Why does a person do a Google search for cake pony, and then link to my blog from the results, despite the fact that my blog is something like the 54th item on the list? Is my cake pony reference somehow better than everyone else’s cake pony references? Have I definatively defined the cake pony blogging experience?
Somehow I doubt it. Sadly, it will likely always remain a mystery.
I’m doing my best to become a scotch snob. I’ve experienced some setbacks. Mainly the high price of good scotch. I’m a poor university student, so buying a $70+ bottle at any regular interval is well-beyond my means if I have any inclination to eat. I bought one nice bottle, $70, of Dalwhinnie 15-year single malt. I drank it reverantly, sparingly, mainly because of the price, though also because it deserves to be savored. The amount of time it lasted, at the price it cost, actually seemed fairly reasonable.
The other day, I bought a sub-$30 bottle of Ballantine’s Finest. I suppose the simple fact that it was palatable makes me a very poor scotch-snob indeed. It’s a blend of over 40 malts. I drank the bottle over the course of the past three days. We value the things that cost us dearly, more than those we come by easily. I guess that holds true with scotch as well. No reveration was required. No savoring, nor sparsity, nor even common sense was used. Some weekends you just want to get drunk. Those weekends are rare for me, but I enjoyed the lightly buoyant feeling as I plugged away at my database project.
Now the bottle’s gone, and since I’m rabidly aware of the dangers of over-consumption, it will be some time before I acquire any more scotch. Probably not until the new year, at least.
One of these days I’ll become a scotch snob. Once I can afford it, that is, and they’ve invented artificial livers.
Happy to say that I’ve used them all. Of the 10, I think the Laptop Gun from Perfect Dark is my fave. Nothing else has been quite so fun in FPS multiplayer. (via Fark)
procrastination:
to put off cataloguing,
i write a haiku.
*sigh*
and off to work i go …
the project: pick three old-ass books from some boxes provided,
find said books in three different online library catalogs,
make my own records for the books, in both isbd and marc format,
write about the experience, the joys, and the tribulations.
verily, i tribulate. wish me luck.
Batten the hatches! Self-Destruct! Hit the big red button!
Some of my classmates have found this blog. Obviously, I must now destroy it.
…
Actually, I don’t really mind. I’ve long since come to terms with the idea of this blog being “found”. By anyone. For the most part, I wouldn’t write it if I cared who read it. So, welcome. I doubt anyone would find this blog particularly interesting on its own merit (i.e. out of context, i.e. if you don’t know me), as I’m fully aware the writing is not of a particularly entertaining sort. Sure, I’m charming and funny in person, but I do my best to avoid those things in my written works. I find that if you set a precedent, people will come to expect wit and charm, and then there’s just too much pressure to perform.
In short, new readers, welcome to this ridiculous exercise in verbal exposition.
I had a conversation with Abigail the other night about this blog, in which I admitted that I actually don’t particularly enjoy blogging. In fact, I find it something of a chore. On the other hand, I do feel like it’s a good practice, and I do enjoy being able to look back on it and see what I was doing, what thoughts I had, when. The other reason I do it is simply to keep certain people up to date on certain things in my life, should they choose to come by here and look (which, I think, most of them do not). I remember that I used to enjoy blogging, back in the day when I first started and I was all artsy and stuff. In my old age I’m becoming less creative and more discursive, much to my chagrin. Perhaps one day I’ll turn it back around.
Actually, I am pretty excited about a creative project I have brewing. I’ve even started some research on it. But for now it’s all top secret, so you’ll just have to simmer in your own anticipation. I hear that expectation cooks in its own sauce….
One thing I’ve begun to notice about graduate school is that it isn’t a Monday thru Friday sort of deal. Or, at least, it isn’t for me. I set my alarm this morning the same I do during the week, and it’s irrelevent that I slept through it and, subsequently, somehow turned it off. The point is that though I didn’t wake up until nearly 10, I meant to wake up at 7 or so. In either case, I woke up, showered, dressed, and walked to school on a cold, rainy, windy Saturday morning. Chances are that I’ll be here all day, working on a project.
The project itself is a case study of an (imaginary) public library (except I think that they call them municipal libraries around here). This library has a crapload of things wrong with it, mostly due to the old management, Jerry, who is now out the door. The new management, George, has just received a crapload of money (why is a mystery), from the municipal officials, and know he has to come up with a battle plan for making the library not suck. But him, I mean that we do, and it isn’t particularly difficult except that the professor has a tendancy to be vague about what EXACTLY she wants you to turn in, until you’ve turned it in, and then she’s VERY exact about what she wants. Which is frustrating, to say the least. The last assignment we turned into her was a beautiful work of art, a diagram of how information flows through a library, complete with little people, flipbooks, and I even think it showed a full, synthesized understanding of the ways in which information flow happens. Turns out that she didn’t want synthesized anything, she wanted her buzzwords, verbatim, explicitly listed on the diagram. I’m not bitter, really….
Marianne Bailey, one of my favorite professors from Evergreen, once told me that graduate school was, more or less, nothing but a series of hoops that you have to jump through in order to get your degree. For the most part, I’ve found my experience so far to be much more fulfilling than that, except for this one class, which is characterized perfectly by her analogy. The jumping part isn’t even hard, by itself. Finding out where the hoop is, how high and how wide, and whether or not it’s on fire or coated with acid; that’s the tricky bit. But even if graduate school were just a series of hoops eventually leading to a degree, I’d still be here, though with substantially more gritting of the teeth. Fact is, I’m tired of correcting people when they call me a librarian. Sure, maybe I’m here for other reasons too: education, personal growth, etc. But the name thing, that’s definately the big one.
Or is it a website? That’s the problem, really, with moving to your own domain thingy. You begin to experience an identity crisis. Granted I never knew what I was doing on blogspot or LJ either, but I was the most prolific when I was just blogging, before I felt like “just blogging” was somehow cliche or trite, or god forbid, completely self-obsessed.
That all said, I’ve ceased to care, for this very particular instant, what anyone who reads this and doesn’t know me might think of me. Because honestly, if people read random blurbs of inane information concerning my personal life, and they know me, they’ll have a context, find it interesting maybe, or at the least, feel in the loop. And if they don’t know me, and don’t have a context, well then I don’t know why they’re here anyway. At one point I know I was hoping to have a “popular” website. Something topical and interesting and poignant to its field, like an LIS blog or something. I had all these great plans to blog about library school, but honestly it’s just not that exciting. Maybe I’m just a crappy storyteller. Who knows. Excuses aside, let the inanity commence.
Today I had my first quiz in a long, long time, and now it feels like my brain wants to explode. I imagine it would help if I went and drank some wine and ate some food, but I guess I’d rather relax and type out these thoughts. Huh.
Jeph released his “She blinded me with library science” tees for preorder, so if you’re interested you should swing over to questionablecontent.net and put in your order. They’re sexy AND clever. But then that’s QC for you.
I spent a week in Olympia, and it was nice to see everyone again, though I admit that the week was a bit more hectic than I might have liked. Now I just have to trudge through six more weeks of school until Christmas break, and three weeks off. Hopefully I can make it seem like I’m NOT trudging, but then that’s the trick, isn’t it.
So back to my quiz. We had to write correct authority headings for some entries, and then we had to write out cross-reference cards indicated by various authority files. After that we had to create a main entry unit card based off a MARC record, and then create a level 2 ISBD description based off the title page and some listed information of a book. Finally, we got to explain the four uses of uniform titles, using specific examples, and furthermore explain how each use might be effective in different types of libraries. It’s been a long time since I ran out of time on a test, and I did finish, but I was rushing a lot near the end, on the essay, and I didn’t finish insofar as I could have easily written a lot more to make my essay answer completely satisfactory. But then I didn’t much care for the question, as far as something that we have to analyze and think about rather than just regurgitate the rules and uses of uniform titles, so I didn’t particularly feel like putting an enormous amount of energy into it anyway.
After the quiz, in a flash of halloween wickedness, we had a manic thirty-minute lecture on LC subject headings, and how to assign them, which was subsequently the topic of our lab. It’s been a long day, and I’m tired and hungry, and I’m now one-eighth of the way done with my degree and that, at least, is a little bit exciting.
Happy Halloween! I’m off to eat some food and watch some more of season six of Buffy. I’m almost done! I was thinking about being Giles for Halloween, but then I realized that my accent just plain sucks.
Jeph has made promises of shirt availability. Shirts that say, “She blinded me with library science”.
Once again, Jeph Jacques is totally my hero.
You can see the shirt in action: here, here, and here.
Aside from the shirt, which is magnificent, what makes me feel ever warmer and fuzzier inside is that Jeph claims he has NEVER had as much demand for a shirt. Hellz yea, librarians represent!
The controversy over the new library in Lawrence, Kansas has been interesting, and it’s certainly been nice to see that, with a few exceptions, opinion has been strongly slanted against Mr. Hirschey’s suppositions of library obsolescence. My own thoughts, as I stated in the comments of the op-ed, go something like this:
Technology is changing rapidly, and therefore so are people’s needs. But the point of a library is not (in my opinion), to do its “library thing” with no consideration to the needs and desires of the community. The fact is that as the world changes, libraries change too, and strong libraries in strong communities will never become obsolete because they will always grow to meet their users’ needs.
That said, if you really feel like the library isn’t serving you, why not get involved? A new library is a great opportunity to voice an opinion on what roles and services you would like the library to provide. How about a large meeting room to host community activities? The Princeton Public Library opened its facilities to host the World Cup and became a great place for community to come together and enjoy the sport (via Tame the Web). Computer instruction in libraries often helps those people in the community who would otherwise have no idea what to do with free technology if you did give it to them at their homes.
What about after-school programs? Summer Reading programs? What about families who love to read and bring their kids in once a week to check out literally hundreds of books?
If none of that appeals to you, and you have other ideas of what you’d like to see, then I guarantee you your library would love to hear from you. In the end, that’s what libraries do: they serve their communities. And hey, some people don’t use libraries, and that’s fine, but we should still look at them in a broader context and see how, as educational and community institutions, they provide a great deal of value to our communities.
Finally, a lot of people say how great libraries were to use when they were growing up. Now that they’re adults they don’t use them anymore. I guarantee though that there are still a lot of kids and families out there that are getting a great deal of value out of the library. Plenty of adults, having grown up and having no children, have no personal need for schools anymore either, but no one questions their roles in the community. Libraries are just as important, because they’re schools where anyone can go, at any time, for any reason. And what could possibly be cooler than that?
Aside from comments left by library supporters around the world, people from Lawrence have written in and voiced their opinions. Lots of them.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/05/not_obsolete/ – Sally writes:
Browsing books in the library can open whole new worlds that might never be found on the Internet. The library has much more to offer than computer access.
I hope that we will never see the day when libraries become obsolete as suggested by Mr. Hirschey. I would ask when he last read a good book. I know where he can find one.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/05/library_defense/ – Betty writes:
For seniors, libraries offer programs, books and videos. I know people who can no longer afford to buy books and magazines so they depend solely on the library for their reading material.
There are many families who cannot afford computers so the computers are an important part of the library, as are the books, videos, programs, art, meeting rooms, speakers and events.
All of the above are benefits and amenities that one cannot find on the Internet. I am an avid user of my computer and the Internet, but I do love a library. So, Mr. Hirschey, I do think we can have the best of both worlds to enrich our lives.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/05/reliable_source/ – Alison writes:
While the Internet may provide a high degree of convenience, it is not a reliable source of information. Blogs, instant messaging and publicly edited sites such as Wikipedia may be a good place to quickly and casually find information, but these are not acceptable references for serious research purposes.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/04/library_value/ – Charles writes:
Mr. Hirschey is absolutely right that digital information is hugely valuable, but this shouldn’t be an either/or choice. Books have a reassuring permanence not found in cyberspace — and they’re easier to write in (sorry, librarians). And they’re portable, and they don’t need batteries. As Mr. Hirschey recommends, let’s do wire Lawrence for 24/7 high-speed Internet access — but let’s not unplug the library.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/04/computerbrary/ – John writes:
I could not agree less with Mark Hirschey’s Take a Stand in which he claims that computers have made book libraries obsolete (Journal-World, Oct. 2). I think people, these days, too often confuse information with wisdom. Admittedly, I’m prejudiced because I built my career and supported my family on skills I learned from reading books borrowed from the public library.
That, to me, constitutes overwhelming library support. As librarians part of our job is to promote library awareness. In the face of folks like Mr. Hirschey, that can be daunting. It’s nice to know that we’re not alone.
With a title like that, I’m sure you’re excited to read on.
My Sony Dream System ™ arrived, and as I had feared it doesn’t have a digital audio connection. Also, it has an integrated dvd-player. WTF!? Okay, so I ordered it and I should have known. But I had thought to myself “NO WAY does a decent receiver in this day and age NOT have an optical port!” Well, I guess you showed me, Sony. FutureShop, for their part, were annoyingly vague in their description of available ports, and had no pictures on the website of the back of the receiver, which you’d think would be the most informative part to show prospective buyers. I thought that true DTS support required a digital audio connection, but somehow mine is still working through my handy red and white connectors. Perhaps my presumptions all this time have been wrong, in which case I blame Theo. Also possible is that the receiver is faking the DTS connection, but I don’t know how that would work exactly, either. In any case, my apartment is tiny and it actually sounds pretty good, so I decided to keep the damn thing, though I’ll try to sell it before I move for the summer. I’ll take a loss, that’s fine. No optical as a temporary situation is okay, but in the long term I simply can’t exist in such a state of squalor.
Did I mention that FutureShop has listed, as a recommended accessory, an optical cable? That’s just tricky, that is. The bastards. Oh yeah, and as a dvd-player it doesn’t have an hdmi port, which seems ludicrous what with television going digital and all. Here’s a link to the system, if you wanna see.
Some guy in Lawrence, Kansas wrote an op-ed piece essentially positing that libraries are worthless and obsolete. The write-up itself is incredibly annoying, but the responses to it have been really interesting. I forwarded the story on to my classmates, since it’s the kind of thing we’re going to have to stand up against soon enough, and we may as well start now. To briefly outline my description here, libraries are NOT worthless and are, in fact, AWESOME. These are facts, and therefore undeniable. So there, Mr Hirschey of Lawrence. I wrote a more eloquent proclamation (if you can imagine such a thing), in the comments proper. I encourage everyone to go and have their say. Lawrence could be a masthead for the library advocacy movement, if enough people took notice. Michael Stephens and the Librarian in Black have both posted verbose rebuttals, which is a start, but I think we really need to steamroll this issue. Their posts are worth reading, in any case.
My trip to New Jersey to see Abigail was fantastic. It was a slice of heaven, spread over a little less than two days, and that’s even considering the fact that I was suffering from some flu symptoms. Ain’t no disease was gonna get me down! The wedding itself was very sweet, and got us talking about how we want to do OUR wedding, which was fun in itself. If you’d told me a year ago that I would be making wedding plans in Jersey, I’d have given you my quizzical eyebrow look. Now it makes all the sense in the world, except for the Jersey part, of course. We’re looking at July of 2008, which will be right around our second anniversary, so it seems like a good time. Mark your calendars, etc.
I just finished watching season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which took me all of … oh, three days to get through. Maybe two. Much to my homework’s chagrin. But hey, once you start watching Buffy, it’s all over. I was powerless to resist its spell. It’s my first time through the series, as well, and a journey I began with Tim back when we were living together in Olympia. I’ll get through the rest of the series before the end of the year, and will finally be able to call myself a fulfilled and cultured individual. Until then, I have seasons 1 and 2 of Deadwood to keep me occupied, as well as, oh yeah, schoolwork.
Go figure. On one last note, the Pharmaprix up the street has Orangina for sale for $1.99 CAD per 1.75L, which makes me the happiest and orangest guy in the province, at least until Oct 13th or so, or until they run out. I bought four, which wasn’t nearly enough, but a guy only has so many arms. Until later, then: stake em if you got em.
There was a lot of coughing and sneezing and sniffling and the like among my classmates last week, so that by the time the weekend rolled around I wiped my brow and let out a brief but heartfelt sigh of relief that I had escaped infection. Of course by the time Saturday night arrived I was congested and achey. I’m surviving well enough, and yesterday afternoon I went to the pharmacy and picked myself up some vitamin C, some garlic pills, some peppermint tea and some calcium caramels. Combined with my daily vitamins, I’m expecting some sort of miracle recovery. I’ve never been very good about taking vitamins on a regular basis. On average, I’d take my daily vitamins weekly, and other supplements at most a few times a year. One thing I’ve been working on as I’ve been reinventing myself in terms of habits and daily practices is to eat at home more (which has been going amazingly well), and to be healthier in my diet, which includes taking vitamins.
In short, so far no dramatic sense of well-being, but I remain hopeful.
That covers under the weather. As for the other, I’m over the moon because tomorrow morning I set off for Parsippany, New Jersey to see my darling Abigail for a few brief and much-needed days. Her cousin’s getting married, and close enough to me that it made sense for me to drive down. I mean, after spending a week moving from Washington to Montreal, what’s a 7-hour drive? Peanuts, that’s what.
Classes continue to go well, and today and tomorrow is the voting for the McGill Library and Information Studies Student Association (MLISSA) executive team. I’m running for VP against two other people, so wish me luck!
In other exciting news, I have a fancy desk and chair in my apartment now, delivered from Ikea, so I expect both my work and blog productivity to increase. I’m so far behind on my bloglines that it’s not even funny, but I’m hoping to at least start reading my online info sources again, so that I may have exciting and pertinent things to share. Until then, toodles!
Today I can feel the first gusts of winter, flush with cold, though I’m sure that it’s a meager herald of the coming ice age. I’m a rain-baby, you see, born and having lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, I know fancy words like “rainshadow” and I’m used to more green than white, even in the winter. Granted I spent quite a bit of my youth in eastern Washington, where there is a real winter, including temperates well below zero and snow up to your belly-button, at times. But it’s been awhile since then and from what I’ve been told the winter here will be make eastern Washington seem a tropical paradise. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it.
Tomorrow marks the end of my first two weeks of classes. They’ve been going well so far. My classmates are – so far in my experience without exception – intelligent and interesting people, and though I wouldn’t say that I’ve made any “fast friends”, I’ve made some nice connections and shared some good conversations and conspiratorial smiles. We’re all in this together, after all, for the next two years, which means plenty of time to conspire, work, and share this experience called grad school.
The GLIS at McGill is modeled to resemble real-life work in a lot of ways. It’s considered a professional degree, so the studies rest much more on the practical than the theoretical, which I think is reasonable and very useful. The graded work in most of my classes is based almost entirely on group projects. Much as a real work environment, you have a project, people to work with (or you work on your own), and a completion date. Much as a real work environment, you generally have multiple ongoing projects at the same time, and you have to schedule the projects around other aspects of the job, in this case lectures and labs (which one could equate at work to time at the reference desk, or cataloguing, or other daily tasks). This is a good model for me because even though I’ve gotten much better at working in groups over the last couple years than I used to be, I consider it an essential part of effective library practice and it remains an area where I feel like I could still grow and learn. Working with people is always the most difficult, and most rewarding, part of the job.
I have some exams as well, and term tests, and individual projects to work on. I have plenty to work on, indeed. I’m not too stressed. Yet. Give me a couple weeks.
I’m working on creating a bibliographic database with a partner in a program called InMagic. We create fields – author, title, keywords, etc – decide how we want these fields to be searchable – term search, word search, both, or neither – and then enter records using the field information. We also have to identify our purpose and audience, and pick a subject, which for us is French Poetry. So far it’s been the most daunting of the projects assigned, though hopefully once we put some elbow grease into it then it won’t seem so insurmountable. For the moment, I’m just having trouble wrapping my brain around it.
Other projects involve creating a diagram describing how information flows within a library, which I’m working with two other people on, as well as creating original card- and MARC-format descriptive bibliographies for three books and comparing my records to records for the same books entered in other libraries. Like I said, I’m quite busy.
If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out my Flickr photos (I added some new ones on Sunday and now there is a link over to the right), and check back here when you can. I’m going to make an effort, now that my life here in Montreal is solidly underway, to be more bloggerish. No, really!
My thoughts and condolences go out to the victims of yesterday’s attack. I’ve spent the past hour or so reading Gill’s online journal and looking at his pictures. I really don’t understand what drives a person to such acts of violence, but then, I don’t think I’m capable of any form of actual violence, on even the smallest level. I wish that people realized that there are other options and other ways to be. I wish we could always show each other kindness and compassion. I wish that we would respond to … well, President Clinton was quoted by Sarah Vowell in her essay Ike was a handsome man, and perhaps he said it best (at that time at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial service):
When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death let us honor life.
I’m avoiding linking to articles about it. The news is too sad as it is, and certainly easy enough to find and even hard to avoid. As for me, I’m fine, alive, and not afraid. I’m just so sad that things like this happen to people, both the victims and the shooter. Why must it come to this? It’s a question with no good answer.
I left Burlington, VT after a couple days stay with my friend Tim and headed north into Quebec early on Thursday, August 31st. The drive was fairly short, as I had been told it would be, and I had no troubles at the border. They looked quizzical regarding my temporary plates, since I own a new car, and the customs agent scratched his head slightly as he tried to pierce the veil of my packing in order to ascertain the actual contents sequestered deep within the dark chasms and carpeted crevices of my car's interior. Suffice it to say that I was not able to use my rear-view mirror during my journey across the country, and that the car rode very, very low over the back wheel, as one can see here.
Upon entering Quebec, the interstate became more rural, and before long I was driving through fields of corn at a leisurely 50 kph. Kind of like driving through Wisconsin, only in Wisconsin the corn moved much faster. Wisconsin corn would beat Quebec corn in a race every time, I wager. The signs, of course, were in French where they weren't bilingual (which most of them weren't), and so I spent the drive proudly reciting signs out loud to myself, happy that, with sometimes a small amount of reflection, I knew what they meant. "Maïze Sucré", for example, actually means that they are selling sweet corn and not that they are trying to lure tourist rubes into any unsolvable labyrinths.
As you might expect after so much anticipation, consternation, and aggravation surrounding moving to Montreal, to actually drive into the city was a landmark event. I had managed not to get lost so far on my trip – excluding my brief, circular tour near Toledo, OH as I searched for the Super 8 – and gave myself a pat on the back for a trip well done. Driving into Montreal was like opening to a new chapter in the checked-out library book that was my life. My first impression was that the city was big, that I yet had a chance to get myself horribly lost, and that at least the architecture was pretty. I managed not to get lost, despite a great deal of construction that led me on a merry detour and made a halfhour trip through downtown take at least an hour and a half. Finally I parked in front of my apartment building, stretched my legs, and intrepidly strode inside to claim the keys to the small 1 and 1/2 that would likely serve as my castle for the next two years. Much to my chagrin, my apartment was being retiled and was unlivable until the next day. Happilly, upon my confession that I had not another place to stay the night, my kind apartment manager offered me the key to an empty fourth floor apartment until the next day. I did my best to be more heartened by his kindness than frustrated by the fact that I would have to put off unpacking, and walked out into the city to do important things (as one does).
Following the apartment manager's advice, I followed Saint Laurent south for a short time until I found the Canada Trust Bank. I had already spent $80 wiring money to this bank, so I figured, at the least, they owed me a checking account. Setting up my account was easy and speedy. The gentleman who helped me, Pierre-Luc, was Francophone though he spoke English well, and he was very friendly. Approximately thirty minutes after entering the bank, I left with a new account and debit card, and decided to continue south on Saint Laurent to see if things would continue to go so fortuitously. In nearly no time, I spotted the Telus store across the street – which is where I had decided to get a call phone plan after a great deal of research during my stay in Burlington – and an hour later I walked out with my student plan (100 minutes long distance, including into the US, and unlimited incoming calls from anywhere!) and my fancy new phone. The best part was that the phone came activated and about half-charged, so it was ready to use immediately. I called Abby at work and bragged about my productivity, for which she was properly appreciative, and then went back out into the vast, vast city to explore, my productive phase at an end (being that it was now after 5 pm), and my curiosity now ready to take over.
My first exploratory excursion covered, exclusively, the length of Rue Saint Laurent. Saint Laurent is quite long and definately thriving, packed with bars that are packed with people that are packed with booze, which in concert with the many clubs and restaurants that line the street, makes for a caterwauling sort of affair that remains yet alluring through its vibrant variety of offerings. I kept my curiosity at street level, feeling too overwhelmed to venture into a maelstrom of drunk bodies, and by the time I got back to my night's lodging it was nearly midnight and I had walked what I suspect was nearly a total of ten miles, half of it uphill – okay, so up a gentle, barely noticable incline. Feeling accomplished, if exhausted, I liberated the mysteriously present Ikea mattress from its resting place against the wall, layed out my pillow, spread my quilt, smoked a Canadian cigarette, and proceeded to sleep like a giant, syrupy maple log.
To be continued …
Hy hy, I'v got m som Flickr powr going on! That includs picturs from my trip across th country! Chck 'm out, and b sur to chck back for updats.
Dear friends,
My bloggish silence is due to the fact that I have been laboriously moving, by automobile, across the country. I left Tuesday and arrived in Oberlin, OH yesterday afternoon for a short reprieve. The final destination is, of course, Montreal, and I will probably arrive on Friday after hanging out with Tim in Vermont.
Rest assured that I'll be sharing my adventures with you once I've landed, that I've taken some fun pictures of my travels as well, and that I'm even considering making a small, amateur music video, if I can find the time. Does anyone know a nice, free program I could use to edit together some video footage and throw music behind it? If so, do tell!
'Til then, love and truckstops.
Ahniwa
Every time I think about starting a webcomic again, of one sort or another, I go and look at the great webcomics that are already out there and I despair a little. I try to think of what I could create in the "write what you know" sphere, and every once in awhile I think, "Well, maybe I should create a library webcomic. There aren't many out there yet, after all."
And then, out of the blue, that big old meanie Jeph comes along and gives Marten a library job. And the worst part is that if I gripe about it, Jeph will just tell me that I have an attitude problem. Sigh. Oh well, I'm looking forward to Jeph's take on library humor, though he should know that most academic libraries primarily use the LC classification system rather than Dewey, for most of their collections.
I mean, duh!
The Dada Detective hits 100 strips, and catches my attention. It's about a detective hired by a French Mime to find her missing duck. Absurdism and punishness abound, and he drinks from a bottle labeled, Old Andalusian Dog. In case you don't get it.
The Perry Bible Fellowship, which recently one some WCCA award or another, has its new website which you'll be pleased to learn allows for direct linking to specific comics, something the old site didn't support. Now you can share your favorite PBFs with ease, so get to it!
Achewood joins Webcomics Nation. Somehow, Onstad doing anything not entirely on his own seems incredibly weird to me, maybe because Achewood is just so damned strange and, even though I read his semi-normal blog, I still can't imagine having a conversation with the guy. Still, I wish him luck, and I wish Webcomics Nation luck too, just in case. You never know with these guys.
Adultwebcomics.com. I think that speaks for itself. Their first comic is called Jess Fink's Dirty Limericks, which I can't check out yet due to my current locale (i.e. work), but it sounds promising.
(links via lore and comixpedia)
The LA Times story by Claire Hoffman on Joe Francis and Girls Gone Wild has really been getting a lot of press lately. I've gotten a lot of hits on my write-up about it, mostly from the Chicagoist post which was nice enough to throw me a link. Pandagon also has an interesting take on it, stating that for Joe Francis the main pleasure in Girls Gone Wild is actually in forcing women to do things they don't actually want to do. While I'd love to agree with Amanda on this, I think that in this case it's really too easy to villainize Francis, letting the women completely off the hook. One must bear in mind that the places in which Girls Gone Wild operates are the sorts of places where people frequently "get wild". There are always more private, demure clubs for the girls who really are not interested in flashing their boobies.
On sort of a different side of the issue, John at Dealbreaker.com states that even Francis's business philosophy is full of crap.
Girls Gone Wild came to Olympia once, not too long ago, to the now-vanished (not surprising) Barcode. People got arrested, and the bar was practically fined out of existence for allowing nudity, sex, raucous behavior, and other sundry perversions. Good on ya, Olympia.
Diesel Sweeties covers Girls Gone Wild, which makes sense because R. Stevens' blog was the first place I saw the article linked. Quote of the day is definately: "My dignity fits me better." Hooray for dignity!
If I would keep up with my webcomics in a more timely fashion (silly me, I must be busy getting ready to MOVE TO ANOTHER COUNTRY), I would have noticed that Jeffry "Snakes on a mutha' fuckin' plane" Rowland has also, in webcomics form, stepped up the assault on Joe Francis. For those not in the know, The Poopmonster (aka R. Stevens) is the one who strangles Joe Francis from behind in panel 5.
I'm sure there are plenty more webcomics out there using their voices to shout down Joe Francis, Girls Gone Wild, and inebriated booby-bobbing. Which is one of the greatest things about webcomics, really. They're funny, sure, but they're pertinent as well!
It's indicitive of our relationship, I think, that I make sure to read Penny Arcade before I meet Theo for lunch. Plus, I'm still waiting for them to announce their special edition release of Bacon Robots. Waiting anxiously.