(no subject)

[twincityhacker]

• Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions (I'll also answer more, if asked)



neadods asked me:

1) What are you planning on doing with your degrees?

I have to update my profile. I'm only taking a degree in linguistics, for one thing. What I want to do is work in an area related to language policy.

2) What's your favorite alternate history?

My very favourite is the one in "War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches" Which is basically the Martian invasion as witnessed by people around the globe, and the prologue and epilogue goes into some of the changes of the world since the invasion. A lot of the social turmoil in the early part of the 20th century doesn't happen, World War I doesn't happen and neither does it's sequel, and the impression I get from the section set in China everything goes off in a completely different direction. It also ventures into steampunk territory a bit as scientists reverse engineer the Martian technology, and there's talk of taking the war to Mars.

3) What's behind the interest "we'll never conquer space"?

During 12th grade English ( The British Experience ) I was borded out of my mind. And since I learned that novel reading would be too obvious, I decided that I'd start reading my reader. As it's a very large book and we maybe talked about six things all year, there was a lot of things that were both interesting and things that we didn't cover.

One of these was an essay by Arthur C. Clarke called "We'll Never Conquer Space." In it, he tries to explain how big space really is, and how as we go into space the vast distances involve will fragment human populations to the extent not seen since people domesticated the horse. And it's all to do with the speed of light, which constraints the speed of communication. From here to the moon is a few seconds delay. From here to Mars there's a delay of several minutes. From here to the nearest star is four years. And it just gets longer. There's a star in Cyngus that pretty much marks the limit on communication to Earth, as it would take 40 years for a message to get from there to Earth, then another 40 to Earth to that star. To think there would be much of a tie between those two populations, when communication would be the greater part of one's lifetime, is mind boggling.

Thank goodness that sci-fi has warp-drives and ansible communicators, huh?

4) You can only take the works of *one* author to a desert island. Which one?

If I'm being practical, I'd take everything the US Army has ever published. I'm sure in there there's a lot of information of "how to survive on a desert island" and the really outdated things I can use for kindling.

Barring that, I think I'll take the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft. And for being cosmic horror and the insignificance of humans in the greater universe, he's very comforting because I associate him with travel and beach reading. And I can remind myself it's not so bad - I'm not turning into a fish monster.

5) Joel or Mike?

It's hard to say. I think I like Mike more, but I haven't watched enough Joel episodes to come to a definite conclusion. I'll say Mike, anyway, because he riffs my FAVORITE EPISODE EVER ( The Beginning of the End! ).

It's Marry, Shag, Cliff! game, but with Kiss added.
Comment, and I'll give you four. karaokegal She gave me John Barrowman, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and David Tennent.


Cliff! David Tennent. Sorry David, you're too skinny to compete in the physical category, and I know nothing about you except being a Doctor Who fanboy.

Shag! Hugh Laurie. Because it would be awkward as hell to have two gay people try to shag one another.

Kiss! John Barrowman. I've heard he's a great kisser.

Marry! Stephen Fry. I really think we'd make the best match out of this list. He's intelligent, funny, and a technological geek.