Displaying the most recent of 742 posts written by

Amanda

Confidential to the BSG fans among my readership…

… especially those of you on Twitter: I just learned (via Twitter, of course) that someone has set up Twitter accounts for a whole bunch of Battlestar Galactica characters. I’m currently following @billadama and @cylonhybrid. (But where’s Laura Roslin?) And looking forward to getting cable in my new apartment when I move at the end […]

Pre-weekend update

My move (a little less than a month away) is finally arranged, and now the address-changing and packing begin in earnest. Tomorrow is my last day at Swarthmore, and then I take off for a long weekend of camping and canoeing in the wilds of Delaware with my extended family. And then back to Philadelphia […]

Department of unexpected operatic adaptations

There are some types of source material — Shakespeare plays, classical myths, lives of particularly colorful or notorious monarchs, and so on — that lend themselves readily to being adapted into operas. There are others that seem unlikely but turn out quite well; if Stravinsky could write an opera based on Hogarth engravings, nearly anything […]

Mapping and transportation hacks, #253

I've been trying to figure out the bus system for my soon-to-be neck of the woods, and have thus far found the regional transit agency's website a tad challenging to navigate. So I made up my own transit map instead, with the bus routes marked on it, plus grocery stores and coffee shops and sundry […]

Proof that the LOLcats model is universally adaptable

How on earth have I gone all this while without knowing about the existence of the LOL Manuscripts blog? Its motto: "Everything could use a little LOL. Especially the Renaissance." Technically they're LOL woodcuts, but, as the author of the blog, a graduate student who makes frequent use of EEBO, puts it, "LOL Early Modern […]

A new job on the horizon

Those of you who've been following my posts about my job search have probably noticed that I haven't said anything about it in a while. I've been holding off making any kind of formal announcement until everything was settled, but now that I have an official offer letter in hand, I can share the big […]

Name that poem!

A meme for a Saturday morning: I've just discovered Wordle, a site that lets you generate nice-looking multicolored "word clouds" out of any text you put into it. One of the first things I tried doing with it was running the text of various poems through it. And then I thought, "I wonder how identifiable […]

On comfort reading

Inspired by New Kid on the Hallway's pair of posts about "comfort reading," I've been thinking about books to read in times of stress and worry, or general upheaval, or even just vague fits of the blahs. Comfort reading, for me, means going somewhere very much elsewhere for a little while. If the situation that […]

Aaaaand I’m done!

As of yesterday, all of my final papers and assignments and presentations are done. Now it's all over bar the diploma. I'm still readjusting to the thought of not having my evenings and weekends given over to classes, readings, and homework. Whatever shall I do with myself? Anyone care to recommend something suitably fluffy (but […]

Birthday, end of library school, changes afoot

Yesterday was my birthday. I'm 33, an appealingly palindromic number (I've always liked multiples of eleven). I didn't get to do anything yesterday evening, because I had a class to go to; thanks to the quarter system, my birthday always falls right around the crazy pre-finals weeks. (The University of Chicago is on the quarter […]