Rhan's dan

Deck the halls with books on fission
fa la la la laaa la laa laa la
‘Tis the season for revision
fa la la la laaa la laa laa la
yawn, we now are tired of reading
fa la laa la la laa laa laa la
still, we must make one more meeting
fa la la la laaa la laa laa la.

Yup, it’s that time of year, when your bum gets sore from multiple days on end spent sitting hunched over a laptop, tik tak typing away. Just to warm you post-grads with the comfy glow of schadenfreude, I just sent in 28 pages of political analysis on apartheid South Africa and the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Last Friday I turned in a 10 page paper for the same class, just a few hours before an evolution exam(…for which I had just turned in another 6-pager), and Thursday I had a short story due along with about 37 or so pages of revisions. So, I get tomorrow off, but Thursday holds a Swahili final, and Friday is my Evolution final. I think my eyes may be welded to my laptop.

Any cool news from the outside world?

Well, I’m on the job-hunting, exam-prepping stage of the semester, so I figure I’ll just give you guys an art update that doesn’t actually draw time away from my studies. Yeah, I’m a total miser, I know 🙂

One of the major points in my critiques for the Umm Kwakiyya story (see two posts ago) was that, since I dumped my readers straight into the middle of a war zone and allowed the physical descriptions of setting to trickle in over the course of 14 pages, it was a little hard to visualize the opening setting. My classmates recommended that I add another illustration, possibly even a map, to deal with this, and this is what they got:

The House of Assad

It is a bit dashed (I had a 10 page paper and an exam due at the same time), but hopefully you get the picture, as it were. As a size reference, the lines in front of the water wheels are grated catwalks wide enough for perhaps 4 people to walk abreast.

Apparently the post-thesis world is a kind place.

I had a great graduation this weekend (they let us “graduate” before exams this year, since grades aren’t due until Christmas Eve or some nonsense), a great meeting with my dean, got my Evolution paper turned in, made my bosses’ day by bringing in a box of homemade dark chocolate, aced a medical Swahili quiz, had a great review in my fiction writing class, and had my modern anthropology professor delay our 27+ pages of papers by a week. We also initiated an anthology project in or fiction class that will apparently involve a fried s’mores discussion party this weekend.

Oh, and someone just walked up and handed me a Papa John’s sausage pizza.

Wow.

This week’s Autoclave comic here for your amusement, and a reiteration of the last post:

Yup. Tha's all done.