The son of my niece has made a stop-motion Lego Batman movie, so I’m doing my part to make him slightly famous.
The goal: let’s seem him get more traffic than my YouTube channel does (I believe in setting achievable goals here).
I guess I’m going to tend to the spiders in the lab for a while until the 80 kph winds come howling across the prairie. I expect the sidewalks to be completely drifted over so I won’t be going in tomorrow.
Awesome. One of my favorite movies of all time is Ravenous, and this morning I found someone who has the same appetite, but can explain why.
(Warning: grisly gore included in this review)
I got all my syllabi written, and organized my first week’s lectures. I also created and published the Canvas pages for my students. I still have to revamp the first lab — thanks to COVID-19, I’ve had to do major surgery on how the lab operates, to accommodate social distancing. I’ll probably get that done tomorrow.
Also, I sort of understand why the administration did this, but it’s still kind of annoying. They killed Spring Break — don’t you students scurry off to visit family and bring back the plague! But then they sprinkled one day long breaks throughout the term, rather than just shortening the whole semester. That tends to mess up lab schedules more than the usual big block of lost time.
But they didn’t consult me on the matter, so I guess I can’t complain. I just deal with what they hand me at this point, and hope I don’t die a horrible slow lingering death of the current epidemic.
Another addition to my YouTube schedule: Friday night is play time. I’m going to try streaming No Man’s Sky, assuming I can get my streaming software to cooperate.
There are so many people playing this game now that it’ll be hard to add anything new by being yet another streamer, but I’ll try to give some informed biological commentary on the algorithmically generated planets. I can tell you in advance that they have limited success…but it’ll be fun anyway, right?
Oh, also — I’ll plan on doing some creationist bashing on Sunday mornings at 6am my time, look for that announcement later. I’m trying to accommodate all those people in distant time zones, too!
I did something yesterday to throw my back out — I’m 63, which means I probably did something radical like sneeze. Anyway, I’m sitting here trying not to move a millimeter that way or twist this other way, which would send spasms rippling up my spine, and I think I’ll be immobile most of the day…except that I’m about to get up and walk to the medicine cabinet for some painkillers, trying not to scream or die, and then come back to my chair and just stop for a while.
Fortunately, my self-imposed agenda for the day is to hammer out a couple of syllabi and get them posted to our CMS, Canvas. It’s just fingers that need to work, and so far they seem OK. Classes start up again in 9 days.
Time to gently ease myself out of this chair and gingerly shuffle to the next room. If you hear a shrieking howl out of the upper midwest, I didn’t make it.
This was a new phenomenon to me. Walking into work today, everything was covered with these long whiskers of ice, typically close to 2cm long.
We’ve stayed below freezing for the last few days, and also we’ve had freezing fog every morning, which I presume feeds some peculiar crystallization process. It looks cool, anyway.
This afternoon when I was walking home I saw that they hadn’t melted, but were gradually falling off the trees as a very gentle snow.
Asking for a friend. I’m hoping to have a conversation about how to use YouTube for science communication on Sunday at noon my time. Maybe it’s not possible. Some of us just have a face or voice made for blogging. Tell me what you think this weekend.
If anyone wants to join the livestream, drop me an email and let me know, and maybe I’ll respond with a link so you can join in. Maybe. I’ll be a little discriminating about who I’ll share a screen with.
Hey, I just had an idea — more spiders. Maybe I could recruit a spider co-host to add more charm!
This is the opening sequence for an anime. Let me know if the theme music sounds familiar — is this music not copyrighted?
The series is based on a manga, So I’m a spider, so what?, which I own and have read. I had hopes that it would be something like Jay Hosler‘s work, which is excellent and informative, and that it would be useful for teaching about how wonderful spiders are. It’s not. It’s this bizarre fusion of spider biology with video game dogma, and most of the emphasis is on how this person transported into a spider body can go up in levels and acquire new spider powers. Maybe you’d enjoy it if you’re more into video games than arachnids, but I’m the reverse of that.
Shortly, I have to take off on my regular biweekly foraging trip — it’s a couple hours of traveling that the pandemic adds to my load.
It’s probably a good thing today, though, because doomscrolling through news of the shambles the USA has become is not doing me any good.
