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Archive for May 2010

Only if you buy all your world maps from Europe.

You know how I think teaching kids history is really important? I read in the Guardian today (and I really tried to find a more neutral source to read up on it on, but no-one but the Guardian and the Daily Mail cares at the moment) that the Tories want an historian called Niall Ferguson to help re-write the history syllabus.

I think getting down a general chronology of what order things happened in is probably a good idea, if that's not being done already, but then there's this:

He said the syllabus was "bound to be Eurocentric" because the world was Eurocentric.

I've heard his name for the first time today, and already I dislike him.


In other historical news, I am totally excited for this on TV tonight:

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister on BBC2 at 9pm! It sounds like it's going to be pretty great. You should watch it, guys.

(Also there's a documentary about Anne Lister directly afterwards presented by Sue Perkins :3)
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31. 5. 2010 7:25 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , | Comment

Got a cold.

I should tidy my room, really, but I think I'll just sit around blowing my nose a lot and writing a blog entry.

I arranged a fair number of flat viewings last week, and all but one of them got cancelled or postponed (usually when I had already travelled up to London), and the one we did see was crap. It's been a really irritating week. But we found a lot of nice ones online this weekend, so let's hope next week is more productive. We might move to Canary Wharf and take the river bus in the mornings. Sure, the tube might be quicker, but river bus!

Hey, look what Tim got me as a present:



Awesome, right? XD There's a whole series of them. (Though statistics totally has the nicest cover art.) It's pretty good, actually. I haven't gone through the last few chapters yet, but it's been a nice review of the stuff I learned in school.

Speaking of manga, I read the first five volumes of Otomen* this weekend. It's all about boys who secretly like girly things, (and vice versa, though I guess there's only one girl) (there's also a guy who looks girly but really likes manly things) and Being Accepted For Yourself and doing cliché stories in amusing ways and it's generally the most adorable thing I have ever read. Also there is a girl/boy love story, obvs, and they keep being equally badass and either saving the day together or saving each other in equal measure. (Which does end up with people getting kicked in the face a lot, admittedly.) And it makes me happy about everything.

I have run out of things to talk about! Oh yeah, we went to see the Evangelion films last weekend! Have I really not blogged since before then? Sheesh. Anyway, they were badass in so many ways. The artwork and design were amazing, and it was a lot more emotionally engaging than I remember the series being: some bits were actually pretty uncomfortable to watch. I rather want to re-watch the series now, to see some more of the in-between bits, and to remember what my problem with it was. I remember waiting the entire the time for things to be explained that never were, and I didn't really get that from the films (though there's one - or two? - films left still). Either I was being dumb or they really tightened up the writing. Maybe both.

God, the battles were so badass. Especially on the big screeeeen. Most enjoyable night I have spent in a cinema for ages.


PS: I just watched the latest Doctor Who episode. I think the pacing was a bit off again, but aaaaaah, the end was SO SAD. ;____;


*Which is a pun on otome ("maiden, young lady"), and the English word men. And it's spelled 乙男 in kanji, which is otome 乙女 with the kanji for woman 女 replaced with the one for man 男. I love Japanese for punning.
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30. 5. 2010 7:19 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , , , , | Comment

I’ve had this post written for ages but I can’t think of a title.

I've been doing some little doodles lately to practice with my watercolours and markers on! And then my scanner did its best to screw with the colours, and then I did my best to un-screw them in Photoshop for a few hours until all of life started seeming loveless and cruel, and in conclusion I'm asking for a new scanner for Christmas.









I definitely need to practice more, but I think I'm improving, anyway.

Oh yeah, and I've started posting some drawings on deviantART again. (I'm being sociable on the internet! :O) It seems the way to get comments on dA is to post pictures of dragons. They like dragons there, I guess.


Tim and I are looking at a flat in London tomorrow. :D I hope it's nice, 'cause it's in an awesome location. Right down the street from the Tate!
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20. 5. 2010 11:26 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: | Comment

Wait, what? 11pm?

I was planning on doing something else this evening, but then I got stuck in front of the TV after dinner watching Role Models. Which did end in an epic LARP showdown, so I guess it was worth staying for all of it.

So instead of whatever else I was going to do, here's some cool links I urge you to check out:


• "Mario's Three Lives". Possibly the finest piece of fanfiction on the internet today.

• Spera. I meant to link this earlier, but I don't think I ever did. It's an excellent comic about adventures and things, and I don't know why I only discovered it recently.

• BAÏDIR trailer. I need this in my life.

• Really early Pokemon concept art. Eeee.

• Filthy Figments. Comic porn by ladies! I've never subscribed to a comic site before, but I think I might for this one. :3

• And I'm pretty sure everyone's heard this already, but: The Pope Song, by Tim Minchin. NSFW. But brilliant.


Good night.
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19. 5. 2010 11:07 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: | Comment

Rapidly approaching academia.

It's suddenly only a small number of months until I start at UCL! And just when I've just about figured out how not to let myself drown in a sea of ennui and depression when I have nothing to do. What a waste.

I got an email from the Institute of Archaeology (IoA?) this week asking me to tell them what options I'd like to do with my MA, so they can gauge interest. Unfortunately these two, which I really wanted to take, aren't running next year, so I spent forever deciding which of the alternatives to pick. I ended up with these:

• The Near East from Later Prehistory to the End of the Iron Age
• The Archaeology of Early Egypt and Sudan, c.10,000 to 2500 BC
• Archaeology of Late Pleistocene and Holocene Hunter-Gatherers

And as second choices in case any of those are cancelled, The Mediterranean world in the Iron Age, Anthropological and Archaeological Genetics, and The Aegean from first farmers to Minoan states.

I wasn't sure whether I should put one of the Mediterranean ones in my preferred options list instead of the hunter-gatherers one, but in the end I went with hunter-gatherers because the professor co-ordinating it has the more interesting research interests. I think that's a legit reason.

Ffff guys, I am so excited.

Speaking of Archaeology, I've been reading about the MASS Project today. I heard about it vaguely just before I left Durham, but then I completely forgot about it until recently. It's a super-badass project that involves modelling prehistoric settlements to see how they interact with, affect, and react to their environments. I've not finished reading all the stuff on the website yet, but like I said, it sounds super badass.


In other news, my parents and I went to see Robin Hood yesterday, and it was... really, really lame.

They just kept piling on more and more story elements none of which congealed into any proper kind of plot. An element was introduced (all the prepubescent children have run off to live in the woods!) and then eventually "resolved" (crossdressing Cate Blanchett leads them into battle) with nothing in the middle to lead from one to the other. The story with the orphans the most extreme, but all of the plots were similarly half-arsed. Nothing flowed properly. It felt a bit like scenes from three different films cut together into one. And the action scenes were pretty uninspiring, too, unfortunately. I wouldn't recommend it.

It doesn't feel right somehow to make a post without a single picture or drawing in it, so here's an animated gif of a cat that I found on the internets:


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14. 5. 2010 6:12 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , , , | Comment

It’s a blogpost.

I am actually kind of nervous about the election tomorrow. :/ Don't fuck it up, ok guys?

Anyway.


I borrowed Tim's USB barcode scanner and scanned all of my books into Book Collector this weekend. (Well all of them that aren't in boxes in the attic, anyway.)

Two things I learned doing this:
1. I actually have more books that I ahven't read yet than I thought
2. German publishers have some kind of aversion to putting a barcode on their covers. Instead, they prefer to write out the ISBN in numbers. I'm pretty sure they do this only to be difficult.

The latest book I've started reading was one of the freebies from Eastercon, but it wasn't really pulling me in at all, so I'm re-reading Monstrous Regiment instead. Because there's never a bad time for that. Consequently I haven't really gotten anything done today.


So, here's some art:


When Tim saw the camel of the rainforest lizard (which I should probably give a name soemtime), he apparently thought its eye was actually a nostril. So I drew a thing with a similar shape that actually had a nostril there. The creative process in action.

Some sketches from the Natural History museum:


Elephant ancestors are just cool.


I decided recently I should practice drawing people more, so here's a person.



Her name is Marielle, she's French, has robot legs, and lives in space. Like the cool kids do.



THis owl is not a person, but it is the forest king's spy master, so you should be careful what you tell it, because that dude will fuck you up.

Also, some Pokemon fanart.



Drew this as a thank-you to Tim for giving me his spare copy of Pokemon HeartGold. One day in the far future I might grow out of Pokemon like a normal boring person, but I highly doubt it. I'm thinking of importing a Japanese version of Black/White when they come out over there; the original Pokemon games helped me learn English, so there's no reason I shouldn't harness their power again! After all "It hurt itself in its confusion" is a vital part of any vocabulary.

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5. 5. 2010 11:40 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , | Comment

Numbers are pretty badass. Especially 3, you should watch out for that one.

I accumulate topics to blog about inbetween posts, each too short for a post of its own—in my opinion, anyway—but I keep collecting them for so long that if I were to write them up all at once they'd end up a hugely long disjointed monstrosity. So I'm gonna write about one or two things now, and some more later.

I took the Political Compass test the other day. Here's my result:


I was kind of surprised how far down it is, since I am, you know, quite a fan of governments existing, in general.

But I wouldn't treat the result as terribly accurate, anyway, because it was such a frustrating test to take. More than half of the questions left me sitting there for ages going "well, I kind of agree with this, but under some circumstances I would definitely disagree, too" or puzzling over semantics. Except for the religion and sex ones. Those were really easy.

Me: "'Today's society is too open about sex'... strongly disagree; we're by far not open enough."
Tim: "I knew you were going to say that, pervert."

I also obviously don't know enough about economics. One of the questions asked whether inflation or unemployment were more important to deal with. I do not know enough about the causes of inflation and unemployment and how they affect each other to answer that. Though apparently it's just code for "do you think rich people's or poor people's problems are more important". Rrrrrgh, simplistic questioning! I'm pretty sure you can't disregard the rich or the poor if you want a healthy economy. Maybe I'll move on to economics when I'm a bit further through the maths section at Khan Academy.


Oh yeah, I've been (re)teaching myself math using the videos at Khan Academy (at the recomendation of... FY!Math, I think, or possibly FY!Space). Because, thanks in part to some of those awesome science panels at Eastercon, I remembered that I've always enjoyed it (despite those IB external assessments. What's the point of a test if they don't tell you what you did wrong afterwards? Bastards), and that I've forgotten rather a lot of it of it. And also it'll be useful for me to know my way around statistics for my MA* (which is the reason that seems to fly best in non-geek circles, but they're all equally legit).

I wasn't sure what I still remembered, so I'm just making my way through it all starting at Algebra, doing a problem or two in each section to make sure I can still solve equations and so on. (I can.)


I've noticed the way I enjoy math is a lot like the way I enjoy language. Okay, the rules of any language probably have a lot more irregularities than math, but they're both structured ways of conveying information. They make sense and are aesthetically pleasing in the same way. Translating something or constructing a sentence feels a lot like a mathematical operation: putting words in the correct order so they transform each other's meaning in the way that will result in the overall intended message. And when you read a sentence you solve it, bit for bit, dividing the words into their types, applying the verbs to the objects and subjects and the adjectives to the nouns, and in the end you have a meaning, which is the solution. I'm sure other people have described this in more eloquent ways, but you know what I mean.


Aside: I never know whether to say "math" or "maths". My spell-check says "maths", but "math" sounds more natural to me. Maybe I'll just start saying "mathematics" all the time.


I didn't intend to divide by fiction/non-fiction, but I guess in my next post I'll talk about what I've been reading and watching lately! \o/

And now I'm gonna go watch the new Star Trek film on blu-ray. Again. :3


*What's that, you say, some understanding of economics will probably also be useful for me academically? Why yes, that is correct. So will linguistics, and a number of other things. Fuck, I love my subject so much.
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3. 5. 2010 3:47 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , | Comment