we, like sheep

[ursula]

A meme:

Ask me three questions. Ask me anything you want. Then post these instructions in your own journal, editing for style if necessary.

I am thinking about goblins, Morrowind, lentils, and algebraic topology vs. differential geometry, and not thinking about algebra.

Comments

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

1. What is Morrowind? (for it sounds like something I should know)

2. Who is your favorite poet?

3. Turnabout is fair play: Nesbit, Jones, or Burnett, and why?

[ursula]

1. A computer game. I had a dream obviously influenced by its graphics the other morning, which resuscitated the dependence.

2. Horace, I suppose . . . I'm not as good with modern poetry, or poetry in English at all, for that matter. Modern Poem of the Moment is Ted Hughes' poem in Birthday Letters about the bear.

3. Nesbit, for having had the greatest influence on my moral code, I suspect.

[kid-prufrock.livejournal.com]

1. What goes best with rice and lentils?
2. When did you join the SCA, and why?
3. d20 over White Wolf. True or false?

[ursula]

1. Red wine goes with everything. Otherwise . . . Salad with non-supermarket greens and feta, maybe. Or lemon juice and cumin as a general set of flavorings.

2. My first SCA occasion was a St. Patrick's Day parade March of my freshman year of high school, which I went to because Hank (alias Elric), who was in my physics class, was trying to persuade people to attend, and I had a crush on him. There I met Jeremy (alias Gwynnin), possibly not for the first time, and gloried in being surrounded by older men with dark hair.

The following winter I managed to date Jeremy for the span of about two months. He was my first boyfriend. We were cute and clueless and not very good at actually talking to each other. In the process I made friends with Jeremy's friends, aelfgyfu and nobu and Hank and so on, and thus the following summer I began going to events. In An Tir (the Northwest) there are camping events just about every weekend for the entire summer, with firelight and alcohol and lots of drum circles and belly-dancers of varying degrees of skill.

3. True for combat, false for magic. The Mage system, because of its fluidity, is closer to the way I think magic ought to work than any incarnation of D&D can ever be. The clunkiness of physical combat is unconscionable, though.

[hankshiny.livejournal.com]

1.) Describe your mental picture of a goblin. Include specific details concerning size, shape, color, and apparel where possible.
2.) Refute or support: Differential geometry is, like, way lamer than algebraic topology because you have to do calculus, and calculus is hard.
3.) Rank the following categories of people from "sexiest" to "least sexy": mathematicians, livejournalers, D&D dwarves, classicists, Weasleys.

[ursula]

1. Smallish, perhaps a shade under five feet tall if standing upright, which they never do (possibly their spines don't bend that way); around four feet with ordinary slanted posture, maybe shorter. Very thin and angular all round, grayish skin, nocturnal, cat-eyes, pointed ears, sparse and stringy hair, teeth tending to points. Apparel dark and often in rags, though both sexes are fond of jewelry when they can get it, including long strings of animal teeth.

2. Answering this statement would probably net me a thesis advisor. Points against algebraic topology include the molasses-like feeling of trying to compute anything involving a long exact sequence, and the coolness of manifolds.

3. livejournalers (glasseye, though journal does not reflect this fact), mathematicians (literate), livejournalers (people I know), classicists (don't sound like Garrison Keillor), Weasleys (sane and not mushy), D&D dwarves (male), mathematicians (illiterate), livejournalers (people I don't know), D&D dwarves (female), Weasleys (insane or mushy), classicists (sound like Garrison Keillor)

[d-m.livejournal.com]

// 1. which is more limiting: a story- or rules-driven rpg?
//    (i.e. games where your actions are limited by the story's
//     needs (rolls and planning are compromised) versus games
//     where planning and rules trump the story's needs)

// 2. do you distinguish ideas and thoughts; if so, which do
//    do you "like" more?

// 3. are analogies worth the details they gloss over?

[ursula]

1. Limiting for whom, whose story and whose planning? I tend to be lazy about rules and obsessive about characterization, so generally I prefer plot and improvisation to long bouts of dice-rolling, but for everything there is a season . . .

2. My answer to "What are you thinking?" is quite often "Actually I was just remembering a conversation or a bit of writing . . ." So I suppose a memory can be a thought (one considers it) without quite being an idea yet. I guess I expect thoughts to be verbalized, so the set of ideas is strictly contained in the set of thoughts. The set of non-idea thoughts is too amorphous for me to like or dislike (and it's probably too big to make a set, anyway.)

3. One could attempt to avoid this problem by employing many different analogies, so that any particular detail is only occasionally glossed.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

1. Where do you garner book recs (lj aside)?

2. If you didn't read lj, to what use would you put that time?

3. To break the implicit theme, what color(s) are your curtains / blinds? (Pick a room.)

[ursula]

1. For books that aren't science fiction, my mother. For science fiction, though I've borrowed particular books from particular friends, my private book-choosing process in the library or a large bookstore is probably more influential. I read largely on the "Everything by X" principle; if I haven't read a book by someone before, title and not having the words "epic" or "cycle" on the cover are probably most influential, aside from the subtleties of plot description.

2. E-mail, I suspect.

3. I have the very ordinary white blinds that came with the apartment. At the moment, my highest decorating priority is to substitute more bookcases for eleven milk crates.

not related

[nobu.livejournal.com]

first, i had to inform you that while i don't even know what a misplaced modifyer is...
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


(http://quizilla.com/users/BaalObsidian/quizzes/How%20grammatically%20sound%20are%20you%3F/)



also... is the subject of your entry from something? if it isn't, can i steal it for a poem? it begs poetry :)
and um..hi and stuff.

Re: not related

[ursula]

Yeah, my title is from Handel's Messiah, which in turn borrowed it from Isaiah. (I just looked this up.) So you would really be stealing from the Bible, not from me . . .

Hi. What's your yahoo name?