Synova

Today was my first day. The classes were fun. Sort of. I sort of dread the one class because it's going to be about arguing effectively and rules of logic, which isn't dreadful at all, but we're going to be making arguments in class and I expect it has the potential to include a fair amount of cringe-worthy college-age passion about "causes." The last thing I want to do is get in an argument with idealists who just graduated from high school. (Does this count as a "don't commit this to the internet" sort of sentiment?) I do want the logic class though. And Algebra. The first Math class I've taken in over 25 years. So far I remember the material once it's shown, but before that the problems are entirely opaque and I couldn't even guess where to start. The on-line homework is new and confusing. On the one hand the way each step is shown is wonderfully helpful. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I exit if the p...

Sword and Sorcery tends to embarrass itself at the movies. The genre is simultaneously deathly serious and silly beyond all reason so it's easy to see how that might all go wrong. It seems less ridiculous if you're reading the story in a book. I don't know why, it just does. So making a new Conan is a risk. It's a risk because any movie in the genre is a risk. It's also a risk because the original Conan movies were pretty darn good and who can top Arnold? Conan IS Arnold and Arnold IS Conan. It's a risk because too many people already know what Conan is and what Conan ought to be. Everyone has preconceptions the new movie has to live up to. Well, I think they did good. No, it's not brilliant. It's not as great a movie as, say, Iron Man, but then nothing is. What it is is solid good fun. The plot is the plot to Conan and nothing particularly new. His village is slaughtered and his father is killed, he advocates ind...

I bought at least some of my books today. I'm starting (returning?) full time at UNM this fall; easing in with a relatively light load of classes. I expect that math will be a struggle as I've not had a math class in 25 years and I can't afford to do "just enough" since I'm going to have to take more for my major. In any case, it's got to be solid. My other classes range from less worrisome to "easy A" even though I'm a bit hesitant to say so. It just sounds sort of bad. I'm looking forward to them all and am actually quite excited about them because it's all interesting stuff. It's much easier to do well in an interesting class for an interesting subject than one that is so easy it's dull. So school is looking good, so far. Once it starts I have some administrative things to do. They gave me a whole bunch of transfer credits, enough so that I'm classed as junior year, but few of them applied to my ...

The Rise of... Saw it this morning. I will say this... it didn't FEEL like I was cheering the end of the human species. Contrary to what PETA said (IIRC) the apes weren't getting their own back, not getting some sort of revenge against humans. What the movie does is establish how the apes got smart and set up the reason they were able to fill a void. The movie used an amazingly light touch in dealing with animal research. None of the villains were among the scientists or researchers. That medical research was dealt with as a complex thing and the motivations of the researchers shown to be anything but evil, made the simplistic treatment of the three individual humans who were villains a disappointment. Important plot points depended on teh stupid. It would not have been hard to do better.