Category: Pulverbatch

It’s only March

My notes are mostly doodles now, but I can’t claim the same kind of downhill slide as Amy, because they were mostly doodles to begin with. I think the first page of last semester’s notebook was all doodles.

What it gets down to is that I don’t pay much attention in class, which is bad. But the professor for whom I have two of my classes hands out hard copies of his PowerPoint presentations every day, which is good. But I’m still not doing well in two of my classes, which is bad. But I get a lot of writing and drawing done, which is good. But I’m still not drawing comics and I haven’t gotten around to publishing my writing project yet, which is bad.

Grad school is proving very useful to me, in that I’m a much better programmer than I was six months ago, and also now I understand frequencies. It may well be, though, that it proves more useful as a way of forcing me to create via an acute and growing distaste for computer science. If I actually had a way to make a living writing, I know perfectly well that I would instead play Dynasty Warriors and never write anything, until I ran out of food and starved. But being stuck in a quiet room with lots of math and Web Serwices[1] is a pretty efficient way to turn my desire for escape into a very exacting word count.

Amy’s blog is pretty great, by the way.

[1] Not a typo.

Whoa, get this! Apparently this new Interweb phenomenon of “‘blogging” (that’s short for web logging) has been somehow involved in campaign politics. Who knew! Thanks, Courier-Journal, for keeping us “ahead of the curve.”

In other news, man, I’ve gotta get out of Kentucky.

Lady In The Next Cube must be having a rough day–she turned on the radio at 0900 and hasn’t turned it off since, which means that since the batteries are dead on my Discman, we both get to enjoy it. As I told Maria, I now understand that they really meant Soft Rock Music. All Day Long.

So yeah, basically I’ve spent the day trying to decide whether I could crash through the plate-glass window wall, and if the resulting fall would kill me. Soft Rock Hits. All Day Long. I didn’t think I was going to make it, but then–could it be? Yes!

I was saved by Wham!. Careless Whisper came on and revived my flagging spirits by reminding me of the BNL live cover to which Jon and I used to rock out in college. Glory be.

It was quickly erased by Sheryl Crow, of course, but still.

Pain is A-ALL YOU’LL FI-I-IND!

As a follow-up to my last entry, yes, I’m taking Probability and Statistics (“For Engineers,” which apparently means “For Dummies”) for the first time. In grad school. There are reasons I didn’t really feel comfortable about my undergrad Comp Sci education.

In fact, as a follow-up to this entry, I should mention here that last week I dropped a class for the first time in my educational career. It required PnS, and the idea was I’d take both at the same time and catch up as we went along, but there were no dice happening there. It was my only Tues-Thurs class, so I’m back to working two full days a week again. Plus ça change.

I wear a winter hat in the winter–the kind of hat variously referred to as a wool hat, a skiing hat, a skull beanie or a sipple cap. You know what I mean. Mine is dark blue and says GUSTER on the front. It keeps keep me warm very nicely, but because I have ridiculously fine hair, removing it causes a static explosion–the kind of wildly divergent hairdo that made me a pariah for life in middle school and now causes my roommate no end of amusement.

The other day in Prob ‘n’ Stat, I looked around the class at perfect coifs and wondered if anyone else there wore my kind of hat. If so, how did they keep–wait! There were people wearing wool hats! They apparently just never take them off all day.

That’s brilliant!

Hey, I show up in a Google News search! Thanks to those plays we did. I mentioned I was going to help out with some plays a while back, didn’t I? They went well. The audiences were small but nice. I only missed one sound cue in six performances, so I feel okay about that.

We debuted our little improv troupe, too, which also went fairly well. We did have to deal with a horrible performance space and karaoke downstairs (we asked them to, oh, turn it down a bit just from 2300 to 2400 hrs, and they agreed, and then turned it way the hell up), but we did well all the same. Our last show, this past Saturday, was probably our best yet. I was glad that was the one to which most of my friends came. I rode Greg the Terminator to Wal-Mart after drinking twelve tubs of movie butter, and Nicole and Richard were psychic. Evan was so emo it hurt (for that matter, Evan was so emo he got a LiveJournal but won’t tell me his name).

On a completely unrelated topic, I really, really need to draw comics again.

Oh, yeah, and it was pretty icy here for a while, especially Sunday and Monday. My classes yesterday were on a 2-hour delay, which was nice, I guess, but I really wanted them cancelled, and the delay was kind of like getting candy instead of cake on your birthday. I mean, come on. It’s been five years since I had a surprise day off, and I’m going to a public school again! I am entitled to snow days!

The office directly behind my cube at work is currently empty, so I sometimes wander in there to check out the view. It’s not all that nice, but it does have trees in it.

This morning, I checked it out after a phone call from Maria and confirmed her statement: it was snowing pretty hard, again. The direction of snow falling when you’re on the twelfth floor, apparently, is completely horizontal.

Some hours later, I came back from lunch and checked out the big window-wall at the end of the hallway, which (unlike the office window) looks out the narrow end of the building. The sun was brilliant and warm, and the streets were entirely clear, black with runoff.

Just now, I went back into the office and found that the surrounding area was blizzard-white.

So basically, either the hallway window here sees the future, or the office window sees the past. Amazing!

I took a couple chunks of my last vacation days to continue work on the Wall of Glory project, now significantly bigger than that picture shows–it covers a lot of the east side of my room, and has extended onto the door. The numbers so far are twenty-five Penny Arcades, eighteen Checkerboard Nightmares, thirteen AZWPs, three of my own comics, one each from Random Frog Children and Skinny Pandas, and four Grimbleses (you may remember the Grimbles as the only comic that updates as slowly as I do). Oh, and of course the Ninja Assassin Algorithm, which I can’t reprint for fear of its falling into Russian hands.

It’s a pretty great freaking wall. I’d like to make a project of papering my entire room with my favorite comic strips, but it’s going to be hard enough as it is to take these down if I don’t live here in seven months. Plus, eh, I’m kinda tired now.