hmpf

It's fascinating how many articles there are about alternative energy and about the fact that oil resources are finite and so on. It's almost like reading a current newspaper.

It's also disheartening, because it shows that by and large, society did not change course, despite the nasty shock of the oil crisis, and despite the fact that plenty of people back then pointed out that even though *that* oil crisis was not due to depleted resources, the day *would* come, fairly soon, when resources would be depleted, and that we should plan ahead for that.

(Climate change was not a topic for newspapers back then, although it was already being investigated in the sciences to some degree; but even without that, the finiteness of certain resources should be enough of a reason for any *sane* civilisation to not base its entire industry on those resources... Not to mention that it's clearly a really bad idea to just *burn* a finite resource for fuel that is also used to produce a lot of *actually* vital things, from fertilisers to medical plastics... Even if the burning did not produce gases that heated up the atmosphere, it would still be a pretty daft thing to do. Is a pretty daft thing to do.)

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I should perhaps have mentioned, yesterday, that I went to see my advisor, and she convinced me to keep trying to write my current thesis. She says I should get a two-month extension if necessary, and could still try to get the exams following that postponed, under certain circumstances.

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Oh, and I should also add (for fairness' sake) that the mouse was not caught by me; the personal pronoun left out in the previous entry was 'we'. 'We' being me and my roommate, with me shouting 'get a bucket or something!', and her grabbing the bowl standing on the table and throwing it. *g*

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Got "Fiendish" and "The Great Leap" by Phideaux today. Why those two? The choice is somewhat random, I have to admit. Eventually I'm probably going to buy all of Phideaux's albums; I initially wanted to start with "Fiendish" and "313", but the latter was sold out.

... my thesis project. I think we're allowed two attempts... I'd have to wait for the next sign-up period to start a new one, of course.

Not sure if it's possible to just stop and start something else, though. Possibly it would take an official rejection of my current thesis before I'd be allowed a retry.

'course, it would look crappy on my C.V., and would mean I'd be nearly 34 when finishing uni... Then again, I do fairly sincerely believe society's going to go to hell in the next few decades anyway, and don't particularly believe that even in the case of it not going to hell my degree would mean shit. So I'm kind of, 'feh,' about my job prospects and stuff, at the moment.

Frankly, I don't think I ever seriously believed in something like a career being in my future, and I think in the past few years I've begun to understand more and more clearly that my future trajectory needs to lead further *out* of society's mainstream instead of further in. Art. Writing. Political activism. Whatever. Poverty, yes, probably, but who cares?

Maybe I need one more failure to finally... propel myself out of the remains of my normal, 'respectable' life...

Also:

"Spatial, social and other boundaries/structures in world-building small press/self-published comics by female authors, with a special focus on the works of Carla Speed McNeil and Donna Barr"

This may be the topic of my thesis. Hurrah.

It only took me four fucking weeks.

... were the two seemingly antithetical results of my short but 'intense' trip to Britain. The physical exhaustion, a result of travelling 18 hours by coach, showed as a desire to sleep through all of Monday, interrupted only by two hours of work in the evening. The - unexpected! - mental relaxation showed as sudden inspiration to vid and make jewellery. Granted, not the most intelligent thing to do when you have a deadline for your thesis and still no idea what to write, and I would probably have appreciated a sudden *thesis-related* inspiration more... But, having stifled most of my creative impulses for months now, until I eventually nearly lost them, I decided to give in to them this time.

Vidding didn't go too well (see previous entry *g*), but jewellery making did. I've started making a necklace for my mother, one I promised her so many years ago it's not even funny. She had these labradorite beads, and I wanted to make something really nice from them, but wasn't really happy with any idea I had over the years. I've now ended up using a very simple idea that came to me literally in my sleep. It truly is ridiculously simple, but I think that's why I like it - all the more 'sophisticated' ideas I had earlier just didn't fit the beads very well, but simplicity does. Plus, I get to melt lots of little blobs of silver for this design, and there are few things more relaxing and satisfying - nor more foolproof! - than melting metal. (Seriously! You try it! *g*) And then I get to hit the blobs with a hammer a lot - also foolproof and relaxing. (This is what goldsmithing-as-therapy would look like, I tell you.) The only thing about this necklace that may get the least bit tricky is the clasp, but I'll manage that as well, I'm sure. Maybe I'll think of a very simple mechanism for it... *g*

Oh, and I still haven't told you about the insane trip *to* Britain, have I? That really deserves an epic poem... I'm not sure I'm up to that today.

Go here to marvel, and boggle, at the psychology of denial:

And then get angry.

And, no, I still can't tell you where to take that anger so as to use it productively, but I nevertheless think that having that anger is a Good Thing - a first step to something else.

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Other News:

I'm making some progress on the M.A. front, though I still haven't formulated a precise topic. I'm currently reading or rereading all the comics of my 'core group' (Finder, the works of Donna Barr, Amy Unbounded, Castle Waiting, A Distant Soil, Winging It, Raven's Children), taking detailed notes about the way they treat a number of issues (gender, culture/ethnicity, class, to name just a few). Whatever exact topic I will end up with, this kind of data collection will be necessary, so doing it now will buy me time later - and maybe the close rereading, and the collection of data on certain aspects, will help me to recognise my topic.

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To Whom It Concerns:

Minor progress on the writing front. That dialogue is a bitch.

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What I'm Doing When I'm Not Reading Comics or Worrying About the Apocalypse:

Through my research on world building (the main result of which, so far, is that world building is woefully underexplored) I discovered this, and immediately bought it. It's not, so far, all that interesting as a utopia, and it's vaguely racist, I think (though the racism doesn't intrude much on the actual 'plot'; it's just sort of there in the basic setup.) However, it's a nearly perfect example of a book whose main purpose is making a place come alive - a type of book that I'm particularly fond of. I'm reading it very slowly, just to savour the beauty of the countryside. It's like a little bit of a holiday every night before I go to sleep.

Just in case anyone is wondering what those 400 euros got me in the past six months:

Donna Barr: The Desert Peach (complete); Stinz (complete?); Bosom Enemies (complete?); other stuff (mostly very relevant indeed, I think - some still unread)
Colleen Doran: A Distant Soil 1-4 (still haven't decided how relevant this is thematically - apart from its historical significance)
Roberta Gregory: Winging It 1-2 (highly relevant)
Rod Espinosa: Neotopia 1-4 (relevance doubtful, not self-published, but at least it's pretty *g*)
Rachel Hartman: Amy Unbounded: Belondweg Blossoming (relevant, but probably not going to be a main focus due to incompleteness)
Layla Lawlor: Raven's Children 2 (I already had part 1; fairly relevant, I think)
David Mack: Kabuki 2, 4 (not self-published, but features some interesting stuff about identity that sort of struck a chord. Also: pretty. I don't have the money to buy the entire series, so this is just to get a general kind of impression, really.)
Linda Medley: Castle Waiting, vol. 1 (fairly relevant, but probably not central to whatever argument I'm going to end up making)
Paul Pope: PulpHope (Not a comic, really, but since I can't get THB before 2009, this seemed like the best option for getting an impression of the man and his work; I have a strange gut feeling he may be relevant.)
Dave Roman, John Green: Jax Epoch and the Quicken Forbidden 1-2 (mostly irrelevant, but fun)
Dave Sim: Cerebus: High Society (just to get an impression - hasn't arrived yet. Definitely historically relevant.)
Mark Smylie: Artesia 1-3 (fairly relevant, possibly)
Teri Wood: Wandering Star (haven't read enough yet to judge relevance)

Not all of these are strictly relevant for my work. Some don't quite fit thematically, others aren't really all that 'independent' (I still want to focus mainly on self-published books)... but I needed to get something *approaching* an overview of the field, and it's really difficult to find any literature about it. Obviously, this small a selection still does not qualify me to really claim I 'know' the field of indie/self-published sf and fantasy. But reading as widely as I could under the circumstances definitely helped me to develop some ideas, although they're all still very vague.

More and more, I'm beginning to think that the one, elusive thing that all the comics in my 'central' group have in common - that strange quality that I sense about them all without being able to say what it actually is - is simply... 'literariness' (for lack of a better word).

Of course, that is probably the single most unhelpful discovery I've made so far, because 'literariness' is not a clearly definable category like "sf/fantasy comics" or "self-published comics". So how can I use it to help define a group of works?

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What I'm dealing with here just might be its own sub-genre, too, although a singularly difficult one to define. It's neither clearly sf nor fantasy, though it frequently contains elements of both. More than anything it's characterised by a certain messiness, an organic quality, a sense of having not so much been written as grown.

Carla Speed McNeil calls the world of Finder a 'magpie world' in an interview. That works, too.

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(Why, oh why are Cerebus and THB so difficult - read: impossible - to acquire? I *need* to read them... THB especially.)

I'm reading this introduction to Foucault, and it *seems*, sometimes, as if Foucault could be rather useful in discussing Finder... but I'm sadly incapable of really understanding almost anything. I mean, I get these sort of... vague *glimpses* of What It All Means, here and there, but they're interspersed with lots of Really Dense, Really Incomprehensible Philosophy - I can read entire pages without understanding a single sentence. Much like my attempt to read/understand some Judith Butler a few months ago, this foray into theory seems doomed by my too-low intelligence (or my lack of years and years of previous experience reading philosophy).

I wonder - is there any theory that might be useful for my thesis that is actually comprehensible to a student of only *slightly* above average intelligence and not a lot of experience reading philosophy? I get the impression that even most of the introductions to the great theorists are written for people who already have a fairly good grasp of the canon of great thinkers of the past two centuries or so, and/or a much higher IQ than me.

Right.

Here's the deal.

I have *no* time. No time for anything beyond uni and the bare necessities of living, that is.

This will continue to be the case for... at least the next eight months. Possibly the entire next year and a bit longer than that, even (though I really hope that there will be a bit of a break somewhere between the eight months and the phase after that).

Technically, I should have spent much less time here in the last few months already; I just ignored the more sensible parts of my mind that said "if you worked a bit more on your thesis now, and a bit less on fic/discussions/catching up with LJ... you would have less stress when the actual deadline for your M.A. comes up, and probably get a better result to boot." Being chronically unable to keep any kind of balance in my life, I overdosed on fandom instead (knowing, at least subconsciously, that it might be my last dose for a long time to come).

To make up for all that lost time, I now have to devote my entire time to my thesis. By now, time's so short that the necessary work is only *barely* manageable, even if I do devote all my time to it. I was deluding myself to think that it would be possible to keep up the semblance of a life beside it.

I am sorry that, in my deluded state, I got involved in some fannish projects, believing I would be able to keep being properly involved - and getting people's enthusiasm up in the process. I hate leaving you guys in a lurch. I hate being unreliable; I hate being a bad friend; I hate being trapped and waylaid by my own inability to plan ahead. The guilt is immense.

Guilt aside, I miss you guys already and will miss you more. I'm literally crying here now. But I think the only way I'm going to get over the next... eight... twelve... months, is by essentially disconnecting the fandom parts of my brain. Fandom is a source of great joy, but it's also the greatest devourer of time in my life. Fandom, *active* fandom - the social side of it, the creative side of it - is not possible without devoting fairly massive amounts of time to it. I've been struggling with it before, and I absolutely can't afford it now.

So this is me announcing another GAFIA (actually, I think, announcing a GAFIA for the first time - the previous ones always just sort of... happened, and weren't so much a matter of conscious decision.) Think of it as me being suddenly offered a chance to work in the Antarctic or something. Communication is going to be difficult, but I'm not going to forget you guys, and it's not forever. It's just a year. Or so.

I'll continue to post here, but it's mostly going to be one-way communications - just short life signs, and a way for me to keep track of myself. I'll be checking in with some of you occasionally, probably mostly silently, but the Great Catching Up Project will have to be restarted when I'm back, *properly* back.

I may go on the occasional surprise posting/commenting spree when I can't bear the isolation anymore.

As a very busy wizard once said: expect me when you see me.

closely (re)reading all of Finder for thesis preparation has made me fall in love with the series all over again. I mean, how can you not love a comic in whose universe exists the following people:

"Huldres are farmers. They live in giant combine harvesters, rolling around the hills outside the cities, mowing the grain which, according to them, grows wild. Other harvesters take issue with their methods. Huldres are pirate farmers."

The sheer awesomeness of the idea of pirate farmers makes my mind boggle in the most delightful way. And this is only one of hundreds of weird, wonderful details.

Go here to read/buy.