not falling down

The Handmaid’s Tale was everything I expected plus three. I mostly remember it as being one of the choices of summer assignments for Mr. Munson’s junior AP English, and even though my choices were fairly mature (Ordinary People and Catcher in theRye), I can’t help but be impressed that he gave it to unproven high schoolers to read.

I’ve been trying to articulate this thought for like fifteen minutes now, and it’s not coming. It’s something like this: But. The fact that he had the balls to give rising juniors books like Handmaid’s Tale isn’t as impressive, really, as the fact that under him we read them and enjoyed them and understood them. Reason number five hundred sixteen I won’t be a teacher–I could never live up to that.

Anyway. The Truth was even fluffier than I expected it to be, actually, but still not bad. I’m most of the way through Enchantment now, and of course it’s brilliant, in its way, but Card’s books are only getting talkier and I don’t like it. He wrote a book called Character and Viewpoint a long time ago, and while I still consider it one of the best books on writing I’ve ever read, he’s stopped listening to his own advice. I wish he’d show me what his characters are doing instead of telling me what they’re thinking. Ender’s Game works so well because it strikes a balance between those two. Enchantment is close, but no cigar. (Children of the Mind missed the whole damn booth.)

And Minority Report was really good,yadda yadda. I just wish, in a fashion oddly reminiscent of Vanilla Sky, that I hadn’t had to pee so bad for so much of it.

CSC 336 Software Engineering will be taught by Prof. Baxter, who also teaches computerscience at the University of Kentucky. The course has been moved to 8:00-9:30 a.m. TR inOlin 124.

Uh huh. Yup. Fuck theregistrar.

(This line appeared in my head, as a title, just as I finished proofreading this thing: “I walk afine line between literacy and hedonism.” Don’t ask me, I just live here.)

Updates to the site are rapidly decaying, but as it’s summer and nobody comes here now, I think Ican live with it. GSP is a little more work than it was last year, largely because Susan has askedfor my help with her General Studies, whereas Carolyn pretty much told me to take off. Both wayshave their advantages–it’s nice to be needed, but it was nice to have all that free timetoo.

Not that I have a great deal of that anyway, what with talkback books. I have already, in typicalBrendan style, failed to meet one deadline with them, but I don’t think it’ll happen again. Igenerally don’t fall more than once in the same spot. (You are asked not to think of the comic at this time.)

What free time I do have is mostly spent socializing and, failing that, reading. I’ve done more ofthat than I expected, actually. The Word For World Is Forest was great prose, but the story was disappointinglyheavy-handed, and more than a little cliched–Speaker for the Dead did itbetter. Then again, I have to keep reminding myself that the ideas in there are cliches in thefirst place largely because Ursula invented them.

(Weirdly, the site I just found for that link contains my commentary almost word-for-word onTWFWIF. I feel, like… slightly knowledgeable. Or maybe just cliched.)

Hexwood was okay, but then saying something by Diana is “okay” would be “hideous,blinding waste from the pit of Hell” for anyone else. The story was deliberately hard to follow,and the book had an extra chapter at the end just to explain the historical significance of thecharacters who were introduced in the chapter before that. I liked it, really, but I expectedbetter.

Now the good parts: Neverwhere wasn’t as polished as American Gods, but the story was cleaner and the characters some of Neil’s best. I could more than stand a sequel,and I’d like to find out more about the BBC series that inspired it. Actually I want to read itagain right now. Damn.

Finally, the book I finished just yesterday was as good as it’s supposed to be, and that’s reallydamn good. I’ve been meaning to try The Left Hand of Darkness ever since I read the Earthsea books in middle school,but I have a longstanding grudge against “hard” SF that kind of kept me away. All the stuff I don’tlike about it was in TLHOD, all right, but the sheer power of the story and writing made me forgetall about them. Everybody else has said it already, but I want to say it myself: It’s brilliant.It’s worth it.

Reading that really took it out of me, though, so my first of the dozen or so books I got from thelibrary last week is… well, not fluff exactly, but certainly easier than Atwood or Steinbeck(which I have too). So I’m reading The Truth as a treat, and I’ll hold the Feist for after I getthrough The Blind Assassin.

Yeah, it turns out I still like reading.

Oh, and I almost forgot my favorite PAnews item ever:

For us, Zettai Zetsumei Toshi is an allegory for relations between the sexes, and itworks especially well at this because we don’t speak Japanese. She will say things, and we haveno idea what the hell is going on, and then we’ll select from a list of responses, but wehave no idea which one is the right one, and then they’re all wrong. It works on a lot oflevels.

I’mTycho. I like books.

Leonard pluggedme again, which I can only assume is designed to make my heart thunder like a herd of wildwildebeests.

Is that actually redundant? Are there tame wildebeests? That really has me thinking.

Anyway, it could also be part of the Vast Five-Letter Domain Name Conspiracy, but I wouldn’t puttoo much faith in that. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

(Also “crummy” has six letters. I bet you hadto think about that.)

• My first remote update! I am at GSP. It is planning week. I am in List-Making-Mode.

• It’s the smells that set off my memory, and the strongest of those memories, weirdly, are ofthis week last year, rather than GSP proper. Maybe it’s because that’s when I first encounteredthese smells–the same way the smell (odor? miasma?) of Nevin still reminds me of my five weeksthere during my GSP, instead of my whole freshman year.
• Same floor. Same room. Six dumb flights of stairs or the bitchy elevator. And the lights don’twork as well this year.
• But! I get to practice saying “Sixth Todd” as all one syllable again.
• I got Brushfire Fairytales and Dirty Vegas. Both are really good, although I think I like the former better.(Jon, let me know if you want me to burn you a copy of the second. Just to try before you buy, ofcourse.)
• I shouldn’t say this, because Kim and Taylor will probably read it, but I don’t think it reallymatters now. Last year’s campus director was named Laura. This year’s director of seminar is adifferent Laura. The first one is about as gone as you can get, but every time someone mentions thesecond Laura by name, I shudder involuntarily.
• The new campus director is named Joe, and he’s kickass, awesome, right on. I’ve been lookingforward to working with him since the retreat in April, and so far it’s every bit as good as I’dhoped.
• Just finished American Gods, which wasbetter than chocolate (and chocolate, of course, is better than everything).
• I loved our staff last year, and I would have been happy to see any of them return. Not many ofus did–some by choice, some not so much. But the few who did come back… well, if you’re readingthis and you didn’t make it this year, don’t take this the wrong way: again, I loved you all. ButErin, Mooch, Jimmy and Caudill are the ones I would have picked if I’d had four choices, andthey’re all back, and that makes me really happy.
• But.
• B Rich and Harney would have been in my picks too, except I knew they were going to be head RAslast year anyway. And they’re brilliant and exactly right for the job, and it’s going to be a goodtime, with them around.
• There’s simply no comparison to draw between them and the people who had those jobs last year.Not just apples and oranges, but, like, apples and tungsten.
• So it’s not that I miss last year’s head RAs because I want them doing the job again. It’s thatEmma and Drew were my friends, and now that I’m here again, with these smells and that room andthose memories, I miss them so much it’s like a knife in my side.
• That said. It’s going to be a good six weeks.

I did it. I failed, true, but I got a finished package out of it all the same.

Updated 1242 hrs: Uploaded, although the page isn’t pretty and I can’t figure out why. I’lltry again when I’ve slept. So here.

Tired and a little sunburned, but generally in a good mood. That will probably change.

I’m going to try to get to bed at around midnight, and get up at eight and finish somepreparations, and then at around nine o’clock I’m going to lock the door to my room for twenty-fourhours. SolitaryConfinement. Bla-DOW!

I’ll try to keep some kind of log, but it will probably degenerate (like every journal I’ve hadexcept, usually, this one) into sparse venom and whining eventually. Like after ten minutes.

I really hope I think of an idea for this thing by tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.

I guess the moon isn’t the worst place to be if
you like cheese. Or maybe the key is to be a
mouse. What the hell does that mean? I don’t
know. I think I’m freaking out.

As seen camwise, I have a lightbox. Like a real honest to goodness lightbox. It is made of a box with plexiglass on top, and it has a light switch on theside, and when you flip the switch these two fluorescent lights on the inside come on and you light it up FROM THE INSIDE. So you can trace things. It is a miracle of modern technology.

Like most of the web cartoonists who have one of these, I built mine instead of buying it–if by “built” you mean “stood around and made helpful grunts while Mom’s boyfriend, Joe, did all the real work.” It ended up taking six hours and costing about $50 in materials, plus probably hundreds of dollars’ worth of skilled labor on Joe’s end that he wouldn’t even let me chip in for. He’s a really good guy, and amazingly skilled with anything related to carpentry or building. He tends to stay away from computers, but lately I’m starting to think that’s a wise attitude.

Anyway, I have a lightbox, and it’s well beyond merely “cool” into “slopy” territory. I need to sand down the corners, probably, and maybe stain or varnish the wood, and I’ve got a can of glass obscurer that I may or may not use on the window to diffuse the light a little. We’re going to Gatlinburg tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll pretty much have to test it out tonight if I’m going to do a comic thisweek.

I’m guessing it’s going to cut my inking time in half, at least–which will knock that out of its top place as Most Dreaded Part of doing the comic. Now the writing is all I have to fear.

Back Wednesday.