Eldrad must live

OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW

Seriously, I have waited for a remake of this game (which presumably will get a US translation this time around) for a decade, no lie. It is my favorite videogame of all time. I've often said that I wanted a remake/rerelease of this game and Tactics Ogre, and now they're both coming up.

Now here's hoping for a similar release of Eternal Punishment!

Edit: Also, have one of the most hilarious summing-ups of grad school I've ever seen.

Just finished the newest Harry Dresden book by Jim Butcher, Changes...and it was totally awesome, as expected, but wow the author REALLY wasn't lying when he said this was the book that changes everything (as per the title). Also HOLY CLIFFHANGER ENDING BATMAN WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Also why is no one else I know reading these books, sob

Also I have been watching the new Doctor Who! I am greatly enjoying Smiffy as the Eleventh Doctor, and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond is adorable and awesome.

( Highlights, lowlight and nattering about previews for next few weeks )

In other news, I sent off a prospectus draft this past week, and hope to send out the final draft next week. All things going well, I should have it approved and starting the dissertation should be go by the end of the month!

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor thy Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
-- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald

Unfortunately, my problem is that my finger is not moving, or at least not for the right reasons; I'm having a ridiculous motivation problem finishing up the last couple of items for my comps portfolio, but for some reason have no problem moving my fingers to take a blogging break. Still, perhaps this will get me back in the writey mood, or something. (Or maybe I just need to stop being a dumbass and suck it up and finish...yeah, I think that's more likely.)

However, I am sad that I forgot my camera at home today, because on my way to the office from the Airliner, I saw a squirrel on the Pentacrest with a half-eaten slice of Airliner pizza in its mouth. It was alternately nibbling on said half-slice and carrying it around, which was kind of hilarious because the piece of pizza was larger than the squirrel's entire body (sans bushy tail, of course). Nevertheless, it was a pretty kickass squirrel (after all, who wants nuts when you've got PIZZA?); and even squirrels endorse Airliner pizza as the best in town!

Why do I have no squirrel icon, not even of Dramatic Squirrel? (Never mind that he is in fact Dramatic Prairie Dog.) Oh well, furry raccoon Mario's close enough, I guess...they both have bushy tails and love Italian food.

Hmmm, after listening to a lot of Higurashi music lately, I suppose I should catch up on it; I'm fairly certain I haven't been getting 100% of my recommended daily allowance of killer lolis, after all. :(

Also I am being ridiculously productive today; I've graded all my informal assignment backlog (and am now completely caught up on grading, for almost the first time EVER this semester!) and am FINALLY getting back to annotation-writing after like two and a half weeks away from it. Go me!

Wow, yesterday the UI sent out safety guidelines in case of an active shooter (presumably in response to Virginia Tech and NIU). They know whereof they speak - the UI had a set of shootings back in '93, which decimated the Physics department (you can read an essay with a little more detail here, written by Jo Ann Beard, a Nonfiction Writing Program MFA student who also worked on editing the UI physics journal at the time, and was good friends with several of the victims).

And I gotta say, I appreciate the heads-up, and that they're thinking about this kind of stuff, but I still find it hella creepy and unsettling that we even have to worry about it. D:

It feels so strange not to be going to any classes this semester; don't get me wrong, it's nice, but still very strange. I do kind of miss the structure; without it, I hope I'll have enough initiative on my own to get all my comps shit done on time. I've gotta say, though, I was quite happy not to have to fight the crowds in our various textbook stores this semester, though.

Also I have finally finished my first week of teaching Gen Ed Lit. Discussion today was...distressing to me, so I'm hoping I can get some good tips for discussion when my sort of teaching support group meets next Thursday. It's been years since I took an undergrad lit class, so I have problems remembering exactly what my professors did to get discussion going; I remember my grad classes better, but getting discussion going usually isn't at all hard in them (in fact, frequently the problem is STOPPING folks from talking all the time). I felt like leading discussion was one of my weak points in Rhetoric, too, but I really want to get it right this time, since this is presumably what I'll be doing for the next umpteen years, so better to figure it out earlier than later...right?

Anyway, back to work on an annotation, since I'll probably be meeting with one of my committee next week and I NEED MOAR ANNOTATIONS DONE before then.

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2)Italicise those you intend to read/read part of but never finished. (If I italicised the books I want to read, everything would be italicised.)
3) Underline the books you LOVE (or at least really, really liked a lot).
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.
(Extra rule from supplanter: strike out the ones you disliked.)

( My list )

So, 37/100? (Plus a couple unfinished because they sucked so much.) Not bad, if I do say so myself...though it feels a little unfair, what with me working on my English lit Ph.D. and all. Though to be fair, NOTHING from my actual time period (medieval) turned up on the list...wtf? If they had room to put Hamlet and the first Narnia book twice, then they freaking had room for something like, oh say, The Canterbury Tales? Or Gawain and the Green Knight? Or hell, even Malory's Morte Darthur (or one of the derivations thereof, like T.H. White)? In fact, I think the only things on this list pre-1800 are Shakespeare and the Bible, right? Admittedly, this seems to be in step with a lot of the way literature is taught and perceived in modern society, but pfeh on that, I say.

THANK JESUSU, THE SEMINAR PAPER OF DOOM IS DONE, DOWN TO THE LAST FOOTNOTE

Now I can put it out of my mind, at least for a few weeks until I have to work on it again in my summer class, augh.

In other news, tomorrow I have to turn in my booklist for Gen Ed Lit in the fall, and a course description. I imagine I'll crap something out revolving around looking at literature in context and engendering a lifelong love of literature for my course description; that's pretty much all I can do, since we have yet to have our proper orientation (it's in the fall, and the one we had last weekend was basically three hours of mentioning things and then saying we were going to talk about them in the fall). As for the two novels I'm going to teach, Pride and Prejudice is a shoo-in, of course, but I'm still debating between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I've got till tomorrow, so any suggestions?

Right now I'm leaning towards Atwood, just because I'm thinking it might be better to avoid TWO 19th-century female authors. On the other hand, I'm thinking about adding monster theory to my special interest area for comps, so maybe I should get some practice teaching Frankenstein?

And last night the second half of the new two-parter of Who aired, so my usual impressions post: ( Cut for your protection )

In miscellaneous "awesome" news, have some scary fake babies, the oldest sound recording ever, and Japanese boobie pudding.

Edit: Edited for GIP. :D

Wow, I've been feeling really grumpy on and off (and more on than off) today. D:

It's probably because of a combination of a headache, my stomach trying to devour itself, and being lower on sleep than I'd like. And I'd really like to take an Aleve and go to bed early today, but as I have a seminar paper due Friday, that's not so much an option. (The deadline has technically been moved to Sunday, but as I'm spending all day Saturday helping proctor an engineering test, working on it over the weekend isn't really an option; and given that a good portion of my Friday is going to be spent looking at an apartment, teaching, and then going to the prep session for the engineering thing - and given that I'm actually going to have to go to bed on time that night, since I have to be in to help proctor at 6:30 on Saturday morning - I pretty much have to finish my paper tonight and tomorrow. (If I don't, then I'll probably have to skip German class on Thursday - and I can't really afford to miss again - to finish it, augh.)

Anyway! Since any content I posted this evening was gonna be angsty emo shit, I figure I'll spare y'all the whining and give you bizarre linkspam instead. :D

Let's Positive Linking!
- OMG BEST HOT FUZZ SLASHFIC EVAR...as you will discover when you read to the end. (From nibantan.)
- Also from Puu, MTV Cribs: NICU. This is bitchy but hilarious, and it was even more hilarious when Puu explained the few medical references that I was missing to me.
- And one last Puu-link (she brings all the awesome medical links to the yard): the smallest girl in the world due to primordial dwarfism. I wonder whether she has to wear doll clothes, or what. But she totally looks like a Gelfling. D:
- The Napkin Musical. I think I've posted links before from Improv Everywhere - which basically does large scale rehearsed performances everywhere (so not very improv, but still). In this case, they decided to stage a impromptu musical in the food court of a mall as if it were real...the resulting song is hardly Sondheim-caliber, but it's still highly amusing.
- Wanna give Radical Honesty a try? Warning: everyone else will, rightly, think you are a douchebag. Nevertheless, I think there are some good aspects of this; it would be nicer if people were more honest about expectations and such, since there's an awful lot of mind-reading that seems to be expected from life. D:
- The coolest cafe ever. I wish it were still around, it looks like a kind of awesome place. XD
- Hannah Montana really is going to bring about the downfall of civilization. Personally I'm waiting for the Disney Channel movie I WAS A TEEN TERRORIST starring Zefron.
- The Five Most Ill-Conceived Action Figures of All Time. I'd protest what they said about He-Man, but really he is pretty gay. XD
- Also from Cracked.com, The Twenty-Five Most Disturbing Sex Toys Ever. Most of these are indeed pretty horrifying, though I think the sounding device was the worst. (If you don't know what sounding is, don't ask me, just DON'T FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH IT.)

...man, I'm exhausted and tomorrow's Monday, the beginning of the week. ARGH.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I kind of had a working weekend - tomorrow I have to present on my seminar paper, and progress thereon, in my Lydgate seminar, and also had to send out a five-page excerpt from my paper this weekend, so I've been really working crazily for a good part of this weekend. (Read: I pulled an all-nighter last night to get the last part of said excerpt beaten into submission and in some semblance of readable-by-others quality.) Still, this means that I do now have a decent chunk of my paper draft done, so that automatically puts me way further ahead of schedule than pretty much any other semester I've taken a seminar, lol. The full 20-page draft isn't due until a week from Friday, but I'm hoping to finish it before then and have it out of my hair.

Speaking of hair, I went and got a haircut today. (I was overdue, since my last haircut was in January I think.) I like it, except that I had them leave it a bit longer on the top, so if the wind blows it wrong it has a distressing tendency to sort of settle into a faux-hawk. (The better you know me in person, the funnier this will probably seem.) So I think I may have to use product, at least for a few days until it settles down a bit, just to keep it from faux-hawking on me. D:

Tomorrow is going to be hellacious, as I have my presentation in the morning, then I have to scramble to get through my reading for Rhetoric (since I will have to lead discussion on it, being the teacher and all), and then I have my German class in the evening. (Also I may be meeting with my seminar prof sometime in there.) D:

On the plus side, Mana Khemia comes out tomorrow, and y'all know how much I like me some Atelier-series gaming.

...I was about to say that if Gamers doesn't have it in tomorrow I'm gonna have to cut someone, but then I realized that I won't be able to play it till Tuesday night/Wednesday anyway (since I have to do my Old Norse translation tomorrow evening for Tuesday, and even after that I probably SHOULDN'T be playing it and SHOULD be finishing up my seminar paper draft), so I guess if they get it in a day or two late I'll be able to deal. STILL I NEED TO START IT ASAP SO I CAN FINISH IT BY THE TIME FES COMES OUT

Finally, linkspam!

Let's Positive Linking!
- I've discovered that I should probably be watching the British show Blackpool. It's several years old and is essentially a straightforward cop/crime drama, but every so often they break into musical numbers set to pop songs to express homoerotic antagonism or to celebrate a drug bust. Note that the series also starred David Tennant (a.k.a. the current Doctor Who)...and that judging from the second video, synchronized dancing is not his strong point. XD
- You know, I'm really glad that YouTube wasn't around when I was a teenager. This is not to say there aren't remnants of my youthful folly online - the Wayback Machine has copies of some rather embarrassing (attempts at) fan translation pages from when I was like 12 - but at least I never had to worry about being an Internet laughingstock, like this girl is.
- New Zealand man receives sentence for claiming that he was raped by a wombat, which caused him to start speaking "Australian." ...I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.
- On a similar note, the latest news on efforts to rekindle pandas' dormant sex drive in order to save the species. I didn't even know porn for pandas existed (unlike panda porn, which I'm sure does exist somewhere in the depths of the Interwebs).
- And finally, this is the best post I've seen on ONTD in ages (link probably not worksafe). I now know far more than I ever wanted to about Bobby Trendy's sex life, but the sheer horrific trainwreckness of this post left me simultaneously going "OH MY GOD NO I CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE" and "...wait, they're refusing to give all the gory details? I CALL SHENANIGANS, GIVE US THE GOODS."

...For some reason I've had this song running through my head all weekend. So because pain shared is pain halved, have some early '90s cheese.

...h, holy shit, the English grad student/faculty e-mail list just sent out a call for papers for a conference on British SF and television.

THEY EXPLICITLY MENTION DOCTOR WHO

...........I, I kind of want to submit something orz

(Maybe if I make a lot of progress over spring break and come up with a good idea for a Who article, I'll submit an abstract; and I have to say, the thought of doing a Doctor Who scholarship lit review kind of makes me want to cream my pants.)

Edit: ...oh shit, you know, a paper on the implications of Who's treatment of medieval history/life (for pseudo-alien-medieval stuff like The Ribos Operation) would actually be not that irrelevant to my own CV, orz