Becca Stareyes

Well, yes, I have many thoughts. Some of which are full of colorful language. These thoughts in particular about his whole 'space program thing'.

So, for my non-American readers, the Republican Party is currently trying to decide who they want to run as the official Republican nominee for President in November. Most of my thoughts on the candidates involve 'gentlemen, your policies are 99% bigoted garbage that I think will be horrible for America, and you seem engaged in a contest to see who can be the worst human being'.

( But, Newt Gingrich, in an effort to distinguish himself from Mitt Romney*, decided he was going to be all 'Space is awesome, you guys!'.  )

Taken from sabinetzin

Pop quiz! Pick a sentence or so from anything I've written (either beccastareyes or invoking_urania), and I'll see if I can identify it. Be brutal, but we will have none of this "Jesus wept" crap. I'm expecting at least ten words here.

I think traditionally I offer drabbles to who can stump me, but I might just make it best out of three.

You know, I should update this.

Sunday was the cooking day from Hell; I was making stuffed peppers, but forgot that when I made a delicious chicken-pot pie last week, it leaked all over the bottom of my oven. Until I noticed my apartment filling with smoke. And that my smoke detector doesn't work -- good when trying to clear out apartments filled with smoke, bad when you consider I might have started a fire. (Do not tell my mother this.)

(The stuffed pepper filling was pre-cooked and I don't mind raw/warm peppers, so I ate them half-done.)

There was also a worm in one of the peppers: I did notice this before doing anything beyond washing them, so I could throw it away. But yeah.

Monday was better, even if I had to clean my oven.

That and we had a research group meeting. Between Researcher who is with our group for paperwork purposes, but lives in Arizona and Other Professor who is on sabbatical in British Columbia (IIRC), we had a group meeting with five people and two iMacs with Skype. Next week, my adviser is gone to Massachusetts, so we suggested another iMac. Our goal is apparently to never have to meet in person again.

Today was cold and rainy so I worked from home. Someone asked my adviser 'hey, can we do X with Cassini' and since it involved the boresight*, Phil gave it to me since I know the data of (looking at the Sun through the boresight with VIMS) better than nearly anyone.

Unfortunately my answer is '... Maybe'. Which is an irritating answer, but I'm not sure if we can do better -- basically, I found I'd get a marginal detection if we averaged a lot of observations (80-some), and I don't know if averaging more data would help. I was able to get an answer as to how we'd have to do the observation if we wanted to do it, though.

And typing this out gave me another idea to try. Yay.

* Basically a hole in the spacecraft with a bunch of filters and mirrors in front of it so two of our spectrometers can be pointed at the Sun without breaking and/or melting things. Seriously the spacecraft software sends up all kinds of red flags and alerts if you even think about pointing the main camera near the sun, even if it's just on the way to something else.

So, LJ did a thing and now my browser-add-on set up interacts with their site such that I can't comment on entries!

Brilliant!

Oh, whoops./ I should update. So, anyway, today I leave for Nebraska for a glorious two-week vacation...

... that isn't really, since I promised my adviser a paper draft. Oh, well. It's almost a vacation.

Anyway, Mom wants to know my plans for vacationing. Here's what I got so far...

Today (20 Dec.): Get on plane and take off at 5 PM; Land in Omaha at 10-ish. Jenn picks me up at airport and I go to her and Matt's place (in Omaha, still) and sleep.
Tomorrow (21 Dec.): Chill around Jenn's house while Jenn (and Matt?) and Mom are all at work. Wait until Mom or Jenn gets off of work to head to Lincoln.
22 Dec: Dinner with Mom and Ben
(Christmas Eve) 24 Dec: Family dinner, probably.
(Christmas Day) 25 Dec: Morning of opening presents. Jenn and Matt will be here, but will probably go to Matt's parents for the day, and maybe come back in the evening for soup and treats.
28 Dec: Dad and Marjorie leave for Florida, so sometime before that we have Christmas with Dad.
4 Jan: I go to Omaha, and then get on a plane back to Ithaca.

Dad wants me to spend the night, and I don't know what anyone's schedule looks like, but that's what I got.

So, as the Internet might know by now, Anne McCaffrey, she of the color-coded-by-sex dragons*, passed away.

It's weird because, well, somehow -- I don't know how -- when I was getting into book SFF fandom, I read her books because... well, I honestly don't know. She was listed as one of those authors that people read, especially high school girls who would like a sparkly telepathic dragon friend or to be a telepath who could toss ships around with her mind and don't notice some of the skeevy sexual politics.

Later, you did notice things like that, so maybe you sold your Pern books to the used bookstore to clear up space for other authors. And every time things came up, you kind of rolled your eyes, since half the time it would good (McCaffrey finally stopped fighting fanfic!) and half the time it would be... well, not so good (McCaffrey seems to define slash as 'non-canon explicit gay sex' when her series had canonical same-sex (male) couples who had on-screen sex, so she disallowed it)**.

But, everything I read -- good, bad or so-bad-its-terrible -- has shaped what I write and what I like (even if the shaping is 'I can do it better' or 'I don't like that'). Part of me can't think about animal companion fantasy without Pern and its dragons. Or, hell, a lot of my webcomic's universe probably owes itself to the Talent series. And hell, Acorna introduced me to conlanging, even if Ms. McCaffrey wasn't the co-author who worked on that.

Ms. McCaffrey was kind of the literary equivalent of the elderly aunt who embarrassed you at family gatherings, but who took you to the seashore every summer when you were young and told you stories you still remember.

* After all, the color-coded-by-alignment dragons were Gary Gygax's.
** You thought I was going to mention tent pegs, right?

As is customary, I am signing up for Yuletide. Sort of surprised at some of the fandoms that made it -- I was just telling yuuo that Legend of Zelda: the Ocarina of Time would be way too big for Yuletide. Oh, well.

Dear Yuletide Writer,

( I want a pony! )

Making my Thanksgiving and Christmas plans. Currently, for Thanksgiving, I'll be in the Boston area from Wednesday night until Sunday morning -- I haven't booked the bus tickets yet, but I'll get right on that.

For Christmas, I fly in to Omaha on the night of the 20th of December and out mid-morning on the 4th of January. Probably what will happen is that I spend the night of the 20th in my sister's place, then she drives me down after work on the 21st. Then either I go back to my sister's place on the 3rd and she takes a half-day off to get me to the airport, or Mom gives me a lift up to Omaha. (Mom really hates the Omaha airport, but having Jenn willing to act as shuttle helps her, since it really is cheaper to fly out of Omaha. Not to mention I only have to change planes once!)

So that's what's up.

I'm on my way to finish with data analysis this week or next. Now, all I need to do is write a 250-page dissertation. (Plus, you know, jobs.)

The plus side is that it'll be the contents of three papers; one is already written, one is drafted but going in between the adviser and me before I submit it, and the third has the theory written up, but... well the data is being analyzed.

So, my adviser suspects I will take about three months to write a goddamned dissertation -- he said six months if I had to write from scratch and one month if I had the three papers published. That puts me at defending my dissertation sometime in the first quarter of 2012.

That means while I won't have my PhD by the end of the calendar year, I'll be ready to go by the end of the academic year. Well, February, even if the degree comes to me in May.

It's kind of scary, but... I can't wait.

A political thing that is relatively uncontroversial for your (American) election day. But, first! A story!

So, yesterday folks in my research group were talking about various things, as we do, and somehow the Cassini end of mission plans came up. If you're not familiar with what I actually do, Cassini is the mission I work on, that currently orbits Saturn and has for seven years. We plan on running it until 2017, since outer Solar System missions are pretty hardy, and it'll always be cheaper to use what you got than to build a new mission and wait til it gets out there. Plus, there are other giant planets to visit.

( Now, NASA has a thing about space missions near potentially habitable places cleaning up after themselves.  )

So Yuletide Treasures/yuletide is an annual fandom thing, where 1000+ fanfiction authors* sit down and do a secret-Santa style exchange focused on rare fandoms. Basically, with the idea that there are boatloads of Harry Potter stories, and you could even find a decent number of, say, Discworld stories***, but finding a story for Beyond Good and Evil (example chosen to tempt [Bad username or site: yuuo @ insanejournal]) is harder.

( Now, every year, it seems like two things happen: )

--
* And others. I mean, you could probably fill a request/offer sheet with just Fairy Tales and Mythology, which is technically fanfiction but most people won't object to, say, retellings or 'with a twist'. Or, for that matter Historical** Real Person Fiction. Or 'fiction based on songs/music videos/commercials/gmail themes'. Yes, seriously.

** Or modern, but most people seem to treat writing about modern celebs or politicians different than Shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth I. Probably because the latter have been dead for ages, and half-mythologized.

*** Though part of that is that Discworld got a lot of attention in previous Yuletides, so it's kind of aged out.

I'm trying to walk more, but taking a half-hour break in the mid afternoon for 'wander about campus' is making me tired. Or maybe I didn't sleep well last night.

Also learning there are vegetables I don't care for. Kale is kind of one -- it's not that bad with tomatoes and cheese on toast, but inevitably I don't use it until it's not good any more. Pumpkin may be another; I have some roasted pumpkin in my fridge and eating it with dinner is one of those 'swallow it quickly so it's done'. Which is a shame, since I like most veggies, so I shouldn't have to feel like they're medication.

In addition to at least half a cooked pumpkin, I also have an uncooked butternut squash. What to do with that...

So, I collect dolls. Because I'm a big old nerd. And then I take pictures of them...

( And photos take up space on your FL )

I may have a lazy Halloween costume this year -- wear my fox T-shirt, fox sweatshirt and fox ears to work. I know, first Halloween on a weekday in a while, and I show up with animal ears and normal clothing. I've been too frazzled to work on costumes.

I have one job app (the NASA one) out and one that needs my adviser's sign off to go out. So far, things feel like they're all out of step -- jobs, the state of my dissertation, etc.

On the other hand, I still love the science I'm doing. I kind of wish I could do it forever.

I promised beanbunny (and the Internet) I'd photograph something every week.

And then forgot. And then realized I needed to clean my apartment.

As penance, I created a tumblr for my art that I haven't uploaded to the Internet. So far, it's mostly art trades with other people that existed on devArt, but...

http://beccastareyes.tumblr.com/

Goal for this week is to get everything I've finished from March on up there -- it's also going up on my personal website. Maybe Flickr, I haven't decided.

And maybe figure out this tumblr thing.

Debating on getting a tumblr for art posts. I'm not really sure what tumblr is useful for besides as a picture/image macro delivery service. (You can share short bits of prose, but I'm not really sure if it is good for sharing my writing.)

This started in a roleplaying game. I was playing a character with almost supernatural levels of fearlessness*. As part of a plot, she was (slightly) transformed and lost her natural fearlessness.

( Two things emerged as I played her.  )

* Not actually supernatural, though. I've played paladins in 3rd edition D&D who are supernaturally immune to fear, even magically-induced fear. IIRC, Kender in the Dragonlance books have the same ability.

Comment saying "MEME" and I will tell you the following:
1. Something random about you.
2. Which color you remind me of.
3. My first memory of you.
4. What random character I associate with you.
5. My favorite thing about you.
6. What fandom I associate with you.
7. Challenge you to post this on your journal.

It's worth noting that my answers to #7 will probably all be 'I don't see a need to give you orders'. ^_^

Because two trans-Atlantic flights and a week's worth of dinners and breakfasts in restaurant alone* gives one a lot of time to read.

( I read the books so you don't have to! )

My talk went all right. I should have practiced it more, because my delivery was pretty rushed, but I got some good questions, and even got to mention I've got a paper in draft on a related subject. Plus, there was another talk that agreed with my results (but using a different method), which was nice.

Granted, one of my results is 'the trans-Keeler region of Saturn's A Ring is weird', since everyone who looks at it gets that it's different from the nearby parts of the A Ring, but we can't agree on what that means in terms of ring properties.

I do wish I understood French, though. Most of the hotel clerks speak enough English to get by, but I'm terrible in restaurants. I do think I'm better off than a French tourist in USA though; maybe because it seems a bit more normal to have tourists who can't speak much of the local language, because France is physically a lot smaller than the USA and is surrounded by non-Francophone countries*. All of the restaurant staff here have been really nice about the fact I obviously have no clue what they're saying to me, and can be barely trusted to order my own food.

(Also, being in a non English-speaking country makes me a lot less picky about food, because I barely know what's in it, so can't be expected to order 'X, hold the Y'. Also, I've had chicken curry sandwiches two days in a row for lunch in two different places. I wonder if this is a thing; and if so, can I bring it back to the States?)

It does amuse me that the 'unaccented' English I hear is British English. Logically, it makes sense -- I know I was taught Mexican Spanish rather than Castillian in school because Mexico was the nearest Spanish-speaking country -- but it's one of those things that is like 'oh, right, Europe'.

Tomorrow will probably be another full day of talks, but I might start to skip sessions in favor of exploring the city. Or checking out the public exhibit running with the meeting -- they have life-size Mars rover mockups.

* Given how much Spanish I know, I can read things pretty well. But the languages sound totally different to me.