Because I just can't take any more anxiety about the state of the economy, I'm going to blog about fluffy animals today. Well, that and because I went to see some fluffy animals this afternoon. Specifically, alpacas. This weekend is National Alpaca Open House weekend, an event I'd never heard of until some of my […]
On the recommendation of Mike from vitia (hi, Mike!), I've been reading John Crowley's indescribable sort-of-fantasy, sort-of-alternate-history Aegypt Cycle. It's a series of novels about, among other things, a historian who becomes convinced that behind the tantalizing fragments of Renaissance mysticism that he keeps stumbling over, there lies "more than one history of the world." […]
I'm having one of those blogger's block weeks. It's probably due to the beginning-of-semester rush at work; my brain's been a bit fried lately. (In a good way—I had an absolute blast teaching a class today—but nonetheless in a way that leaves me disinclined to write long blog posts.) So in lieu of anything thinky, […]
Various people have noticed Clive Thompson's New York Times article on Twitter, Facebook, and the ambient social awareness that these kinds of tools promote. He points out a lot of things I find interesting about microblogging, particularly the way small bits of information add up into a new kind of sense of one's friends' lives, […]
Adamas shawl in progress Originally uploaded by amndw2 This is a shot of my in-progress Sci-Fi Shawl, which is finally starting to look like the pattern. It occurred to me, as I started it, that lacemaking ought to be a metaphor for something: you start off with no idea what you’re doing, it all looks […]