile and opened a kindle book I'd bought because twitter told me to and it was on sale. This is also when I went to bed.

That said, I can only lighten up so much because the (great!) romance novel I went with is An Extraordinary Union, by Alyssa Cole. It's about a black woman who is a northern spy during the Civil War and goes undercover as an enslaved servant in Richmond. And the hero is a white Scottish man. So that's interesting, but a little more fraught than your typical romance, and also I wasn't sure there was actually a happily ever after possible?

But that got me to sleep, and when I unexpectedly woke up early Sunday, I finished that off, and since I already had my kindle, it was easy to dive into another novel, Annihilation. This one's by Jeff VanderMeer, and the movie of it is coming out next month, and Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson are in it, so I figured I'd check the book out and then the movie. Welp, I read the book in basically one sitting, and have NO DESIRE to see the movie anymore, even though everything I see about the movie deviates HARD from the text. It's weird horror/thriller stuff, and I'm torn as to whether I care enough to read the second and third, especially since I'm pretty sure I don't trust the author to explain anything actually.

Then I read some more Obelisk Gate, until someone had an arm unexpectedly chopped off, and so I stopped that and switched again.

I had picked up Dear Martin at the campus library because the waitlist at the public library was insane, but the campus library had it just on a shelf! (Our campus library often has this happen. They're great. I should go there more.) It's about a teenage boy in Atlanta, and it starts with him being arrested as he tries to drive his drunk girlfriend home. He starts writing letters to Martin Luther King about his experiences. He's a black student, and a scholarship kid at a swank private high school, and it deals with all that entails, including dealing with rich white students who think racism's over. There are good parents in this one too - I love good parents in YA books.

And then as the day wound down, I picked up Obelisk Gate again, and finished it as the evening wound down. It was intense. I think I read the first of that series over more than a month, so squeezing all that into two days was a lot. Also, violence, racism, and end of the world.

So yeah, I read 7 books in 20 hours this weekend. Six of the seven I would totally recommend - Annihilation, maybe not. This was possible due to the pizza my husband bought on Sunday and totally blowing off work and other preparation over the weekend. Also because our plumbing is kinda borked, laundry/showers/dishwashing etc all have had to be minimized or taken elsewhere for a week or so. This should be fixed by this weekend.

Ok. So that's my weekend. I'm getting close to caught up on the rest of my life, so here's to that. I'm feeling the need to knit more, so that'll probably be what I burble about next. Thanks, y'all

hardback or paperback: Mmm, depends on the book and where I'm reading? At home it's either-or, but if I'm traveling, paperback.

Borrow or buy: Borrow! Libraries are amazing. I buy after I've borrowed if it's exceptional and I want it in my life always.

fantasy or sci-fi: Sci-fi.

love-triangle or love at first sight: Triangle, if we must.

Wall shelves or bookcases: Both?

Bad plot with good characters or good plot with bad characters: Define "bad character," plz. Inconsistent or simplistic characters won't take me very far no matter what happens, but I've definitely enjoyed some antiheroes lately.

Harry Potter or Percy Jackson: Well, I've read HP over and over again and watch his movies whenever they're on cable, and Percy I quit halfway through his second series.

Booklr or Bookstagram: Goodreads. (also this journal?)

Contemporaries or Fantasy: Contemporaries.

English books or books in your native language: Yes?

Buy in a bookshop or buy online: It depends. If I'm in a bookshop, I buy something. If I must have to have a book, I go online.

amazon or book depository: Amazon.

buy because of the cover or because of the description: Both can affect me, but description is weighted more.

Alphabetical shelves or colour coordinated: Neither, shelve by topic/genre.

wait to marathon a series or read as they’re released: I find it really annoying to finish a book and realize it's the first of a series. So I guess wait to marathon, or at least to marathon a few.

movie or tv adaptations: It depends?

zombies or vampires: Zombies, if we must (I just read this steampunk thing with zombies in 1880's seattle that was super fun).

Reading indoors or outdoors: Indoors

coffee or tea: tea

bookmarks or random objects to mark your page: Ereaders remember where you are. But random objects if it's a physical book.
dog-earing or bookmarks: bookmarks

Be your favourite character or be their best friend: Nah, thanks.

physical or e-book: Ebook for novels, physical for reference, audio for nonfiction.

Read in bed or on a chair: Yes, please.

audiobook or ebook: Both - audio is good for nonfiction that I'd otherwise never pick up, because it's just going in my car, or for rereading. Ebook is great for tearing through novels. Audio does depend HEAVILY on having an excellent reader.

series or stand-alones: Stand-alone.

Reading in the winter or reading in the summer: Both! How is this even a question?

Woot. New space.

So last week there was the Veronica Mars movie kickstarter. I had given up on seeing any continuation of the world of Neptune High and its denizens and environs, and so it was surprising and hugely exciting. Here was the chance of making Veronica Mars a movie, and I could help make it happen! I could get the amazing Kristen Bell a movie role that wasn't sidekicky or a bad rom-com. Plus, it was pitched as Veronica's 10 year high school reunion, and if there's a unrecognized movie genre I love, it's the high school reunion movie.

Heady stuff, that was. Apparently not just for me, as the project was fully funded at 2 million dollars in less than a day.

And that was one thing. The week before I had pledged to a $7500 movie project that didn't make its goal. My brother's friend had a movie he wanted to make, and they're still trying to, but on the even cheaper than they'd originally planned. I threw some non-Kickstarter money at them too, partially as a gift to my brother, but mostly because I think you shouldn't have to be a big deal to make cool stuff.

My favorite podcast (NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour) talked this week about what the Veronica Mars kickstarter was a harbinger of, and what this means going forward. Panelist Linda (who I usually agree with on many many things) talked about her concerns regarding an interview with Rob Thomas where he said there were multiple avenues he had considered but he was going with what the fans wanted. And while I see the issue with that, I think there are similar issues in the system as-is. Yes, the Neptune High reunion movie will probably give the fans what they want more than a different tack would, but I expect that a studio would ask for that kind of crowd-pleasing route had this been funded more traditionally.

I keep wondering what if this had happened with a different fandom. Specifically, I wondered if Serenity would have been the movie it is had it been backed by fans. There are issues with the kickstarter process, starting with artistic freedom and ending with the fact that Warner Bros is going to make some serious money off a film partially funded by fan donations.

But mostly I wonder how big a deal you have to be to make kickstarter work for you. I watched Amanda Palmer's TED talk about asking for help and letting people pay for what they love, and that obviously works for her, but it didn't quite for my brother's friend. Other people are making it work for different things. I bought a live tour cd whose tour had been kickstarter-funded, even though I didn't know the artist when that happened. I'll happily watch Hannah Hart's video tour when it kicks off next month, and again that funding drive happened outside my awareness. (That's another fun YouTube channel - she does a comedy cooking show called "My Drunk Kitchen.")

And meanwhile, I'm supporting the things I love and respect when I can. Whether it's giving to a weird YouTube channel about natural history, taxidermy, and animal dissection (the Brain Scoop) or supporting the creation of a DVD set so that the people who made Lizzie Bennet can get paid, which they kind of didn't when actually filming (this was the appeal that worked on me - I am always an advocate of people doing work that I admire being paid a living wage for that work),

(Another side note: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is coming to an end. Darcy and Lizzie got together in yesterday's video, and I have watched it about ten times. It's so ridiculously good.)

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

I have a complicated relationship with my sofa. My corner of it is literally my favorite place to be, but it keeps trying to make my life difficult.

If it were up to my sofa, for example, I would never have done the half-marathon in the fall. I think it's still annoyed I spent so much time away from it training.

One of the things my sofa does is eat things that fall between its cushions. This is exceedingly frustrating when I'm using those things. Today it was my iPod. Things that fall beneath the seat get pulled out no problem, but when things get stuck inside the wooden box in the arm, I might never see them again. Sometimes getting things out means upending the whole sofa.

Thankfully, tonight all I needed was a coat hanger, which took the trip to AL and back. I've been not taking it back to my closet for reasons unknown, and today it came in handy.

The iPod, which I had just synced with new episodes of favorite podcasts, was recovered. I also turned up a knitting needle that may have been missing for four years, various hair ties, and three colored pens obviously lost while grading (they were all uncapped: green, pink, and orange).

I find this a somewhat accurate portrait of my life, and think it must only mean that my sofa is trying to make a nice place for me for the inevitable day that I get lost in its innards.

I have noticed over the past couple of days, people on facebook and ravelry - they quote The Office, and then tell me they're quoting The Office. Which is a very funny show with some good quotable lines. I do like the show, I do get the reference, often.

My problem is that I can't tell if they're being ironic in being like Michael Scott.

Well, hm. DS battery is forcing me to do something besides play. So here's a video game review. I know it's an aberration. Noted.

The interface is really fine, easy to get around in. There are hints available, but I've been eschewing them, so I have no clue how they are - though the tutorial thing at the beginning seems to make them look like just the same kind of "here's a starting point" thing as any person would begin with anyway.

The puzzles are timed. This kind of bugs me to begin with, since I'm a solver's point fan (plus, the first thing I lose when rushed is accuracy - in arithmetic and everything else). The real problem I had getting started is that (in normal mode) a misplaced fill-in gets you a time-penalty, and then you know something you didn't before. I want to say successive errors get larger penalties, but I wasn't paying that much attention. (Seriously, I was in a PBN-obsessive time warp last night. Must... Fill... Squares...) The other thing is that the dark squares are what counts, if you don't get all the light-square x's filled in, no big. I am sometimes tempted to skimp on the x's to make up time, but that tends to slow me down eventually because I can't see what's next, especially as the puzzles get harder. It's a little strange. Happily, there is a no-penalty error-blind mode as well. I expect after I finish all the "Normal Mode" puzzles I'll spend plenty of time and energy in the "Free" mode.

My next issue - the biggest puzzle so far as I can see is only 15x15. But still, that's too big for the little DS screen, so there's some zoom-in-zoom-out action that happens while that's going on. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but the picture detail is limited by that, which is disappointing. However, for such small puzzles, the difficulty seems good and varied, definitely not too many super-easy ones. I am pleased.

This is the first game I've bought for myself in a long while. I think this one will hold my attention for a good long time. Not perhaps as long as the fabulous defunct PBN website did, but it'll do.

Last night I could see my tree and the snow at the same time, so I figured I'd take a picture.
( Picture! )

So rather than actually buying a digital camera myself, or borrowing my mom's, or something sensible like that, 26 months after finishing the afghan based on my userpic, here's an actual post of an actual picture of the actual afghan.

Because I had to marry a guy who had a digital camera in order to have use of one available enough that when I thought "hey, let's get a picture of that" I could. Silly me.

So there it is: SOLS(10). I finished it on January 30, 2005, here's a picture finally.

( Explanation of the math behind it. )

( Details about the crafting )

And so if you ever wondered what my default userpic was all about, there it is. :)

It's a Thick Book is a documentary about the AL Constitution. Apparently the whole film will be available online sometime, but meanwhile the Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform will be having screenings around the state throughout the month.

Shiny.

So sometime when I was in high school, I had a freakout when I realized that the people on Sesame Street were actors. Yeah. I was a mess, and obviously had some weird naivete that went away. It's not like I didn't know the Muppets were puppets, but it really messed me up that the guy playing Gordon wasn't actually a guy named Gordon. Maria wasn't really Maria, and Susan wasn't Susan. I had a real problem getting my head around that. Thankfully, Bob was really Bob.

I thought I was over it. I'm not. I'm reading Roscoe Orman's memoir, Sesame Street Dad. Roscoe is the man I've known as Gordon as long as I can remember. I'm three or four chapters into this book. He's a fascinating real person, he was involved in a theater troupe that traveled the South during the Civil Rights Movement, and was a player in an experimental theater company in Harlem in the late 60s and early 70s. He's pretty cool, even if he's not Gordon yet. But....

He's not perfect. So I'm wandering around the house, stunned, and trying to deal with the facts that Gordon stole another man's wife and smoked marijuana.

Surely we'll get to Sesame Street soon?

So the Colts won the Super Bowl. And local news showed all the people congregating in Monument Circle downtown. My first reaction: Where's the toilet paper?

Seriously. It's the only way to celebrate!

Current Mood: bouncy

Profile

canijustbejanet

January 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Aug. 28th, 2026 04:22 pm

This is my place to vent

just so you know

Recent Entries

Not a Snow Day!

Snow Day!

Book Meme

Eclipsing

Watching things

Coping mechanisms

Quarantine Media

2018 Reading Debrief: Read Harder

24 in 48 and all that entailed

Reading meme from frenchroast

Hello Hello!

Kickstarter, art, and supporting things that might be awesome

My Sofa is trying to eat me

Current minor internet obsession

Picross DS

Merry Christmas

Long, LOOONG overdue

Hey, a movie!

I know, but!

Go Colts!