"You're beeping," says she

Dear all,

I was comparing Wordpress with Blogger this week and have, in conclusion, decided that though I like the fact that Wordpress is under the GPL and I am all for open-sourced things, the really cool things that caught my eye about Wordpress only applies to Wordpress.org and not Wordpress.com (for some reason I keep typing "Worldpress", which makes me think of some kind of newspaper), or in other words, only if you host your own blog. For the regular stuff the differences isn't that great, and frankly I've been with blogger for too many years (since what? 2003? Definitely by 2004 and christ that's a long time ago) to bother changing for the minutiae. (Though blogger? Being able to password protect an entry so only certain people can see it would be very very nice. Hint hint.) On the plus side, I did find out more stuff about blogger that I could do, that I didn't previously known I could. Like this
for example.

I have two recs this week to mention. The first is "PhD, the movie" based on the Piled Higher and Deeper comic. There was a free (for grad students) screening yesterday that I, after an hour of dithering, decided to go to. It was worth staying late in lab. It was worth the extra (and unexplained) 30min of waiting in the darkened campus theatre. I wish I could make my parents watch and understand it. As an article from Ars Technica (currently one of my favorite online magazines) summarized nicely:

PhD Comics is a humorous and point-blank accurate take on the everyday struggles scientists face in grad school that are often hard to explain to people on the outside—like our parents.  ...The movie adaptation stays true to the spirit of the original comics, and it is by far the most accurate depiction of scientists' daily lives I have seen in popular media. Most of the things we try, we fail miserably at and in the most boring way possible—no explosion, no billowing smoke, just stupefying silence or an infinite loop cut short with an expletive. The recent rise of geek culture ... is still not quite something we relate to 100 percent. For example, the Big Bang Theory’s contrasting depiction of socially awkward male physicists and engineers with a blonde waitress neighbor is still far from breaking the stereotype; in many ways, the PHD Comics Movie is Caltech’s own answer to the Big Bang Theory. 

So, yeah. It's every moment where I mentally screamed and asked myself why I'm doing this and realized that for all the insanity there's no other place / job I'd rather be at.  And it's surprisingly well-done in terms of directing and acting. I wonder when they're going to have it in the shop....

The other thing I wanted to rec is Flight, which is a comic anthology that I plan to use like an artbook (meaning for art reference), edited by Kazu Kibuishi of the Daisy Cutter and Copper fame. (Copper is one of my favorite webcomics. I ordered volume 2 (the older volumes are cheaper) recently and it's over 400 pages of colored short comics by ...I don't know how many, but definitely over 20...different authors. The stories are sometimes cute, sometimes disturbing, sometimes depressing, sometimes heartwarming. The art styles range everything from Kibuishi's own polished colors to this weird blend of crayon & water color thing to ...I have no idea what that other medium even was.

Okay okay, so it's not for everyone, but if you like art (or even just artbooks) and you like comics, this is like... to quote Victoria, "magical unicorn fairy dust". It's really kind of awesome.

...

Moving on to life stuff. Lab has been slightly depressingly lately because for some reason all of my experiments are not working. I have just discovered yesterday that this is due to two (possibly three) different reagents expiring (oh yeah, they do that. In biology). So that cheered me up significantly since suddenly I'm getting good DNA quality and things are amplifying and future is bright if I can get things to continually work through next week.

Also, school's apparently starting again here, which I mostly found out through a) our lab's undergrad and b) stepping on the bus after six pm this evening and finding it crammed to capacity (not kidding: it took two buses to transport all the people). A few stops later all the people just poured out, all at the same spot, and we saw the sign someone had helpfully posted at that stop for the student orientation bonfire. The sudden flux in density in the bus mostly left the regular passengers, such as myself, blinking stupidly and thinking "wtf just happened", because it was viral. No, not accurate, but definitely some kind of infestation. I seriously do not do well with crowds. (How the heck did I manage to survive the first decade of my life in Beijing, anyway?)

If things go well, expect an entry over at LJ this Sunday.

Thank you for the recipe, Anna.

Over and out.