That has got to be the 8th Batsignal t-shirt I've seen on campus this week. Not to mention all the S-shields. Not that I mind, but srsly, wth? =D

Gladiator-At-Law, by Pohl - we have two copies! How do we have two copies of GLADIATOR-AT-LAW.

The Three-Legged Hootch Dancer, by Resnick - Cover and title combo

The Red Spider - Doc Savage, by Robison - for the cover:





And another one: "What- what is that? It's like a half-naked guy with a fishbowl on his head. And a sword."

We had three copies of that.

Okay you guys

So I just had the best day, ever, period. So freaking awesome. I met up with eponymous_x &co at the Guggenheim and saw the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit in all its glory- no webpage can explain or truly exhibit this and I exhort you all, if you are anywhere near NYC, to GO SEE THIS SHOW before it is gone. This man lit'rally makes explosions and explosives his medium for artwork. There are other beautiful and stunningly thought-provoking things he does, taxidermy and construction and clay sculpture. Go see, go see.

And then we went to Union Square for THE PILLOW FIGHT. A clutch of strangers with pillows thwapping each other, feathers EVERYWHERE, feathers drifting up into the air and blowing along with the wind and making a SIGNAL for where the fight was. It was beautiful.

And what should we see there on the edge of it? What should be parading along the side, chanting slogans and waving signs? Why, a campaign rally, of course – for what better way to reach The Youth than to campaign at an internets-organized pillow fight? And for whom, pray tell, are these fresh-faced activists-in-training cheering?

Why, Harvey Dent for District Attorney, of course!!

We got stickers and bumper stickers. Gotham City News was covering it, and the pillow fight behind it, as a strange escalation in the tense race for DA. Vicki Vale, on the scene, seriously for real you guys. I thought my face was gonna crack I was grinning so hard.

We took a time-out for food and Forbidden Planet, 'cuz why go to Union Square and not buy comics, amirite. They have a life-size Dalek in there now. I got some Teen Titans because I hadn't had enough Bart Allen in my life lately. And, you know, can never have enough Drake. Picked up some free Harvey for DA campaign buttons at the counter.

And then it was back to the pillow fight. We waded in and got to sit in the big pile in the middle. Feathers EVERYWHERE, cannot emphasize this enough - a guy on the subway afterward asked if we'd been attacked by birds. Whumpf bumpf shoompf! There goes another pillow, a cloud released into the blizzard. Every time one gets thrown out of the ring, some helpful soul throws it right back in and beans a combatant on the way. One pillow said OBAMA BOMB. One said 'デクスタ' on one side and '暗' on the other and had small bloodstains, very mysterious. One crowd favorite was bright red silk with Chinese characters all over it. THE FEATHERS. Trails of foam mixed in.

Ahhhhhh. A glorious, glorious day all around. And tomorrow is Easter. =DDD

Everything's worked out just as it should.

and I feel really, really good. Damn, it's nice to get 8 hours a night.

Runaways has been pretty reliably fun- I finished volume 4 last week. Want moar. Jack of Fables did not entertain.

Still watching Teen Titans. Avatar goes but slowly, but TT goes down like popcorn and it's just so stunningly well-done. Except for the bits that aren't, but now that I'm on Season 4 I haven't actually seen any of those anymore.

Kingdom Hearts 2 is lovely to watch from the beginning once you've seen enough plot to know what's going on. It's really nice to be living with fellow gamers, and I don't appreciate that fact often enough.

Beat Prince of Persia again, because lol time travel.

ICO is incomprehensible and I can't deal with it for very long at a time. It's beautiful when I can though.

Smith and Wollstonecraft share this annoying habit of blathering on about whatever they feel like without demarcating their main points clearly. Mill is pretty alright though, and what little I read of Toqueville wasn't too bad.

I get to lecture for two hours on knot classification next Tuesday evening. It'll be fun. I'll use colored chalk.

I have gingerbread cookie dough and trufflestuff chillin' in the 'fridge.

I guess that concludes your irregular State of the Lina address. Needs moar language and arting. =/

After two weeks of being a complete and utter delinquent, I kicked things into gear today. Pulled a full homework assignment in the morning, wrote up and prepared the evening's presentation throughout afternoon classes, turned in the homework, and gave the presentation. All done to a T- my, it is nice to have easy classes again.

Nicer than that, though, is the feeling of acceleration. I've begun at last to work. I want to paint tomorrow.

In other news, it's 63 degrees out. I'd be miffed at the loss of my winter, except the spring-feeling really is kind of energizing.

Went to Painting II, which seems a little too enlightened for me. After detailing the amount of homework we would have, (none,) and the general workload of the class, (as little as you like,) the prof spent about half an hour at the whiteboard explaining how the identity of one painter went through four stages of mimicking the identities of others. I hadn't heard of any of them. This would have probably been far more relevant had we actually gone to see the exhibit of the man in question, but museum's closed today.

I got out of that just in time to miss the trial run of Complex Variables, which I may or may not attend on Thursday. This will depend entirely on how well things go in Analysis & Optimization tomorrow; if I think I'd rather take that, then I'll definitely go to Painting 1 on Thursday. If not then I'll be in a bit of a bind, as I'll need to try Complex Variables that day. Maybe I can just go to the first 40 minutes of painting- we won't be doing anything, anyway.

I've already taken one intro painting class, but that didn't require drawing. I suspect I can count on the arts department to be pretentious and say that my painting class from a different school doesn't really count in their program, anyway.

Besides. It might be nice to be ever-so-slightly overqualified for a class, for once in my college career. Couldn't hurt.

Anyway, that's it for classes for me today. I could go back into that studio and paint! Or actually clean up this junkheap of a room. =D gee, it's nice to have free time.

Today in German Lit the prof used our current government for examples to illustrate how a common citizen experiences and accepts fascism. It felt very lopsided, as it usually is when he's challenging us to contest him in German, but it's useful that way.

We also learned that the second German word for suicide, Selbstmord, is Freitod - the "free death". It really does make more and more sense every week, why the Meiji-era Japanese government delegation to Europe was so utterly impressed with Germany.

Meanwhile I am posting this in the break between Phil hours. John Locke is a wordy little wanker and I don't like him, and there's no oxygen in this room. haaaaalp. =(

Well, that was mildly discouraging, given how much I studied for it. I didn't come close to finishing the thing, even- started the last problem having skipped two pieces of earlier ones, and barely had time to dash down an idea of how I would solve it before we had to hand the papers in.

What's really disappointing is, I do still feel as if I have grasped the relevant concepts for this unit. After five or six days on it, I was actually able to parse all three chapters and their homework assignments. And yet, I have probably still failed this test.

It would be frustrating, if I let it. As it is I just don't have the time to be frustrated over this class any more than I already have been- particularily now, when there's nothing more I can actually do.

Reasons I'm a math major, #6:

I much prefer reading five pages of extremely dense and complicated information which, when parsed, reveal absolute truth via cold hard logic in a good solid language. Particularily over reading a hundred pages which tell me what an ancient philosopher thought about concepts too vague for language to hold in an imperfect translation of a dead language.

It's like playing Phoenix Wright. The effort is all in my head.

As opposed to, say, playing Xenosaga. In which the effort is in figuring out why I care.


...


And then of course there's the eighty pages about how an artist's life is paaaain and his sufferings are almost beyond human imagining, because when he was 17 he embarassed himself in front of the girl he liked and when he was 14 the boy he liked said his name was weird. In German.

I'm not sure if there's a videogame analogy for that.

Another long workday, done and over with.

Select vocab from today's German Lit: Vergewaltigung, Abtreibung, Sexualerwachen. Sündenbock, Schandbube, Fünfgroschendirne. Gooo Germany. Next week: Kafka at last.

Today in Phil I compared God's treatment of humanity to behavorial psych experiments with lab rats, amused myself over God's intelligence being countable, and queried whether or not Anselm's proof actually bothers to first show that greatness even converges. It was not bad for a two-hour session on Augustine. City of God is, I freely admit, much easier on the eyes and the brain than Confessions.

Alas that it nevertheless destroys one of my favorite images of last year: Augustine is no longer Edgeworth to me, for his logic is circular and made of terrible fail. Edgeworthustine is dead.

My second (and much more colorful) shot at no-beef beef stew awaits only reheating, sitting happily in the fridge in all of its purple-orange-green splendor. I think it is going to get tofu and eggs in, just for tonight.

*edit: Out of tofu. There's something terribly, terribly sinful about an entire spoonful of beef-flavored egg yolk.

Simply awful.