General Upkeep

I'll do a nice long post tomorrow, but for now, I'm going to try the "brevity is the soul of wit" approach and go for a 500 word limit.

--I’m teaching my first solo course this semester. It seems to be going all right so far—the students are very enthusiastic. Okay, that’s a bit much. They’re interested. Mildly interested. All right, one guy showed up for class and immediately slept for the next hour and a half. It’s a new class. They’ll learn. I won’t be discussing the class in any great detail here, though, for the same reason that I don’t blog about my research—it lacks a sort of professionalism, y’know? At the same time, I’m not going to pretend that this blog is particularly well hidden; if a student knows it exists and looks for it, he/she/it stands a good chance at being able to find it. So let’s make things interesting. To my students: the first of you to find this site, and email the word “hedgemuffin” to my university email account gets one bonus mark on the midterm test. First come, first serve.

--As part of the whole “I’m a real instructor now” theme of 2011, I’ve upped my wardrobe and my sleeping schedule. On the clothes front, I’ve always wanted to generally dress nicer, but there have been certain things holding me back: general cheapness; a intense, passionate hatred of trying on clothes in stores; utter and complete lack of style. But I’ve got my new X-Mas gear as outfit, a lovely grown-up winter coat with buttons and everything, and I think the new glasses really add some vim to the whole number. Excelsior! ...Sorry, I’ve been reading old Stan Lee press releases. They kind of seep into your brain. Anyway, I’ve also been getting up early—for a total of two days in a row. Considering I was averaging a wake-up time of around noon for most of last semester, it’s a big step. I really like early morning work at the university. It’s so much easier to work when those student things aren’t around.

--Random pop culture thing: I just purchased the DS game Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. The plot is classic sci-fi/horror: after years of pollution, humankind has ravaged the earth. The worst devastation is a strange, expanding hole that’s appeared in the Antarctic, that’s destroying everything in its path. I play a UN commando sent in as part of a large force to investigate. Things then go horribly wrong... The game follows the typical Shin Megami Tensei template (it’s a big series in Japan). You recruit demons, and unleash them in battle to fight for you. The difference between this game and others in the series, such as Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3, is that rather than play characters that unleash demons, you recruit the demons and they fight directly alongside you. The shift supports the game’s story directly, which is all about uneasy truces with Earth’s new demonic residents. It’s long, yet you can still play it while watching TV, which is, sadly, one of the big things I look for in a DS game.

That’s it. Later Days.