Various threads
Jul. 14th, 2019 10:51 amIt's been ages since I posted here, and a lot of stuff has been happening. Consider this a post to catch up on various happenings since ... mid-June.
I've spent most of the past few weekends away: Matthias and I went with my mother for a long weekend to Brighton, where we ate excellent fish, visited the pavilion (absolutely wild, over-the-top design), and went for a long walk along the coastal path. After that all three of us were in London for a couple of days — Matthias to watch cricket with a friend of ours, Mum and I to (bizarrely) hang out in the House of Lords on the invitation of this guy she interviewed for one of her radio programmes. As I said at the time, I've never seen so many elderly current and former barristers arguing over the presence or absence of the word 'technical' in a document.
Then it was back to Cambridge for a few days, Mum returned to Australia, and Matthias and I went to London to watch baseball, and then the weekend after that went to Manchester to watch cricket. (I should say that I'm not in any way into watching sport, but he is, and I go with him to keep him company. My conclusion: I vastly prefer cricket to baseball.) It was my first time in Manchester, and I was very impressed with its cafes, city centre, trams, and museums.
So this weekend is the first time in ages I've felt I had time to catch my breath. It helped that I took Friday off, and Matthias and I went out for a fancy seven-course tasting menu at one of the nicest restaurants in Cambridge. This was to celebrate him finishing his library/information studies degree. I've stuck a little photoset up here on Instagram, which includes a photo of the menu. It was delicious, and a really great thing to do.
Yesterday I caught up with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
catpuccino, who is one of my oldest friends (we've known each other since high school). She currently lives in London, and came down to visit me, and we sat out by the river and chatted for most of the afternoon. After I'd put her back on the train to London, I went on to meet a friend from my PhD days, who did an MPhil in my former academic department in the same year I began my PhD. She's American and went back to the US to do her PhD, and now has a tenure-track job over there, and is visiting the UK to research some manuscripts and present at the big conference in our field. As often happens when academics and former academics gather, there was a lot of complaining about academia, and particularly at the dire situation for PhD students, and how unethical it is to only support them in seeking non-academic careers as a sort of last-ditch afterthought. I found it interesting that someone who has in every way succeeded in achieving the academic dream (tenure track job one year after completing her PhD) would feel this way, but I suppose it's an encouraging sign that those within academia are coming around to this way of thinking.
Reading-wise it's been a mixture of Hugo finallists (I'm currently reading Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars) and library books. Of the latter I read both of Jordanna Max Brodsky's urban fantasy books set in a New York populated by dwindling, forgotten Greek gods, with the focus on a crime-fighting Artemis who finds herself dealing with crimes of a supernatural nature that threaten her divine relatives. It's a cool premise, but unfortunately the execution did not match the quality of that premise, and I was deeply disappointed in this series. I also finally managed to read the last in Stephanie Garber's Caraval series of YA novels, which was much more up my alley (I have a terrible weakness for earnest, courageous, trauma-survivor human heroines and the damaged supernatural boys who love them), but lost me in its final pages with a sadly typical YA novel solution to the dilemma of 'mortal girl, immortal boyfriend, how to show they really love each other?' I love this trope, but I hate the way it's resolved in 95 per cent of instances, and this one was no different. Finally, I read the New Suns anthology of SFF by people of colour, edited by Nisi Shawl. As with all such collections, it was a bit of a mixed bag, and I personally felt that most of the stories were too blunt and obvious in the real-world analogies they were making.
So all in all it's been fairly disappointing in terms of recent reading, save Max Gladstone's incredible space opera Empress of Forever, which was simply wonderful. I'm hoping the quality of my reading material will pick up a bit with the next few books!
I'll leave this post with a link to an interesting new take on the friending meme,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
findingfriends, which instead of a single post where the friending meme is collected, instead requires posters to copy-paste the questions and make their own personal post with their responses, and then seek out the posts of others who look like people they'd be interested in friending. I'll make my own post there later, and see how things go. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in doing, the link to the community is here:
How are you all? Do you have anything interesting going on that you'd like to catch me up about?
I've spent most of the past few weekends away: Matthias and I went with my mother for a long weekend to Brighton, where we ate excellent fish, visited the pavilion (absolutely wild, over-the-top design), and went for a long walk along the coastal path. After that all three of us were in London for a couple of days — Matthias to watch cricket with a friend of ours, Mum and I to (bizarrely) hang out in the House of Lords on the invitation of this guy she interviewed for one of her radio programmes. As I said at the time, I've never seen so many elderly current and former barristers arguing over the presence or absence of the word 'technical' in a document.
Then it was back to Cambridge for a few days, Mum returned to Australia, and Matthias and I went to London to watch baseball, and then the weekend after that went to Manchester to watch cricket. (I should say that I'm not in any way into watching sport, but he is, and I go with him to keep him company. My conclusion: I vastly prefer cricket to baseball.) It was my first time in Manchester, and I was very impressed with its cafes, city centre, trams, and museums.
So this weekend is the first time in ages I've felt I had time to catch my breath. It helped that I took Friday off, and Matthias and I went out for a fancy seven-course tasting menu at one of the nicest restaurants in Cambridge. This was to celebrate him finishing his library/information studies degree. I've stuck a little photoset up here on Instagram, which includes a photo of the menu. It was delicious, and a really great thing to do.
Yesterday I caught up with
catpuccino, who is one of my oldest friends (we've known each other since high school). She currently lives in London, and came down to visit me, and we sat out by the river and chatted for most of the afternoon. After I'd put her back on the train to London, I went on to meet a friend from my PhD days, who did an MPhil in my former academic department in the same year I began my PhD. She's American and went back to the US to do her PhD, and now has a tenure-track job over there, and is visiting the UK to research some manuscripts and present at the big conference in our field. As often happens when academics and former academics gather, there was a lot of complaining about academia, and particularly at the dire situation for PhD students, and how unethical it is to only support them in seeking non-academic careers as a sort of last-ditch afterthought. I found it interesting that someone who has in every way succeeded in achieving the academic dream (tenure track job one year after completing her PhD) would feel this way, but I suppose it's an encouraging sign that those within academia are coming around to this way of thinking.Reading-wise it's been a mixture of Hugo finallists (I'm currently reading Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars) and library books. Of the latter I read both of Jordanna Max Brodsky's urban fantasy books set in a New York populated by dwindling, forgotten Greek gods, with the focus on a crime-fighting Artemis who finds herself dealing with crimes of a supernatural nature that threaten her divine relatives. It's a cool premise, but unfortunately the execution did not match the quality of that premise, and I was deeply disappointed in this series. I also finally managed to read the last in Stephanie Garber's Caraval series of YA novels, which was much more up my alley (I have a terrible weakness for earnest, courageous, trauma-survivor human heroines and the damaged supernatural boys who love them), but lost me in its final pages with a sadly typical YA novel solution to the dilemma of 'mortal girl, immortal boyfriend, how to show they really love each other?' I love this trope, but I hate the way it's resolved in 95 per cent of instances, and this one was no different. Finally, I read the New Suns anthology of SFF by people of colour, edited by Nisi Shawl. As with all such collections, it was a bit of a mixed bag, and I personally felt that most of the stories were too blunt and obvious in the real-world analogies they were making.
So all in all it's been fairly disappointing in terms of recent reading, save Max Gladstone's incredible space opera Empress of Forever, which was simply wonderful. I'm hoping the quality of my reading material will pick up a bit with the next few books!
I'll leave this post with a link to an interesting new take on the friending meme,
findingfriends, which instead of a single post where the friending meme is collected, instead requires posters to copy-paste the questions and make their own personal post with their responses, and then seek out the posts of others who look like people they'd be interested in friending. I'll make my own post there later, and see how things go. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in doing, the link to the community is here:How are you all? Do you have anything interesting going on that you'd like to catch me up about?