Random thoughts

[brigdh]

I finally managed to force myself to start writing that paper at around 1am last night. By 3:30, I'd written all six pages of it, around 1,700 words. I... did not know I was capable of that. I had assumed I just wouldn't be sleeping last night, but I suppose this is far preferable, if surprising.

I've decided that the issue I have with this linguistics anthropology class (and possibly all cultural anthropology!), is that everything is either so entirely abstract and vague that it could be applied to anyone anywhere, and thus is almost meaningless, or is so context- and culturally- specific that it can't work outside of this one place and moment in time. And then people try to use either set of evidence as a way to generalize about people's thoughts, and it makes me flail and go No! You can't know that! You're just guessing! It's certainly interesting to say "every speech act is intended to do more than one thing", but where do you go then? You can't set up any general theory of social meaning off of that, and so I never have anything to say. I want proof and statistics and graphs! I want to talk about which models best fit the physical evidence! Which clearly is why I'm in archaeology instead, and I suppose at least now I know.

Anyway, louiselux posted a link to the Gender Genie, which can supposedly guess your gender based on a sample of your writing. I've been playing around with it, and the different results that come up are insteresting. This paper was very male (M:2786/F:1400), my last livejournal post was slightly male (M:723/F:699), but my last story was pretty female (M:695/F:1106). Which clearly proves that, when speaking in my own voice, I'm a guy, but Richard is a girl*.

Or something.

Currently I'm wasting a few hours before I go out to meet people for karaoke (yeah, I don't know, it wasn't my idea). Given that I've finally written all these papers and so on, I will have free time this weekend! I'm excited. I have interesting posts I've been thinking about and planning, and can take a look at the stories I've got half-finished, and hopefully polish them off. Plus, Remix assignments come out on Saturday! I'm all anxious.


*After I thought of that joke, of course I had to stick the only piece of Alec-POV I've written into the system to see what would happen. Though it was too short to work well, Alec is apparently male (M:232/F:155). Ha!

Comments

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

*grins* I think you've thought about this more than I have. And you can certainly be envious of rm if you'd like, though I suspect she's the sort of writer who wouldn't be anxious over this sort of thing even if she'd had an extra week of waiting instead of one less.

But yes, that's the same place where I become uncertain. If I get sorted into Swordspoint fandom, I must get rm, but if not, I have a whole range of people I could be assigned to. I suspect musesfool does go out of her way to avoid pairs like that, but I don't know how much time or effort she'll have available to prevent it from happening this year, with the huge amounts of sign-ups. And there are probably all sorts of other things influencing my chances as well, such as the number of other Saiyuki and Yami no Matsuei writers, and whether either of those groups will need an extra person or not.

Currently though, I'm worrying over whether it'll be worth bothering to keep up the anonymity if kessie and rm and I do get assigned to one another, or if even trying to do so would be silly.

[kessie.livejournal.com]

...I would actually find that very funny and would probably cave and admit it. But then I'd freak over having to find a beta. :))

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Yeah. I don't think we'd fool anyone, so we may as well. Though at least I'm lucky enough to have several people I can make beta Swordspoint for me.