Weekend's end

[tarigwaemir]

Haste Street on the Feast of Basilicas of Sts. Peter and Paul

Whoa, there are suddenly a lot of fics to read. (owari's new multichapter, corbeaun's update to "A Season for Black Chrysanthemums", murinae's drabbles, just to name a few.)

No progress on fifthmus. >_< It's due in about three and a half weeks, so I still feel complacent, although I shouldn't be. The deadline for India and the Conundrum is also hitting me in the nose yet again so that's probably first on the writing priority list.

Those of you subscribed to infinityblog will have noticed the unusual surge in activity yesterday (given that the blog is usually updated, at best, once a month). I'm reposting my old LiveJournal entries on books starting from 2002 on the blog, so the blog will see more activity than usual for the next few months. I'm also reading more nowadays and managing to more or less catch up with my bookblogging. I think it's the effect of visiting a public library on a regular basis again. Having a three-week limit really motivates you to finish reading the books you've taken out, and you can't resist the temptation to borrow more when you return them.

My haul from yesterday's library visit: Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton (Victorian dragons!), A Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett (on jaebi_lit's recommendation), Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (on account of reading Flaubert's Parrot), A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (I know, I know, I've only gotten around to it now), and Sampath: The Printer of Malgudi by R.K. Narayan (so I can finally finish reading all the Malgudi novels).

Spent yesterday sleeping in and watching Musa, which was a good movie although not as wonderful as I'd expected it to be. About a Korean delegation to the Ming dynasty, which gets caught up trying to rescue a Ming princess (Zhang Ziyi) from the Mongols (remnants of the former Yuan dynasty). I've always wondered how these bilingual movies work (bilingual dramas are usually failures), but Musa did a good job at both acknowledging the language barrier while not letting it become a barrier to the characters' acting. Thought the love triangle was annoying but at least the jealousy was kept to a low simmer. Yeosol was pretty awesome--a little too awesome at times because I kept wondering how a slave would learn how to wield a spear that well. Felt more sympathy for Choi-janggun, even though he was a horrible leader and a classist jerk.

I also went to the MCB Follies, where the grad students in my program submit funny movies parodying themselves, their advisors, and science in general. (Tangent: some of you may remember this video about a stolen laptop circulating around college mailing lists. I watched it before I even knew I was going to Berkeley, so when a parody video of it was shown at Follies, I was surprised to realize that now I know this professor. He taught the first third of the class I'm taking, plus he even knows my name and always says hello to me when he sees me in the building. Isn't that crazy?) To get an idea of some of the videos that are shown in Follies, here's a famous one from last year: Brokeback Rotation.

Met with ladydaera today and walked around the Westfield mall at Powell Street. I bought two reference books on Perl at Borders, spending $80 in the process, ouch. Ended up not buying the $50 Perl Reference, although maybe by the end of this rotation I might find myself investing in one. (Maybe I should ask my parents to get me that for Christmas.)

Yours &c.

Post-script: Editing to add that finally my Perl script works! Ugh. What's infuriating is that I rewrote the script in four different ways before I found out that the first way would have worked fine as long as I hadn't gotten ambitious and embedded a section of code in a subroutine. What's sad is that I spent all day on Friday plus the past two hours trying to write this script, and all it does is convert files of one format into another.

Post-post-script: Also, I just figured out how to access IRC via Terminal (Unix shell application on Mac OSX). I love Unix. When I have enough money to buy a laptop, it will be a Linux machine.

Comments

[owari.livejournal.com]

You're better off reading corbeaun's updated fic. Mine is long and full of fail. XD

Good luck with your fifthmus entry~! I know a lot of people are starting to panic about approaching deadlines, so I hope everything goes well for you there. ♥

[fromastudio]

Hey Tari! Erm, this is just a nudge about the renga project at modus_scribendi? It's finally underway, and the stanzas so far are at here.

It's uhh, manage to come around to your turn so far. You are good at organising things *flatters, wheedles*, so if you could come up with something that lends the piece so far a bit more organisation, that would be wonderful.

[fromastudio]

(...and uhh, no pressure if you're busy; this isn't a time-limited thing at all.)

[troisroyaumes]

Oh, I saw the thread last night but didn't expect it to be my turn so soon! I, uh, tried my best to organize by referencing images from all the previous poems, but I'm not sure if I entirely succeeded. ^_^;;

[fromastudio]

no, that looks awesome. I always knew you were amazing. :P

[schwimmerin.livejournal.com]

Ooh, how did you like Flaubert's Parrot? I thought it was quite fun. I read it in my Lit and Arts A (of course, the only things we manage to read in common are things I read for class).

Glad you're seeing at least one good college friend on occasion ;)

[troisroyaumes]

I liked it a lot! Got me to pick up Madame Bovary again too, so now I'm reading that. Also have Julian Barnes' other books on my to-read list as well, since I'm weak to experimental novels. XD

How are you by the way and how was your Thanksgiving?

[schwimmerin.livejournal.com]

My Thanksgiving was unconventional. It's the second time I've spent it out of the country and it just doesn't really feel like Thanksgiving, it's just like any other day. ;) How about yours?

Otherwise I'm doing pretty well, thanks.