A freezing-cold Friday.
It is very, very cold today, with the temperature staying below 20 degrees all day. This is weather I'd expect in January, not mid-December. Hopefully this isn't a sign of a long, cold winter to come.
It's going to snow most of the day tomorrow, but it will be slightly warmer, which is good since I'll be out all day. Data collection first--we're leaving the lab at 7:20am, so it will be freezing outside, with the sun just barely risen--and then in the afternoon I'm meeting up with my college buddies to celebrate one friend's birthday and play boardgames. Hopefully the weather won't be TOO bad, as the data collection team will be driving at least an hour both ways in it.
I'm actually flying solo tomorrow, as we are so short-staffed that we can't afford a second person at my data collection site (we're going to five sites in all, so we're stretched rather thin). I'll be operating two cameras at once, but all the coaches will be pre-consented; we don't have the personnel to try to get on-the-spot consents (since that would require me to operate three or more cameras at once and manage the microphones for them all, which would be basically impossible). I've never led a data collection before for basketball so I guess I'll just have to see how it goes. I imagine it will be rather hectic...unlike baseball, with basketball we film several games in a row, so I'll have to find and mike up coaches pretty quickly between games. I think there's only four coaches consented at my site, though, so it should be manageable I hope.
It's kind of lousy to go by yourself anyway since you're stuck at a random gym for hours with nobody to talk to, but that's just how it is! At least I'll get to see my pals in the evening. I've actually been running around all week doing various stuff, including buying a birthday present for the one friend (this boardgame she saw at the local game shop like two months ago but didn't have room in the budget for--they still had just one copy left, sitting on the shelf!), baking cheesecake (her cake request! I'll have leftovers for work as well), and baking an additional vegan desert for the vegan friend who's also going to be there. It's a vegan blondie recipe I found online, although I used banana as the egg substitute rather than the recipe's listed chia seeds (couldn't find them at the grocery store), so it smells more like a very dense banana bread. I think it'll be tasty though, it smells nice. The trick will be carrying all of that to their apartment! I have to see if there's a convenient bus route, as walking a mile with two cakes and two boardgames in my backpack would be kind of annoying (not to mention everything will be covered in snow and ice).
Well, at least last year I ended up buying a warm pair of boots (not my full-on hardcore snowboots, just boot-like shoes) with good traction, so I can venture out with impunity. Sadly I don't have my snow shovel (forgot to bring it from back home at Thanksgiving), but it'll be in the fifties tomorrow so hopefully it'll mostly melt.
At work I'm still trying to find something worthwhile to do with the baseball data, as well as running That One Analysis. I have a working version of it, but I'm still hunting for the other version I produced at some point that was better. But at least there's a version. Sigh, the data are so sub-par...it's hard to do a lot with them. I heard from project manager (she also worked on the other project previously) that a reviewer rejected one of the project's papers very harshly, saying they couldn't understand how the project managed to publish multiple previous papers. But that reviewer was pretty much right! Most of them were in special issues and things that the lab director was involved with. The data are really quite poor overall and I'd regard any of our findings with some skepticism because of that. My suspicion, based on what we've seen so far, is that the measures weren't great and unfortunately we struggled to get our teenage participants to really care about the survey and do it seriously. But still, we must publish, for such is life in academia...
I'm on a conference call on Tuesday about this other prospective project...I reeeeeally hope we can find a grant to fund it, because I'd love to do it. Partly because it's a project I'm really interested in, but also partly because I would like to still be employed next year. My current grant only goes until the end of July. Life in academia is also one of constant anxiety over job security, except for the few who have tenured positions. Soft money is no way to live.
Other than that...it's been so cold and miserable this week and I've been busy almost every day running random errands. There really isn't much other than that. I'm planning to head home on Wednesday and then take vacation days so I'll be out until January 7 (which is a Saturday, but let's be real I'll definitely be out filming more basketball games). That'll be a nice break at home with the family. Working weekends is seriously messing with my routines, it feels like the week just never actually ends. It's kind of messed up my sense of time. Each day feels the same as the next because I get up and go to work on all of them. Ooo, that reminds me that I forgot to do my timesheet today, woops. I'll have to do it on Monday. I'm always forgetting my timesheet.
I've been in a contemplative mood of late. I've been thinking about climate change...as a kid I always had I guess an unexamined assumption that humanity would just continue on and on. I was really into marine biology when I was in elementary school, I would read all sorts of books about ocean life, and at the time there still had been very little research done on the ocean floor, down on the abyssal plain. All sorts of new discoveries have happened since then. But as a kid there was always an implicit feeling that of course one day humanity would be able to explore it and we'd learn all about it. I remember reading some statistic about how like...70% or something like that of the earth's surface was still unexplored. And it seemed like of course one day we would invent new technology and explore it all. But now as an adult I realize that that may never happen. Not that I'm saying we're all going to disappear tomorrow of course, but humanity won't just continue on endlessly. There are things we will accomplish and things we won't.
In the summer my family lives out in Long Island; when my parents were my age they bought a piece of land out there, back when it was still a little fishing town and not all gentrified like it is now. And it's sobering to think that my little nephew's generation could be the last to see so many of the places I went growing up, because by the time he's an adult they might be underwater. Scientists still aren't certain exactly how much the sea levels will likely rise, so it's impossible to say what will survive and what won't, but certainly some of those places will be underwater. We live by the salt marshes, which are just at sea level.
As a kid I actually was a bit of a melancholy soul, and I often had a sense of...the passage of time, I guess, and the fact that things would always keep changing and being lost as time went on. But it was in more of a personal sense--this is funny to think of now, but as a little kid (maybe seven or eight?) I remember thinking about how even though I LOVED the Power Rangers, one day I would be older and not like it anymore. The 'me' of that moment, with all my thoughts and feelings and likes and dislikes, would change and, in a sense, be gone. I had a strange feeling of sadness thinking about that fact. And of course, as an adult I have no particular interest in the Power Rangers (although I have maintained my deep love for Pokemon, so child me would be slightly appeased perhaps). Things always keep changing as time goes by; that's just part of life. Even now, it is kind of strange to me to actually think about the fact that things that seem very important to me now might seem completely pointless or be forgotten by me in the future. But as a kid I never thought about these things in more global terms (although I did, when I was ten, become obsessed with the realization that one day everyone I knew would grow old and die. Yaaaaay OCD and bipolar disorder I guess...). But it's true there, as well. One day the salt marsh might no longer exist, because the sea levels will rise.
It's much more depressing though, because with personal changes, those are just a natural part of life. Climate change is something we inflicted on ourselves. A couple weeks ago I happened to read an article in the Guardian about soil depletion, and how apparently scientists think that we may only have about sixty harvests (as in yearly harvests) left. In sixty years I'll be 88, but my nephew will only be 60. Not even retirement age by today's standards. It's terrible to think that depending on our actions now, the next generation may face problems with the potential to destroy humanity, which they have no means of solving. We'd be handing them a ticking timebomb of a planet at that point. And yet where is the political will to do anything about it? It puts one in mind of the famous Ozymandius poem--"look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." We truly may be facing the ultimate decline and finally the end of humanity, if we don't turn aside from this present course. Although intellectually I know it to be true, it's still hard to wrap my mind around it.
Winter tends to make me more contemplative, I guess. Well, it's not like there's much else to do when it's this cold and dark all the time, after all. Although, I shouldn't make myself sound too deep here...I also spend a lot of time thinking about which characters to level up next in FFRK (a mobile game I've been playing). Such is the stuff of my mind I guess!
ReEldest update: lel I have not worked on it at all. But like, it has been winter and I am bad at winter! I'll try to work on it over my Christmas vacation. I need to hammer out an outline of what actually even HAPPENS in Ellemsera, and then I can write it. The main problem is that the elves are such a black hole of boringness that every time I try to write any of the Ellesmera section, it meanders off into nothing. Even though there are actually many stupid and hilarious things to do with the elves! But, penetrating the vast wall of boringness is as hard as getting into Ellesmera in canon. As another sidenote, the more I work out the details of the story the more hilarious I find it that Arya is ultimately shipped with Durza, because it's like, this guy is just a complete mess, and Arya is like, yeah, he seems like date material. She clearly has absolutely terrible taste in relationships. Although by the end of the story I guess it's like, who ELSE is she going to date, the elves hate her so Durza is the only person left with a similar lifespan to her unless she wants to date a dragon. And all the dragons are either little kids or Glaedr! But yeah Arya's judgment seems amazingly poor throughout this entire story. Literally no other character is that bad at choosing relationships (not even Selena, because in this story Morzan isn't actually evil, he was just driven insane by magic later on). Except, perhaps, for Durza himself, but in fairness that's not ENTIRELY his fault because he has magic Stolkholm syndrone.
In hindsight, Arya and Durza somehow managed to steal the show a bit from Eragon. Ultimately he is still one of the most important characters, but they're more fun because Eragon is just kind of naive whereas they're both idiots and therefore much funnier. I guess Arya and Durza really more steal Roran's thunder, since he didn't even get to be in the story, due to me finding him pointless and boring in canon.
And that's the haps! Hm, I still need to write that review of FE Fates. That game is SO GREAT, y'all. I was not as into FE9 and FE10, but FE13 and FE14 have been just my kind of games. I still need to finish FE9 actually, I borrowed it from a friend and need to return it eventually.
It's going to snow most of the day tomorrow, but it will be slightly warmer, which is good since I'll be out all day. Data collection first--we're leaving the lab at 7:20am, so it will be freezing outside, with the sun just barely risen--and then in the afternoon I'm meeting up with my college buddies to celebrate one friend's birthday and play boardgames. Hopefully the weather won't be TOO bad, as the data collection team will be driving at least an hour both ways in it.
I'm actually flying solo tomorrow, as we are so short-staffed that we can't afford a second person at my data collection site (we're going to five sites in all, so we're stretched rather thin). I'll be operating two cameras at once, but all the coaches will be pre-consented; we don't have the personnel to try to get on-the-spot consents (since that would require me to operate three or more cameras at once and manage the microphones for them all, which would be basically impossible). I've never led a data collection before for basketball so I guess I'll just have to see how it goes. I imagine it will be rather hectic...unlike baseball, with basketball we film several games in a row, so I'll have to find and mike up coaches pretty quickly between games. I think there's only four coaches consented at my site, though, so it should be manageable I hope.
It's kind of lousy to go by yourself anyway since you're stuck at a random gym for hours with nobody to talk to, but that's just how it is! At least I'll get to see my pals in the evening. I've actually been running around all week doing various stuff, including buying a birthday present for the one friend (this boardgame she saw at the local game shop like two months ago but didn't have room in the budget for--they still had just one copy left, sitting on the shelf!), baking cheesecake (her cake request! I'll have leftovers for work as well), and baking an additional vegan desert for the vegan friend who's also going to be there. It's a vegan blondie recipe I found online, although I used banana as the egg substitute rather than the recipe's listed chia seeds (couldn't find them at the grocery store), so it smells more like a very dense banana bread. I think it'll be tasty though, it smells nice. The trick will be carrying all of that to their apartment! I have to see if there's a convenient bus route, as walking a mile with two cakes and two boardgames in my backpack would be kind of annoying (not to mention everything will be covered in snow and ice).
Well, at least last year I ended up buying a warm pair of boots (not my full-on hardcore snowboots, just boot-like shoes) with good traction, so I can venture out with impunity. Sadly I don't have my snow shovel (forgot to bring it from back home at Thanksgiving), but it'll be in the fifties tomorrow so hopefully it'll mostly melt.
At work I'm still trying to find something worthwhile to do with the baseball data, as well as running That One Analysis. I have a working version of it, but I'm still hunting for the other version I produced at some point that was better. But at least there's a version. Sigh, the data are so sub-par...it's hard to do a lot with them. I heard from project manager (she also worked on the other project previously) that a reviewer rejected one of the project's papers very harshly, saying they couldn't understand how the project managed to publish multiple previous papers. But that reviewer was pretty much right! Most of them were in special issues and things that the lab director was involved with. The data are really quite poor overall and I'd regard any of our findings with some skepticism because of that. My suspicion, based on what we've seen so far, is that the measures weren't great and unfortunately we struggled to get our teenage participants to really care about the survey and do it seriously. But still, we must publish, for such is life in academia...
I'm on a conference call on Tuesday about this other prospective project...I reeeeeally hope we can find a grant to fund it, because I'd love to do it. Partly because it's a project I'm really interested in, but also partly because I would like to still be employed next year. My current grant only goes until the end of July. Life in academia is also one of constant anxiety over job security, except for the few who have tenured positions. Soft money is no way to live.
Other than that...it's been so cold and miserable this week and I've been busy almost every day running random errands. There really isn't much other than that. I'm planning to head home on Wednesday and then take vacation days so I'll be out until January 7 (which is a Saturday, but let's be real I'll definitely be out filming more basketball games). That'll be a nice break at home with the family. Working weekends is seriously messing with my routines, it feels like the week just never actually ends. It's kind of messed up my sense of time. Each day feels the same as the next because I get up and go to work on all of them. Ooo, that reminds me that I forgot to do my timesheet today, woops. I'll have to do it on Monday. I'm always forgetting my timesheet.
I've been in a contemplative mood of late. I've been thinking about climate change...as a kid I always had I guess an unexamined assumption that humanity would just continue on and on. I was really into marine biology when I was in elementary school, I would read all sorts of books about ocean life, and at the time there still had been very little research done on the ocean floor, down on the abyssal plain. All sorts of new discoveries have happened since then. But as a kid there was always an implicit feeling that of course one day humanity would be able to explore it and we'd learn all about it. I remember reading some statistic about how like...70% or something like that of the earth's surface was still unexplored. And it seemed like of course one day we would invent new technology and explore it all. But now as an adult I realize that that may never happen. Not that I'm saying we're all going to disappear tomorrow of course, but humanity won't just continue on endlessly. There are things we will accomplish and things we won't.
In the summer my family lives out in Long Island; when my parents were my age they bought a piece of land out there, back when it was still a little fishing town and not all gentrified like it is now. And it's sobering to think that my little nephew's generation could be the last to see so many of the places I went growing up, because by the time he's an adult they might be underwater. Scientists still aren't certain exactly how much the sea levels will likely rise, so it's impossible to say what will survive and what won't, but certainly some of those places will be underwater. We live by the salt marshes, which are just at sea level.
As a kid I actually was a bit of a melancholy soul, and I often had a sense of...the passage of time, I guess, and the fact that things would always keep changing and being lost as time went on. But it was in more of a personal sense--this is funny to think of now, but as a little kid (maybe seven or eight?) I remember thinking about how even though I LOVED the Power Rangers, one day I would be older and not like it anymore. The 'me' of that moment, with all my thoughts and feelings and likes and dislikes, would change and, in a sense, be gone. I had a strange feeling of sadness thinking about that fact. And of course, as an adult I have no particular interest in the Power Rangers (although I have maintained my deep love for Pokemon, so child me would be slightly appeased perhaps). Things always keep changing as time goes by; that's just part of life. Even now, it is kind of strange to me to actually think about the fact that things that seem very important to me now might seem completely pointless or be forgotten by me in the future. But as a kid I never thought about these things in more global terms (although I did, when I was ten, become obsessed with the realization that one day everyone I knew would grow old and die. Yaaaaay OCD and bipolar disorder I guess...). But it's true there, as well. One day the salt marsh might no longer exist, because the sea levels will rise.
It's much more depressing though, because with personal changes, those are just a natural part of life. Climate change is something we inflicted on ourselves. A couple weeks ago I happened to read an article in the Guardian about soil depletion, and how apparently scientists think that we may only have about sixty harvests (as in yearly harvests) left. In sixty years I'll be 88, but my nephew will only be 60. Not even retirement age by today's standards. It's terrible to think that depending on our actions now, the next generation may face problems with the potential to destroy humanity, which they have no means of solving. We'd be handing them a ticking timebomb of a planet at that point. And yet where is the political will to do anything about it? It puts one in mind of the famous Ozymandius poem--"look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." We truly may be facing the ultimate decline and finally the end of humanity, if we don't turn aside from this present course. Although intellectually I know it to be true, it's still hard to wrap my mind around it.
Winter tends to make me more contemplative, I guess. Well, it's not like there's much else to do when it's this cold and dark all the time, after all. Although, I shouldn't make myself sound too deep here...I also spend a lot of time thinking about which characters to level up next in FFRK (a mobile game I've been playing). Such is the stuff of my mind I guess!
ReEldest update: lel I have not worked on it at all. But like, it has been winter and I am bad at winter! I'll try to work on it over my Christmas vacation. I need to hammer out an outline of what actually even HAPPENS in Ellemsera, and then I can write it. The main problem is that the elves are such a black hole of boringness that every time I try to write any of the Ellesmera section, it meanders off into nothing. Even though there are actually many stupid and hilarious things to do with the elves! But, penetrating the vast wall of boringness is as hard as getting into Ellesmera in canon. As another sidenote, the more I work out the details of the story the more hilarious I find it that Arya is ultimately shipped with Durza, because it's like, this guy is just a complete mess, and Arya is like, yeah, he seems like date material. She clearly has absolutely terrible taste in relationships. Although by the end of the story I guess it's like, who ELSE is she going to date, the elves hate her so Durza is the only person left with a similar lifespan to her unless she wants to date a dragon. And all the dragons are either little kids or Glaedr! But yeah Arya's judgment seems amazingly poor throughout this entire story. Literally no other character is that bad at choosing relationships (not even Selena, because in this story Morzan isn't actually evil, he was just driven insane by magic later on). Except, perhaps, for Durza himself, but in fairness that's not ENTIRELY his fault because he has magic Stolkholm syndrone.
In hindsight, Arya and Durza somehow managed to steal the show a bit from Eragon. Ultimately he is still one of the most important characters, but they're more fun because Eragon is just kind of naive whereas they're both idiots and therefore much funnier. I guess Arya and Durza really more steal Roran's thunder, since he didn't even get to be in the story, due to me finding him pointless and boring in canon.
And that's the haps! Hm, I still need to write that review of FE Fates. That game is SO GREAT, y'all. I was not as into FE9 and FE10, but FE13 and FE14 have been just my kind of games. I still need to finish FE9 actually, I borrowed it from a friend and need to return it eventually.