I stumbled upon this today and thought it was massively cool:
http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/Edfu-Projekt//Edfu-Projekt%20-%20Official%20Homepage.html
A good deal of what we know about Egyptian temples comes from Edfu, so I’m pleased to see that this German team is making an effort to make the inscriptions more accessible.
The Physicist and I had an interesting conversation today about leaving Facebook. At one time, such a course of action would’ve been unthinkable, but now it’s looking better and better.
I don’t remember exactly when I joined Facebook, but it was no later than the winter of 2005/6. At that time, it was exciting and new and I marveled at being able to see what my friends were doing. Every time I added a new friend, I got a little thrill. I posted frequent status updates detaining the mundane details of my existence, largely because I could.
But, like many things, Facebook lost a lot of its luster over time. As I got more and more friends, my NewsFeed became engulfed in a tidal wave of minutiae, from FarmVille updates to statuses posted while under the influence. It was TMI every day.
Still, I clung to the idea that Facebook was useful because it helped me keep in touch with old friends. On reflection, I’ve come to question whether that’s actually the case. The mere fact of being someone’s friend on Facebook does not constitute ‘keeping in touch’ with them. It’s one of the paradoxes of modern life that, although we know more and more facts about our friends, we end up knowing less and less of them. I suppose most people see no reason to take the time to write a personal letter or email when they can convey their information coldly and clinically through a status update or a comment on a Wall. It may be more efficient, but it lacks soul.
I’ve also been unnerved by Facebook’s endemic privacy problems. Lately, they seem to be bound and determined to make you share your personal life with strangers. I know it’s possible to go in and opt-out of a lot of this stuff, but it’s kind of galling that you have to do that in the first place. Facebook used to feel like an intimate little club; now it’s as public as Union Station. That makes it harder to connect with people on a meaningful level because you have so many more people looking over your shoulder. True, you can go through and set your filters so that only certain people can see certain things, but, in my experience, that ends up being more of a hassle than its worth.
My mother is one of the few people I know who doesn’t have a Facebook account. She’s always said that she has no desire to bombard others with the details of her life, nor is she interested in being bombarded by others. The more I think about it, the more I think she’s probably right.
Men’s Health recently described Cold Stone Creamery’s PB & C shake as the unhealthiest drink in America. Being a huge fan of chocolate/peanut butter combinations, I naturally had to try it out for myself.
Not being suicidal, I ordered the shake in the smallest possible size. That proved to be a wise choice because the PB & C is incredibly rich. It’s so rich in fact that you have to drink it slowly, lest its leaden mass overwhelm your stomach. Even then, it sits in your gut, giving you an unpleasant reminder of just how many calories you’ve ingested.
You would think that, for all those calories, the PB & C would at least be sinfully delicious, but that’s not the case. It’s really too rich for its own good, which makes it a chore to drink.
If you’re looking for a chocolate/peanut butter treat, I suggest you skip Cold Stone and go to Jamba Juice and get the Peanut Butter Moo’d instead. You’ll save a couple hundred calories and you won’t feel like you drank lead afterward.
I am pleased to report that A Theft of Bones has survived its first public outing. Almost all of my beta readers have now reported back and I was touched by the obvious time and energy they’d put into reading my manuscript.
Going into the beta read, I harbored a lurking fear that I’d fall flat on my face. I was afraid that the plot I’d so lovingly constructed would end up being utterly impenetrable to a normal audience, sending me back to the drawing board with my head slumped to my chest. Happily, that was not the case: both plot and characters passed muster.
For the most part, there was very little overlap within the beta readers’ comments. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it means that there’s not much that MUST be changed. If most of them had told me that chapter 3 was crap or character X was unbelievable, I’d have to believe them and make changes accordingly.
But in the absence of that kind of consensus, I’m left with a number of things that COULD be changed. Individually, they’re all good suggestions, but now I have to evaluate them in turn and decide whether or not to incorporate them. When doing so, I’ll have to keep the following things in mind:
(1) I can’t please everyone. I can spend months and months and months struggling to incorporate every single suggestion only to have agents reject my work. Even if AToB manages to get published, there will be people who think I should have done A, B, or C differently.
(2) There is no such thing as a perfect novel. This is not the best work I’ll ever do. It would be sad if it were because it would mean that I’d peaked at 26.
(3) Revising is important, but, eventually, I’m going to have to put my red pen down, take a deep breath, and send my manuscript out. I can’t get caught in an endless cycle of fine-tuning.
For the first time in 22 years, I’m no longer a student. My Master’s degree was officially conferred last Sunday and today I handed in my office key and said goodbye to the department staff.
My life ended up taking a much different course than I had anticipated. When I came to this large midwestern research university, I was enrolled in the History PhD program. Getting a Master’s was supposed to be nothing more than a hoop I’d have to jump through before I could take my prelims.
But over the course of four years, the department changed. We suffered an exodus of British historians which effectively crippled our British history program. Class offerings dried up, forcing Europeanists such as myself to either take classes that had nothing remotely to do with their area of study or load up on independent studies. Internecine squabbles within the faculty delayed much-needed hiring decisions. A poor funding situation was made worse by archaic and outdated departmental policies that royally screwed graduate students. All the ingredients were there for a perfect storm.
Even though the situation within the department was bleak, I still held out hope that, if I transferred to another school, things would be better. But I came to realize that, even if I got a PhD elsewhere, I’d still face a tortuous path toward employment. The Great Recession has devastated the academic job market as universities cancelled or postponed searches. More ominously, the Recession seems to have accelerated the move away from traditional tenure-track positions in favor of adjunct professorships. It’s not hard to see why university administrations like them so much. They get more work for less money without having to offer the possibility of tenure (or even benefits, in some cases).
Of course, this sucks if you’re a grad student looking for a career in academia. The academic job market has always been challenging, but most of us hoped that we’d eventually land a tenure-track position. Now, it looks like a significant number of new PhDs will be doomed to spend most of their careers as adjuncts, probably making only a little bit more money than they made as grad students. The real kicker is that, unlike our counterparts in the sciences, humanities PhDs can’t rely on a career in industry as a backup plan. If you’re forced to go into a field other than academia, having a PhD isn’t going to help you much.
There came a point where I had to ask myself: why should I pursue a degree that’s probably not going to get me a job in academia and won’t better my chances of getting one outside of academia? I still love history, but you don’t need a PhD to enjoy history and do the occasional bit of research. And while it’s certainly scary trying to find a job in this crummy economy with a liberal arts degree, it would be even scarier to be 30+ and in the same position.
It’s been a great four years, but it’s finally time to come down from the Ivory Tower.
When I was a kid, I used to spend hours dreaming up imaginary civilizations and writing their histories (I stumbled upon one of these histories recently and noticed that, in its unfinished state, it was just a little bit shorter than my Master’s thesis!). I would take bits and pieces from the real world civilizations I was reading about and combine them into fantastic shapes. It would be scant exaggeration to say that I spent most of my childhood immersed in these fantastic realms.
All that ended up being good practice for fantasy writing. Even though my stories are all set in the ‘real world,’ the presence of magical elements allows me to do a lot of worldbuilding. Usually, it’s in the form of a system of magic or the backstory that shapes the events I’m writing about.
While worldbuilding is a lot of fun, you have to be careful because there’s always a strong temptation to fill your writing with all the delicious details of the world you’ve created. An egregious example of this would by H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. The story is chugging along fine (at least by Lovecraft standards) until the protagonists enter the ruined Antarctic city of the Old Ones. Then, the reader is forced to endure pages and pages of the narrator telling you about the history and society of the Old Ones, as gleaned from their wall decoration. (The idea that human scientists could divine that much information about the Old Ones from their wall carvings strikes me as ludicrous. We have a hard enough time interpreting ancient Egyptian art, let alone the art of an alien civilization!) It’s not even that the material is necessarily boring; it’s just that such a lengthy digression dissipates the atmosphere of suspense.
J. K Rowling, on the other hand, is much better at working her worldbuilding into her writing. She does an excellent job of hinting at the details that underly the story without going off on tangents about the parliamentary procedure used in the Wizengamot or the relationship between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw during the interwar years. Rowling realized, unlike Lovecraft, that you need to keep the story going without bogging the reader down in endless minutiae.
Last night, I decided I’d finally cook the lobster tail I had sitting around in my freezer. After all, what could be tastier than a nice juicy lobster tail dipped in melted butter?
I soon discovered that preparing a lobster tail for cooking is about as much fun as smashing myself in the head with vol. 6 of Ramesside Inscriptions. Even dead, lobsters manage to be nasty, grudge-wielding crustaceans that are determined to punish you for their death.
I thought I’d be fancy and ‘piggyback’ the lobster like they do in restaurants. It seemed so simple: all I needed to do was slit the shell and then gently push the meat upward. Of course, slitting the shell proved to be rather more difficult than I had anticipated, for this particular lobster must’ve eaten its Wheaties in life, giving it a well-nigh impregnable shell. I was forced to hack and saw away with a combination of knives and scissors. It wasn’t pretty. Little bits of lobster shell were flying everywhere and it seemed I was making about a nanometer’s headway for every 15 minutes of hard labor. Finally, after much effort, I managed to crack the shell all the way back to the tail and I started pushing the meat through.
Being gentle proved not to be an option. I was eventually able to push it through, but, instead of an elegant mound of lobster meat, I was presented with a ragged and torn mass that made the lobster look like a slain ingenue from a splatter film.
Thoroughly concerned by this point, I decided to pop it in the oven and hope that baking would cure all defects. When the appointed time came, I stuck my kitchen thermometer in and saw that it wasn’t quite heated through yet, so I put it in for a few more minutes. Still not heated through. When I checked a third time, it was finally done, so I sat down to enjoy my delicious lobster meal with some melted butter.
I took one bite, chewed it carefully, and decided to chuck the thing in the trash. Not only was it bland, but I also managed to overcook it, giving it a lovely rubbery consistency. All my hard work was for naught. So instead of an elegant feast fit for the elite, I ended up having cereal.
Last Sunday, the Physicist and I finished watching Samurai Champloo. Overall, I really enjoyed it, though, like many anime, it suffered from a craptastic ending.
Champloo is set in a fictionalized version of Edo-period Japan that borrows heavily from modern life (e.g. there’s baseball and hip-hop culture). Ordinarily, the historical anachronism would bother me to no end, but, in the context of the story, they work. The plot follows a fifteen year old girl named Fuu and the two roving samurai, Jin and Mugen, who accompany her on her quest to find the Samurai Who Smells of Sunflowers.
But the quest for the Sunflower Samurai isn’t actually that important, and most of the series is about the journey itself and the trio’s adventures along the way. The series is well written and, unlike a lot of other anime characters, the characters in Champloo develop a bit over the course of the series.
My only real objection to the series is the ending. The writers pulled some random villains out of left field to fight the heroes and the result is thoroughly unsatisfying. There are also a number of WTF moments that left me scratching my head. But overall, I really enjoyed Champloo and I’d give it a final grade of A-.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. For starters, I’ve been having lots of issues with my internet connection. Although the signal quality is always good, there are periods where there’s no connectivity. I get my internet access through my apartment building, so I suspect there’s a problem with their router. I’ve brought this to the management’s attention, so with any luck it’ll be fixed soon.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a number of short stories set in the ancient Egyptian ‘universe’ I’m developing. I’m really pleased with them so far. My previous attempts at ‘short’ stories ended up being way too long (but never long enough to turn into a novel or even a novella). Happily, I’ve managed to keep these five stories to a manageable length. I have a bit more tinkering to do, but I should be ready to submit them for publication in the next few weeks.
Codex Lochianus 