snarp’s blog

On Monday, a bunch of us in Renaissance Lit took a trip to a prison to see the Shakespeare Behind Bars guys from this documentary rehearse, and talked to them afterwards. I didn’t find out about the shootings in Virginia until we got back at about 11:00 at night. I’m kind of assimilating the whole visit and probably won’t post about it more than this.

Apparently, though, I do feel comfortable talking about shitty news coverage of the shootings.

Professor Portentous let us get slightly off-topic in Confucian Classics today (yesterday), presumably because, you know, we’re mostly East Asian Studies majors in there, and we’d darn well better have an opinion. Inse said he turned Fox on to see just how horrible their coverage was, and apparently O’Reilly said something along the lines of, “Exactly how did a South Korean get hold of two guns?” O’Reilly is big on the gun control. He feels it is an important issue worthy of serious thought. He also knows the difference between South and North Korea, and the state of the US’s diplomatic relations thereto.

Prof. Portentous then got us back onto the subject of, you know, the Confucian Classics, and asked whether we could connect The Guy’s behavior to any specific failure to follow Confucian guidelines. Silence. I say, “No.” “No?” “No. We can’t know that. I mean, we don’t need to know that.”

I’d looked at some of the links posted on BoingBoing and suchlike, but - this is why I need to stop reading BoingBoing. It fetishizes tragedy the same way the mainstream media does - why did I say mainstream. This is BoingBoing. It is mainstream. There are always a few good links in there when they’re covering a developing story, but they’re mixed in with a lot of shit, some of it insanely journalistically irresponsible.

For instance, they linked to some poor guy with a slightly similar name’s Flickr page, and several students’ accounts of what had happened on their personal sites - and some of these kids were clearly pretty rattled and only really posting to let off stress and tell their friends they were okay. They don’t need this kind of exposure right now. And I like how, in the midst of her own reveling in tragedy, Jardin sanctimoniously links to this guy’s discussion of the harmfulness of obsessive television coverage of school shootings. Nary a synapse fires in her head.

Okay. Anyway, I’d looked at some of the stuff posted on BoingBoing, but only some, and wasn’t totally sure what the guy’s nationality was. I did look at some of his creative writing. It looked like something the Something Awful guys would write.

In an attempt to change the subject (because I did not want to sit there listening to people vaguely talking about mass murder in terms of “ritual propriety”) I brought this up in class. I said that whatever his ethnic background, his writing style indicated that he was “pretty assimilated into American culture,” and that therefore the journalists who felt it necessary to constantly refer to him as “the South Korean shooter” were engaging in “rash speech” and “careless thought,” and thus were failing to uphold their responsibility to society.

It’s weird using Confucian vocabulary to say stuff, you sound very glib. (Unless you’re Professor Portentous, of course.)

Aside from asking me to explain Something Awful, and asking for the URL on learning that it “satirized American culture,” he then let me off the hook for a while, and other people cheerfully expressed their own dubiousness of Bill O’Reilly’s chances of achieving authoritative conduct at this late point in his life (see Analects 9.22), and the sadly low likelihood of Fox president Rupert Murdoch’s being recognized by all men as a sage king, and being followed as water follows the slant of the earth.

But I was serious.

(On the subject, I’m glad -ing Imus got fired. Mom, tell Dad I’m glad -ing Imus got fired. Dad did stop listening to him, like, a couple years ago, right? Tell him I have expectations of his taste.)

Professor Portentous: Now if everyone will look at passage 20 -

1: I don’t think it would be very authoritative (ren) of us to have class today.

Prof: You don’t?

1: I think it would better demonstrate our love of learning (haoxue) if we went outside and applied our concentration (zhong) to, you know, watching the pretty birds and refining our empathy (shu) for them.

2: Yeah, that would be pretty appropriate (yi), you must admit.

3: And also sweet.

1: Possibly even exemplary (junzi)!

Prof: Well, as Zhu Xi says, study for class should only account for twenty percent of your learning as a whole. Right now it’s time for that twenty percent. Now everyone turn to passage 20.

2, stage-whisper: I thought that that suggestion was very much in line with ritual propriety (li).

1, stage-whisper: So did I!

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

( ANTONIO: I know not why I am so sad. *is so sad* )

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Mom: What was the big paper about?

Me: Uhhh… Iago, basically. Like, from Othello, not from Disney.

Mom: And what was the big computer assignment about?

Me: WaaaAGH I CAN’T EXPLAIN IT TO NORMAL PEOPLE!

Mom: Okay -

Me: IT HAS NO PRACTICAL APPLICATION it’s sort of a simulator, of something you don’t know what is -

Mom: So I don’t -

Me: - it’s a simulator of something that doesn’t exist! It’s like I made a toy unicorn -

Mom: Okay! Okay! I get it!

TITUS: Man, what the fuck is wrong with me?

AARON: No, what the fuck is wrong with me! (Me!)

*LAVINIA has no frickin’ hands anymore.*

LITTLE LUCIUS: What the fuck is wrong with Lavinia?

TITUS: She’s fine! *kills her because there is something fucking wrong with him*

AARON: I work at a goth club. Bartending. In the dark. THE NASTY SYMBOLIC RACIAL DARK THAT IS

*AARON’S KID is maybe Othello? Symbolically?*

Computer Science - No one from my class last semester is taking this, because it usually comes after this math class, even though it’s apparently only important a couple of places. I decried Nova for his cowardice. He accused me of being a substandard second-semester senior, because I am taking a hard class I don’t technically need. I think I countered with a remark about his hair, but I was running late and so couldn’t play the Well My Implementation Of Quicksort Was Faster card for the KO.

Link’s in the class, though.

Confucian Classics - We are going to read the Confucian classics, discuss them in great detail, and keep journals about our feelings about them. This class might be completely ridiculous.

No one I know is in it; every other senior East Asian Studies major is doing senior research right now and refusing to touch a 300-level, and a bunch of the juniors are abroad or already taking another class with the same professor, who assigns obscene amounts of reading in all his classes. This, too, I call cowardice. I took two of his classes at once last year and did fine.

Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Renaissance Literature - This class is going to be completely awesome. It is quadruply cross-listed as an English\Black Studies\Queer Studies\Women’s Studies course (possibly some kind of university record, it seems), and it started out with a gratuitous explanation of the zodiac and a Brief History of the Sex Lives of English Monarchs, and That Girl I Hate actually isn’t in it, and apparently the school will be paying for a trip. And it is going to be awesome.

Fourth Class - There isn’t going to be a fourth class. I don’t need one to graduate. Ha.

Meal Plan - None. I got them to cancel it today. HA!

SENSEI GOT TENURE!

HAHAHAHA I DON’T HAVE TO BE ARTICULATE CAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE PAPER WAS FOR I EVEN LEFT OUT AN APOSTROPHE JUST NOW HAHA

Ohhh yes I knew this had to exist. I think I’m about to order it.

It looks like it’s just one volume. The artist’s name is Kihara Toshie - I’d never heard of her before, but when I googled the name I found some pages grouping her with the 49′ers. This manga will definitely be awesome.

Having been awake for 36 hours finishing a thirty-four-page research paper, what do I do? Do I… sleep twelve hours and eat a bunch of junk food? Or do I… sleep slightly less than six hours, then get up and read two more books on the same topic as the paper, and set about purchasing another?

I slept a very short amount of time last night. I think I had a dream, because this conversation is in my head:

did you bite somebody
only slightly

All in lowercase and without punctuation, too. But they were talking out loud. I don’t know.

This was in my paper that I turned in an hour ago or something.

Quick, LiveJournal people - what’s a fairly recent manga where these high-school kids get pulled into another dimension, and one’s a girl with secret powers or something who keeps zoning out and having visions (at least at first), and one’s a dark-brooding type who I guess she’s in a love triangle with, and one’s the blond shouta-con type who’s totally not in the love triangle? This is supposed to pretty popular or something, to the point that it’s probably already licensed but they haven’t got it out yet? (I need a third in my triumvirate of blond shouta-con types with Momiji and Hunny, for part of my gosh-darn paper. I’ve got some others for back-up, but they don’t fit the pattern so perfectly.)

-

Edit 12/21/06 - It was Harukanaru Toki no Naka de.

It seems that Sensei really does think of me when he thinks “Hitler manga.” I finally got the pile of manga I loaned him back today, and he added in a volume of Adolf in Japanese. He made it clear to me that he has never ceased to find this manga’s existence completely hilarious.

(The price tag’s in dollars, so I assume it’s from the tiny-little Japanese used book place in Columbus. I can easily imagine him squeezed in there having a sudden giggling fit over a manga with a frowny Hitler-youth on the cover, while the other, much shorter shoppers slowly edge away from him.)

I now feel like I need to get him something equally ridiculous. I was going to just give all my professors a Green and Black’s bar, but Hitler manga kind of ups the ante. It’s probably too late to try and find someone selling an imp of Akuma…

(In the translations sessions last year, see, we read two or three different short stories that had an Akuma in them somewhere.)

In CS we’d had a contest going on with the last assignment, which was a bunch of sorting algorithms - whoever’s implementations were fastest got an extra such-and-such points on the assignment. We spent all of today’s class timing them. I somehow tentatively tied for first with The Fear, thus completely breaking Sound Effect Jr.’s heart - he and The Fear had been bouncing off the walls about their brilliant optimization ideas, and I’d… left the lab early. (I actually came back for an extra, like, five hours later, but he didn’t see that and thus was surly.)

But I say “tentatively” because Nova, who had come in last in nearly all the other trials, actually won one of the quicksort trials. Unfortunately, he won by a lot. We suspect that his “win” might, in fact, be mathematically impossible. Seeing as his user interface wasn’t complete (gasp!), and we couldn’t check to see whether the array had actually been sorted, the professor assumed something was wrong and gave the point to me (I’d come in second). The Fear and Sound Effect Jr., whose pasty, 110-lb CS-major bodies contain far more testosterone than is healthy for them, were extremely cruel to Nova about all this.

I asked Nova to tell me what that was about when he figured it out, so I could give him a certificate ceding the point if it did turn out he’d inadvertently invented a brilliant new sort that would revolutionize computing. He assured me that he would do so. He was still looking dubiously at his code when I left the room.

I mean, today’s just fired.

(The third round of power outages was the last straw.)

But it does prove something I’ve suspected since the beginning of the semester - no matter how infuriating everything else is, coding always calms me down. I just go into the zone. When I get frustrated about the program, it’s not the big-smile “I WILL PUNCH ANY DEITY IN THE CROTCH” sort of thing I get from papers and whatnot. Your essay or your paper ninja ornament might have an problem that’s just impossible to solve - but your algorithm won’t.

Or, apparently that’s how I look at it.

I just uploaded my last month or so’s stuff to Flickr. (Though most of it’s marked private.) When I was looking through my photos for the animal shelter ads, I thought this puppy picture was cute, but…

…I don’t… it looks like it’s going to transform. Into something bad. I don’t know about this puppy.

(Fortunately, I don’t think it’s the one I actually used in the ad.)

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

1) WAHAHAHA election

2) I got nervous the other day (see: election) and spent something like a third of my paycheck on manga. ( It came today. )

3) Sensei’s giving a talk in a couple hours. Apparently he’s talking about Miyazaki somewhat. I hope he doesn’t switch directly from crazy porn to Miyazaki. I hope he doesn’t say something that makes me start giggling and he gets grumpy at me and takes it out on my research draft.

4) ELECTION

I’m feeling kind of weird and hyper and everything’s-awesome. I hope I don’t hit the bad side of it and die this evening, because I really need to get started on my computer science project.

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GRRR-RAH!

F*******e yourself with cold metal implements, thou worthless debugger!

Grrrrrah…

(Edited much later because the time was randomly way off.)

At school. Finished big programming assignment; will now (or, soon) start on big history paper.

I now have a space heater. It’s kind of loud.

I read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the other day. It got much funnier when I started googling the proper names I didn’t recognize.

I just found a fragment of a button on the floor of my room. I do not know what it came off of, but since I will probably get upset when I find out, perhaps this is for the best.

We watched a video on zen in art this morning, you see. I’m very zen about this clothes problem.

We watched the same video last semester, in Professor Portentous’s early Asian civ class; it has monks who try to stay awake for seven days, and get hit with sticks when they doze off. When it was over, the professor asked us, “Did watching that video make you go to sleep, or get tense? When I watch the monks’ training, oh, it makes me really tense!”

I think this must be kind of a Rorschach test kind of thing - because I am a lazy person, it just made me want to take a nap. The professor, however, is very serious and always kind of nervous and jumpy, and was probably worrying about the fact that she wasn’t sure she could stay awake for seven days, and would get hit with sticks.

When Professor Portentous showed us the film, he left to do something else. Clearly he has attained satori.

(I bet Sensei would giggle.)

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

This semester, I’m in two classes in which I’m the only girl. One’s a history class, which has six students, and the other’s a computer science class, which has five. Both have male professors. I’ve had other classes where I was either the only girl or seriously outnumbered, and while that obviously sometimes gets awkward, it’s generally not so ba

( I abandon all disclaimers THE COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT CAN’T DEAL WITH WOMEN. )

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I bought some manga, and requested some manga off ILL, and also bought some other manga.

It’s important for my senior research. It is.

(The astute viewer, who decides to go into Flickr and zoom in for some reason, will note that I have been puzzling the Quebecois again - I had to order the Pokemon and Princess Knight in French. These are some of the ones I actually seriously needed for research, which makes Sensei unhappy because he’s having to take my word on what they say.

Anyway, I didn’t realize Misty’s French name was “Ondine.” That’s pretty cool. I am, however, far less enthusiastic about Gary being “Regis.”)

Also, apparently the signs were, in fact, the work of a fraternity - it was apparently supposed to stay secret even after the meeting, but someone told Link. I mentioned the subject to him last night, and he admitted he knew, but claimed the only hint he would give me was that the organization started with an “f.”

He then immediately caved under the intense pressure of me deciding he was talking about FLAG.

I named my program “randread” because if you read it wrong it looks like “van dread.”

Sleep deprivation

(this post originally written around 6:00 AM yesterday)