C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 34

100 Days of Spanish

I have completed 100 days of Spanish.

I’m quite proud of that. On the other hand, for probably the last month or even more, I’ve really been retreading the same territory. One of the… problems? Duolingo has, or I have, is that it reasonably wants you to keep your vocabulary going. It wants to strengthen your previous lessons. Which you know, makes sense.

So the problem that I’m having is that I’m basically not spending enough time — certainly not as much time as it wants me to – studying. I...

Marvel Movie Marathon: Iron Man 2

Marvel Movie Marathon: Iron Man 2: I saw most of IM2 again a couple years ago and I thought it had held up a *lot* better than expected. My memory of it was that it really wasn’t very good, which is borne up by the fact that basically everybody seems to think it really wasn’t very good, but…actually, it’s pretty good.

It does, yes, have the problem of following very similar beats to the original film in terms of the Whiplash storyline, which ends with him in a giant mech just like Stane ended...

getting closer to the perfect scheduling app

My friend Chrysoula (you should read her books) notified me a couple weeks ago about this to-do/scheduling app she’d found, that she thought seemed like it had many of the features I’ve been looking for in a scheduling app. It’s called SkedPal, and it’s…it’s pretty good, guys.

It uses time blocking, which I’m…getting the hang of… :) …and it’s pretty flexible, in that you can plug a bunch of projects in and it arranges them into your work time block (or whatever you assign it to). You can teac...

Today was hard.

Today was hard. It would have been my mom’s 69th birthday, her second since her death. This year was actually harder than last year, possibly because my entire friends list was overwhelmed with tributes and sorrow over Ursula Le Guin’s death, and, as someone said, grief stacks. It’s also that I miss her terribly, every day, and it’s just been…hard.

Since it’s her birthday and everything, I thought I’d mention the dance scholarship fund we set up in her name. Our goal now is $4000, an addition...

picture post: blue hair & disney & birthdays, oh my

I’ve been threatening for many years to dye my hair blue. Last week I picked up a bottle of temporary hair dye. I had hopes it would stick mostly to the grey, of which I have plenty:

although I had been totally unable to find anything on the internet which suggested it might. After some dithering, I applied it:

To my delight, it in fact did a pretty damn fine job of sticking to the grey without blueing the rest of it up much:

Also to my delight and relief, it does appear to be temporary....

Recent Reads: Strong Female Protagonist Vols 1 & 2

Recent Reads: Strong Female Protagonist (Vols 1 & 2)

I got volume 2 of SFP for Christmas, which totally surprised me, even though months ago (perhaps longer) Ted had said to me, “SFP Kickstarter! Should I? It won’t be out until December!” and I said, “Oh, yes! It can be a nice Christmas present for me!” And it was! A very surprising one! :)

I re-read the first one leading up to v2, as it had been a while. One of the things I enjoy about sort of…early career comics? is watching the art style d...

a day in which nothing went right

I had a day in which nothing went right. Nothing went catastrophically WRONG, exactly, it was just nothing went…*right*, and it was very frustrating.

I went to buy a couple new earrings for my stupid ears, because I keep losing the ball ends of the ones I’ve got (although more memorably I lost the actual earring recently, which, rrgh), and only somewhat after the fact did I discover I’d had a miscommunication with the dude and had accidentally gotten a much longer post than I wanted. I’d been...

two weeks of #100DaysOfWriting

Okay, okay, it was two weeks until yesterday, but it’s close enough. Today’s day 15 (assuming I can count, which I couldn’t last week when I gave us two Day Eights…), and I’ve managed to write every day, which is pretty unusual for me.

I’ve done about…mmm. 7000 words, which isn’t really very many (particularly after last month’s, what, 65K+ and November’s …65K…?) but, you know, possibly the 120K in the past two months is taking its toll. Although really it’s more that I’ve…

So my projects thi...

Marvel Movie Marathon: Iron Man

Marvel Movie Marathon: Iron Man: omg I had somehow managed to forget the sheer level of asshole Tony was in the first part of Iron Man.

Back in 2006 or whatever when Marvel said they were floating an Iron Man movie, I, an X-Men fan who never cared much about the Avengers, was like “why would anybody make a movie about a 2nd tier character like Iron Man that nobody cares about anyway.” Ted, who is much more of an Avengers fan, objected strenuously to “2nd tier” and argued in favor of an Iron M...

100 Days Of Writing: A Project

Late last year, near the end of Nanowrimo, a friend said she thought maybe she would do a 100 days of writing challenge instead of NNWM, because she thought that would work better for her.

“Oh!” I said immediately, “I’ll do that with you!”

“AUGH,” she said, “but, but, you’ll actually DO it!”

We started yesterday. :)

As a matter of fact, about…30 of us started, I’d say, between Facebook and Twitter. The minimum goal is 100 words of writing every day for 100 days. People can do more than that,...