In a little more than a month I'll be turning 40. Most of my friends are in their late 20s, so it's a weird place to stand socially. I'm considering throwing myself a fantastic 40 party with a kind of boozy alice-in-wonderland type theme, but we'll see if I change my mind 50 times between now and then or not ( Read more... )

I post them elsewhere, so I thought I'd post 'em here too....

Setting The Table: The Aesthetics of Hannibal
Bryan Fuller and David Slade are major talents, so coming into the project I was immediately aware that this was a chance to do something complex and haunting. In our first conversation, Bryan invoked the painter Francis Bacon as a reference ( Read more... )

Richard Stillman is coming to talk on our campus

Tuskegee experiment - details on national health conspiracies that were ... well... real

The etymology of conspiracy : conspire
c.1300, from O.Fr. conspirer, from L. conspirare "to agree, unite, plot," lit. "to breathe together," from com- "together" + spirare "to breathe" (see spirit). ( Read more... )

Monday was, to quote, "A rare and historic occasion, bringing critics AZUMA Hiroki and MIYADAI Shinji together in dialogue with North American scholars for the first time outside of Japan." And it happened at our University.

( And these guys?  They are so frigging smart )

Ok, first off, check out this meta (link via sl_podcast )

What you want, what you need: fans and endings, and narrative satisfactions

From the article:
Authors are readers, and authors desire order and satisfaction as well. But the job of an author is to suspend satisfaction, that is, to sustain the reader's desire so she'll finish the story. Therefore ( Read more... )

nemo_88 did something really lovely over at her journal, and I thought I'd try it.  This is the second of hopefully three posts - icons, manips, banners, where I'm going to post my very first graphics and describe why I shudder at them and what I could've done better, if I knew then what I know now (or something like that ( Read more... )

nemo_88 did something really lovely over at her journal, and I thought I'd try it.  This is the first of hopefully three posts - icons, manips, banners, where I'm going to post my very first graphics and describe why I shudder at them and what I could've done better, if I knew then what I know now (or something like that ( Read more... )

Let’s talk about a girl. A girl in the woods. Trying to go somewhere, but they’re never good woods. Dry leaves stick up little edges under her feet. She tries to walk softer, but that just makes the edges stab deeper ( Read more... )

Wow.  A friend of mine sent me links tonight to the youtube trailer for the Japanese version of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books called Gedo Senki.  We were bemoaning the fact that it's not going to show up in the US until 2009 because the SciFi channel (that made one of the CRAPPIEST book to TV adaptations I've ever seen) holds the rights to the ( Read more... )