media + log

Over the last week:¹

movies

• Saw Batman Begins with a small contingent from emerald_citizen. I was impressed at the faithfulness to the comics, without being campy: there were very clear references to big chunks of Year One (the look of Wayne Manor, the trips to the Far East to learn, the doubts about how to use fear) Dark Knight Returns (the automobile, the pearls), along with a successful re-introduction to Ras al-Ghul, who had never previously "worked" for me as a villain (I stopped reading the whole Batman panoply around the time they introduced Bane). I particularly liked that the script takes its time in introducing the costume etcetera, and that the hand-to-hand combat scenes were shot in the close-up, confused flurry that leaves a lot to the imagination (Michael Keaton's Batman always looked like a clown in fights).

  I got suckered by the turn-your-cellphone-off preview, which had medieval kung-fu warriors clashing in mid-air when someone's cell phone started ringing. It went on, and I was completely snookered -- I said "okay, turn it off now", out loud, loud enough to be heard throughout the theater, and then I realized that the subtitled moment had the two warriors debating what noise that was -- "it's in the audience", says one. So embarrassing to be taken in. I obviously don't watch enough movies, because it felt like everybody else in the theater knew what was coming. I felt like one of those apocryphal primitive tribesmen who talks back to the television, or asks "how do they get the little people in there." Amusing for everybody else, though I could feel my skin flush with embarrassment. This embarrassment was somewhat mitigated by being massively out-fanboyed by the entire row behind us, who [to a man, and yes they were all men] bore a striking resemblance to Comic Book Guy and as soon as the movie ended started ripping on how it wasn't really authentic.

  It was very nice to spend some time -- however non-conversational -- with both blackwingedboy and imtboo; the former I barely see at all and the latter has been frantically busy in going to a major theater conference in town (to which she received a scholarship!).

reading
Wow, I've been reading a lot.

• The Nation
• The works of Ellen Ullman, at imtboo's recommendation. She's a decent writer, and it's the first thing I've read that really seems to capture the feelings of clarity, confusion, drive and obsession that go into a programmer's life. The Bug is both frightening and fascinating in its eerie similarities to my own life -- the first-person narrator, for example, is a PhD linguist who has dropped out of the academy and become a software tester; she is forced to learn to program as a matter of pride in her job but it quickly becomes a mesmerizing world of its own to her. (nihilistic_kid didn't like it, though [some spoilers in these reviews] Mostly Fiction and the NYT did.) I won't say more -- there are a few plot points I don't want to give away -- but I encourage the geeks and geeks' friends out there to read it, or her gonzo memoir Close to the Machine (an interesting review).
• I've started reading The Confusion, which I picked up the other day. This morning I took a knife and tore the giant trade paperback into three chunks so I don't have to carry around 2.9 pounds of paper, I'm still on chunk 1.
• in a fit of bookstore madness, I went to Twice Sold Tales and left with $35 of used books: #2-4 of the Princes of Amber series, Emergence (non-fiction about group-emergent properties and processes ), Persepolis (a comic-book memoir of a girl in Iran) and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which I've been meaning to re-read for years.

¹There's no narrative here. It's just a log of what I've been doing for the last week or so. Sorry for the lack of updates...

web + log

(broken into two posts -- this one's more my activities):

School:

• Met with my fellow vice-president-draftee to plan colloquia for the upcoming year. We come from very different branches of linguistics, so it's a sort of bipartisan committee; luckily we both feel that last year's colloquia were too overloaded with theoretical syntax (her area) and computational linguistics (mine), so we'll be looking to do other things next year; we're both interested in trying to get more First Nations talks, among others.
• Had lunch with a classmate who's abandoning her MA idea and needs a new one -- I think our undirected brainstorming over fish and chips on Lake Union helped; we came up with something pretty good
• met with an advisor about my MA; he tells me (how flattering!) that my strength in writing this MA is that I'm "eclectic", which I dare say is true.
• regarding that MA -- I'm running short on time. Not one, not two, but all three of my MA committee members are on sabbatical or on leave in the fall. Yoicks.

Work:

• Ran more than a year's worth of 21st century computer time, parsing
• Sent off email indicating my interest in coming to Palo Alto this summer
• Went to a full-day's talks, by (among others) the first authors of the white book and the black book, who (in a very ego-stroking moment) waved "hi" to me when I came in late to hear their talks