twenty-ten, or two thousand and ten?
Belated Happy New Year, flist! Mine was rung in with Guitar Hero and Scribblenauts, and begun with a daft but awesome film (Sherlock Holmes) and a daft and slightly less awesome book (last one in Cassie Clare's pro trilogy), both accompanied by good food and good friends; if this sets the tone for my year I will be happy.
This year, I have:
1. Written approximately 55,000 words of thesis chapters, conference papers, journal articles/reviews, presentations, not including drafts.
2. Presented at my first academic conference.
3. Got my first article accepted for publication.
4. Finally sweet-talked my way into AHRC funding.
5. Got upgraded from MPhil to PhD status.
6. Had my first experience of teaching, during which I marked 53 essays, scratched out more apostrophes than I could count, produced about 15,000 words of handouts and notes, and realised that I love doing it quite desperately much.
I have two sort-of resolutions:
1. To keep better notes (read: any notes at all) on all the random spontaneous ideas I have for my thesis. Given that one of the main thrusts behind my research is that the stuff I'm studying is becoming increasingly the default in Anglo-American media landscapes, pretty much every time I open a book or load up a game or turn on the tv or go to the cinema these days I end up thinking about my thesis - but at the moment, I'm not doing anything with those thoughts. So in an attempt to be generally more productive and also, you know, make my thesis better and have actual cutting-edge and relevant content and things, I have purchased notebooks and am making an effort to grab for them whenever I have thinky-thoughts.
2. To make better use of my down-time. I don't mean trying to fill my time with Useful and Worthy things, although I maybe should make more of an effort to do that. I've just found over the last year that I'm increasingly capable of falling into stretches of completely wasted time, where not only am I not doing anything useful, I'm not doing anything fun, either - just running boredly through compulsive cycles of website or email or w/e checking. So I'm going to try and make a conscious effort, whenever I find myself getting caught up like that, to switch to doing something I'll actually enjoy - gaming, or reading, or writing fic, or watching a film, or posting on lj instead of just mindlessly trawling through it.
So with that resolution, expect reviews of Sherlock Holmes, City of Ass Glass, and Where the Wild Things Are to come soon, along with ramblings about my new Christmas games and anime, and possibly some Ema/Franziska fic if I can make my words start working for me again.
Christmas was lovely and restful, and therefore staggeringly uninteresting to post about. I am pleased, though, that I managed to leave work alone for long enough to break the epic burnout I had reached by the end of last term, and am now spontaneously wanting to get back to my thesis. Let's see how long this lasts, eh?
Hope 2010 is suitably awesome for all of you <3
This year, I have:
1. Written approximately 55,000 words of thesis chapters, conference papers, journal articles/reviews, presentations, not including drafts.
2. Presented at my first academic conference.
3. Got my first article accepted for publication.
4. Finally sweet-talked my way into AHRC funding.
5. Got upgraded from MPhil to PhD status.
6. Had my first experience of teaching, during which I marked 53 essays, scratched out more apostrophes than I could count, produced about 15,000 words of handouts and notes, and realised that I love doing it quite desperately much.
I have two sort-of resolutions:
1. To keep better notes (read: any notes at all) on all the random spontaneous ideas I have for my thesis. Given that one of the main thrusts behind my research is that the stuff I'm studying is becoming increasingly the default in Anglo-American media landscapes, pretty much every time I open a book or load up a game or turn on the tv or go to the cinema these days I end up thinking about my thesis - but at the moment, I'm not doing anything with those thoughts. So in an attempt to be generally more productive and also, you know, make my thesis better and have actual cutting-edge and relevant content and things, I have purchased notebooks and am making an effort to grab for them whenever I have thinky-thoughts.
2. To make better use of my down-time. I don't mean trying to fill my time with Useful and Worthy things, although I maybe should make more of an effort to do that. I've just found over the last year that I'm increasingly capable of falling into stretches of completely wasted time, where not only am I not doing anything useful, I'm not doing anything fun, either - just running boredly through compulsive cycles of website or email or w/e checking. So I'm going to try and make a conscious effort, whenever I find myself getting caught up like that, to switch to doing something I'll actually enjoy - gaming, or reading, or writing fic, or watching a film, or posting on lj instead of just mindlessly trawling through it.
So with that resolution, expect reviews of Sherlock Holmes, City of Ass Glass, and Where the Wild Things Are to come soon, along with ramblings about my new Christmas games and anime, and possibly some Ema/Franziska fic if I can make my words start working for me again.
Christmas was lovely and restful, and therefore staggeringly uninteresting to post about. I am pleased, though, that I managed to leave work alone for long enough to break the epic burnout I had reached by the end of last term, and am now spontaneously wanting to get back to my thesis. Let's see how long this lasts, eh?
Hope 2010 is suitably awesome for all of you <3