Bugger, I forgot to go back and do the May attribution thing. Excelsior!

• 2nd May, "it's not about what you love, it's about how you love it". Quoting Wil Wheaton on being a geek, from a response at a Q&A (linked from that post). The man is very sane.
  
• 5th May, "the same old painted lady". The Mandatory David Bowie Quote, this one from "Song for Bob ( Read more... )

Today I appear to have bullied my therapist, been excessively nice to a string of students, and taken a flamethrower to my Intray Of Doom, which was starting to achieve sentience via the compaction heating of its organic layers. This appears to be guilt in operation, not least because I am now badly overdue on one paper submission and slightly ( Read more... )

I would blog about our lovely weekend away, except (a) I don't have the energy to dig up and post the photos, (b) I need to do the traditional start-of-month acknowledgement of sources, and (c) I'm too damned upset about Iain Banks. Apart from being one of my favourite sf authors who falls into the China Miéville category of "clearly way more ( Read more... )

The Great New Year's Eve robbery relieved me of Winona, my netbook, whose petite Goth self I sincerely mourn. In a bizarre and unprecedented move straight out of left field, however, the insurance has actually paid out for more than the replacement cost of a low-end netbook, as a result of which the whole "resistance is futile, you will be ( Read more... )

Examining two plagiarised Masters dissertations in a row will make one really, really antsy about unmarked quotation. I signally failed to note my subject-line sources for the entirety of December as well as sailing blissfully past the end of January, making me a Bad Person, although I think the end-December default possibly had something to do ( Read more... )

It's apparently the sixth of the month. Not sure how that happened. It's gone past in a blur of meetings and stressed students. I had a very weird dream last night in which I was exploring a derelict haunted house in the woods somewhere, and kept encountering a ghost of a 4-year-old girl in a black dress who ran through the rooms with a fairly ( Read more... )

This month is inching along at maddened inchworm speeds, now, given the date, with added fireworks. I am horribly behind in The Department of Intellectual Debt Acknowledgement. Before I do that, however, a brief service announcement ( Read more... )

'Tis the first of the month. The regularity with which that happens, month after month, is simply distressing. Or reassuring. One or the other. Possibly both. I've been teaching seminars on vampires and gothic and marginal indeterminacy all afternoon (it's alive! it's dead! it's attractive! it's repulsive! it's real! it's not!), and may ( Read more... )

Hooray! I am back in the familiar embrace of Winona, with all my logins automatic, instead of having to type the wretched things in manually on my mother's computer. I miss my own virtual space. I am also much in favour of Virgin trains, which are currently trundling me happily towards Euston with a power point and a table for Winona and easily- ( Read more... )

There's been a big red ABSA poster up in my corridor for two weeks, advertising some sort of graduate development programme. It has a little mathematical conundrum on it, which reads as follows:

2+3=10
7+2=63
6+5=66
8+4=96
9+7=?
This bugged me for a couple of days, as I dashed madly past it in Hellweek flurries, and eventually I stopped and looked ( Read more... )