A day in the life, 12827: tired while a long stretch approaches, bit of a ghost story kick, and I'm sure other exciting things

BLOT: (12 Jul 2012 - 10:09:29 PM)

A day in the life, 12827: tired while a long stretch approaches, bit of a ghost story kick, and I'm sure other exciting things

Today has not been a terribly hard day—a little long if anything—but it has left me for-sure tired. "My eyes are open but my brain's not seeing" level of exhausted. What sucks more, my exhausted brain is effectively assuming today is Friday, which means it thinks tomorrow is a sleep-in day, not a 8a-5p at the reference desk day, and I have no idea what that is going to mean about tomorrow. Nothing good, I wager. Nothing good. Here's hoping I am awake enough to (1) get a blog post up about a vegan soup recipe I made, (2) get a blog post up about a horrid ghost story and/or something exciting I saw on a Big Finish Doctor Who upcoming release cover, (3) tweak the adventure for Sunday's GURPS Horror campaign session, (4) read a couple more of Wakefield's stories and a couple more of M.R. James's stories, and (5) you know, do my job for 8-9 hours and such.

As you might can guess, I have been doing a stint through ghost stories, currently focusing on British ones from about 1890-1940. Despite reading a good handful lately, I'm still digging the genre so I'm going to keep it up for a few more days at least, try to finish H.R. Wakefield's They Return at Evening and M.R. James's More Ghost Stories [from an Antiquary]. The plan is to read a wide mix of the genre for about three months, and then to sit down and start tabulating how the ghost story has changed as a moral device over the years. Some tend to be amoral, some tend to be transgression-punishment (you went into the basement!), some tend to direct revenge, some are expository (this is why there's a ghost)...rather than go on, let me say that these ar ethe broad categories I'm going to be looking at:

• Direct Revenge - The ghost kills you because you did something bad to it, probably resulting in the ghost state (moral structure)
• Indirect Revenge - You did not do anything bad to the ghost/person, but someone did, and now you are paying for it (amoral structure)
• Transgression-punishment - You broke some rule, some concept, or some moral, and this is directly or indirectly why the ghost is after you (moral structure)
• Revenge Exposition - It's not about you and the ghost, it is about you finding out what makes the ghost tick (amoral, usually with moral underpinnings, structure)
• Transgression Exposition - The ghost is the one who did the bad thing, and now the ghostly state is the punishment (moral, usually with amoral underpinnings, structure)

When I made an off-the-cuff statement about the predominance of revenge stories in ghost tales, I partially goofed and colluded almost all of those things into one. It really is more complicated than that. What I want to do is to take hundreds of ghost stories and movies, and then check them off. There will likely be another category caused something like "just because", and then there will be a ranking amongst them.

Well, that's that for now, I have a long week coming up next week, but it should be fun. Will have two or three days where I am effectively on my own, which will probably become "Minecraft at the reference desk!"—which I am getting back into thanks in part to Syndicate's The Minecraft Project—or it will be me reading ghost stories at the desk and taking furious notes, or it will be me staring blankly into the mid-distance, hearing the sounds of broken printers come to claim my soul. Either way, will be a blast!

Some bonus links just in case you didn't see them before!

• SCAM ALERT: Obama won't pay your utility bill! - the truly interesting thing with this link is the comments, in which a number of people claim to have fallen for it...and have it work for them. All in all, skip the post, read the comments, which is something I almost never say.
• Snopes: Man's cell phone calls his loved ones after he dies in train crash - Spoiler alert, it is true. TRUE! The phone was never found. Skeptics might say that maybe the calls that went through were just someone who found the phone and was unscrupulously trying it out [and/or smashed up phone glitch] and not getting through. Or, well, I'm just saying
• Neil Gaiman to do more Sandman - woot

That's it, go home. It's bedtime!

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: July 2012