I've been trying out the neighborhood Argo Tea as my Panera replacement. It's a nice little tea shop in the downtown Loyola area, and short walk from home. I've been here for the past few hours trying to make Books talk to Portuguese Z39.50 servers and catching up with e-mail. So far, it's been pretty good. I'm hooked up to power and wi-fi and chugging along. There are two major drawbacks though - no Mountain Dew and the chairs are a bit uncomfortable. Other than that, it's been smooth sailing. I'm not ready to designate it the official replacement yet (we'll have to see how pleasant it is when the Loyola students return), but it's off to a good start.
Bakker's "Prince of Nothing" story is a tale set that seems to be an interpretation of the Crusades. The Inrithi (Christian) nations band together after the Shriah of the Thousand Temples (the Pope) calls for a Holy War to liberate the city of Shimeh (Jerusalem) from the rule of the Fanim (Muslims). The first book saw the formation of the Holy War and this second book described their march to Shimeh through the Fanim lands. The story is quite significant in its breadth. I can't remember reading any recent stories that have quite the number of actors and factions that are in this epic.
The main plotline follows a sorcerer accompanying the War and a mysterious monk who subtly shapes the Holy War for his own purposes. The sorcerer is not concerned with the War, per se, but is instead worried about the confluence of events that he believes will usher in the Second Apocalypse.
There is as much going on in this tale as there are actors. The story is remarkable for the interplay between the characters and the factions. Everyone has their own agenda, and Bakker weaves a tale of ambition, religious war, betrayal, and magic. There are no heroes in this tale and the reader is pulled along by waiting to observe the results of the schemes and plots between the characters. The series is also remarkably violent. Rape, pillage, and murder are a constant throughout the books. Whole cities and nations are crushed as the Holy War advances to its ultimate destination. No detail is spared and Bakker is not stingy with his descriptions of battles and their aftermath.
While I think a lot of the sex and violence in the book was excessive, I enjoyed the story immensely. I didn't find myself rooting for any characters, but I was trapped by the webs of intrigue and I kept reading to see how the events played out. This isn't fantasy for the swords and sorcery crowds, it's fantasy for the political nerds and students of history. At around five hundred pages per book, this isn't a minor investment in time, but it does go quickly.
I give it 4/5 stars.
It's 10:53 PM in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I find myself posting a blog entry. This means one of two things - I either have something interesting to say, or I no longer have anything interesting left to do while I wait for the caffeine to wear off before going to bed.
You make the call...
Holly and I exchanged Christmas gifts before leaving for Iowa. I picked up some Angel and Buffy comics to add to her collection (and a spa gift certificate), and she got me these things:
Starting at 12:00, you will see a Spider-Man handbook. This was not something on my wish list, but he picked it up for me because she thought it reminded her of me. The Amazon page describes it as
I can hardly wait!With great power comes great responsibility so if you want to be like Spider-Man, you'd better read the instructions first. The Spider-Man Handbook describes everything you need to live the Super Hero life. You'll discover:
How to Crawl up a Wall
How to Design and Build a Costume
How to Swing from Building to Building
How to Stop a Getaway Car
How to Negotiate the Release of a Hostage
How to Take On a Gang of Henchmen
Plus a few skills that would benefit all the Peter Parkers of the world (such as How to Deal with a Nightmare Boss, How to Live on a Meager Income, and so on). Complete with colorful step-by-step illustrations by a top Marvel artist, The Spider-Man Handbook is essential reading for all your web-slinging needs!
The next item is the Calvin and Hobbes collection. As in every Calvin and Hobbes comic ever published in a newspaper. It weighs something between forty and fifty pounds and is wonderful. I can hardly wait to get started. The item on the bottom-left is the Ray Harryhausen film collection. I don't know much about the guy, but I tend to get annoyed with modern special effects, and this guy made skeletons fight Greeks using stop-motion animation. The films include Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad movies, and one about Gulliver. I'm behind on schedule watching these, and I'm looking forward to catching up soon. Do I tackle Sinbad or Gulliver first? We'll see.
The final gift is a Uniden BearCat radio scanner. I asked for this gift on a whim, but I think that this one may have opened up an interest that has the potential to become an obsession. For those unfamiliar with scanners, these devices can be used to monitor much of the radio spectrum. Using this scanner, I can listen on CTA radio conversations, police pulling people over for drinking, aircraft transmissions, ham radio operators, and so much more. The unit that Holly picked up for me is a relatively basic one, but a good one to get started with. I'm looking forward to learning more about this hobby and I'm wondering if there might be some interesting research that can come out of this. There seems to be interesting research waiting to be done with respect to the social situation of these devices, how they relate to Foucault's panopticon, Orwell's Big Brother, and modern ideas about surveillance.
A potential research question: Are civilians who use scanners to monitor unencrypted radio transmissions (private and governmental alike) resisting or reinforcing Big Brother?
My stay in Iowa has been relaxing. I've been spending a bit too much time on the computer working on a minor project dealing with adding barcode scanning via webcam to Books. I've tried out some open-source libraries for doing this type of thing, in addition to starting to roll my own. I honestly haven't really added anything to the app yet that is worth releasing, but I've been learning quite a bit about QuickTime screen grabbing, Quartz Composer, and some of the Cocoa image manipulation functionality. To be perfectly honest, I think the whole "webcam as barcode scanner" is one of the stupidest features I can imagine (sounds wonderful in theory, but always disappoints in practice), but it's been an interesting problem to tackle.
My newfound interest in Cocoa programming and Books development unfortunately has stalled my Iowa reading plans. I brought with me R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy, but I haven't cracked it one bit. Given my lack of progress on the Harryhausen films, I'll probably table the barcode reader project until I get back in Chicago.
... is one where I am terribly rusty. I'm trying to teach myself how to physically pen letters once more, and I just finished my first one. My hand aches, but I figure that it's for a good cause. I'm hoping to send out more (and exercise my hand some more), so if you'd like an actual letter as opposed to a mass e-mail or generic Christmas card, please leave a comment and I'll add you to the list.
Over the past few years, I've created a working ritual where I would go to Panera on Clark and Diversey to get stuff done. I would enter the restaurant and order a French onion soup in a sourdough bread bowl with a medium drink. I'd get my meal and then sit down somewhere situated near a power outlet and get to work. I'd use my laptop to sign on to the free wireless network and go from there.
After today (and several recent trips), I think that I'm ready to put this ritual to rest and construct a new one to replace it. Here are the problems that have prompted me to reconsider Panera:
1. More often than not, the free Wi-Fi is extremely spotty. I can't seem to get it working half the time and it's totally unreliable. The reliability has gone steadily downhill since I started visiting the restaurant a couple of years ago.
2. The place is much more crowded than before. It's often difficult to find a good place to sit, power outlet or no. I've begun to arrive early so that I can get choice seats, but it becomes necessary to do this earlier and earlier.
3. I don't know if I'm tired of their food or whether there's a real slip in quality, but I'm not enjoying the food there as much as I used to. The French onion soup seems oversalted and I can't ever get a fruit cup that isn't completely messy and stick o the outside.
I don't fault the place for the first or second complaint. I believe that these problems are simply a symptom of the place's success. The more people you get on WiFi, the spottier it becomes. The restaurant is not composed of infinite floor space, so it will become more crowded as more people visit. Until the last few months, it was a very nice place to be, so that's understandable. As for the food, I'm not the pickiest person in the world and I'd completely overlook my complaints about the food if I didn't have problems finding good places to sit or logging onto a reliable wireless connection. However, it's not good enough to keep me there.
So, what's the alternative?
I think that my plan will be to walk around and scout out coffee shops and Panera-like locations to see if there are any that I like with my laptop. I will constrain my search to my immediate neighborhood to begin with and expand from there if needed.
If by any chance I have any Chicago readers that have suggestions, please let me know.
Clint Mansell's score is really amazing and I've listened to it no fewer than four times over the past twenty-four hours. My favorite part of any music ensemble is the strings section and the strings in this score don't disappoint. The album is forty-five minutes of audio bliss. I spent some time last night reading up on the film and the music and I was happy to make another Mansell-related find. I don't know how many people remember this, but when the trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers came out, it was set to an orchestral rendering of Mansell's Lux Aeterna, a part of the Requiem for a Dream score. The original version of the piece was set to the harsh violins that characterized the Requiem score. However, in The Two Towers trailer, the piece was being played by a full orchestra and it was quite moving and effective. While reading up on Mansell on Wikipedia, I found that those particular tracks could be purchased from iTunes. A group called the Corner Stone Cues released a short (twenty-five minute) album that contained this track and others. I picked that up too, and I haven't been disappointed.
This isn't meant to dismiss the the other new fantasy films. There's some really good looking stuff coming down the pipe - I was very impressed with how Eragon has come together - but it's nice to have a bit of variety.
Other than musing about films, I've been spending the morning cleaning up my mailbox and building a to-do list of things that I've been delaying. I've began to receive feedback on some of the papers I submitted a few weeks ago for grading and I'm now researching potential venues for publication. To be honest, the only thing I feel that might be worth publishing is the paper on the Lovecraft copyrights, and I think that I'm going to try and develop this topic a bit further. My basic problem at the moment is that I have a straight history of the copyright situation (with a minimum of theory), but I can't really build upon the theoretical aspects of the work in a publishable way until I can cite the full history when applying what I've learned to other copyright controversies.
Another item on my to-do list is to get a decent idea of the fellowship landscape. I don't really need the money - as I'm being generously supported by the university - but I do need some stuff to put on the ol' curriculum vitae. I think a couple of fellowships might help out a lot. And speaking of the new CV, I've posted it online at aetherial.net. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.
The biggest thing on my wish list is the lenticular poster that is being distributed to movie theaters for advertising the movie. The local AMC has one, and Iike looking at it every time. When you go past it, the costume changes from the classic red and blue to the silver and black and back again. I usually don't care all that much about movie posters, but I want this one badly so I can frame it and put it in my basement home theatre (when I build it). Unfortunately, the print run was something like 4700, so I'll have a hard time getting one of these.
In other movie news, I saw Casino Royale today and enjoyed it. It seemed to suffer from having way too many endings, but I found Daniel Craig to be completely believable as 007. However, the film that I'm most looking forward to in the short to medium term is Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. Del Toro did Hellboy, which I really enjoyed and I'm really looking forward to this one. The audio and visuals seem perfect and I'm looking forward to the dark and fantastic atmosphere.
In other news, I'm being moderately productive over the break. I skipped a trip to the gym this morning to rest up and relax a bit. I've been experiencing the typical graduate student existential crisis where I worry about what I'll be doing once I graduate and whether my interests now will lead to that end. I seem to be doing fine so far - I pulled down my first 4.0 GPA report card since high school. My ability to do the work and research isn't what bothers me - it's the worry that I'll specialize in something that makes it difficult to find decent employment within the city. I really have no desire to leave the fair city of Chicago and my overall identity is not sufficiently welded to my academic identity such that I'm willing to relocate to the middle of nowhere just to advance an academic career. I believe that my optimal outcome would be to get my Ph.D. and find a job at one of the private universities within the city. I've heard horror stories about the state system, so if I can manage to find an academic job within a Loyola or DePaul that offers the chance for career advancement, I'd probably be satisfied.
I'm reluctant to leave Chicago because I feel that I've built up a good life here. I have a decent social network and I'd hate to tear that down and start over somewhere else. I know where stuff is at and how to get around and I don't feel like learning a new city unless it's somewhere like New York. This morning was a good example of why I like this place. As part of my writing at Chicagoist, I was able to take advantage of an invitation to the offices of Chicago Public Radio to hear them talk about upcoming schedule news changes in the new year. So, around 8:30 this morning, I hopped on a bus to Navy Pier and spent the morning listening to the presentation by their president and vice presidents. After the talk, I got a tour of the facilities (which are very spiffy, by the way). Then, I came home and wrote up what I heard. It really wasn't a bad way to spend a morning.
So, in short, I like where I live and I don't believe that I'd have as rewarding an existence elsewhere as I do here. I spent much of the past few days worrying whether I'm spending my time an a manner that will solidify and enhance that existence. I am enjoying graduate school and I haven't regretted my decision once. However, I would be more comfortable if I had some master plan and roadmap in my hand that spelled out what I needed to do and when. In any case, I managed to get past it and I'm in a much better disposition.
I'm also going to try and blog more often here. I feel that I've been missing something since I gave up regular posting and I'd like to find it again. I'm going to go ahead and post public entries more often so that the technical hurdle isn't so difficult to clear for those of you wanting to post a comment or leave a note. I wasn't really posting too much that required a firewall, so back to public blogging it is again. I will once again burden the world with my unpithy and disinsightful musings once more.
For all practical intents and purposes (and most of the human population on the planet Earth), this blog is disappearing and will be no more. I've gone ahead and made the rest of the posts private any only accessible to people within my Vox friends and family. I have no intentions or plans to continue doing a public personal blog. If you want to read what's going on, post a comment below and I'll get you set up with an invite.
Why is this happening? A couple of reasons:
1. My day-to-day minutia really isn't contributing anything all that valuable to the rest of the world that it justifies being public. I don't really think that clogging up Google (and other information services) with things like my thoughts on the new Transformers movie helps anyone.
2. I've been self-censoring a bit in fear that some of what I think in its rawest, most naked form would pop up in a well-defined search done by people who I really don't want to read it. I have a few things that I'd like to talk about without worrying about the scrutiny of present and future coworkers, bosses, and the like.
3. As a public blog, this site doesn't really provide much of a bonus but it does present many potential liabilities.
4. I'd like commentors to be able to post their raw thoughts, too. I would like this to be an open and honest communications channel, and all of the problems I may have may also be a problem for someone else hoping to hop into the conversation.
My apologies for the few of you reading this anonymously, but if you'd like to post a comment or read the entries, you'll need a Vox account. E-mail me for an invite and I'll get one to you as quick as I can. I have a couple sitting around, so don't worry about depleting my supply.
I am leaving this post open so that everyone else knows what's going on. If the blog looks dead, that's probably just deceptive.
