By Any Other Nerd

2018 is off to a great start in terms of books to enjoy!  I hit some 24 books this month and enjoyed a great deal of them.  Let's take a look at the stacks! The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum by Stanley G. Weinbaum Weinbaum has come up on my radar a couple times over the years, often described as an early light in sci-fi, extinguished all too soon.  This collection has most of his popular works (maybe all of them?) since he was only active a few years before passing away.  The anthology is a nifty collection of stories from the 1930s that seem more forward-looking than others of the time.  The writing is solid--not amazing, but Weinbaum can tell a tale and create a realistic future science-fiction world at that.  The tales are largely about exploration and establishing life on Venus, Mars, and moons of Jupiter, including tales of first encounters, hazardous environments, and space bandits.  Other stories raise questions about time travel and the li...

Song of Susannah by Stephen King My rating: 4 of 5 stars Note: This review was originally written in the early 2000s and published for a no longer running website: AudiobookCafe.  When last Stephen King spun the tale of his famous gunslingers, he ended his story with some closure but also a cliff-hanger. Eddie’s lover, Susannah had been possessed by a demon-spirit named Mia. Mia was shortly due to give birth to a child that she would give over to the dreaded Crimson King, the ultimate incarnation of evil. Controlled by Mia, Susannah had no choice but to leave her comrades behind in Calla Bryn Sturgis in Endworld and step through a portal to New York City, 1999. Roland of Gilead and his troupe of fellow gunslingers are fast approaching the Dark Tower and the Crimson King. In book six of the Dark Tower series, “Song of Susannah,” our heroes are displaced and separated into three groups. A possessed Susannah discovers herself in New York City in 1999, awaiting the birth ...

All About "IT": Adaptations, Remakes, Franchises, and #MeToo Welcome people! We’re back with EPISODE 2!  You can catch the full episode on YouTube right here or read it below.  And, if you missed last week's episode, check it out, again, either here on the blog or on YouTube ! I appreciate a few people who reached out and said they liked the first episode and found it enjoyable and so I'm back with the next.  This week's moment in pop culture was a scene from the 2017 film, It.  Let's take a look at the scene that made me stop and think--which is what this series is about! Ok, let's talk about It.  Well, but before we can talk about the 2017 film, It , we've gotta do some backtracking.  Now, this film is a remake of 1990s TV mini-series, which is an adaptation of one of Stephen King's more ginormous novels by the same name. Right here--it’s HUGE! To boot, the film has been made into 2 films with the second film to be released 201...

How the hell did that happen?  By semester's end, we'll be at 36 credits--technically, half way through the program (though some could say the easiest, half no?).  But still--it was just yesteryear that we were having our first classes.   This semester is pretty exciting for me.  I have two courses that I feel offer me a lot (all my courses offer me a lot, to be clear; but these two I feel strongly tie to the work I want to do on my dissertation and beyond).  The required class is Qualitative Analysis--the other side of the Quantitative Analysis course we took last semester.  It's a methodology I'm much more familiar with in terms of my previous academic experience and areas in which I teach. The other course is Civic Engagement in Higher Education is also interesting for me as I've been doing a lot of thinking about issues of public good, higher education, and the digital environment so I feel like it could provide me with a significant framework to delv...

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi My rating: 4 of 5 stars Note: This review was originally written in the early 2000s and published for a no longer running website: AudiobookCafe.  What’s magical, wooden, and has an affinity for trouble? Everyone’s favorite magical marionette, Pinocchio can be a downright nuisance or at least his original version can be. While Carlo Collodi’s “Pinocchio” has many similar traits to his Disney-counterpart, the original Pinocchio has many more misadventures and can be a most troublesome juvenile. The original story of Pinocchio by Collodi illustrates the impulsivity of youth and the burdening weight of adulthood. The three main characters of the audiobook are Pinocchio, the living wooden puppet, Geppetto, a poor man who is Pinocchio’s caretaker, and the Blue Fairy, a magical creature with the ability to turn Pinocchio into a human boy. Pinocchio serves no end of misery and misfortune to his father, Geppetto. The old man endures through prison, sickne...

As part of my teaching Pop Culture in the US this semester, a course that I've been teaching for 8 or so years (and online for about 6), I decided to spice up the course in many ways.  One way I'm trying new things is by creating a web-series on moments in pop culture where I think about and discuss something that I am enjoying in popular culture that week.   This week, I tackle a moment within Season 2 of The Chronicles of Shannara .  You can watch the video or you can read the text below.  (Since I had to make a transcript, I figured I might as well share that too!).  Let me know what you think!  Here is the link to the video on YouTube . So this is a new series I want to try to do in the ensuing year called, The Weekly Pop: A Reflective Moment In Pop Culture.  The series is primarily for my students but I am making it available for others who might also find it interesting and enjoyable. So let’s start with this clip. B...

My goals for 2018 are not super-ambitious.  Mostly because the biggest goal on my radar for this year and the next two is obviously completely my dissertation.  And since I'm posting this at the end of January--I think it's clear, I'm not prepared to take on too much.  But since I made goals for  2016   and 2017 , it follows that 2018 needs some direction as well--I think these serve as good balances to my year-in-review posts that I've done for 2014 , 2015 , 2016 , and 2017 .  So, here's what I got! It's good to have goals, right? So I'm breaking them up into physical health/training and intellectual goals because that's just how I do things! Physical Health/Training Half marathon I didn't run any half-marathons in 2017.  I'm a bit sad about that because I really like this distance and the longest I ran in 2017 was about 11 miles.  That clearly needs to be rectified.  Ideally, I want to do another half-marathon in under 2 ho...