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Your plastic pal who's fun to be with (wink wink nod nod say no more)
I've got a surefire way to get the attention of any class.
Two words: erotic robots.
That sure perked up my somnolent classmates. Although it might be a little hard to follow through if you aren't teaching a class called A Cultural History of Computers, Robots and Artificial Intelligence. I mean, I was interested in the stuff about Stephen Wolfram, C. S. Peirce and René Descartes, but the rest of the class woke up for the first time today with the erotic robots.
Our professor, in spite of not having $250,000 to put up, managed to bullshit his way into these displays of erotic robots from the 17th and 18th centuries. Steve Forbes has a very impressive collection of these erotic robots, apparently. (I don't think he'll be writing a column about them any time soon.) They were used, or at least people admit to using them, more like "fertility robots" than erotic robots – the same way they would try to get every animal on the estate or whatever fucking at the same time as a couple having fertility issues.
You know, real life has been kicking my arse around the block for a while. Not impressed, real life, not impressed.
Of course, some of it could, strictly speaking, be considered my fault, as when I decided to go on a long, "relaxing" walk with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
satyadasa instead of, say, sleeping, and, at midnight, when we had walked all through Battery City Park, deciding to get on the Staten Island ferry instead of, say, going home.
There is nothing worth seeing in Staten Island as far as I am aware of. Certainly not at 12:30. Sadly, we decided to confirm this, and missed the Manhattan ferry we could have caught if we had never exited the ferry terminal. Oops.
On the plus side, you get a great view, standing on the deck of the ferry boat as it chugs towards civilization, with the Statue of Liberty and the downtown skyline accompanied by the gentle sound of waves. However, it was freezing out on the water in the wind, and all the heat was sucked from my body and I shivered so much I thought my kneecaps were going to escape my body. So it goes.
I read an interesting book, sitting on the floor of the Astor Place Barnes and Noble. Actually, as I was finishing it, I got trapped in the department where I was sitting by a ton of people showing up to see the Guerilla Girls in the event space, so I ended up listening to the Guerilla Girls, too. Which would have been better if I could have a.) seen the slides from where I was sitting, or b.) reached a restroom from where I was sitting.
The book was The Little Women, which is of course based on the Louisa May Alcott book that I read a zillion times when I was ten. Well, I don't know if "based on" is quite the right way of putting it. Kind of like Little Women fell for a postmodernist and this is their love child.
It's about an über-perfect family with daughters named Meg, Joanna and Amy, and yes, their parents chose their names on purpose and yes, people make smart remarks about their names, and yes, there is no girl named Beth. Nonetheless, they still refuse to realize to what degree they are transformations of their namesakes, in a plot isn't, even as it very much so is, Little Women: its trajectory begins when the girls discover that their mother, an NYU professor, was having an affair with one of her grad students, and Joanna and Amy decided to go live with Meg, who is a student at Yale, rooming with a guy named Teddy Bell (ring a bell?). And yet, it becomes Little Women anyway, with small allusions and longer lines and entire scenes, blatantly.
I liked it. I thought it had fun with what it was doing with the original. Even the lengthy, intrusive notes (purporting to be from Meg and Amy, as part of a compromise with Joanna) become fun, even if they seem annoying.
Two words: erotic robots.
That sure perked up my somnolent classmates. Although it might be a little hard to follow through if you aren't teaching a class called A Cultural History of Computers, Robots and Artificial Intelligence. I mean, I was interested in the stuff about Stephen Wolfram, C. S. Peirce and René Descartes, but the rest of the class woke up for the first time today with the erotic robots.
Our professor, in spite of not having $250,000 to put up, managed to bullshit his way into these displays of erotic robots from the 17th and 18th centuries. Steve Forbes has a very impressive collection of these erotic robots, apparently. (I don't think he'll be writing a column about them any time soon.) They were used, or at least people admit to using them, more like "fertility robots" than erotic robots – the same way they would try to get every animal on the estate or whatever fucking at the same time as a couple having fertility issues.
You know, real life has been kicking my arse around the block for a while. Not impressed, real life, not impressed.
Of course, some of it could, strictly speaking, be considered my fault, as when I decided to go on a long, "relaxing" walk with
satyadasa instead of, say, sleeping, and, at midnight, when we had walked all through Battery City Park, deciding to get on the Staten Island ferry instead of, say, going home.There is nothing worth seeing in Staten Island as far as I am aware of. Certainly not at 12:30. Sadly, we decided to confirm this, and missed the Manhattan ferry we could have caught if we had never exited the ferry terminal. Oops.
On the plus side, you get a great view, standing on the deck of the ferry boat as it chugs towards civilization, with the Statue of Liberty and the downtown skyline accompanied by the gentle sound of waves. However, it was freezing out on the water in the wind, and all the heat was sucked from my body and I shivered so much I thought my kneecaps were going to escape my body. So it goes.
I read an interesting book, sitting on the floor of the Astor Place Barnes and Noble. Actually, as I was finishing it, I got trapped in the department where I was sitting by a ton of people showing up to see the Guerilla Girls in the event space, so I ended up listening to the Guerilla Girls, too. Which would have been better if I could have a.) seen the slides from where I was sitting, or b.) reached a restroom from where I was sitting.
The book was The Little Women, which is of course based on the Louisa May Alcott book that I read a zillion times when I was ten. Well, I don't know if "based on" is quite the right way of putting it. Kind of like Little Women fell for a postmodernist and this is their love child.
It's about an über-perfect family with daughters named Meg, Joanna and Amy, and yes, their parents chose their names on purpose and yes, people make smart remarks about their names, and yes, there is no girl named Beth. Nonetheless, they still refuse to realize to what degree they are transformations of their namesakes, in a plot isn't, even as it very much so is, Little Women: its trajectory begins when the girls discover that their mother, an NYU professor, was having an affair with one of her grad students, and Joanna and Amy decided to go live with Meg, who is a student at Yale, rooming with a guy named Teddy Bell (ring a bell?). And yet, it becomes Little Women anyway, with small allusions and longer lines and entire scenes, blatantly.
I liked it. I thought it had fun with what it was doing with the original. Even the lengthy, intrusive notes (purporting to be from Meg and Amy, as part of a compromise with Joanna) become fun, even if they seem annoying.