Just read Palin's resignation statement. My inner English major just slit its wrists. And I think I sprained something in my head trying to make sense of it.

MEDIC!

But seriously, what? Maybe there's some kind of medical/family emergency, and that would make sense, but... bzuh? Drugs? Aliens with mind-control rays? The Illuminati?

If you haven't seen it yet, it's on the front page of her website. The quotation marks sprinkled throughout it seemingly at random leave me fearing for her sanity, though. It's about one step from the benchmark of wingnut writing, random capslocking.

Well, just finished the first complete edit of Throne of Nightmares. It's settled down into 27 chapters.

I'm pleased.

So I got an e-mail today, from the Japanese department. The literature class I signed up to take has been moved from TR 1400-1515 to MW 1500-1615. This means that it's now in direct conflict with the field geology class that I HAVE TO TAKE if I'm going to earn my geology degree. There is only ONE OTHER FUCKING COURSE that I could take for Japanese that DOESN'T conflict with the field geology class, which is Classical Japanese. I'd be willing to take it, but registration for it is closed.

I am so incredibly pissed off right now that it's making me dizzy. The person who is going to teach the literature course is actually new and doesn't even have an e-mail address yet. But basically, unless that teacher is willing to work around the fact that for all of August and September I won't be able to make Mondays because I'll be IN THE FIELD, I'll have to drop the class. And there isn't another class I can take.

I've e-mailed the undergraduate adviser for the department, because it's the only other thing I could think of. I have no idea if I'm going to be able to work anything out.

So I may very well just have gotten fucked out of my second major.

So, around 6:30-ish, I opened my Throne of Nightmares stuff to do a bit of light editing. Mostly in the later chapters, because that's where I had my ideas.

Six hours later, and I'm done my initial pass through chapter 11.

I forgot how much I love this story. It's still the best thing I've ever written. And it feels good to be working with it again.

But holy shit do I need to go to bed.

(possible tiny minor spoilers)

So there were explosions!

And slow motion!

And explosions!

In slow motion!

And people running from explosions!

In slow motion!

I think this movie does present an intriguing answer to the metaphysical question of, "Just how many explosions must a man run from in super slo-mo, before you call him a man?" The answer is not so much blowing in the wind as a giga-fuckton.

All kidding aside, I thought it was a fun movie. I liked it. I'll probably buy the DVD, because I did a lot of bouncing and squeeing over pretty much all the scenes that can be summed up as 'By the way, in case you forgot, the military is FUCKING AWESOME.' You can certainly tell the movie was made with the full blessing of the US military, and some of the shit in there was just crazy cool - like the surveillance drone. Oh, and railgun on a destroyer? I just vibrated out of my seat with glee.

So, it's not classic cinema, but it's a lot of fun, and has some incredibly cute parts. Of the bones I have to pick:
a) The twins made me cringe at times.
b) The constant inappropriately timed relationship talk made me roll my eyes.
c) The movie could probably have done with being 10-15 minutes shorter and it would have tightened the plot.

I'm not sure why people are saying it's not easy to follow. It's pretty straightforward. With explosions. Lots of explosions. I'll also admit that while I liked the autobots okay, all of my favorites in the movie were actually the soldiers. Though don't get me wrong. Optimus is still awesome.

And how did I not realize that Hugo Weaving is the voice of Megatron? Maybe if he'd said "Mr. Anderson" I would have picked up on it.

So yes. Fun. Explodey. Explodey fun. Worth seeing it in the theater.

And the US military? We're number one, baby.

A couple thoughts on the previews:

Okay, I might actually give in and see the Half Blood Prince movie, as well as the next one. It looks good. And I liked the book, but not as much as I liked Prisoner of Azkaban so I can probably see it and enjoy it with the minimal amount of brain melting.

I'm still not over the Avatar movie having a white kid cast as Aang. I'm trying to let go of my bitterness. I swear. It'll just take time. Hopefully I'll have gotten the hell over it that I can enjoy the movie by the time it comes out next summer.

And saw the preview for whatever the next awful sparkly vampire movie is. Seriously, does the mannequin they've cast as the lead actor have more than two facial expressions? From everything I've seen, he's got Blank and Grimace and that's about it. Bleh. I've seen better attempts at chemistry come out of the freshman I was trapped in lab with last semester. Though I will say that the preview contained the BEST on-screen werewolf transition between human and wolf. So good for them. Maybe we can set the movie on fire other than that scene?

And now for something completely different.

Going to catch a shower now. I went for a swim earlier and didn't have a chance to get a shower in before the movie. But Mike and Sin were nice enough to sit next to someone that smelled like a pool and not say anything about it.

I'm going to start working on the Throne of Nightmars edit and put the other project on hold. I had some really good ideas hit me while I was swimming today, and if nothing else, the book has made up its mind. It wants to be a YA novel. Which if nothing else means the rewrites will be a little less overwhelming. We'll see if I can make that work.

Woo, I spent money today! Go me!

Most of it was necessary money. I bought myself two new pairs of shoes. I came to the conclusion that one of my old pairs was giving me the horrendous blisters I got during AAPG, and the other I've completely blown the backs out of, so they were giving me blisters too. So yay, new shoes! We'll see how long it takes me to chew these ones apart with all the walking I've been doing. I'll take it as a mark of achievement, really, since it'll mean I've been getting more exercise.

I also stopped by Barnes & Noble in the hope that they'd still have copies of last week's Newsweek, which was guest edited by Stephen Colbert. I desperately want a copy. Alas, they only had this week's. If anyone knows where I can get a copy of that magazine, I'd be oh so grateful. I tried the Newsweek website, but as far as I can tell, you can only buy subscriptions, not single issues.

Also at B&N, I went ahead and bought a couple books. Mostly because I saw one book that I simply could not live without, and decided what the hell, I might as well get a couple more while I was at it. So:
The Shadow Queen by Anne Bishop (this is the one that I HAD TO HAVE)
Kushiel's Mercy by Jacqueline Carrey (since I spied it in paperback)
Empress by Karen Miller (I've been hearing amazing things about this series so decided to give it a whirl)

There's been a guy on the 16th street mall for the last couple of days, holding a sign that, among other things, says, "Chaos is Satan." He's actually one of the nicest crazy people with signs I've ever seen on the mall (way, way, WAY nicer than Jesus Saves/Hillary is a murder whore guy) so I let him hand me a little flier this morning because what the heck, why not. In all honesty, I feel a little proud of our very sweet Colorado-grown (I'm guessing) nutter. He's got one of the most readable crazy sites I've ever been to... the color scheme is okay-ish, there's really a minimum of random capitalization and ellipses. (If you do a comparison, he really comes across saner than your average terrifying, frothing at the mouth Christian.)

So if you're curious, I present to you, straight from 16th street to your computer screen: Universal Church Of Man

Though I think he does get extra crazy points for having a geocities site rather than his own domain. Though those points get redeemed a bit since you really have to dig before you can find a mention of the Illuminati.

• 12:27 @ Lasseter Ranch. Best so far was steer cuddling up to a ranch hand's truck & knocking the side mirror off. #

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• 16:57 OMG. Just watched the first episode of Colbert in Iraq. MADE OF WIN. You can watch it from the comedy central site. Start @ June 8th. #
• 17:34 The 9/11 "truthers" are out on the mall again. All 2 of them. Yawn. #

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• 18:19 Yes, I have joined the borg collective known as Twitter. No. I'm not following anyone, probably ever. Just doing it for the batch update ... #

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Well, third and final day of the AAPG Convention is done. My dogs are barkin', so to speak. I've been on my feet a lot for the last few days and have done a ridiculous amount of walking. Which is good, because I need all the exercise I can get, but also a bit bad since you should see my interesting array of blisters.

This was actually the first professional convention that I've ever attended - before now, it's all been anime, gaming, and skeptical conventions. It was very different, atmosphere-wise. Though I think some of that might be because I was pretty much by myself the whole time, though I did run in to some of my coworkers and walk around a bit with them. (Not the same thing as being around one's good friends, though.) It just seemed more serious and intense and also overwhelming, since it was so enormous.

The exhibition floor was HUGE, and some of the booths... well, I wouldn't even call them booths. The one that sticks out the most in my mind was Saudi Aramco's, which was enormous, made of wood paneling, and had two floors, the upper of which someone told me was a bar, but he could have just been fucking with me. On the lower floor there was someone in a black fest and bow tie serving coffee, however. So I guess that's what companies do at conventions, when they have a lot of money and want to impress people. Quite a few of the other "booths" were similarly large and had lots of space for people to sit around and talk business, or for companies to give demonstrations of new software or the like.

I honestly found the exhibition floor kind of intimidating, so I didn't spend much time there other than a couple of walkthroughs just to see the sights. I'm still just a student, and while some of the new software packages that were on display were pretty cool (particularly the new seismic software from Kingdom) I didn't feel really comfortable sitting down for what was basically an extended sales pitch. Everyone was very friendly, but with how I feel about crowds and lots of new people, that often amounted to Way Too Friendly.

So I spent most of my time looking at the poster sessions and oral sessions. The poster sessions were interesting - people would basically put up visual presentations of whatever paper they were presenting, and you could look it over at your leisure and then ask them some questions if you wanted. A lot of it was incredibly specialized and way over my head, but I found a few that I really enjoyed and felt like I got something out of, mostly related to fluvial sedimentation models. The oral sessions were my favorite, though. They were oral presentations of scientific papers, normally half a day's worth at a time on a particular theme. I stuck to the sessions about sedimentation and stratigraphy, since I had the best chance of being able to understand and learn. (I tried to poke my head in on some of the tight gas sandstone sessions and gave up quickly.) Some very interesting stuff there.

My favorite was actually this afternoon, which was the astrogeology theme. The even more specialized theme was impacts, so all of the talks were about geology as related to meteor impacts. Most of them were regarding terrestrial impacts, but the first two papers were about impacts in the solar system and on the moon, which were very, very cool. I know there are at least a few graduate level astrogeology courses at CU, so maybe if I can manage to get in to grad school, I can get some of those in.

So, that was the convention. I'm very glad that I went, but I'm looking forward to being back in the relative peace and quiet of my office tomorrow.

* * *

Let's see... what else has been going on.

On Saturday, I got to play in an L5R game and it was pretty awesomely fun. I built a character unlike anything I normally play (she's a social monkey) and it turned out really well. I'm looking forward to the next game.

Last week, we had Qwest DSL installed and canceled Comcast. I was initially pretty pumped about that, since I have some issues with Comcast, but almost immediately we had problems with the DSL. It kept dropping us off, giving us lots of errors, and the internet would run very slowly or simply go down for sometimes an hour at a time. After a lot of calling Qwest (and the last time, being honestly a little more hostile than I should have been to the poor schlub on the phone) they sent out another tech yesterday. That tech found that a piece of Qwest equipment in the box on our house was putting out "a horrible noise on the line" that the other tech "probably didn't hear because he wasn't listening to the dial tone." So the tech replaced the equipment, and it's been perfect since. Here's hoping.

Got my rejection letter for my story from Analog today. I definitely expected it. I just need to figure out where I should farm the story out next. I do have to say one thing... Analog was incredibly quick with the rejection, which I appreciate.

I've been clinging to my cats a lot for the last couple days. I read about something really awful that upset me a lot - I'm not going to go in to more detail than that, because I really wish I could unread it and it's STILL bothering me. But hugging my kitties makes it a little better, and I also donated money to the ASPCA. Both of the boys are certainly enjoying being fussed over.

I also donated money last week to Medical Students for Choice in honor of Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered in a terrorist act a little over a week ago. Thinking about it both saddens and angers me; I think Dr. Tiller deserves to be remembered as both a friend to and a hero for women, many of whom were experiencing the worst days of their lives when they came to him for help. I'm just hoping the next generation of doctors will have the courage and fortitude to follow in his footsteps, particularly since the threat of violence has become ever more clear. I would also like to hope that some day soon the hateful rhetoric will die down and the violence will end, but it only seems to become more frightening and venomous with each passing year.

What a downer to end an LJ post on.

By the way, I got to see Kat, Aki, and Minmin on Saturday since it was Minmin's first birthday! It was so much fun. We had ice cream cake and Minmin had a sugar-free carrot cake to smoosh. She made a mess and had a lot of fun with it. It was nice to hang out with Kat, Aki, and Kat's parents after. We even all went to dinner together, which was great. Can't wait to see them again! It's just crazy how big Minami's getting. I love that kid so much.

Well, I didn't go into work today. I ended up eating dinner really late last night, which was a mistake. I felt so awful this morning that it wasn't to be believed. And of course, the reason that I ate so late last night? I was trying to go swimming. And they closed the pool five freaking minutes before I got there because there was a storm overhead. I can't imagine why, since it's an indoor pool, but whatever. So no swimming and a crappy stomach. What an evening.

Anyway, feeling better now but I'm being a loser and just staying home for the whole day. I ate some oatmeal around noon and it's sitting all right, but I'm still being kind of urpy, so probably best to just take it easy.

If I get really motivated later, maybe I'll clean the bathroom. I did discover that one of the couch cushions smelled like cat pee. I'm pretty sure it wasn't one of my boys that did it... it's one of those things you notice if you sit on a wet couch cushion. I think it's residual cat pee from the previous owner. Anyway, I threw the cover in the washing machine and did my best to rinse out the foam cushion. I soaked it down really well with Nature's Miracle first and let it sit, then rinsed it out more with water. Let me tell you, I've got new respect for the washer women of yesteryear. Just trying to wash the cushion and then squeeze it out almost did me in. Hopefully it will no longer be all smelly. Seems okay now, but we'll see how it is when it's dry.

And that's my exciting life. I've been doing some writing, having fun with my friends, and playing a ridiculous amount of WoW since I'm now a Guild Master and I don't have homework. It's pretty fun.

Here's an interesting study to read: The Irony of Satire

...though unless you really like you some statistics, I'd recommend just skimming the methods and results sections. I found them to be a bit rough going, and I didn't really understand the statistical analysis, since they use very different methods than I'm used to. Because, and I admit this might be a bit of a stretch, people aren't the same as rocks.

Anyway. What I found so interesting about this study (and I admit, I'm WAY behind on linking to it, so you've probably all already read about it) was that since Stephen Colbert stays in character so well for his program, it allowed people to basically interpret his humor in whatever way reinforced their political ideology.

Interpretation of information in a way that reinforces one's own view isn't necessarily surprising. I mean, anyone that's been even peripherally involved in the skeptic's movement has intimate knowledge of how people will interpret [tortuously at times] scientific facts and papers (and occasionally engage in the time honored hobby of just making shit up) to get the world into line with their own view. But what got me on this one is that it seems to obvious, so blatant, so apparent what Colbert is making fun of.

...but then it would to me, right? It is deadpan satire. I'm sure it seems just as obvious to people on the obvious end of the political spectrum. Though I also hold the advantage of probably being more right than the other side (though not necessarily 100%) since Colbert is a self-proclaimed Democrat, and has in the past characterized his fictional self as, "a fool who has spent a lot of his life playing not the fool — one who is able to cover it at least well enough to deal with the subjects that he deals with."

In the discussion section of the paper, there's some very interesting points the authors make about how this effect may lead to more factions within society becoming even stronger, because it helps people convince themselves of the rightness of their own position. I imagine there's added spice in this case, since it is supported by the mockery of the "other side."

All in all, interesting paper, and I thought it was pretty well written. One thing I have noticed is that a lot of people seem to be walking away with the wrong lesson on this one. What I've been seeing on a lot of blogs is "Haw haw, Republicans r stoopid, they don't get Colbert is making fun of them." But that isn't the point, not by a long shot. The point is that we are all capable of falling in to this trap. We are all capable of automatically assuming that someone is on our side and supporting our viewpoint unless it is blatantly pointed out to us by that person what the true intent of their humor is. It should be a call to be skeptical of assuming that someone agrees with us, if nothing else.

They might just be making fun of us, after all.

Aside: Well, this effect probably explains why Colbert was invited to the 2006 Correspondent's Dinner, huh.

* * *

Still having a hard time getting in to the work groove, but it's slowly happening. I'm researching a particular formation right now, so I'm currently in literature search mode. It's interesting, for sure.

Also, I've finally started working on a short story that I originally wrote a couple of years ago, and hammering it into something readable with the help of Isaac and David. Anyone out there have a bit of spare time to give it a read once I've finished the last of the large additions/edits?

Actually mailed this off two days ago, but haven't had a chance to post it until now.

* * *

( Text of letter. )

Saw the new Star Trek movie last night. It is full of 100% win, and I'm looking forward to seeing a new round of Star Trek movies. Love love love. I will not squee in more detail at the moment to avoid spoilers, but YOU MUST GO SEE IT. NOW. Even if you're not a Trek nerd like me. I think they did a good job of restarting the universe and making it accessible to more people, while giving the hardcore Trek nerds stuff to love, too.

Skepticamp was a ton of fun. I got to see a lot of people I haven't seen since basically last year, thanks to school being so hellish. Hung out with them a bit afterward, which was fun. And my presentation was a success, I think. I didn't drool on myself, I got some laughs, and most people did seem genuinely interested in what I was talking about - I even got a few questions at the end, only one of which I had to throw to my geologist buddy Shawn. So, all in all, I think it was very successful. And even cooler, Shawn needs a roomie for TAM, so it looks like I can make it to TAM this year! WOOHOO!

I've finally gotten back into drinking tea - basically, what I bought when I was over in Japan visiting Nick and Chelsea what, a couple of years ago? But it's still good! And I was starting to feel all said because I'm running out of "Cookie" tea, but guess what! I don't think it had much of a US web presence back then, but Lupicia has a nice US site now and they've got my tea!

Happiness ensues.

I finished my geochem exam in about 40 minutes, way ahead of everyone else. So I either rocked it, or had no idea what the hell I was doing. I think it's mostly the former, though I think I did make an error on the last question. Doh. But I think it was okay.

Also, I finally finished watching Buffy, and have started watching Angel. Hands down, Angel is superior in every way to Buffy. First season, and I love this show. I'm glad I've got another four seasons to watch. The funny thing is, after watching Buffy, in the end Buffy was my least favorite character, and Angel my second least favorite. This show's changing my opinion of Angel as a character, though.

Well, the first round of finals on Saturday wasn't too mind-bleedingly awful. There were only two questions that I didn't know how to answer for the Chemistry exam, so here's hoping. I'm not going to hold my breath, because I felt okay about the other exams and still go very crappy grades on them. The second exam wasn't really an exam; I just had to sit there and listen to all of my classmates give their presentations in the Writing in the Geosciences class. (I volunteered to give mine on Wednesday, so I didn't have to do anything on Saturday.) Still, it was a bit like torture, since it was basically the same presentation about glaciers and global sea level, over and over and over and OVER. So I spent most of my time watching the Blizzard guild recruitment forum as my ass slowly went numb from sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair.

The rest of the weekend's been pretty chill. I've been studying, but not sweating it too much. I think I'm going to do okay on geochem. And how I'll do on Japanese is anyone's guess, but Suzuki-sensei doesn't really seem to write tests that it's possible to study for. At least not well. I think I'm going to go swimming this morning (since I can't tonight) and probably again on Thursday, since Friday I want to go to Colorado Springs and tell Kat's class about how awesome rocks are.

Mike's parents arrived on Sunday night and we went to Las Delicias last night for dinner. I had my first margarita of the summer and it was most excellent.

John Scalzi gives President Obama a well deserved 'F' for his first 100 days in office.

And now, time for class. I studied chemistry last night. I will study more tonight. My brain is already crying.

Dear Snow,

I know over the years, we've had some wonderful times together, most of them involving me being eight years old and in a snow suit. That said, and I do not make this decision lightly, I think that we should start seeing other people.

Respectfully yours,
Katsu


(...at least it's not sticking to the roads, at least not yet.)

[whining about finals being less than seven days away]

[whining about giant piles of homework that have been present for the last month]

[whining about being tired]

Fin.