What I did in my holidays

I was going to finish this and add photos but that doesn't look like its going to happen. John Cohen (Winner of the B.H. Neumann prize(*) for best student talk, and him only an honours student!) has photos here. He and I didn't hang out that much but since I can't find my photos it'll have to do.

No, not a long blow-by-blow account, don't worry. But I got people to give me reccomendations of stuff and decided the least I could do is say what I enjoyed. I didn't get much time to explore since the conference was 9-6pm most days (though I did skip the odd lecture with titles like "Dirichlet-to-Neumann map, solvable model and application of them to the analytic peturbation theory on the absolutely-continuous spectrum")

So:

• Federation Square: To be honest I don't see why people go on about it. I mean its ok, and the art gallery was cool, but still. Unfortunately the Moving Image museum closed shortly after we arrived.
• Queen Victoria Market: So big! Worth going to if you want to buy interesting, reasonably priced food. Or want a really large range of cruddy knick-knacks.
• Lygon Street Carlton (Walking up from the city). More italian restaurants than the entire state of W.A. The one we went to was very nice. We tried both gelato places and they were Oh My God the best gelato ever. Especially the Dolce Vita Freddo roche stuff. Mmm. The spruikers are annoying, but mainly on the expensive side!
• Brunswick Street Fitzroy (In the middle of lots of boring stuff, luckily we caught a tram) This is a cool street. Polyester books was interesting. And I got Armageddon Blues from a little secondhand place.
• South bank and casino: Eh. The casino was classier than burswood but still rather tawdry and pokie-ridden. (No, we didn't go in to bet all our money away, just to see :)) All the fountains were off but the flame-things are cool.
• The Aquarium: What little I saw didn't seem that different from Aqua, except a bit classier- we had the dinner there, and having canapes and drinks in a big room surounded by fish was pretty cool. The dinner itself had a big reef aquarium at the back and nice view of the south bank at the front, so we could see the flamy things every hour. There was a rather tacky ride too.
• City circle tram: A free trip round the city with commentary. Cheaper than all the other trams!

(*)The photo I really wanted to put up was of the prize itself, a certificate and a piece of paper with "$400 to follow" written on it :)

Somebody shoot me..

I just crocheted a doily.

Well, a "lacy motif" according to the pattern. If I'm not stopped soon I'll start making toilet roll covers for school fetes!

I came across a wire crochet stall today and the woman did her best to convince me that it was really hard and I should give up and buy some of her stuff immediately. Bah. I originally had no intention of doing much "real" crochet since it all seems to be unbelievably dorky or require extreme neatness (generally both) but this morning was taken with the unshakeable need to make a snood(*). Since all the patterns online seem to work on the assumption that being crochet it must be as ugly as possible, I may have to design my own. I'm thinking dark and beaded in a medieval style. Maybe I can get Phlebus to make me one for my birthday, since she's actually competent. (She makes the extremely neat not dorky stuff like bags and lace) Heehee. As I suspected this blog has turned into a space for me to ramble about my obsession-of-the-moment. Which still satisfies The Golden Rule Of The Internet since I'm sure someone out there might be interested.

(*)Am I the only person who thinks this is something the Onceler would make? I asked Cam and he turned out not to have heard of "The Lorax". I think he may be an alien.

A few things...

Zoe is a Really Nice Person for lending me umbrella despite it meaning she got rained on. Those of you who she desires it of should lavish hugs and cuddles apon her.

I made a Chibi Delerium out of clay which I am inordinately proud of and took me absolutely forever. I've also actually bought some wool and started crocheting with a hook that just happened to be sitting in the medicine cabint. (Spooky huh?) I'm really crap at it but enjoying it anyway. Much more fun than knitting. I still have to work out where to get cheap wire to practice with.

Something I forgot to mention in my whine that was not angst is that during the 4 hours or so I spent coughing and feeling sorry for myself last Saturday morning, I got to see He-man! Woohoo! I was quite amazed at exactly how much I enjoyed it. Possibly not enough to get up early on Saturdays though.

Livejournal is the spawn of Satan

Just in case anyone didn't know, out of the kindness of her heart Liz decided to set up a RSS feed of my blog into a livejournal account which she, logically enough, gave the username "sqbr". When she realised this meant I couldn't use this name myself she tried to change it and discovered she couldn't. Ever. So I can never have a livejournal. No, I don't blame Liz, I too know the horrible feeling when the warm fuzzie of doing someone a favour sours into the cold relaization you just made things worse. I blame livejournal. But since they refuse to delete the account, I can insult them all I like and it gets fed into the lj. Unlike say Geocities where if you look at them funny they delete your account.

So: livejournal smells funny. When livejournal was born, the doctor slapped it's mother. Hmm...

And to those who say "Just use a diferent username" I say "But I am sqbr!...

..and when did I say I wanted a livejournal anyway?"

Not that I mean to whine...

I've had a cold recently (Yeah, hardly headline news) and the last couple of mornings have woken up with an incredible cough. Really, with the right PR I think this cough has the determiniation and guts to be president someday. (I'm not sure what of..coughs maybe) After sitting on the cough coughing from 4-9am this morning I decided to go to the Doctor.

So. I describe my symptoms and do the saying ah etc

Dr: Sounds like all the symtpoms of an asthmatic attack. Have a puff of this free inhaler. Don't you feel better already?
Me: Um..maybe. *thinks "Gee, what a nice Dr"*
Me: And... I have this wart on my foot...
Dr: Right! We'll just go burn that off! Come with me to the bathroom!
Me: Uhhh...

He didn't even say "This may sting a little" and then froze off part of my foot. With liquid nitrogen! I had to walk three blocks home! And the cough came back.

Yes, ok, I'll be thankful to the doctor when the wart actually heals but right now I have a cough and a sore foot and feel like being irrationally whiny. Specially since I seem to have developed both asthma and hayfever all of a sudden, unless he misdiagnosed me. Maybe I'm just wierded out by seing part of my body turned into a chunk of ice all of a sudden.

Not that I mean to insult one of our fine medical practitioners, so compassionate and undertstanding of the sick. Especially those who are, say, too sick to buy birthday presents. Yes. Doctors good.

Maybe I should shut up now....

---

Another conversation from today:
Phlebus: Can you find out some swancon details for me? Our internet is down.
Me: Sure, I'll email you.

Yeah, shutting up. Good idea.

Stargate rant

EDIT:Now on my livejournal! How exciting. I'm clearing out my draft posts, and have decided to post this rant I wrote absolutely ages ago but decided not to post iuntil I had time to ponder and decide if it was worth saying.

Maybe it's just a repressed way of expressing my..annoyance..about the election!

So...this is a little rant about something that has been bugging me about Stargate for a while.

I have to say first off that I don't really watch the show. Cam does, and I watch over his shoulder from time to time. But I've talked to him about it and while he thinks I'm maing a mountain out of a molehill he couldn't come up with any counterexamples.

So- We have humans from all over the world scattered on various planets as slaves for the evil Go'uld. The odd planet gets left to its own devices (Come to think of it I'm not sure how this happens. The Go'uld in charge dies and none of the others notice I suppose) and their culture develops naturally from there. Most populations seem to be mainly taken from one place on earth and maintain to a greater or lesser extent the original culture from when they were taken. In all cases this is before written history of course. So there are pseudo-japanese/celtic/african etc etc cultures at various stages of civilisation and different kinds of society. Plus some generic whoever-applied-as-an-extra-today groups when the script doesn't require any particular background.

Some time ago the Stargate team came across a planet with slightly-better-than-us levels of technology who were of celtic background and so had slight celtic influences on their society, though this was a pretty minor part of the (actually quite silly)_story. Anyway, I thought this was cool, and started thinking about all the possibilities for modern/futuristic socities that weren't just tweaked copies of England/America etc. but were influenced by truly different cultures and had developed in complete isolation. And realised that not one stargate episode does this. Every "modern" society is either a thinly veiled copy of America (Now, in the past, or the likely future. For some reason they really like pseudo WWII) or just a generic scifi trope like "Powerful visitors who claim to come in peace but actualy want to kill you". The only explicitely non-western-european societies are in the odd feudal-villiage style planets, and are at best a straight cross between generic ethnic villiagers and whatever scifi idea the plot is based around. I see this as a lost oppurtunity for an interesting exploration of ideas. I mean how cool would it be to have a planet of ex-egyptian slaves (as in the movie) who still worship the Old Gods and have an egyptian society but also have futuristic technology? Ok, maybe it's just me who thinks it's cool. Cooler at least than the episode I just watched, which was basically WWII with religious fundamentalists as the nazis. (In the several months since I wrote this I remembered one of the dangerous-alien-woman-falls-for-Daniel episodes was a pseudo-mayan culture populated by people who look significantly less mayan than me. I do not consider myself corrected)

Personally I think it shows a real lack of imaginiation on the part of the writers, not to mention casters. Why do most people in any industrialised society have to be white? Huh? Guh. And don't give me that "Oh, but they have to work with the actors they can get" crud. Most episodes have a cast of like 12 non-earth people.

Of course the correct response to this rant is "Well, Sophie, that's the price you pay for watching cruddy t.v. s.f.".
Still, at least it isn't as smug as Star Trek. And they have done an adequate exploration of the effect sudden access to intergalactic travel might have on the world as it is right now.

Something I generally find interesting is the idea of colourblind (etc) casting. I have no problem with it in general (unless you really are going for historical accuracy) but sometimes I think its important to get people to look and act like the character is supposed to if it makes the audience think a bit. Like the hundreds of years before the first black Othello. Or the way they cast Lydia in P&P as a 25-yr-old thus losing some of the impact of "Oh my God Wickham ran off with a 15 yr old what a prat!" *ahem* Anyway, I'm done now :)