There have been good things this week.<\/p>\n
For example, there was hot-tubbing.<\/p>\n
And today I got to see a fun talk: Raya Yarbrough<\/a>, the singer for the haunting main-title theme of BSG<\/cite>, interviewed Bear McCreary, the composer of most of the BSG<\/cite> music. The focus was on McCreary, but both of them were interesting and entertaining. And they performed some music; in particular, they performed that main theme, and wow, Yarbrough sounds even better in person than on the show.<\/p>\n (Side note: I had no idea until now that the lyrics to that main theme<\/a> are the Gayatri mantra<\/a>. I'm guessing there must have been discussion of cultural appropriation at the time, but I don't recall seeing such discussion. And I don't have the energy to try to discuss it right now, but I felt like it would be bad form to avoid mentioning it now that I know about it.)<\/p>\n (Other side note: I also had no idea that the song \"Lords of Kobol\" was in Sinhalese. Follow above link for more info.)<\/p>\n Sadly, didn't remember until too late that McCreary also wrote music for Sarah Connor Chronicles<\/cite>; I would've asked him about it, but I had to run off to a meeting.<\/p>\n This evening, I was delighted by a writeup of Star Wars as an Icelandic saga<\/a>. Very nicely done. (I suspect it's even better if you know more about Icelandic sagas than I do, which wouldn't be hard.)<\/p>\n Earlier in the week, I labeled a bunch of photos, and wrote a bunch of stuff for the blog about my father. (I'll post a link to that blog sometime soon, along with more info.) These were among the activities that led me to neglect all sorts of other important tasks that I should've been doing, many of them time-sensitive, but it was good anyway. Among other things, setting out to write those blog entries led indirectly to my reading through a bunch of email from college (both stuff Peter sent me and other stuff), which was mostly good, though also sometimes sad.<\/p>\n (And I found some email that I wrote that I was appalled by; one exchange in particular in which I was being self-righteous about having done some stuff with a local forum system that I now consider outright wrong, but that at the time I apparently felt was completely justified. And I had no memory at all of that episode until I found those emails. Made me want to write apologies to the computer center staff.)<\/p>\n (Oh, and related to all that: I tried to find software that would read MacWrite files, version 5 or earlier (before MacWrite II and MacWrite Pro). I have a couple of leads, but nothing so far has quite panned out. I really should have translated all these files to RTF or plain text years ago, before I stopped using a Mac that could run the old translation software. I'm looking into Sheepshaver, old-Mac emulation software, but it looks like it may take a fair bit of work to get it up and running.)<\/p>\n Got in a couple of sessions of DDR this week; still not as often as I ought, but an improvement over only playing every couple of weeks.<\/p>\n Another thing that pleased me tonight: Flame<\/a>, a lovely fluid web-based swirly painting program written in the nifty Processing<\/a> graphics language. (Requires Java.)<\/p>\n Also, a friend sent me a poem that made me laugh, and another friend sent me part of an erotica story. So, y'know, I really have no room to complain.<\/p>\n Side note: Earlier, I was thinking about whether to watch a movie tonight to cheer myself up, so I looked at what I have out from Netflix:<\/p>\n Yep, I sure do know how to pick those light-hearted fun charming movies.<\/p>\n So instead I think I'll go read some submissions. Tomorrow, it is to be hoped, is another day.<\/p>\n\n