subdee

Left my list of books-read-but-not-blogged at work, so no updates on that front until Tuesday. (Which is the inauguration!!!) Actually I think I am going to follow Tari's example here, and just give myself a clean slate. On that note:

Linkblogging

Anti-Love Drug May be Ticket to Bliss: talking about oxytocin as the be-all and end-all of human pair bonding (on the female side). Also about taking drugs in order to fall in or out of love at your convenience. The wikipedia article has a long list of positive effects, and only one listed negative effect (adversely impacts memory and ability to learn). But I'm skeptical, not even in a philosophical we-are-more-than-our-brain-chemistry way, but in a biological brain-chemistry-is-complicated way. Like it seems to me, as a layperson, that bad things happen when pharmaceutical companies (let's just suppose) focus on a single chemical and don't think hard enough about the way it works within a system.

The End by Michael Lewis: Everyone's gonna think I got this from petronia, but she got it from me! ^^; First-hand accounts from skeptical cogs within the financial machine. Speaking of being freaked out, this stuff is *really* scary, because half of the bad loans and bad assets Lewis discusses haven't come out in the wash yet. Anyway this is a good article because it follows individuals and has a sort of narrative framework - my father and I thought this would make a good movie, with Eismen et al. as "antiheroes" since they were making a lot of money at the same time as they were disrupting sales meetings. "We fed the beast until it exploded" is a great line.

An oldie but a goodie: Gender Differences in Emoticon Use. Man I wish I could read this. Academic journal subscriptions are wasted on university undergrads, who don't have the time. ^^;

Was reading a book I found in my office, on language and communication styles. Nancy Bonvillain is our best-selling anthropology author and she's especially good with gender. Women in general speak with more pitch variation and expressiveness than men, she says, because they are expected to be emotional while men are expected to be able to control their emotions. That's the one everyone knows. Two other theories Bonvillain mentions, and that I hadn't heard before, are 1) women have developed this speaking style because it holds attention, and they are institutionally less powerful, and 2) women speak this way because they spend more time around children, who haven't yet been socialized to attend to verbal cues. This made me think of Pete Doherty, but then again what doesn't. XD

As long as I'm discussing books lying around the office that my obsessed brain was able to somehow relate back to the Libertines: here's another one. The "cutting edge" articles in this book were published in 2005 and aren't so cutting edge anymore, if they ever were -- I'm sure you'll all be shocked to hear that imaginative people are more likely to develop false memories than unimaginative people -- but there was an article on group brainstorming I liked. The basic point was that, contrary to popular belief, brainstorming in groups is almost always less effective than brainstorming alone, first because each person must wait his or her turn, second because people often hold back. Suggestions for constructing a group that will be more than the sum of its parts are: ( Read more... )

The Glass Cliff. Meant to blog this weeks ago, forgot. The idea is that companies/governments are more likely to appoint/elect women/minorities to leadership positions in crisis situations. Good news for peeps in business or law school right now, I guess. XD; One thing that summary doesn't make clear is that this isn't necessarily a conscious decision - we can spare this person, let's set her up to fail! - often it's an unconscious decision - let's try a new direction, and tap into talent we've mysteriously not tapped into before now!

Currently reading

Possession by A.S. Byatt, for bibliophages. Finally gave up on my assigned book(s), so I am reading this instead. Have been avoiding comments for that reason, but you all should feel free.

( Montreal, cut for excessive detail )

Links:
The Paris Hilton Memorial Fellowship: short story by Rachel Shukert. via flyingsauce
Television, Gin, and Social Surplus: article on participatory culture. via Meta no Tame
The Ironic Urban Landscape of Death Note, or, Kira the Pop Sensation: meta in comments by the author of A Tithe to Hell.
A Tithe to Hell: loooong L/Light fanfic with the most canonically perfect beginning and ending EVER, and a gooey fanon middle. XD via sesame_seed

http://kylesmithonline.com/?p=848
Very late, but I forgot to post the link here. Miramax has declined to re-option Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, so there won't be movies made for Subtle Knife or Amber Spyglass. ;_;

http://selfdivider.com/base/?p=28
Murakami interview in Korean GQ: came across this a while ago, forgot to post the link here. Contains lots of interesting information like a description of his writing strategy: while working on novels, he gets up at four in the morning, and works nonstop until ten! Which is sort of like Emily Dickenson's "if half your work is not done before 10 o'clock, it will not be done" quotation, except, you know, that he has all of it done by 10am.

http://apintrix.livejournal.com/158734.html
Proposes three new seasons. "August" is probably my favorite.

http://rashaka.livejournal.com/
Rashaka's been posting reviews of Death Note dub episodes. Very sharp.

http://kirieda.zdap.jp/
Japanese fanart site: Saiunkoku *and* Steel Ball Run! Link courtesy of majochan.

That was even more random and untimely than usual orz.

Mushishi volume 3: sadly not drawn in as much detail as the earlier volumes. Like, there were places in volumes one and two where I swear you could identify the plants the author was drawing by the shapes of the leaves. With volume 3, Urushibara was serialized in a monthly magazine, and I guess she just didn't have the time for that kind of detail anymore. And now there's backstory and stuff being introduced! Part of what I liked about the anime (and first two volumes of the manga) was that there really wasn't any backstory or overarching plot, it was just these oneshot stories about humans interacting with the natural (and supernatural) world. Still, series continues awesomeness.

Unlocked the previous post re: possible jobs now that things are settled and I won't be er jinxing my chances. The winning combination turned out to be 1+2+5: I'm working at the library on Tuesdays and Fridays, the used bookstore on Thursdays, and the lawfirm when I feel like it on Mondays. Thanks everyone who commented on the last post! Yr. input was v. helpful.

On the fandom front: I've been watching old episodes of shows I used to watch in high school at tv-links (Buffy, Farscape, Roswell, Smallville) and I may be ready branch out into something new. Maybe. (First up: Nobuto wo Produce.) I also borrowed Phoenix Wright: Justice For All from sesame_seed, so maybe something on that in a bit. And I'm reading some cyberpunk novel by Patricia McKillip, but I'm not sure why, because it's pretty awful. ^^; Note to self: when attempting to revise your opinion of an author you are lukewarm about, but largely unfamiliar with, upward, please to not be picking up one of the author's earliest works.

Recced by checkered_fool: Honeydew Syndrome. It's a webcomic. ^^; I'm kind of: "...eh" on the high school dynamics (there weren't really "jocks" and "emo kids" at my high school, and who cares about high school anyway), but the art is good and the writing is very sharp. It's funny. It's BL! It's pretty cool. XD.

Not actually spurred on by the latest round of LJ deletions, I have a wordpress:

http://sd.magatsu.net/blog

Hosted by the wondrous telophase. This a mirror of my livejournal since January 2006, but with all the fanfic, lj shout-out, and pointless meme parts taken out. I'd been thinking about -- not leaving livejournal, but moving some of the content on my livejournal to my own domain -- for a while, mostly so that the next time someone asked me what I do with my spare time, I could honestly answer that I kept "blog". I finally decided to go for it after I had this conversation with my academic advisor:

Him: Any hobbies?
Me: I...write? (fanfiction.) And I keep a...blog? (livejournal.)
Him: What's the blog about?
Me: Um. Books, movies, manga comics, anime television shows, whatever I'm into.
Him: Sounds interesting. Is it any good?
Me: ...
Him: ...
Me: ...
Him: ...Have you gotten positive comments?
Me: Yes.
Him: Well, there you go! People are cruel on the internet, if they didn't like what you were writing, they would definitely have told you.

SO YOU SEE. XD I wanted to know whether what I was writing would stand up to the untested wilds of the internet, and then there was the whole LJ-deletion thing, and basically the time seemed right. I've had the blog for about a month and a half, but I've been holding off making any announcements until I'd decided what to do with future content -- crosspost to both journals? Split content between journals? I think for now I'll just copy what I post in my livejournal to the wordpress blog, edited, a few days later. Baby steps, you know. ^^;;;

...Oh right, the other reason I was putting this off writing this post was because I wanted to explain the steps I went through to set up/customize the wordpress. ( Cut to spare the uninterested )

IN CONCLUSION, if you are keeping a blog somewhere else, please leave a comment so I can link you. Or even if you're seat-warming an empty account on another journal -- leave a comment so I can add you to google reader, and I'll know where to find you...if.