truth and consequences

It’s been ages since I last blogged and that is entirely my fault! Really. Very sorry about that. I’m going to try and be much more conscientious about it. It’s not that I don’t have the time to write, now that I’m back in school, it’s more that when I’ve finished all the other stuff I need to do (studies, mostly), I find I don’t have the energy to apply my brain power.

Today, of course, I have both time and energy. Yes, I know, I could be using that to get ahead on work (such as seminar paper writing, finishing up my lit review coding for my qualitative research project, writing the feminist essay that’s due December, working on that editing for the journal I’m assisting with, ad nauseum) but I decided I’d spend a little time before my stats study group blogging.

Let’s give the quick and dirty update:

1. Next time someone asks you to proof a 55 page prospectus, ask for money. Trust me on this one. Really. Either that, or something equivalent to the amount of headache, eyestrain and exclamations to your pet “HOW COULD [PERSON] GET A MA WHEN THEY WRITE SENTENCES WITH NO VERBS; INSANITY!” (see also Confessions of a Journal Editor by Jeffrey J. Williams)

2. It’s the “rainy season” here now. It just finally started getting cold and, shortly following the onset of 50F temperature, it started to rain. According to someone who did her undergraduate work here, it’ll keep raining until winter hits.

3. I think I’ve fairly well settled in here, at least with my cohort and the other MA students. A few of the first and second year PhD students too, I suppose, since they’re taking classes. The third and fourth years… I’ve only met once or twice. I’m getting along really well with all the professors too, which is nice, even the one who drives me up the wall with the insane (and one might argue unreasonable) amount of work she assigns for the semester. This is the qualitative methods class, of course, so on top of everything else we have to do, we’re also conducting a “good, non-descriptive research project” with a final paper that should be “journal-ready.” Not that any of our research, at least us first year students, will be journal ready of course. No reputable journal would publish research, even qualitative research, based on “at least two interviews.” Given that some of us didn’t get our human subjects approval back until late September or even early October (like me, of course), most of us won’t have time for follow-up interviews or anything like that to make the methods conducive to in-depth study. Oh well. It’s not like this is what I’m going to do for my thesis.

4. Speaking of my thesis, I’ve decided what I want to do. I won’t actually be starting until next semester when I take deviance. Essentially, I’m going to be studying female gamers; how they “do” gender on the internet, their interactions with the games, their interactions within female gaming communities, their interactions with male gamers, thoughts of educational gaming, games as toys, and how they reconcile the expectations of femininity with the masculine image of gaming (despite marketing studies on game use and consumption). It’ll be fun; I’m looking forward to it.

5. I am not, however, looking forward to writing up fieldnotes and transcribing the interviews I’m going to do this weekend. Hooray for laziness.

6. Virtual worlds threaten ‘values’: I read this news item earlier this morning and cringed. While I agree in concept — have you seen; some of those Bratz dolls? — that letting toy companies teach our children is probably a bad idea, I cringed more at the sensationalism that the BBC indulged in when they reported the item.

7. There is no seven. There is only Zuul.

I’ll try and actually post more often. At least twice a week. Honest.