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([personal profile] atolnon Apr. 2nd, 2015 11:16 am)
I've got another short essay due for submission at the end of Sunday that's designed to be worked into a longer end-of-year 15 page final essay. 4-6 is just tremendously short and to the point so it's not really easier than a 15, but it doesn't take as long, so the deadline isn't something I sweat so long as I respect it.

I am actually writing on something from Homestuck, actually, if that's the kind of thing that amuses/interests you. Homestuck was something I was seriously considering doing my thesis on after I had my class requirements sorted out, and I think that I could easy get 75 pages out of it, but my thoughts on it drift pretty close to the rhetoric/composition edge of the spectrum and, while I feel that distinction is, well, purely academic, it's the kind of distinction that's put me off thinking about it in terms of thesis construction. I'm leaning (I don't know if I'm repeating a previous entry here) towards a (post?-)post-colonial/Marxist examination of William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy. I'm not married to cyber-punk as an academic topic, but honestly, it's probably already my academic focus since that's what got me into grad school and that's what I'd done seven years of amateur analysis on previous.

Actually, comparing my work with what I see written professionally, I feel like I was doing really well. To go from writing journal entries on Xanga in 2007 to writing a 75-page essay - neither of which got read or will be read - seems like a fun jump for me.

On a down note, I'll probably not be working as a TA come next fall semester, though I am on the waitlist. The information on the official SIUE website isn't correct, and I missed the date on application. I mean, it's bullshit that SIUE can't be bothered to keep its information correct on something that's so important, but I probably should have known by now that they're just blindingly incompetent. It's extremely frustrating, but I'll see about other employment over summer. Kay's been looking at different avenues of work - several have seen like sure bets but are still hanging in limbo. Odds are that they'll all come in at once, but with Star Clipper closing, being bought up, and re-opening under Fantasy Shop ownership, the Fantasy Shop staff have become extremely overworked. Kay's application has come highly recommended from a few high profile employees and it looks like that's a likely (if underpaying) position. I'll probably end up part-time in the furniture mines again. You know, we'll see.

From: [identity profile] atolnon.livejournal.com


Well, good news, maybe! I wasn't really all that keen on my own object analysis of the Homestuck Pesterlog, but that's mostly because I was working on it in such a crunch and because I had to keep it within the confines of the essay type when there was so much I could include. But! I'm hoping for some good results from my (still awfully short) essay on Homestuck as a whole as a kind of 'ludic' text.

Which really just means a text centered on play, in this case. And it really is. The essay format itself is really, really loose and so I'm going to have free reign in its composition. That could be really interesting, but I don't have much time to do the work so I'm still a little concerned that I'll either overshoot my ability and end up with something half-baked or be too conservative and not live up to the potential.

From: [identity profile] atolnon.livejournal.com


I've got a pretty shabby website I'll be updating after next week once summer starts, and it'll at least go there. I'll probably post links to various social media. One of those will be here.
Edited Date: 2015-04-30 01:10 pm (UTC)
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