Friends

When I slow down my brain starts to think a lot about all sorts of things and some make me sad, some make me scared, some I just don't know how to react to and it's something I don't share with, well, most anyone.

I wonder about where I'll be in 10 years. Part of me worries I'll be dead just like my mom was (hell, if I follow her path, I've got 9 at best). I want to be healthy, happy and have my family just how it is, but sometimes I get this anxiety that I'm not meant to have that kind of happiness in life. I try not to have those moments come up, but they do. I have to remind myself I deserve to be happy and that I am not my mother and my life looks nothing like hers did. I work out, I eat right (or try to most times), I get enough sleep (when I'm not having insomnia), I have two stable and healthy relationships, and I try to take care of my health in general.

I worry about next semester. I want to go on to get my PhD, but I also know that getting into Emory is a remote chance in hell for me and realize that in May, that might be it for a while. I wonder about what I'm going to do with my degree once I'm done if May is it for a while and how I can make good money to support my family and pay off my student loans quickly. I think about the thesis I have to write and hope that it'll be good enough. I want to be a scientist. I want to teach college. I want to do research that will affect a change in the way we look at chronic disease. All of those things also terrify me because I've never wanted something like that before. When I was a kid I wanted to be a large animal vet. I think all little girls want to take care of puppies and kittens, but I wanted to work with horses, livestock and got a veterinary catalog subscription and watched every medical surgery show I could. Even then, when the time came to go back to school, it wasn't where I wanted to be. I had no idea that this was where I'd wind up, but I'm very happy to be here and I want so much to become a doctor so I can do the work that I think will become my lifelong contribution to science. I want that PhD hood but right now, it's so remote to me, that I wonder if I deserve it, or if I'm good enough to get there.

I know, it's the good enough problem I have had for a long time and the "I don't deserve it" feelings come out when I'm scared and anxious. I understand that logically and rationally but sometimes I'm scared and unsure and feel mighty small. This has been on my mind for a while now, but today really has been bad. I'm afraid to talk about it because it's my problem and only I can solve it and when I'm not sad, I just don't want to talk about the things that make me sad or scared or unsure.

Everything in my life outside of my home is in flux. A job has eluded me for over a year now and I have to get something sorted soon because unemployment will run out. I am in limbo waiting to either get my rejection letter from Emory or make their "weekend at Emory" short list and go and try to impress the crap out of them and maybe still not get in. Semester starts on Monday (I won't be there the first week) and thesis writing should begin roughly then so I can get ahead of the game and get my draft into committee earlier rather than later but it's all in limbo. Graduation will happen in May,then I may have a few months break or I may be done. I just don't know. I can't plan for anything except what's right in front of me and it's making me crazy. People are asking me about events or things in the spring and I keep having to say "I just don't know" and I really don't. I don't like the unknown in front of me that is largely out of my control. I like change, but this limbo state is enough to cripple me. I need to start on something but I don't know what or where to start on anything and I'm at a standstill. I don't know how to handle that.

Meh, enough rambling. I have to run errands.

For a while now (okay, many years), I've been meaning to read Maurice Leblanc's stories of Arsene Lupin. A couple of years ago, I noticed that a half dozen or so of his books are now in the public domain and available on Project Gutenberg, so I downloaded them, but never got around to reading them. Over vacation I've been toying with my new netbook, but mainly trying to get some decent ebook software on it. After a lot of testing, I'm using FBReader -- it's not ideal or all that pretty, but it works the best for me.

Yesterday, we had a conversation at work about old properties that have been turned into movies decades after they were popular, and the movie versions being more inspirational than the fiction to even later adaptations (Sherlock Holmes, of course, but Conan and Tarzan were also mentioned). Based on that, I remembered that Maurice Leblanc wrote a number of unauthorized crossovers between Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, and I was vaguely curious to much his presentation of Holmes diverged from Doyle's vision. Plus, I read on Wikipedia that Lupin himself spawned a number of movies and TV spinoffs. Since I was mostly[1] unfamiliar with Lupin, I decided to sit down with the first set of short stories and read up on him a bit. I expected to read one story and then maybe get some more work done that night.

By the time I went to bed, I had downloaded the same book to my iPhone so I could finish the last story, because I was not going to be able to sleep without knowing what happened.

For those who don't know, Arsene Lupin is one of the original "gentleman thief" characters that inspired many similar characters (most notably, The Saint). He is a master of disguise, incredibly intelligent (sounds familiar?), and possessing of a certain sense of humor and nobility that puts him into bad situations, but also gives him a flair that makes him engaging. The first nine stories generally follow a kind of timeline, although there's some jumping back and forth in Lupin's career -- it's somewhere between an anthology and a novel. I read the English translation provided by Project Gutenberg, which has some errors and redundancies, but the stories are still quite engaging and easy to read despite that. I mean, this guy manages to steal from someone's locked and guarded manor while he's still in jail.

If you've finished up the Sherlockian canon and are looking for some new turn-of-the-20th-century action/crime stories, you can't go wrong with Lupin.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar

All of Leblanc's work on Project Gutenberg

Footnote 1: I did actually listen to an audiobook reading of the first story, "The Arrest of Arsène Lupin," so I wasn't going in totally blind.

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Agent of Whitechapel Alex Cochrane — who I mercilessly murdered in Episode 7 — has started translating all of the Whitechapel episodes in French! I’ll post links to each French version at the bottom of the English episodes, but you can follow along at the blog here:

Projet: Whitechapel

Épisode 01 – La cellule

I have a lot of strange things on my hard drive. In the process of moving things over from my modestly-large drive on my big laptop to my surprisingly-larger hard drive on my netbook, I've been going through some of the more unusual selections (with a healthy dose of "where the hell did I get this from?"). I decided to start another irregular feature on here called "Shit On My Hard Drive" so I can start sharing them with you. (In this case, "shit" means "hobby game of some sort," but it might be anything else I find weird on my computer -- songs, video games, software, whatever.)

Here are three RPG selections on my hard drive right now that are... a bit odd.

Joe in Ten Persons: I found this via the Free RPG Blog. It's a game about a guy named Joe who meets a man named Keeton who allows him to interact with a variety of alternate versions of himself who are all obsessed with affecting the decision of one particular Joe, Joe Prime. SImple, right? It's a one-shot shared-narration competitive RPG with a clear winner and a weird kind of board game vibe featuring stick figures.

Yeah, there's no easy way to describe it. But it's worth at least a glance. And it's free.

Download it.

Read a review.

The Agency: Take the height of 60s super-spies. Stir in a healthy portion of monster stomping, and you get The Agency. It has a lot of the fun of a game like Bureau 13, but with a system that focuses on high action and camp (with some interesting incentives to fail entertainingly). It was originally designed for the No Press Anthology, but it's now released by the author for free.

Download it.

Read a review of an earlier version.

Super Console: Tired of playing fantasy RPGs? Now you can play a video game RPG... as a tabletop RPG... which is primarily focused on fantasy. Well, you know what I mean. This straddles the line between "faithful reproduction" and "shameless parody," but more than once it's inspired me to run a game where mages and ninjas level up multiple times a session and buy equipment from identical-looking stores while fighting in two opposing rows. There's nothing to handle situations outside of combat, but given the kinds of games this is emulating, that's not surprising. It's a buck on DriveThruRPG, but you can find free (legal) copies on the net if you dig around a bit.

Buy it.

Read a review.

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Listen to this episode

 

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Previously on Whitechapel

Six escaped from the Whitechapel Project, thanks to the help of the mysterious Mister Rich. Although Six got some clues to the nature of his past, he had more questions than answers when Mister Rich was shot by a man masquerading as a police officer. A high-speed chase with real police officers and a van with two unknown men led to a showdown at a hospital, during which Six was knocked unconscious. He awoke in an expensive hotel room with a note from someone named “Elizabeth” and a wake-up call from the front desk that referred to him by an unfamiliar name.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

A quick note to detail the cool presents I got for my birthday/Christmas this year.

Birthday

• Fairyland Brownies from CCP (quite tasty!)
• An Optimus Prime bobblehead from mithras 
• A $75 Best Buy gift card from garchangel and greebotrill 
• A DVD of the new Star Trek movie from my mom
• The Welcome to the Jungle Dresden Files graphic novel, also from my mom
• And $50 in cash from my grandmom-in-law

Christmas

• Flip MinoHD from CCP
• Gateway LY3103u Netbook from garchangel and greebotrill 
• And another $100 in cash from my grandmom-in-law (which went toward a copy of Windows 7 for the netbook)

Note: As people comment here and in other places, I plan to update this with footnotes providing citations for various points (for and against). Because I love playing with Sherlockian research, even if I'm not that awesome at it.

To preface this, I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan for twenty-five years, since my father gave me a water-stained and dog-eared copy of the "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," containing the first twelve stories of the canon. I have read everything by Doyle, probably read an additional two dozen pastiches, listened to close to a hundred audiobook and radio versions, and watched a variety of television and movie renditions of the master detective. While I by no means consider myself a Sherlockian scholar, Holmes is certainly my first and most persistent fandom.

It has been with equal parts excitement and trepidation that I've been awaiting the Guy Ritchie vision of Sherlock Holmes. I planned to see it at a midnight showing on my birthday (because that would have just been awesome), but it turns out that the nearest theater to where we were in Tennessee was well over an hour away. So I waited until Sunday, when we got back. I had a terrible cold, and didn't want to go out -- until David asked if I wanted to go see the Sherlock Holmes movie.

Because that's different, you see.

Interestingly (and to a great extent, flatteringly), a number of my friends have been waiting on my opinion of the film before going to see it themselves. They know of my obsession fanaticism interest in all versions of Holmes, and since I gave my brief review on Twitter, a number of people have contacted me asking for a more detailed review.

If, however, you just want the short version, here it is: I thought it was a very fun and enjoyable update to Sherlock Holmes that keeps to the core of the canon, although casual audiences might not realize that.

( More detailed thoughts (minor spoilers) )