bookish dreamer

I thought I only had six more mid terms to grade tonight until I was getting out of my car this evening and looked into the back seat and realized that there were 10 ungraded ones sitting there that I'd taken with me the other day then left.

NOT FAIR. 

I am not grading at the moment but I will be soon.  Just finished going over presentation with friend from the Visual Studies class - we got to pick a word and then find objects in the Getty Archives that fit that word somehow.  It's a crazy roller coaster ride, but the cool part is that we have two different prints from 1793 of her beheading, Conan Doyle's actual book on Spirit Photography (which you can find in reprint, but this is original printing), a woodblock cut of a comet from Austria in 1680, and Marcel Duchamp's The White Box which is so unspeakably cool I can't even describe it.

I feel a little like a kid in a candy store - WE GET TO TOUCH THEM! - but also like, damnit, why didn't I do art history?  this stuff is FUN.

School is crashing, bombarding, strolling along.  I try to keep track of the important things and not sweat the small stuff.  And dog got over her bruise in three days, so yay for that. I can't believe it's already November, but the rent check I had to write says it is.

I spent the morning playing on the tumblr I made for my EA Cinema class (here if any of you want to be occasionally bored by EA Cinema stuff) which I am debating showing to the professor or not.  Not that I think he would hate it, but I think he might not *get* it, and it's difficult to explain tumblr to the un-addicted.  I tried with my grad student friend today and he was like, 'ok, i kinda see how that's cool' and you know, was vaguely interested, but i think it's impossible to convey how sometimes my fingers now just ITCH to tumble things to him. Because I'm not certain I understand it myself.  Very different than text based stuff, that's for sure.

i think i need one of those hang in there kitten posters as an icon - that's kind of the way i'm feeling today.  started out monday tired, am still tired, have two more days to go. yeach.

while bopping around on the interwebs, I discovered this (an audio many of you who are actually in the star trek fandom: reboot fandom may have already seen).  It is...

An edited erotic (read purple prose) love story, where the fans took the audio book read by Zach Quinto and cut it up until it's Kirk & Spock having a torrid affair.  Hilarious.  Brilliant. 

How's that for new media?

A friend just sent me this, and I find it interesting (but possibly annoying) enough to link to.

It starts out:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

[ the full article here at the Atlantic ]

And some of you will say, oh, it's an article from the Atlantic, of course it's going to piss you off.  ( You might be right )

oh, yeah, and on a personal note i'm still sick and not talking for fear of coughing.  But I managed to finish the Japanese final AND turn in the film paper (even if I did actually forget the printed paper on my way into school, and even though i'd emailed it to myself the printers in the computer lab weren't working, so i had to actually drive back home, and drive the paper back to school, but hey, it's DONE).  One more paper left and I'm home free for the semester.

From Corey Doctrow's Little Brother

More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some were hostile. When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her be M1k3y for a while. It didn't really feel like M1k3y and me were the same person anymore anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to international journalists and inspired a movement. Marcus got suspended from school and fought with his dad and wondered if he was good enough for his kick-ass girlfriend.

Angry Teacher video (caught on a cell phone)

A vid made by one of the women in our class (from high school) drug free america

from Cory Doctorow's book, w1n5t0n's Instructables

ALA.org's list of 2009 Best Children's books (including Little Brother)

Did you know you can measure hope?  there are like a million ways to measure hope that have been academically agreed upon.  You can even google scholar them.