Parvae Res Paucis Verbis Narratae

October 1st, 2007

08:36 am - Another Post About Fantasy Novels
I found another great book in my couch. This one shouldn't have been a surprise though, because it was my absolute favorite book all through high school. I hadn't wanted to try and reread it, because other attempts to reread books I loved when I was younger only made me realize how much I've outgrown them and how many bad writing habits their authors indoctrinated into me. But this one is still just as awesome as I remember it being; the characters are interesting and believable, the dialog is funny, the plot keeps going strong for 800+ pages, and Rawn put a lot of effort into building but not overbuilding the world. It's got strong female heroes and strong female villains. Why aren't there more fantasy novels like this? And for god's sake, why has Rawn still not finished this incredible series? It's a book I can really just curl up with and enjoy. It was the kind of book I always wanted to write, and what made really want to start writing (well, that and

avilina).

I feel like talking about books today. I'll probably swing back around eventually, and go back to rambling about programming or linguistics or religious philosophy, or whatever it is I usually post about, if I post at all. I've hit a roadblock in reading, but I've still managed to finish some new books.

( Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: No Real Spoilers )

Speaking of wizards named Harry, despite all the terrible things I said about Harry Dresden, and I went and bought the second books and read it. I'm really getting to like his world, now that he's getting into the rules behind it. I mean, it's exactly the kind of urban fantasy that sets out to explain how mythological creatures could possibly exist in the real, non-mythological world, and succeeds in fascinating ways. The style is not my favorite, but it's growing on me. The main characters still aren't thrilling me, but the minor characters are actually getting to be likeable. Even Dresden's hopelessly cliched mission to save the mundane world from evil magic-users is getting more depth. And Jim Butcher writes really awesome monsters, even if seeing the hero constantly getting the crap beaten out of him is not quite so cool.

I think the moral of this post is that Dresden > Potter. And I will be buying more Jim Butcher books. And that I have yet to find a fantasy adventure story that is better than Melanie Rawn's (still unfinished) Exiles trilogy.

August 28th, 2007

12:55 pm - Maybe this is God's way of telling me I need a new (lighter) laptop.
Computational Linguistics professor: "Um, there's been a horrible mistake and this classroom doesn't have any computers in it. I want all of you guys to bring your laptops to class so that you can write perl while I lecture. Yes, at 9:30 in the morning on the day when you have to have three or four long treks across campus to get to other classes."

My back is going to die this semester. If only I had a way to secure the laptop to my waist like those gimongous camping backpacks do. On the other hand, this means that during all the "Ok, this is a while loop. This is how you use the assignment operator." lectures, I can debug my java homework and look like I'm actually paying attention.

July 28th, 2007

08:26 pm - Monsoon 2007
Now, I know there was already one terrificly large and inconvenient monsoon storm this summer, because I got caught out in it in my car (and because of that it probably seemed more inconvenient than it really was...) but the one that happened this afternoon was pretty serious, too. I woke up at around 1 PM (because it's Saturday, after all) because the wind was getting very loud. Then it started to thunder and quickly began raining in buckets. Maybe ten or twenty minutes after I woke up, the power in the entire apartment complex went out, and as of yet it still has not come back on. Apparently there was a downed power line a few blocks away, and they still haven't gotten it fixed... I think I spent like a half an hour or so reading in front of the picture window and watching the window be completely submerged in rain, despite the fact that it was under an awning. It was like someone was throwing buckets of water onto the window, over and over. Stuff that was lying under the awning near my door was swept right off the balcony by the rain. Even after it stopped storming crazily, it continued to rain normally until around 4 or 5, and I still have no lights. Or refrigeration, but by some stroke of luck I don't think I have much that's perishable in the fridge right now.

It's actually kind of amazing how well a single candle can light up a room. I wouldn't have thought it would have much of an effect, but I've never had to try it before.

Looks like I'll be haunting coffee shops this evening then. Fortunately, the rain has cooled everything down to a reasonable temperature, so I won't need the air conditioner. But man...
Current Mood:

annoyed

July 3rd, 2007

12:27 pm - Twenty-one-year-old cars give the best birthday presents
On Saturday, my car began randomly stalling when I stopped, or, eventually, whenever I put it into neutral. I almost got it home before it became impossible to start and displayed symptoms of overheating, which is really odd because the temperature gauge was quite low at the time. Anyway, hopefully the shop will be able to tell us what's wrong with it.

As of yesterday, I am now 23. Man, I thought I would be done with college by now. Well, I suppose I probably only overshot it by two years or so, so maybe that's not too bad. But all those fireworks that everyone in America is going to be setting off tomorrow? Independence Day, my foot. Those are for me. Are you setting off fireworks in honor of me tomorrow?

As for my much belated recounting of my reading list, I have an honest-to-god excuse for not updating it now, which is the notebook I'm tallying it in is in the car, which is still in the shop. But I do know the numbers, which are:

April: 4 books
May: 1 book, due to finals and all that jazz
June: 0 books, because somewhere in there I stupidly deleted a 2500-line C++ program and have spent most of the month re-designing GUIs.

Plus, I'm just getting around to reading that Sam Harris book, which periodically makes me have to get up and smack my pillow around a bit. When I finish it, there's going to be a rant post. It's going to be long. Really, I just need to work some more fantasy books into my rotation. I didn't really mean what I said here... fantasy beats out sensationalism any day.

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June 2nd, 2007

12:52 pm - "Documentation" of old code
When I go back through programs I haven't worked on in months, I find amusing stuff in the comments sometimes:

int frogboots; // Note: must not be greater than four

// What the hell is this variable supposed to represent?  
// I think I drew a diagram or something in one of the Latin notebooks.
// Gotta find that then.

// Does this member function actually get called anywhere?
// YES.  For the love of God, stop deleting it.

// It ain't broke; stop fixing it.

// DEBUG ME

I guess when it's 3 AM there's no one else to talk to except future me. Maybe programming is just a kind of extended conversation with myself, where I go away for a while, get some new ideas, and return to add more insight to the discussion. Feels like it sometimes, anyway. I can look back at this old documentation and remember what I was trying to do and what I was frustrated with and why. It's the kind of stuff that gets edited out of writing and art because it's not part of the finished product, but the compiler doesn't care about comments. I've got something akin to a little comment-blog running on the top of one source file. I guess if nothing else, I can always look up there and remind myself, that yes, I have actually built quite a few things that really do work. Or did, at some point.

I missed April's accounting of the books I read, probably because of finals. Strangely, I only finished one book for May. I'll have to find my list and update that tomorrow, before school starts again.
Current Mood:

calm

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May 29th, 2007

08:08 pm - It's that time again.
Every year I almost forget how ungodly hot it gets here in the summer. At least in a month or so it'll be monsoon season, and there'll be rain every day to make up for it. But still... The sun comes in through my apartment's west-facing window every afternoon and heats everything up; the only solution is to be out of the house from 11 to 4 so that the blinds are closed then. Even so, it's hot when I get back. I don't like running the air conditioner in the evening, because it doesn't take long to cool off the whole place that way, and when I start it and go to sleep, I wind up waking up two hours later because it's freezing cold. Like any native Tucsonan, I prefer too-damn-hot to too-damn-cold. At least I've never woken up in the middle of the night because it was too hot.

I have a summer programming class that starts on Monday, but since I have nothing else to do this summer, I want to get back into writing for a bit, or conlanging. It's nice not to have school take up all my time. Maybe I could even, you know, actually get a job.

Incidentally, I have a new conworld, and I'm using a community for it (so that I don't have to log out):

adeya_ne. Maybe this one will actually go somewhere; I think the more I do this, the more rational the conworlds seem.
Current Mood:

lazy

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May 8th, 2007

12:50 pm - Fantasy Premise of Geeky Awesomeness
My syntax professor, who has a sense of humor befitting someone who plays with words for a living, put a question on our final which quoted a fantasy novel and asked if one of the sentences involved an insertion transformation.

The humor? The novel (which was written by a conlanger/linguist) is about a world in which magic is done by applying the rules of Transformational Grammar to physical reality, and the passage was describing how the wizards of this world had transformationally inserted a wall around a city.

I must have this book. Must must must.
Current Mood:

impressed

April 25th, 2007

06:39 pm - People amuse me.
Since I'm usually in coffee shops these days to use the internet, I usually set up my laptop first and attempt to get on the wireless connection. If I succeed, I buy coffee. If I don't, I pack up my things and find another coffee shop.

Part of this process involves asking other coffee-shop denizens if they can access the internet. It's really funny how as soon as you admit you're having trouble with wireless everyone else turns into a wireless networking expert. I get a lot of advice like "you have click on your browser icon," or "maybe you should refresh your connection," and offers to walk me through it with some wireless network organizing program native in Windows XP. They get very confused when they discover that I'm not even running windows, let along XP, and when even more I start talking about "ifconfig" and "ping," or even "SSIDs."

I can remember a time back at Grinnell when there wasn't WiFi and most of the people I talked to didn't know the difference between a wireless card and an ethernet cable. Or maybe that was just because they were all liberal arts students or something. Heh.
Current Mood:

amused

April 22nd, 2007

07:35 pm - "I do not make the rules. This annoys me, and so I comfort myself by breaking them."
I really shouldn't be doing a lot of reading right now, but having god-awful complicated syntax trees to diagram gives me too good of an excuse to take breaks. And it turned out to be one of these 3-day books again, so eventually I just forgot about the syntax trees entirely. But I really shouldn't be surprised; it's the other sequel to Swordspoint.

A character from The Fall of the Kings, which was written before The Privilege of the Sword but which takes place 45 years after it, has this to say about the life of the Mad Duke Tremontaine:

Scandal number one: young noble went to University to study instead of to drink.[...]Scandal number two: got kicked out, went to live with a swordsman in Riverside.[...]Scandal number three: inherits Tremontaine and fills the house with scholars, reprobates, and lovers of all, ah, shapes and sizes.[...]Scandal number four: he was driven into exile, passing the duchy to his niece, the Lady Katherine Talbert.

The Privilege of the Sword is the story of the Lady Katherine Talbert, who at 15 was summoned by her uncle the Mad Duke from the peaceful countryside to make her fortune in the city. Is she going to dress up in fancy gown and go to Society balls and meet her rich and politically felicitous husband like every other young girl in the known universe? No. Her mad uncle takes away all her dresses, replaces them with boys' clothes, and has her trained to be a swordsman.

She does get quite into it, and fuelled by idealism and swordsman-romance, she tries to step in to right a wrong, as every honor-bound swordsman should, and winds up caught up in the already-unstable political games of her mad and extremely contrary uncle. It's got the swordfights. It's got the wit. It's got strong female characters in a world where early arranged marriage is the done thing and divorce isn't. It's got theater. It's got scandal. The Mad Duke Tremontaine brings the crazy; he is like the archetypical eccentric uncle times ten. (The quote in the title is his.)

By the way, the "privilege of the sword" refers to the right of the nobility in this world to have someone killed at swordpoint - provided it was a matter of honor. The crazy disfunctionality of this world is a beautiful thing.

You should read Swordspoint first, though.
Current Mood:

cheerful

April 19th, 2007

06:44 am - Maybe I like playing Devil's Advocate too much...
So, in tribute to another 3-day book, I am giving preemptive commentary on Storm Front by Jim Butcher, though not for the same reasons as last time. You Harry Dresden fans will gather here, and tell me that for goodness' sake it's a fantasy novel, and that you don't expect those to be literature, and none of the things I'm about to expound on actually matter, because you only read it because it made you happy, and that's all you wanted from it. I get that. I'm not trying to insinuate that anyone else has bad taste in their reading material, or assert some kind of elitist self-righteousness over anyone. And I mean, I did like this book. In some ways, it is everything a fantasy novel needs to be. But I think that fantasy is literature, and I have things to say about Storm Front.

Harry Dresden seems to be a kind of a cross between Harry Potter and Dirk Gently, except without JKR's quirky magic or Douglas Adams' humor. A magical private investigator is an attractive premise, but I think it mostly goes downhill from there. This bears enumeration:

( 1. Women )

( 1.1. The Vampire )

( 2. Magic )

( 2.1. Pseudo-Latin )

( 2.2 Inconsistencies )

( 3. Little things )

In spite of all this, I did enjoy reading the book. I'll probably read more. It has action, just enough of a resemblance to mystery to be interesting, and lecherous talking skulls. Sometimes, that's enough.
Current Mood:

disappointed

April 16th, 2007

08:21 am - Harnessing the mystic powers of incorrectly written Japanese
So, at the urgings of various people, I bought Storm Front by Jim Butcher - that is, the first book in the Dresden Files. Now, when I bought the book, the cover seemed to be a picture of a guy holding a staff with some kind of vaguely runic writing on it. Upon close inspection, now that I've started reading it, it actually seems to read matorikkusu in mirror-image katakana.

Someone please tell me that the book involves a staff with something written on it in backwards Japanese. With what I've read so far, I can believe that the guy might keep something like that around, but seriously.

Come to think of it, most of the "Chinese" in Serenity that I saw was actually mirror-image katakana too. Maybe mirror-image katakana is just the not-quite accurate mystical runic scribbling of choice in the SFF community. Hell, if Harry Potter magic can derive itself entirely from the untapped potential of dog-Latin, mirror-image Japanese should work pretty well too, right?
Current Mood:

amused

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April 1st, 2007

04:40 pm - "I had no idea it was so bloody complicated to be a criminal mastermind."
Which is to say, March Books! (The quote is from The System of the Word.)

I really did mean to read more this month. I thought I'd finish Only Revolutions this month too, but I've got 8 x 6 pages to go on it. Well, this just means I'll have until next month to think up a concise way of explaining that crazy awesomeness that is Mark Z. Danielewski.

On the other hand, for once I have (almost) nothing to complain about.

10. Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker
I picked this up ages ago and never finished it for some reason; if you don't know, its a linguistics book with a neurological focus. Pinker's not particularly revolutionary after you've taken more than a few semesters of linguistics, but he's easy to read, and amusing, he's got interesting ideas, and he deals with parts of linguistics I don't usually think too much about. By the way, if you're not a linguistics person, his books are also things I'd feel safe recommending to people who don't know anything about the subject.

*11. The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
The sequel to Swordspoint, so of course I had to read it. I don't think it was as good; it has significantly less of some of the major things I liked about Swordspoint: swordfighting, borderline insanity, and witty dialog. It's also about twice as long. It's got more of the romance and less of the crazy; it's got politics, but this takes place 60 years after Swordspoint, in a somewhat more civilized world, so no one is being killed because of honor and no one's life is really on the line until the very end.

On the other hand, it's still a great book. It goes into a lot more detail with respect to the worldbuilding and the history of the fantasy world, and follows up on some rather loose ends that were mentioned briefly in Swordspoint about the University. Essentially, it is a story about the (relatively) new-age enlightened (or at least popular) intellectualism versus an almost Arthurian romanticism about kings, and it's got a kind of Arthurian magic realism to it also. It bogged down for a bit in the middle, but the only thing I could find to complain about when I finished it was that it probably could have 100-200 pages shorter. I don't think there was anything lacking in the plot; it just went on a bit longer than necessary.

*12. The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
Why has this book been on my list since January? Because it is 1000 pages long. Not only that, but it is the third such book in a series. Neal Stephenson is the only author I've ever read who can keep a story going for 3000 pages and never have it become boring. I've even got my father into this, The Baroque Cycle, which I think it pretty damn impressive.

The Baroque Cycle (consisting of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) is historical fiction. But since it's by a SF author and is about the time period (17th-18th century) when Natural Philosophers and Alchemists were just starting to figure out what real natural science was about, its full of the kinds of philosophies and theories that were going around in people's heads at the time, specifically the philosophical falling-out between Isaac Newton and G. W. Leibniz. It's also full of interesting philosophies regarding the nature of money; and what's a 17th century European historical novel without wars, politics, pirates, notorious vagabonds, Turkish harem girls who grow up to be French Duchesses, and the Elixer of Life? It's really impossible to sum this up in any way, because it goes everywhere. Real historical people show up as major characters in fascinating yet historically accurate ways. I could go on, but let's just say that it's awesome.

Now on my list:
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (because it's been far too long...)
Current Mood:

geeky

March 24th, 2007

09:54 am - Determinism and Idealism
From time to time I muck around with C++ and turn out a simulation program, which is basically just a souped up random-number-generator in that it simply generates random numbers without letup and then arranges and presents them in ways that make sense to humans. Sometimes the results of some prior random number generations effect the results of further random number generations, but eventually they all trace back to the first number generated. This is further exemplified by the fact that the random-number-generating function is not really random - it's just so complicated that it might as well be, as far as humans are concerned. Additionally, it generates the same set of random numbers during the course of any given function, and if you want it to do differently you have to feed it a "seed" - which either isn't random at all, because its based on the computer's clock time, or it's just generated using another not-quite-random number generating program. No matter how complicated you make the random number generation, on some level the results all come back to the time you started running the program and what specific code was involved. In other words, no matter what crazy things your sims (just for the sake of example) might seem to do, their fates were all written in stone the moment you started the game.

It seems like people have been arguing about the existence of free will since the beginning of time, in every field imaginable. Philosophy goes without question; with math you get the whole random-number-generating issue; anthropology has a legacy of psychic unity, biological and cultural determinism at odds with some mysterious force of nature called "agency". Language seems to have rules but is actually fraught with irregularities. Even physicists are starting to wonder if what they observe isn't effected by the fact that it is being observed. The only thing that can't seem to approach these levels of randomness is our own understanding of them, and our attempts to recreate them with computers. It's an unreachable goal; no matter how close we come to getting actual randomness that mimics actual reality, we'll never get there. We are chained to the logical, the regular, and the particular. In some sense, the purpose of all science is to use regularity and patterns to break free of regular forms and specific patterns.

To me it looks a bit like a religious quest for Ultimate Truth, but the weird thing is that every religion, it seems to be the god of good that represents regularity and order and law. Why, when our goal is clearly to find ultimate randomness and chaos, which represents what we think of as free will? If there is anything in us that is free to do what it pleases regardless of laws of nature, it is the ultimate random number generator. Shouldn't law be a subset of constraining earthly vices, and chaos be supernatural enlightenment?

Incidentally, there is one religion that has it the other way around; but since I had a hand in inventing it at the time when I was becoming disillusioned about precalculus and my co-inventor was certifiable, I'm sure its not representative.
Current Mood:

pensive

March 8th, 2007

07:24 pm - TGISB
Syntax Professor: So, English has this past-tense node as the head of its syntax trees, which comes before the verb phrase, and you can't actually hear, but trust me, it is there. But there's this rule, you see, that moves this inaudible tense-marking down the tree to verb and changes the vowel in "run" to an "a". Ok, I know it sucks but it's the best we can come up with, right?

Right. I guess it's a little better than the English-teacher explanation which is generally something like "because my English teacher told me so."

And now it seems that there are actually two whole sets of Japanese that we are going to have to learn again from scratch almost, because practically everything in Japanese has an "honorific" form and a "humble" form, and sometimes they don't even look anything like the original verb. And, since you can actually honorificify (that's a great word, isn't it?) and humblify everything, even words like "do" and "be", you can actually do infinite regressions of honorificification (and you get words that look kind of like that). And now it also seems that Japanese can make passive forms of verbs that don't even have direct objects...

It'll be good to get away from this for a week.
Current Mood:

tired

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March 4th, 2007

01:35 pm - The Nature and Quality of Villainy and February Books
A long time ago I made some post babbling generally about villains and what makes a good villain and how villains are important to my enjoyment of stories. Now that I'd reading more books, with more variously ambiguous characters in them I have something more concrete to add.

First, some definitions:
Main Character: The character whose actions the story is primarily meant to chronicle.
Protagonist: Any character (including the Main Character) whose primary purpose is to further the actions and goals of the Main Character.
Antagonist: Any character whose primary purpose is to impede or otherwise prevent the actions and goals of the Main Character.
Sympathy: The degree to which the author wants the reader to like any given character.
Morality: The degree to which any given character acts based on principles and ethics rather than self-interest.
Good Guy: Any sympathetic character.
Bad Guy: Any unsympathetic character.
Hero: A sympathetic protagonist.
Antihero: An unsympathetic protagonist.

Stories need main characters, protagonists and antagonists. They don't necessarily need good guys or bad guys, though they certainly need at least one or the other. Normally, stories have moral heros and amoral unsympathetic antagonists. It doesn't necessarily have to happen that way, though: Antiheros can make excellent stories, and atypical combinations make stories interesting. One of the things I really liked about Swordspoint was that it had amoral heros, as its sequal is showing me by its conspicuous lack thereof. Essentially, it meant that the antagonists were not dispicable fiends for the sake of being dispicable fiends. One of my January Books, Devices and Desires, had an amoral, sympathetically ambiguous main character, accompanied by a lot of independantly loyal, mostly sympathetic antagonists who were all working at cross-purposes. Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle originally had several sets of independant heroic characters; in the third volume they are intruding on each other's stories and becoming mutually antagonistic. Stories like this are more interesting simply because the "winner" is no longer a foregone conclusion.

So what's a "Villain"? I think it's a combination of a lack of sympathy and antagonism, though a sympathetic character can also be classed as a villain if they are antagonistic enough, like some of the former heroes in the Baroque Cycle, or Boromir from LOTR. A villian is a character who loses to a hero, essentially, or, if there are no heroes, than at least a good guy of some flavor.

I've developed a kind of chart to rate villains and explain what I liked and didn't like about them. It consists of a kind of cartesian plane (because everything makes more sense when expressed as a function of x, right?). The one axis is of "evil" (heh) which is mostly a measure of morality but has some elements of sympathy. The other is what's marked on the chart as "Rational/Irrational" which is partially based on sympathy, partially based on character development (which informs sympathy to a certain extent) and partially based on the extent to which the character's motives actually make sense. These are both no doubt subjective qualities, but I find them useful for categorizing villains.

( Cut for images )

And now for February books:
(*'s mean I actually started the book this year)

*6. Flatland: A Romance in Multiple Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot
I remember my father trying to get me to read this, and I don't know why I never did. It's a trip.

7. The Book of Ti'ana by Rand Miller, etc.
I really like Myst, and I like the idea that there are books that go into the history behind the characters in the game, but I don't think this one stands up on its own as a fantasy novel. The story is kind of bland, and not terribly unexpected, and there are some major plot points that are never really explained effectively. There wasn't enough of Gehn, and the villains that were a part of the book were somewhat disappointing, especially compared to the ones from Riven and Exile (I'm not passing judgements on Sirrus and Achenar until I finish Revelation).
( Comparative Villain Plot )

*8. Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
c. f. this post.

9. Harry Potter y la cámara secreta by J.K. Rowling
I'd forgotten how much I disliked Lockhart the first time I read this (in English) and most of the plot details as well. The Spanish didn't have Lockhart's alliterative book titles, though, which I missed, as well as some other wordplay that I didn't really notice until it wasn't there. It's the nature of the beast, I suppose.

My current list is:
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
*The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
*The Fall of Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
Current Mood:

analytical

February 26th, 2007

05:59 pm - Interesting new developments
I've been crawling all over campus today trying to get more information on things like study abroad programs and computer science minors. I think I probably already have enough credits for a Japanese minor if I wanted to just graduate, but you know, Linguistics and Japanese is not exactly the most useful of degrees to have. I'm good (or at least not too bad) at programming and I've been doing it amatuerly for years, and only have one class worth of credit to show for it. It's time I got acknowledged for my geeky hobbies, dammit.

So I figure, I've got 1-2 more years left of college (at least, undergrad) after this, which makes it a good time to do a study abroad too. I feel like I've been held back a semester or so in Spanish, since the U did not count all of my credits and now I have to retake a semester. When you get the best grade in the class for a test you didn't really study for, it's time to move on. But it looks like maybe next semester, maybe the one after, I can go to an actual Spanish-speaking country and take actual literature classes in Spanish, which is what I would be taking now in Iowa if I'd stayed there. Annoyingly, there are still more prereqs for these, but maybe I'll be able to take them, or convince someone that I don't need to.

There is a building on campus called the Gould-Simpson building, which it probably either the tallest or one of the tallest buildings on campus, and it is an ugly blot on the horizon whenever you can see it. Most of the buildings are at least interestingly shaped, or if they aren't they are quiet and demure about it. Then there's this thing in the middle of campus that looks like some kind of office building. Today, in search of the computer science department, I discovered a place where it is not possible to see this building - namely, from inside of it. But being 10 storeys (actually 9; who decided that floor 1 was the basement? I thought only the Brits were that confused about the meaning of the word "storey") you can see practically the whole campus - all the interestingly shaped buildings, and all the trees (there are a lot more than there seem to be on the surface), the wending bike-streets, the city to the east, and off to the north there's the foothills, with all the expensive adobe houses and the mountains. It's beautiful. I need to get me some classes in that building, so I can sit there and look out the windows.
Current Mood:

excited

February 22nd, 2007

03:20 pm - The essence of a Liberal Arts degree
Today I turned in the strangest Latin assignment I've ever been given: write a letter to your rich relatives in Latin about why they should send you more money. Because, you know, Cicero's son did it, so it must have been a good idea.

Being able to ask your parents for money in a dead language? That's lifeskills, right there.

On a less linguistic note, there were junior girl scouts selling cookies on campus today. It's been ages since I bought girl scout cookies, in fact I don't think I've actually bought any since I stopped selling them myself. I had to go buy some, of course; they keep changing them around, but at least they never get rid of the samoas. But the things are now $4 a box! That's almost twice what they were when I started selling them; the price goes up faster than gas. But it made me remember sitting outside drugstores and banks selling cookies when I was a cadette in middle and high school. It was very odd to see them on the university campus.

The troop leaders all got terribly excited when I mentioned that I'd done my gold award, five years ago now, I guess. It's odd, but it doesn't seem like such a big thing anymore.
Current Mood:

nostalgic