Holy crap, a blog post?! My talks this week, visits home, concerts, and other various sundries

BLOT: (04 Apr 2015 - 12:31:22 AM)

Holy crap, a blog post?! My talks this week, visits home, concerts, and other various sundries

I think one reason it has been a month since my last blog post (give or take, you know, a week), is me trying to avoid the "long time no post" cycle of "I should post more" followed by a blog being deleted a month later. You know what I'm talking about. Yes, you [I'm writing this since about half of my regular readers have done this]. Really, though, the big reason is that I have been super busy for about three weeks, with most of my creative juices aimed at some work stuff and some home stuff and whatnot. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of current events and online arguments recently have been so far down the rabbit-hole that any commentary upon them seems redundant. There is only so many times you can write, "This stance is dumb because it is clearly dumb," before you reach the heights of post-modernism; the "This page is intentionally left blank" of social commentary.

In no particular (except, you know, maybe chronologically, but probably not even that) order, some things!

• Went to see my mom over Spring Break (which, since I work at a University, has meaning to me as a time period). My brothers, Sarah, some others, and I worked on a few big projects at her house. It was quite fun, and quite tiring, and it exposed me to species of spider I have never seen before and to more bumblebees than I would have thought possible. I do have some video footage of the area, but only a little and I haven't even tried to edit, yet. Maybe I will.
• Same week, Sarah and I went to a Moon Hooch concert at the Zydeco in Birmingham. Picture something like a rave propelled by saxophones and drums, complete with people hugging strangers and just jamming out to the music, and you have an idea of the sweat-filled-fun that went on until after 1am. Also picture a drunk woman humping the stage, getting groped, and masturbating until security removed her. Also picture a quantity of e-cigs beyond all count, and people chain-smoking them so much the place smelled vaguely of a knock-off Yankee Candle shop. That's a fairly complete picture.
• The hard-drive on my Linux box hiccuped hard enough that I powered it down until I can get an external hard-drive and make a back-up of the important bits. Which should hopefully be this weekend. I do not know what went wrong, but I think the hard-drive is simply dying block by block, and some block that went out was an important one and it exacerbated the whole thing.
• Gave two talks this week at the Salmon Library. They were part of, broadly, our "Refined Researcher" series, an specifically, our "Three Talks in One Week" fun times. All three were good talks to give, and both of mine went well, and it was interesting to not that each successive talk had more people attending, more discussion, and generally people being more relaxed and enjoying them as academic but laid-back.
• The first of my talks was Wide Weird Wacky World of Science Reporting, which dealt with science journalism and science urban legends. The part that I thought would be interesting, the weird urban legends, fell kin of flat. The part that I thought would be sort of boring, the sociological factors (etc) that go into bad science reporting, actually pepped people up. In the future, if I do it again, I'll focus more on the latter.
• The second of my talks, Welcome to the Future History of the Book, was possibly the best talk I have ever given. It wasn't quite as grand in research scope as my Science Horror and Lovecraft talk, nor maybe as precise as my recent Copyleft talk, but it was almost the perfect blend of research, passion, fun, and interaction [from my perspective as a talk giver]. I've embedded the Prezi, below. I'll more formally right up about it on the library blog, next week, hopefully, but two bits I want to share [next two bullet points].
• The "What's a Book, Precious?" was actually about 10-15 minute interactive exercise where I held up things from monographs to anthologies to magazines to text-based adventures to audiobooks to audioplays and asked, "Is this a book?" Some fun results from that include that nearly everyone thought a comic book was a book, but nearly no one thought a magazine was a book; and that people thought if were to lock down a Kindle so it only had, say, three novels by the Bronte sisters that it might be a book, but that a Kindle as a device is not a book if you can change the content on it.
• The second bit, the aftermath pictured above, is right in the middle of talking about how the destruction of books is a cultural icon to us, resulting in a gut reaction, I tore a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities in to pieces. People actually did gasp. Then I went on to explain how book publishers and book stores (and libraries, too) destroy and discard books all the time, for different reasons, but nearly all behind the scenes.
• Related, I would love to give those two talks (and my copyleft one) again. If you want a speaker, give me a knock. ;)
• I have a talk coming up next week, to be given at the 2015 ALLA conference, about The Best Use of Fair Use. I have ideas for it (in that I have my talk mostly planned out, but there's a certain question of a medium).
• Things are winding down again, which means I'm starting to get my semesterly dose of Impostor Syndrome, which is always annoying because one of the primary drivers of it is that I've done quite a bit and can sort of take it easy but taking it easy feels so wrong. I'll try and make a few big projects for myself this summer.
• Partially due the immense crunch and partially due to have some of my files on a powered down hard drive, Doug Talks Weird is slightly delayed. I will strive to get the next episode up either this Sunday or the Sunday after, and then hit a more regular schedule.

Ok. That'll do. Time to embed the Prezi an get some sleep. Later later...

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: April 2015