extemporanea

It's Monday, time for a rant list! Things That Have Got Right Up My Nose, and which I require to be blasted by the Cosmic Wossnames forthwith:

• The weather. 39 degrees on Saturday, 37 yesterday. Today is only supposed to be 26, but my otherwise much appreciated little house tends to trap temperature extremes lovingly and recreate them for the next couple of days, so it's still like a cross between Durban and an inefficient oven cooking meringues up in here. I have adopted my mother's cunning recommendation, which is to waft around the house wrapped in a voluminous cotton scarf which I dip into cold water at approximately hourly intervals. But it melted my chocolate oranges on Saturday. Not cricket.
  
• My fucking fancy new bifocals, which do not focus on either the screen or anything for close reading, and moreover hurt my nose. I have had them remade once already (removed prisms, no dice), and am currently wearing the old ones (too weak, scratched to hell) in order to deal with Registration Meltdowns, while the long-suffering optometrists make up a new pair with a new prescription and new lenses. We have Ship of Theseused my new specs, in fact. If the new ones don't work I will, recking not the expense, be ordering a brand new pair of office specs, valid reading and computer screen only, and wearing the others, possibly alternately or, like Professor Branestawm, all at once, for distance. Phooey.
  
• Student reading comprehension, which is adding new levels of futility and despair to my tech support function, and today presented me with a student offering me a screenshot of the apparently opaque and incomprehensible final registration screen, with a big blue "Submit" button and an instruction to "Click submit to finalise your registration submission", and an innocent query about why their registration has not been finalised. Because, I patiently point out, they have clearly not clicked "Submit". Oh, they say, they didn't realise. Aargh.
  
• By the terms of my Ancient Treaty with Scroob, Parcelforce and all its works.

Things which have mitigated the rant-worthy list, above: the charmingly eccentric spelling tendencies of the student whose registration form specified yesterday, in cheerful all caps, a course called "ATHMORSPHERIC SCIENCE". This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

Orientation/registration hellseason seems to have leaped out of the gate with considerable verve and velocity this year, I have been working 11-hour days since the start of last week. I am thus currently submerged in the usual sticky and insistent morass of remote registration admin, orientation site design, continuous student queries, advisor solecisms, tech support and fervent wishes for gin. A more than usually infuriating two-punch of student unpleasantnesses yesterday caused me to have to mute my computer, step away from the keyboard and go and play Stardew Valley for an hour to simmer down. (Spend three days patiently explaining the rule behind the "no" I have to give, to increasing petulance and anger, only to have the student go over my head and negate the umpteen emails and hours of typing when the higher-ups promptly fold and grant the concession in the way I've been specifically instructed isn't possible. Twice. Honestly.)

However, there are consolations! today has been materially improved by the following.
1. An advisor sending me an Instagram capture from one of the university's general student hangouts, which cheerfully states "The devil works overtime. Jessica (plus my surname initial) works harder." Which made me go awwwwwwww. Sometimes they do notice.
2. Getting today's Wordle in three goes, possibly as a result of undue fanfic exposure. (You do all know Wordle? Simple, brilliant, addictive. It starts my morning remarkably pleasantly on a daily basis for minimal time input.
3. Cooler weather for the last few days. Thank heavens. Although tomorrow also projected to be a stinker. I do not enjoy temperatures in excess of 30 degrees.
4. The discovery, in the course of digging through the cupboards for more sugar for my tea, of the stash of Terry's chocolate oranges I bought in the post-Christmas price drop zone, and promptly forgot about.
5. The further discovery, over the last week, that feeding her Animalax on a daily basis and catnip on a twice-weekly one reduces the level of continuous whinging from Pandora to something a lot more bearable. She seems to be missing Jyn. Or complaining about the heat. Or suffering existential angst. Or resenting the quality or the food service. Or her arthritis is flaring up again. Honestly, who knows, but the above seems to help.

I am very tired and very stressed (in retrospect, working straight through the Christmas break to update the orientation site was predicably detrimental to my ability to handle all this), but life is not actually all bad. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

A misty, moisty new year, which I think is a Good Omen in my personal lexicon of signs - it's raining very lightly, everything is cool and green. I have ceremonially tidied the house, mopped the kitchen floor and had a Healthy Breakfast, TM, which I think about does it in the "start as you mean to go on" department. Bugger resolutions, anyway.

2021 was... a weird sort of non-event, actually. Pandemics telescope time; some moments are stretched out interminably, and large chunks of days and weeks and months are suddenly gone when you blink. My Tumblr feed is all over people going "wait, that was this year?!", and some events - the Capitol insurrection, the Ever Given, Tiktok sea shanties - do feel as though they were aeons ago.

Things achieved by me in 2021: almost word-for-word the same as 2021: sanity, health, more or less functional work processes, all in the teeth of the odds. And increasingly accomplished remote skills - Teams, Vula, producing remote-format curriculum material comprehensible to the gazelles. I still love working at home. Working at home keeps me sane and more or less human.

Things not achieved by me in 2021: mercifully, COVID. Any sort of forward momentum in the greater life sense, especially in the areas of achieving a new job or fleeing the country. Pandemics, apparently, make one run in place. Unfortunately not literally, as "any sort of physical fitness or actual exercise" was firmly in the "not achieved" column this year.

Losses: Jyn, poor kitty, who I still miss on a daily basis. As does Pandora, whose Whinge Factor has increased materially.

Things discovered by me in 2021: TikTok sea shanties, Death Star metaphors for vaccination, vaccination evangelism, life as a tech support person, ridiculous amounts of overtime, Leigh Bardugo, Victoria Goddard (unqualified approval), geeking out about Naomi Novik with my niece, narrated powerpoints, prism lenses and how they don't work at all for me, Animal Crossing (extremely qualified approval), gluten sensitivity, rice noodles and pad kee mao, Terry's chocolate oranges as an acceptable replacement for Christmas.

Resolutions for 2022: since I achieved improvement on the teeth one from last year, although not complete victory (I now remember to brush them in the mornings about half the time, which is a noticeable improvement on last year) I shall try something similar with exercise. I should do some. Any at all would be more than I am currently achieving. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

I am, once again, a very tired thing in the limp chewed string category, it's been a long year, and one very full of emergencies and makeshifts and adaptations, all demanding unlikely quantities of my time and mental energy. It was exam committee season last week; over four days, including the weekend, I individually checked around 1500 student records. (With the added minor challenge that my wildly expensive brand spanky new bifocals weren't working, and wouldn't let me focus on close stuff, to the point where I had to revert to the old specs and send the new ones back for remaking, apparently without the prisms, which are giving me auras and headaches.) And the exclusion review committee meeting, in which we lovingly review every excluded student in the faculty and try to find ways to readmit them without the whole appeal thing, took out half the subsequent weekend, with 7 hours of depressingly disastrous records on Friday and 4 on Saturday morning, so I feel I am somewhat justified in being wiped.

I really wanted and needed to be on leave this week to recover, but can't, because results were released to students yesterday, and since 7.30am yesterday I have answered over a hundred desperate student emails panicking about exclusions and failures and insufficient accolades and what have you. About one in 20 of which are genuine errors, and the rest are causing me, in my slightly punch-drunk state, to type up replies which unequivocally deconstruct their attempts to graduate despite a pivotal failed course, while gently crooning to myself, to no fixed tune, "There are ruuuuuules, and they apply to yooooooooou".

This is a slightly unhappy, welcome-to-adulthood sucker-punch these poor kids are facing. Most of them wade right in with righteous indignation, insisting that there must be some way around it, it's only one course, can't they do it concurrently with postgrad, or get a rewrite, or a re-mark, or just count up their credits instead of their courses, because Plans next year, and Money, and Aargh. And the answer, unfortunately, is No, because there are Ruuuuuules, and they apply to Yooooooou. And I think the resulting outrage and sense of victimhood is because of two things: (a) their insufficiently developed organs of perspective, which as Just Post-Adolescents they are still develping, so that The End of Their World is still The End of THE World, and how can anyone not see the importance of accommodating them. Compounded by (b), late stage capitalism and consumerism, they are the Customer, there is always a way to accommodate them, they've paid for this, how dare!

Which, no. Welcome to the cold hard reality of adulthood, rules still apply. Like, (for everyone except actual billionaires, about whom the less said the better), gravity, and taxes, and speeding fines, and having to go to work in order to eat. And, in fact, having to meet the degree requirements in order to graduate. Adulthood is in many ways amazing, and I wouldn't go back to teenagerhood for anything except an absolute guarantee I could keep my memories and adult perspective and replay it properly like a botched video game run, but sometimes adulthood, in terms of consequences, simply sucks. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it does.

And it may be some small consolation that, if adulthood sometimes sucks, at least we are all in this together, no-one is immune. COVID doesn't help in the Adulthood Sucks stakes; my mum hasn't been able to visit for two years, my sister and niece are currently down with it (fortunately very mildly), so Christmas is cancelled. Which is not as dire as it sounds, my family's never been big on festive wossnames, I'm really not much bothered by that aspect. Which is just as well, I have to spend most of the break catching up the orientation prep I haven't had time for, in time for the new academic year and reg season to hit in January. I'll rest when it's all over. Sometime in March. Aargh. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

Exam committee season, that is, not necessarily the jolly holly bit, which seems somewhat subdued this year, mercifully: the supermarket music selection has, for some reason, given me Walk Like An Egyptian two weekends running rather than syrupy Xmas carols, which is about a million times preferable and causes the traditional outbreaks of bopping in the aisles. No, 'tis the season of me and what my handy ruler informs me is a 7cm-thick pile of board schedules, which I have since Friday been spending merry 10-hour days checking. I have just finished annotating one and am taking a brief tea-and-bloggery break before assailing the next. With the usual acompaniment of cussing, whinging, exhortations to the heavens for patience in the face of unlikely student catastophes, and occasional wild cries of glee as random individuals manage, in the teeth of the COVID odds, to produce shining and admirable results.

It's been a very weird year for student marks. We expected a high level of fails and academic exclusions, given the extent to which students are not responding well to the remote format, and I think the exclusion rate is probably slightly up. Also, my non-finalist board schedule is about 200 students larger than usual, while the finalists are 200 smaller; all this COVID and larking about remotely is putting a serious crimp in our grad rate. But weirdly, the Dean's Merit List awards are popping up at about double the usual rate. Our faculty's courses all went continuous-assessment this year, since students weren't necessarily in CT for in-person exams; it's inflated the marks somewhat without the usual exam input. Conversely, students who crash, crash hard, and completely, clearly struggling with remote learning and, in many cases, illness and death and economic hardship and really difficult working conditions in their family environments. The marks are strangely polarised, either excellent or catastrophic, the middle stretches are extremely shrunken. Thus, apparently, is academic life under the thumb of the pandemic. In that the pandemic, like the bastard that it is, has its thumb on the scales.

I record for posterity the scene of annotatory endeavour:



From the left: packed of Côte d'Or pralines, with which I am motivating myself through this; board schedule, scribbled upon; curriculum note handout, produced by me in quantities in a desperate attempt to stop our complicated curriculum structures from eating advisors alive; glasses case, containing incredibly expensive new bifocals which appear to have the wrong prescription in that they do not allow me to actually focus on anything close, necessitating much swearing and me wearing the old ones because I can't afford the time to throw them back at the optician until at least Wednesday; cup of Earl Grey, one of endless succession which is powering this whole horrible process; practical essentials including pencils, erasers, handbooks, further curriculum notes, calculator; vase of St Joseph's lilies, which has the consolatory property of at least, if I have to sit here for hours on end, smelling nice. There's a cat in this picture, but she's under the table, on the chair next to me, snoring gently in her sleep.

I am making progress, there is an end in sight, but gods, I hate this time of year. And back to the salt mines I go. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

oh gods we have a new COVID variant, and various apparently science-heavy sources, including this one seem to suggest that its jolly little spike proteins have mutated madly enough that current vaccines may not, in fact, slow it down any. Which is creating a horrible, leaden, despairing sense of déja vu: the advice quoted in that article is "go back to March 2020 precautions". I was enjoying the sense of comparative safety in being fully vaccinated: I had my hair cut, and had plans for importing a gardener and a plumber for necessary operations. This is horrible. And I am wincingly aware that it's putting SA in the news in an extremely negative sense.

I'm staggering around a little exhausted today because I was, weirdly enough, participating in a "women in fairy tales" panel as part of a UK-based online storytelling event until about 10.30 last night, which had me both stressed and buzzed enough that I didn't come down enough to actually sleep until nearly midnight. I have done absolutely no research or teaching for two years, since the exigencies of running faculty remote processes take up my time and energy to the exclusion of all else; it was lovely to dip my toe in the water again. The weird upsides of COVID and everything being online being what they are, the panel included speakers from the US and UK as well as me, and the audience was all over the world. Apparently the US was sunny, Cape Town has been unseasonably rainy for a few days, and the UK was locked in a snowstorm, so go global warming. But I found myself apologising, in the greenroom before we started, for SA's latest unhappy contribution to the current catastrophe. Could have done without that, really. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

The last two years have been cruel, but for me, personally, it's been in a weirdly distant way - a sort of backdrop of global death, disruption and economic hardship to the far more mundane challenges and exhaustions of a radically rewritten lifestyle and day-to-day functioning. COVID's depredations have been remote: I haven't known anyone who's died or even been seriously ill from the virus, and even interactions with students expose me to illness and death and family crisis at extreme second hand, cushioned by the text medium. It's a slow-motion apocalypse at arm's length.

So it's strange, and sad, and somehow a bit wrong, to be hit as hard as I have been by a loss that's, comparatively speaking, petty and small; it's just that, unlike COVID, it's right in my house. I had to have Jyn put down about ten days ago; she developed an abscess in her neck over the weekend, which blew up suddenly and seriously enough that I took her in to the emergency vet on Sunday to have it lanced. Something in the combination of infection, anaesthetic and painkillers put her into acute kidney failure; we had her on a drip for most of the following week at my amazing vet's, but to no avail, her toxin levels never came down, the kidneys were clearly too damaged to be viable. Kidneys, apparently, don't heal. We had no option but to let her go.

I should damned well have learned by now the power of naming pets, on the Todal being evil and Golux being confused principle; I named Jyn after Jyn Erso, given that I'd just seen Rogue One at the time I acquired her. Something about Jyn Erso's story, abandoned by family, taken in by strangers, but spitting and feisty despite it, seemed appropriate. I should have remembered the tragic death very young.

She was, I have been saying to everyone all week, an incredibly sweet little cat - affectionate, playful, full of character, only occasionally evil. Her defining characteristic was her Klingon forehead, that very heavy fur over her eyes which gave her a perpetual frown that was somewhat at odds with the sweetness of her character. She would climb onto my desk while I was working and headbutt me repeatedly in the chest when she wanted attention (she did it whenever I visited her at the vet), and she was always at the door to greet me when I arrived home. Her walk was a sort of flouncy mini-swagger, often accompanied by her characteristic chirrups and trills; at times she'd rocket in from the courtyard giving vent to her astonishingly baritone growl, although not for any concrete reason I could ever discover, I think it was part of the game. She loved playing with rolling toys, especially, for some reason, rolled up foil from chocolates - Codsworth has found several of them under the furniture in this last week, and then I cry.

In a weird sort of way Jyn's early death, while awful, was also on some level not surprising; she was never quite right. She had that terrible recurring tendency to abscesses, probably about one a year, which were weird and mysterious because I never caught her fighting, and for a large number of them there wasn't actually a discernible bite mark. She had the black spots on her nose which were starting to be cancerous, and I was bracing myself for the nosectomy dilemma all over again. She was never very good at jumping; she had a curious insecurity about walking, even, on any ground that was cluttered or yielding; she'd never sit on laps. The standard garden wall, which Hobbit and various other trespassers scale quite handily, kept her securely in the back courtyard as long as there wasn't anything for her to jump up in stages. She never actually learned to go out of the open windows - something about the narrow sill and minor dexterity needed to negotiate the opening, defeated her. Even Pandora, fat and lazy and elderly as she is, quite cheerfully manages these windows. Jyn somehow... did not compute. I think she may have had very minor brain damage of some sort, or a muscular development problem. Or both. I thought of her as having a somewhat buggy operating system, with several intrinsic Cat modules missing or incomplete.

It's been difficult, since losing her, to keep myself from blaming either myself (I should have caught the abscess earlier) or the emergency vet (he gave her stronger painkillers than my usual Splendid Vet does, and didn't put a drain in the wound, and I'm a bit miffed that he drained the neck abscess but didn't appear to notice the second one in her mouth). But my vet says it's just bad luck, a perfect storm of circumstances stressing the kidneys.

I am missing her terribly, and I think Pandora, despite her general grumption, is as well, she's been spending a lot of time yelling at me over the last week. They were quite good friends, they'd lie on my bed and wash each other, at least until Pandy got bored and tried to nip her, so I'm not surprised Pandy's a bit lonely now. I am too. And sorry, and sad.

This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

By way of rewarding self for the horrors of this year's remote reg and orientation experiences, I ordered myself Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and have been playing it in the evenings as far as possible given the various outcomes of the daily war between myself and Pandora for occupancy of my gaming chair. Apparently I can only occasionally seduce her away by deploying the heated blanket on the sofa. We have arrived at a semi-compromise, below:



I am enjoying ACNH, although not deliriously or obsessively, and have, shall we say, Notes.

Pottering happily about a landscape harvesting, planting, building or collecting things and meeting small, domestic goals is very much my jam when I'm tired and stressed, see obsessive re-play of Stardew Valley, incursions into things like Littlewood and My Time At Portia, and my fondness for the buildy bits of Skyrim, Fallout IV or Yonder. ACNH is more of same, although through the console lens rather than the PC, and is thus Different - less textured, less character-driven, and its cutesy aesthetic is occasionally grating. (Yonder and even Portia did it much better, IMNSHO, in the sense of being more Zelda-like, less childish).

I am enjoying, in a qualified sort of fashion, the pottering about, although its grindiness becomes repetitive a little too quickly. The writing, while in the facile sort of class appropriate to the genre, is occasionally amusing and wry. I do become a bit weirded out by the visuals, the fixed perspective is frequently frustrating and the horizon effects are frankly trippy, in the sense that ACNH denizens apparently live on a cylindrical world with a radius approximately the width of a football field. The way things move over the horizon is odd. But overall it's rather pretty and occasionally, when the art team have been let loose on a night sky or sunrise, beautiful. (Also: desperately enamoured of the museum.)

I also think I am losing potential texture and depth because I don't do co-operative play with Real People, that's not what I game for, so huge tracts of the game which are designed for island visits and social interaction with other players, are simply closed to me. (And the inbuilt assumptions around interaction infuse the gameplay rather unacceptably. Cannot, because of lack of above, complete fruit and flower collections! Maddened!) And the characterisation of the NPCs is superficial enough that it doesn't in any way substitute for the Real People interactions, and really makes me miss Stardew Valley.

Which all sounds unduly negative, but I have been playing several hours a day for the last couple of weeks, and am deriving quiet enjoyment from it, so there is clearly a lot here to enjoy despite the minor deficiencies. (I am also developing a marked habit of playing for an hour in bed in the mornings when I wake up, with tea and cats, because Switch, and it's definitely not a bad way to start the day).

What I am not enjoying at all, because I don't think they're satirising them strongly enough, is the unabashed capitalist underpinning of it all. I live in a late-capitalist hellscape, I do not need such to be faithfully and only semi-critically replicated in my gaming, thank you. ACNH is very much about Things, it's a densely populated landscape full of highly specific bits of furniture and clothing and decorations and appliances and useless modern tchotchkes, which you collect in large amounts. Even worse, its achievement and quest mechanisms are expressed in a miles/rewards/tokens system which forcibly reminds me of the one I rejected, with extreme prejudice, from my medical aid - little mini-quests all carefully calibrated to force you to grind, and sell, and buy, and grease the wheels of the whole system.

And Animal Crossing works on a system which makes you borrow money to build things; hell, you arrive on your idyllic island and the managing company immediately turns around and stiffs you with a large bill you spend the first part of the game paying off. It turns out that owing money, which gives me hives in the real world, also gives me virtual hives in gaming. I hate owing money, and you can't do anything - build, move things around - without paying large sums for it. (I am simultaneously replaying Littlewood because ACNH has given me an overwhelming desire for a fully, freely landscapable map at whim, as often as I like, without penalty).

Although it's inevitable for the glossy large-scale popular product of a massive and powerful corporation whose design techniques are clearly aimed more at marketing than at narrative fulfilment, I really, really hate that this game quite unabashedly normalises capitalist assumptions and structures and, ultimately, entrapments. The cute island getaway setting is not an escape from capitalism, it's merely another set of images in which to replicate capitalist pressures and trappings, buy and sell and borrow and consume. (And don't get me started on turnips. I think the empty notional money manipulation of the real-world stock market is vicious and immoral and disgusting, and it's not suddenly cute and acceptable because your abstract coup markers are now knobbly vegetables).

Part of the whole setup is clearly semi-satirical, in that the company characters who run the islands are caricatures - raccoons with their little grasping hands, and Isabelle as a sort of overly and superficially smiley corporate doll. But it's a nod and wink sort of jokiness which renders these corporate figures both innocuous and intrinsic - that's just, the game says, how things are. They're a bit dodge, but you can't resist them or overturn them or choose not to interact with them. They underpin everything. Capitalism, the game says, is the only game in town. And it's cute! don't worry about it! just play it! we all do! it's all there is!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is both training wheels and pabulum for the capitalist serf, and while it's a reasonably entertaining sort of gameplay amble, about the best thing I can say about it, re-reading the above, is that it's apparently energised me into rampantly politicised Marxism in two weeks, which is not bad going, given my levels of exhaustion and usual state of jaded political lassitude. Huh.

(My subject line is Preachers, "Motorcycle Emptiness", because apparently the only possible response to corporate capitalist cute is Welsh anti-capitalist semi-punk). This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

oooh, yes, this blog thing, yes. *blows dust off it in the traditional fashion*. I knew I was forgetting something. Well, probably I'm forgetting lots of things, on account of how it's been a hellish couple of months and I am exhausted enough to have a small, limp, cheesy sort of thing in place of a functional memory. But it's more or less over bar the irritating mopping up. I survived, by dint of two months with 10-hour days and no weekends off, the translation of registration for 5000 students and orientation for 1400 into brand new remote processes designed by a giant, slow, inefficient bureaucracy and implemented by self with hindrance from same during conditions of global pandemic. I didn't even kill anyone, although the temptation was enormous at several points. I also tallied up my overtime hours this week. From the middle of January to the middle of March I worked 270 extra hours, counting extra-long days, evening stints and weekends. I am feeling, shall we say, somewhat entitled to my current state of exhaustion.

So, I had a lovely rant semi-written about last week's inbox full of sustained hissy-fit by a parent-of-student who is incensed because offspring doesn't make the cut for their programme of choice, and has been spamming the faculty hierarchy with increasingly self-important rants accusing all and sundry, but me by name repeatedly, of inefficiency, discrimination, racism, ignorance, despicable conduct, cruelty and what have you. Plus threats of legal action. And I was more than somewhat annoyed about all that, but then yesterday happened, and suddenly it all seems trivial and petty. I suppose the university catching fire would, in fact, deliver a nice hot cup of perspective.

I always vaguely expected my Cherished Institution to be burned down by angry students, not by rampaging bush fires, but that's nature for you. Table Mountain has significant fires every couple of years, we have stuffed the fynbos cycles royally by not allowing it to burn naturally at intervals, so when it does go up, there's all this deadwood and it's a ferocious blaze. There has been ash falling even out here, a suburb away, and the whole city is full of smoke, my eyes and breathing are feeling it.

But none of the previous fires on the mountain have actually affected campus - this time there were fairly serious winds, and the fire leaped onto campus in weird pinpoint strikes, and down over the freeway. Yesterday we lost three buildings (Jagger Library, the Botany building, and a middle campus smallish residence), and saw fire damage to others. The palm tree outside Fuller Hall went up like a torch, it was horrifying. We evacuated all the students from residences because of the smoke and ongoing threat, and there were awful pictures of little trains of them trekking through various suburbs with suitcases. The university apparently found beds for everyone in various hotels, and the community in general has been rallying magnificently with donations and food and what have you, but it's still a lot.

I have been part of this university for my entire adult life: here for undergrad and two grad degrees, and then working here both part time and full time thereafter. The Jagger library, with its special collections section, was where I spent a fair amount of time writing my PhD, it had a fantasy/sf critical collection which we started when I was chairing the Tolkien Society, and the lovely librarian used to order in good fairy-tale texts for me. It's all gone: the pics were horrible, the old building with all its windows full of flame. Some of the more fragile and valuable collections were in fireproof rooms under the library and are mostly OK, but we've lost a bunch from the African Studies library. The building is across the road from my office, which feels uncomfortably close, but it also feels as though a part of my own history has gone up in flames. Yesterday was awful, increasingly disbelieving doomscrolling through all the social media pics, and the weirdest sense of unreality - as if a year of COVID wasn't bad enough, now this? some kind of cosmic joke. The library going was a gutpunch, I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon in helpless tears.

This image of the sign to upper campus, which I've screenshotted from a media compilation on Youtube, really got me:



I suppose, now, we go on doing what we've been doing throughout the COVID crisis: what we can. Assess, replace, try to make it work in spite of everything. I hope the university has really good insurance. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.

We have nearly finished processing the returning student registrations, which means that currently we are doing the last-minute ones concurrently with orientation and registration for the new students. This is not an auspicious year in which to begin your university career: we are teaching largely online this year, and the remote format is going to give these kids a really shaky start to university learning, and absolutely nothing of the real university experience, which is as much inadvisable friendships, inadvisable drinking and hanging out on the Jammie steps between classes as it is actual academics. Bugger COVID, anyway.

Part of my excessive hours over the last few months has been spent cobbling together a virtual version of the usual four-day orientation programme, which has been exhausting and fiddly and at times seems to offer insurmountable obstacles, like the general inability of a large subsection of the student body to read and retain information from anything longer than a tweet. I think we have a comprehensive and largely accessible body of material here; the difficulty is in getting them to actually read it. I need a virtual version of pushing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk, stat.

At any rate, the draft registration forms submitted for advisor checking over the last four days have revealed a subset of students who have clearly read, understood and taken to heart, and who offer nearly perfect forms requiring only minor tweaks; and a much larger subset of students who have clearly done none of the above. Exhibits in the second category including such gems as:

• A long lament about being confused and unable to find the orientation site, to which confusion I can absolutely attest in that said lament is being submitted on the orientation site;
  
• A little clutch of submissions on the form for the wrong programme, which is bewildering me because I have the forms very carefully set up so that students can only see or access the ones for their actual programme; I think they must be swapping them with each other, in lieu of the usual orientation week swapping, via the usual teenaged excitable groping, of exotic doses of 'flu from the four corners of the earth;
  
• Several submissions which have completely ignored semesterisation, and presented me with a curriculum with seven courses in one semester and one in the other;
  
• Those particularly inventively error-ridden forms which have tried to sign themselves up, variously, for English Masters-level courses, or Engineering maths, or a random practical course in tuba;
  
• The deliriously indecisive young lady who submitted two forms, one for the BA degree, one for Social Science, including entirely separate and different majors and courses, and left absolutely no indication (a) why the duplicate, or (b) which one she actually wants. I am still puzzling over what she was trying to do.

I mean, I know the info is there. About half the students seem to find it OK, to a greater or lesser extent. Others... don't even try. Some of the kids are all right. Is that enough? This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.