Note to self:

List of organizations and things I’m doing this semester:

1. 9 credit hours of classes (including Foundations of Criminal Justice, Teaching Sociology, Classical Sociological Theory)
2. Teaching Assistant for Race and Ethnicity
3. Research Assistant for research on Bangalashi women
4. Graduate and Professional Student Council sociology representative
5. Secretary/Treasurer of GA United (GAU, the grad assistant union)
6. Illinois Education Association (IEA, the state-wide union GAU is affliated with) Higher Education Council member
7. Organizing a legislative platform for GAU and local lobbying efforts
8. Finishing my thesis on adult female video game players (seriously, if I haven’t talked to you yet about this and you want to do an interview, leave me a message)

…whoops.

Also, I slipped a disc in my back about two weeks ago. Which was fun. Physical therapy two times a week and prescription drugs. Go me.

What else is going on? Not much. What about you guys?

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.

I just spent a half hour playing fetch with my cat…

…and it was terribly relaxing. Everyone should have a pet to play with.

Let’s see, what to update since the last time I wrote?

1. I got an assistantship! Yay!

It’s the one I wrote about earlier, working under the editor of Design Research Quarterly. The articles are pretty interesting, so even if the writing is dreadful in the pure form and it takes me five hours and three Aleve to edit one article, it’ll be worth it. The experience I get in the editing/publishing end will come in handy later on if I ever hope to have a position in the publication side of research (and the idea of me being a knowledge gatekeeper of that sort is both hilarious and intriguing). I also think it’ll make me an even stronger writer, also very necessary to surviving grad school.

And yes, because I’m materially minded, a partial tuition waiver. It’s only a 25% position, so they only waive 9 hours. I’m taking 11. I pay 2 hours worth and fees. The fees are what really suck. Still, it gives me about $2500 back out of the $4200 for the semester plus a (tiny) stipend. That’s nothing to sneeze at for something that’s in theory only 10 hours of work a week.

2. I’ve been sort of running stats study groups for our quantitative methods class. It’s more fun than I thought it would be because I find that I actually still remember and understand this stuff from way back in 2004 when I took undergrad stats. Also very helpful when you take into account that Sherkat tends to jump steps like crazy and assume we can keep up. So far I have been but I definitely have to remember to ask him to slow down and explain things when we get to the higher end stats formulas that I haven’t really dealt with or used. Regardless, the groups help me cement my knowledge, figure out alternate ways of explaining what’s going on, and it’s a great sort of ‘intro’ to teaching. Most of the tutoring I’ve done up to this point has been one-on-one, so the group environment is nice.

Is it weird I like statistics? I remember being the girl in high school who cringed through her math courses. I survived them and did well because I studied judiciously not because I was “good” at math.

3. I’ve been cooking a lot more since I moved down here. Some of it is out of necessity. I’m hungrier because I’m running around like crazy. But I also need the leftovers. I can’t eat out as much as I used to be able to; I really miss those nice big paychecks from CMR. Alas.

4. I have some thoughts on bootstrapping in discussions of prejudice that I kind of want to talk about at some point. When I’m not in the middle of sauteeing pierogis.

5. Also have thoughts on the use of the tyrant figure and anti-establishment coding vs. establishment frameworks in video games, also to be talked about later. See reason above.

Twice in one day; I must be high or something!

Gamers’ world reveals secrets of the next epidemic

I read this and I laughed and laughed. Then I realized what people did in the game is exactly what people would do in real life and that shut me up pretty quickly. Also, it’s a really interesting social experiment; sort of puts the Black Death in perspective.

But the coolest thing about a WoW epidemic is that real epidemiologists used the virtual outbreak to study behaviors, such as the “stupid factor,” they hadn’t considered in creating outbreak models. Of course, my thought to that is mostly: “you don’t consider the stupid factor first?“

Good lord.

I think I’m done. Okay, so, it’s only a preliminary proposal, really, but I’ve got the HSC forms filled out. I’m sure I screwed it up somewhere but at least it’s done. I have all my qual reading done. I even have most of my stats/quant stuff done (including the problems). The crim stuff is going to be interesting because I’m not getting the bible until Monday.

It was about $55 worth of printing for the readings. Two binders of readings for the semester. That hurts.

I toyed with the idea of dropping a class and taking two hours of readings in the department on sports and delinquency. Then I talked to work and bargained my hours down some. 32 is still considered full time so I get full time benefits. The paycheck… Well, I’ll have to figure that out when I get to it. Even at 40 hours I wouldn’t be making enough to cover all my bills. (This is the part where I cross my fingers and pray for the tuition scholarship to come through.) But I think I should be okay, at least until Nov.-Dec. financially. The real worry is balancing 32 hours of work and 11 hours of grad school courses. I’ll have to cross my fingers on that too. And send out a couple of emails about my final decisions on the matter.

Which I’ll do now before I forget.

There. Done. I love Semagic drafting.

Let’s see, what else?

I’ve been getting a lot of sales calls since I moved here last month. Just today I’ve had five since around 10am. I finally figured out why they keep calling though; my old number is on the national DNCL, not this one. Time to add myself again!

I have mixed feelings about the National Do No Call List. On one hand, I love not getting phone solicitation. On the other, I’ve done that job and the more people sign up to things like the DNCL the faster people like me go out of business. And the DNCL has some glaring blind spots that will get you every time:

• Charitable organizations (which is why the FOP — Fraternal Order of Police — can call me about once a month to solicit donations)
• Organizations you’ve already done business with (so if you stay at night at, say, a Hampton Inn once three years ago, they can call you)

So the DNCL sort of misses a lot of the egregious offenders of phone solicitation.

I also found time this week to finish Bioshock. I went with the “good” ending and made it out of the game with 950 achievement points. Not bad for a first play through. When I have more time I want to do it a second time, try a different plasmid build and maybe even pay more attention to the philosophy of the game. It’s obviously based on objectivism (”Atlas” and if Andrew Ryan isn’t supposed to be Ayn Rand I’ll eat my shoes) and I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of direct quotes from Atlas, Shrugged but it’s been a while since I’ve read the book.

See, this is what I love about video games (Roger Ebert notwithstanding): they can be as socio-politically/intellectually deep as you want them to be. Bioshock is either a philosophical ramble through an ailing dystopia filled with egoists and scientists so devoted to pure research they lost their sense of humanity altogether or it’s a really fucking cool setting for a survival horror FPS game.

Someone linked me this video of Miss Teen South Carolina flubbing her geography on a question about how to improve geographical education in the US. I cringe for a variety of reasons.

Word of the day: exegesis

I have a lot more to talk about but, frankly, after working on this stuff for quant for about 8 hours today… I want to get off the computer and do something fun.