The lyf so short

Computus paschalis

2019-03-22T14:28:14Z

So I've been wondering why we have to wait until mid-April for our Spring Break (the students need it! we teachers need it, too!). If Spring began on the 20th and there's a full moon on the 21st, there is no logical reason for why Easter can't be celebrated on March 24th this year, which would mean that we already should've had one week of Spring Break, and darn, we all could've used it.

I still haven't wholly understood why mathematics and cyclical predictions are permitted to interfere with, like, actual reality? The full moon happened after Spring had officially begun, why do we have to wait until April 21, this makes no sense at all? But I have found out that there is actually a scientific term for this phenomenon in German, which is positive Äquinoktialparadoxie (positive equinoctial paradox), which sounds every bit as absurd as it should - almost like some kind of bullshit technobabble from a time-travelling story. I'm still not reconciled with the long wait, but I hope I'll have many opportunities to use this delightful gem of a rare technical term, which almost makes up for it!

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You're called what?

2019-01-25T08:43:55Z

Look, I know we all like to laugh at JKR for coming up with super-subtle names like "Remus Lupin", but today I encountered a woman called Undine Wassermann in real life, which rather goes to show that Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction and Some Parents Are Like That. Undine Wassermann! What is this, some kind of Modern World AU retelling of "The Little Mermaid", in which the mermaid ends up working as a psychologist among humans?

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In other news,

2017-08-17T18:23:50Z

when designing dragons, there's a fine fine line between "terrifying" and "ridiculous".

[from the diary of Melkor, 223 F.A.]

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Procrastinating like a boss

2017-08-17T15:13:43Z

While I'm sitting here procrastinating starting on my Silm40 War of Wrath art, lemme share another amusing (well, I thought it was amusing) bit from Tolkien's biography.

Sooo he's in his 70s now and retired and unexpectedly wealthy and people are willing to publish pretty much anything with his name on it so his chances of having the Silmarillion printed are pretty good. That means he's got to get 50 years worth of early drafts and disjointed tales and vagueish outlines and experimental family trees, plus the characters he randomly introduced in The Lord of the Rings (like who is this Galadriel woman? NOBODY KNOWS SHE WAS JUST SUDDENLY THERE) in some kind of working order. Basically it's a shitload of work and he really wants to get a crack on it because it's his life's dream and he knows he's running out of time and he sits in his study/garage and...
plays game after game of Patience* and does no writing whatsoever.

That's so... relatable? I mean, I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this has, at some point, put off writing something - be it creative or academic or work-related (or all of the above, if you're lucky?) - and put it off in order to do something completely different. Be it playing round after round of Solitaire or Minesweeper or some more elaborate computer game, or just obsessively checking e-mails or social media. (That's another thing Tolkien apparently kept on doing, searching for some early draft and instead picking up some piece of fan mail and answering at length.) Right? We've all done that. You might be doing it right now, reading your f-list instead of doing whatever you should be doing.

But I love that detail not because I can connect to it on a personal level, but above all because it shows that, yet again, it's not Young People These Days and it's not Those Damn Smartphones And Computers. It's just people, perhaps creative people in particular but it might just be people in general. When they had no digital means of playing Solitaire, they used actual physical cards. Before cards, they probably used dice or sheep knuckles or tesserae or whatever. Cicero's shitload of letters to Atticus are probably the ancient Roman way of obsessively checking your e-mails. It's just human nature and maybe we should just accept that instead of beating ourselves up over it.

(I mean, the Silmarillion did get published eventually. Somehow. Well, four years after the author's death and only due to the heroic efforts of his youngest son but whatev.)

(FWIW, I did rework my fail!sketches from back in March and am now a bit more hopeful that I might actually be able to pull it off. So there. I've totally earned myself a round of procrastination. UPDATE DAMN YOU. :P)

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*Solitaire, for those of you outside Europe or younger than 25.

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Brain!fail

2017-08-03T19:45:58Z

I have been out of academia for so long that I have forgotten how to do citations ;_; Send help.

Then again, I don't think I've ever felt the need to quote a song in an essay for academia. I once did quote Monty Python's killer rabbit scene for the Shibboleth of Elizabeth I essay*, but quoting Meat Loaf in an essay (or is it just a shipping manifesto? meta? a pathetic defence of mah OTP? i don't know really) is a new one even for me². Is there even a rule for it? Damn, this is not what I signed up for ~~all I was supposed to write was a damn love story and this is what my mind comes up with WHYYYY~~

~~Incidentally, elleth, this is all your fault. But you should have done the job yourself BECAUSE I SUCK~~

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*not the actual title of the essay but the tag I used for it on LJ.

²not the most inappropriate choice of quote though. I mean, my husband managed to quote Asterix in Switzerland for his PhD thesis in Chemistry. His geekery may be different from mine, but geekery it is.

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Irrelevant babble

2017-06-08T22:18:31Z

Soooo I have no internet for a week and the world goes batshit. Again. I'll assume that the batshit didn't happen as a direct consequence of my offlinishness. I'll also assume that enough has been said about the batshit so I don't have to try and sum it up now.

Instead, I'll babble a bit about fannish matters.

Being without internet access, I was afraid that I'd miss the deadline for this month's SWG challenge. Finished the story (without access to my online sources, wah!), and today the internet came back so I managed to post it. Afterwards, I learned that the deadline has been postponed by two weeks (!!!) because so many people found it hard to meet it.
I should be relaxed and content but instead, I'm all fidgety and anxious. I mean, basically there are two options,
A) I got the challenge completely wrong and my response is useless and people will hate me and I'll get kicked out of the SWG (yes, I know it's not that kind of guild! Try to get my amygdala to understand that!). Half my f-list will kick me off theirs because I'm too stupid to belong there.
B) I just happened to be lucky and all is well.
(In all honesty, I chose Galadriel as my protagonist because you can basically throw every prompt at her and it'll work with her story somehow, right?)

I've decided against giving in to my panicked inner critic and rework the whole story because of an anecdote my husband likes to tell about his graduation exams in maths. It was a four-hour exam and he was done after two hours, so like any normal person, he was convinced that he had missed something important. So he triple-checked his responses and, indeed, he found an error pretty early on in his calculation, based on which all the rest of his response was wrong. Relieved, he reworked the whole thing and handed it in.
His grade was OK, albeit not as good as he'd hoped.
Ten years later, you can look into your exam papers, and Jörg was curious.
Next to the erroneous calculations that Jörg had crossed out, the teacher had scrawled "1+" (the best possible grade in Germany). Underneath the corrected calculations, the official grade of "2-" (between B and C) was accompanied by "too bad". Jörg had got it right the first time... and because he hadn't trusted his luck, had thrown away a perfect grade.
(On the other hand, he scored one in Latin because the exam text happened to be something he'd translated with a student he was tutoring a mere week before the exam. I can tell that story now because this was all a long time ago! As illustrated by the fact that he could choose Latin for his language exam. (I hear my old school recently added Chinese to the exam canon. O tempora, o mores. Not that there's anything wrong with Chinese, it just goes to show how the focus has changed!))

So I'm just not gonna touch it at this point and see what happens. It's only fanfic, right?
(Whom am I kidding. It's never "only fanfic". It's always a brainchild that's out in a potentially hostile world!)

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Since it's now getting broadcast on German TV, I could use this chance to rant about everything that annoyed me about the ultimate season of Sherlock, but I'm not sure I should open that can of worms. Or should I? Do any of you want to? For the time being, let me just make fun of myself. There's definitely a LOT of beef to be had with that Sherlock season but the thing that bothers me most? ( Potential spoiler for Sherlock S4 )

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