KICKS
YES.
YES.
OH MY GOD.
Why do people keep watching these? Can’t people see they’re just money grabs? You know they’re not going to be as good as the originals. You will come away disappointed. And yet they perpetuate because people keep spending money to go see them.
Stop, you turds.
Are false potatoes imitaters?
I haven’t done a survey in like four days so LET’S GO
Classical: If you were an Olympian god, what would you be known for?
Being obnoxious My endurance? I’d be like “the god of can’t stop won’t stop”
Byzantine: Do you prefer gold or silver accessories?
Gold.
Medieval: Are you religious?
Not at all.
Gothic: What is your favourite historic building?
Does Big Ben (the tower itself) count? I’ve always liked Big Ben and was glad I got to see it in person once.
(It also has the best Twitter account)
Renaissance: Have you ever had a time in your life when you felt enlightened or changed?
The spring semester of 2007. I was taking just the right set of classes that made me feel like my mind was really opening up to the world and was starting to be able to see a whole bunch of connections that I’d been unable to see prior to that.
Baroque: Do you enjoy the finer things in life?
Meh. I’ll take it if I have it, but I’m cool with not having it.
Rococo: Is your bedroom full of trinkets and pictures? If so, which pictures adorn your walls?
Not the bedroom, but I have a designated “trinket shelf” right next to my computer desk full of all sorts of fun little baubles and things that I’ve designated as important. I only have two pictures (of my own) on the wall: one of Leibniz, one of a chart showing the relationships amongst univariate distributions.
Neoclassicism: If something came back into fashion, what do you hope it would be?
Bell bottoms or bell-bottom-style pants. These freaking skinny jeans and ESPECIALLY this “leggings as everyday pants” garbage needs to stop.
Romanticism: Do you often see things in a positive light?
Ha. No.
Pre-Raphaelite: Which book would you like to see turned into a film?
BAH
Impressionism: Do you look for details or take everything in at once?
I try to take everything in at once. It’s all interconnected, after all.
Art Nouveau: When were you last at the theatre?
Like, movie theatre? When we took my mom to see Infinity Wars. Live theatre? Never.
Surrealism: Why does the porcupine think it’s a duck?
Because it can’t see its quills.
Pop Art: Do you enjoy pop culture?
Sure. Though much more on the music/memes side than the celebrities/TV/gossip side.
Contemporary: What did you do today?
Uhhhhh…taught, walked, panicked about the future, wrote basically nothing for NaNo. Not my best day.
Cats
Hey poopers. So I said this last year, but the second half of last year’s blogs
Still
Haven’t
Been
Posted
Yet
And I don’t expect anyone to go back and read any of the garbage from the previous year. So I’ll say this again here: if any of you out there want to get me a Christmas present, I ask that you please donate to a cat shelter or cat sanctuary instead?
Cats > Claudia. This is not debatable.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS (part 2)
I wanted to put this in a separate blog post from the previous one. I’ve already talked about what teaching this calculus class means to me “personally.” I suspect you know what I’m going to talk about in this one.
Yup. Leibniz.
As I’m sure you are all painfully aware, I really, really like Leibniz. I don’t know what it is about him and his ideas and him as a person (from what I can determine from bios and descriptions of him), but I just…connect with him. I of course am not comparing my meager intellect or impact to his; I just feel like he needs to mean something to me, if that makes any sort of non-creepy-history-stalker sense. I’ve joked in the past that such a connection might be due to a surplus of Leibniz atoms in my body…it may be the case, who knows. The universe is weird.
Anyway.
A while back, I wondered what it would be like if I were to get a chance to teach calculus, never actually believing that I would ever get the opportunity.
But now I’m going to be teaching calculus, and I’m trying to wrap my head around just how much that means to me.
It’s a connection to Leibniz. It’s a pretty loose one, and it’s one hundreds of thousands of calc teachers share, but it’s a connection.
I mean, calculus was something that he helped to develop, refine, and bring to the public. He had a very direct hand in this incredibly useful, powerful mathematical study. The fact that I get to have even just a very small role in the passing on of the knowledge of calculus to others is just…it’s so cool. It’s so amazing. It means so much to me.
Like, come on. If someone has a historical figure as someone they greatly admire, how often do they get to directly help pass on that historical figure’s ideas, inventions, influence, etc. to future generations?
It’s an honor. It really is.
And I don’t care how corny that sounds. It’s how I feel.
Leibniz is my dude, and I am damn proud to be given the opportunity to help teach others about calculus.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS
OH MY GOD
So this is the “I might have news soon but I don’t want to jinx it yet” from my November list a few weeks ago. Wanna hear it?
I GET TO TEACH CALCULUS.
Yes, you read that correctly.
I. GET. TO. TEACH. CALCULUS.
It’s intro calc, but man, that’s all I need.
I’m a little bit hesitant to blog about this so soon after getting the news, as this means so much to me on so many different levels and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to express its meaning very well. But I guess the “personal” reasons are a little easier to express, so let’s start there.
I never really had an issue with math until 6th grade. I suppose I was decent at it; I didn’t really pay that much attention. I didn’t like it and I didn’t hate it, it was just something I had to do in school. But then I was put into the “advanced math” class in 6th grade (which was just two super smart n’ nerdy boys and myself doing 8th grade math in the janitor’s closet; yes, it was as weird as it sounds). I probably could have handled it had I been put in there at the start of the year, but they threw me in there like two-thirds of the way through the year and I had no idea what was going on. What was a variable? What was a parabola? I had no clue. And that made it so that I couldn’t keep up with the dudes and had to be put back into the “regular” math class.
Yeah, that wasn’t humiliating at all.
But that was the start of my struggles with math. It started to make me really nervous and I started to doubt my abilities. 7th grade math was a bit rough. Then, in 8th grade, I had to miss like a week and a half of classes due to my grandpa dying, and once I got back into things, I was once again lost in math. 9th grade wasn’t too bad (it was geometry and I was decent at it), but 10th grade was the worst. I didn’t like the class (algebra 2), I didn’t like the teacher, and I just dreaded the whole thing. By the middle of the year, I would literally break out in hives whenever I had to walk down the hall to go to that class. I never told anyone about that, but it definitely happened.
Needless to say, as soon as I was no longer required to take math (which was after that 10th grade class), I stopped. I took the minimal amount of math while I was getting my psych degree and it was only once I took the required intro stats course that I started to get into stats. But plain old math still scared me. Hell, even when I was getting my math degree, math scared me. I’d look at an equation and I’d get that nervous dread that always accompanied any dealings with math.
It’s really only been in the past few years that I’ve started to feel more comfortable with math. The comfort is not at all natural; it takes a lot of work to ignore that “oh my god I don’t know what these numbers and letters mean in this equation I am so stupid” feeling that I still get. But just knowing that I’ve gone from math causing me to break out in hives to being qualified to teach math gives me enough confidence to feel like I’ll be able to do this. If I can teach stats with the level of confidence that I currently can, surely I can do the same with math, right?
And hell, I think the fact that I’m not naturally a math person will be helpful for my students. I’m sure there will be a decent number of them who are dreading this calculus class and who are terrified that they won’t be able to understand things. I know what that feels like. I know how bad that feeling is. And I know that it’s important to be able to explain math to the “non-math” people so that they don’t feel stupid or feel like they’re being overwhelmed and can actually get something useful out of the class. And since I am a “non-math” person, I feel like I’ll be able to do that.
And that’s really important to me.
Right in the FEEEEELS
So the past few times I’ve done NaNo, I’ve made a blog post in which I talk about a “soundtrack” that would be appropriate to go along with that year’s NaNo novel. I don’t really have such a soundtrack in my mind for my ghost story this year, but I heard Owl City’s Silhouette on shuffle the other day and holy hell, does that song capture the mood I’m trying to get to in the sadder portions of the novel when Nick is feeling very much alone, out of control, and aware that he is rapidly losing is fight against a relentless death.
The song itself isn’t about death, but it invokes that exact feeling I’m going for.
It’s beautiful. It’s heartbreaking. I love it.
Edit: zomg, I just listened to this song for the first time on my new Sennheisers and those subtle chords in the line “the fire I began is burning alive”—especially the second time (2:09)—are like daggers to the soul. Gorgeous.
Woah, cool
This is super cool and interesting.
I am Level -100 chef.
Edit: another!
Straight Outta Tucson
I’m making progress on my story. Slow progress, but progress.
I also decided to make this story set in Tucson (as you probably read from the excerpt I posted a few days ago) for whatever the hell reason, which is giving me a ton of excuses to take pauses in my writing to look up some specific street or hospital or restaurant or whatever in Tucson.
It’s also making me miss living down there, which is kind of weird. I mean, I wasn’t even there a year. But I miss some stuff.
Don’t miss Marana, though.
Preliminary Baseball Stuff
Hey turd buckets.
So as I’ve mentioned on here, I want to use Out of the Park to simulate a Canadian version of MLB alongside next year’s actual baseball season. This means that I’m going to basically replace all 30 actual teams with 30 fake Canadian teams (and just have the current players randomly (maybe) assigned to the fake teams).
One of the most exciting parts of this to me is coming up with the names of the teams themselves. I also want to do logos and stuff because I’m weird, but names first.
So there are 30 teams in real MLB, 29 of which are in the US. So I’m probably just going to flip that: have 29 teams in Canada and then one team be from Alaska or something.
So here’s my current list of Canadian team cities/provinces (and the Alaska one):
- Alberta
- Anchorage
- British Columbia
- Calgary
- Edmonton
- London
- Halifax
- Manitoba
- Montreal
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland
- Northwest Territories (Yellowknife)
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut (Iqaluit)
- Ontario
- Ottawa
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Quebec City
- Regina
- Saint John
- Saskatchewan
- Saskatoon
- Thunder Bay
- Toronto
- Vancouver
- Victoria
- Windsor
- Winnipeg
- Yukon (Whitehorse)
I figure each province/territory can have its own team in addition to one or more cities in the province/territory having a team—except for maybe the territory’s teams might just be in their capitals, so I could change those (hence the parentheses).
Now for names! My problem is that I really like alliterative names, which actually aren’t a thing in baseball much. So I’ll try to avoid that.
Right now all I have are the Thunder Bay Lightning and the Victoria Royals. Part of me wants to also avoid duplicating any current baseball names (which would mean that Victoria Royals would have to get scratched), but I also like the name “Victoria Royals,” so…
Any thoughts?
Edit: what the hell do I do with the Blue Jays?
Conglomerate
This is interesting. Check it out if you like linguistics at all.
MUSEic
I have no other songs apart from that Muse song.
I have never had any other songs apart from that Muse song.
I have nothing to do except listen to that Muse song on repeat for several hours.
Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse.
POKE
Man, I wish Pokemon Go had been able to read your phone’s health app data from the very start, because now I’m getting these kind of results:
Which is great for hatching eggs and acquiring buddy candy.
Anyways.
Edit: prof, u ok?
HEAVY NEWS
It’s official! The definition of the kilogram (and a few other units) is being changed next May. Specifically, our buddy the kilogram will now be defined using the Planck constant as opposed to Le Grand K, the physical object that has been the kilogram since forever.
Very cool. Kinda sad, though. The kilogram will still be my favorite SI base unit, even though some of its uniqueness is being stripped away for more precision. Not that that’s a bad thing, but still…
OH NO THEY DID NOT
MUSE ARE YOU FOR REAL
This gives the song and entirely different feel and it’s fantastic, holy hell.
This is the best thing I have ever pumped into my ears. Jesussssss.
Poor Jazzy
Jazzy had her dental surgery today. They took out her top two canines, cleaned the rest of her teeth, and cleaned out the ear that always gives her itchy trouble. She had the kitty derp face when we picked her up, but she’s recovering surprisingly quickly. She is purring and flopping and jumping on the furniture tonight, which is a good sign.
Poor girl. I was really worried that she’d think we were going to leave her there forever (especially given her background), but they said she was pretty chill throughout the whole process and looked like she was feeling better pretty quickly once she got home. Good girl!
Random Thought:
When you’re watching movie or reading a book, do you think about which character you’d play if you were to be in a remake of said movie or book?
Or is that just me and my weird-ass desire to make strange remakes of things that star myself and my friends?
(This is something that I’ve always wanted to do ever since I was a little kid. I have no idea why.)
I’M WAFFLING
Current word count for NaNoWriMo: 4,210
“On pace” word count for NaNoWriMo: 20,000
Yeah, that’s shitty.
Why I want to still win NaNo:
- Winning feels good.
- I already abandoned this story back in 2016 and I keep getting the urge to write it, so I feel like I should at least give it another fair shot.
- NaNo is really the only time where I feel like I have to force myself to write everyday. Which is good.
- I really don’t need yet another failure on my resume this year.
- I feel like I need to do something creative, and drawing’s out because I BLOW AT IT.
Why I want to abandon NaNo this year:
- BUSY.
- SERIOUSLY. BUSY.
- I haven’t had free time in like a year and a half and I’d really like a little bit of free time please lord
- It would go with the current theme of “Claudia Fails Hard at Everything She Tries in 2018” that I’ve got going on.
- I’d much rather deliberately quit than fail after trying. I know that’s like the worst attitude to have, but I give zero fucks.
Eh. I’ll give it a shot. Maybe.
*frustrated screeching*
*more frustrated screeching*
That is all.
CATZ
I’ve been having a really crappy week (and it’s only Tuesday), but then I watched some of JunsKitchen’s videos and felt a lot better. I posted a video of his a while back—he’s the guy who cooks while his cats watch—and he just seems like such a good, calm, cat-loving person that you can’t help but feel better after watching his videos.
Here’s where he makes sushi for his cats.
Here’s where he and his wife take his cats for a walk.
This is how cats should be treated, man.
Eigenblogger 