Long ten days, but I finally get an evening. Which means, Earthbound. That little boy is my soul, that monster is the couch, and that little monkey character is Starbuck. Yep.

Not that I get any say in this part, exactly. But it's hard to both think that grade inflation is a problem and understand that it has to change all at once if it is going to change: Summa does just look better on a CV (and, let's be honest, in general), and that's a non-trivial competitive advantage in certain job markets. When you're grading papers you can sort of respond to this, but when it's a test and you don't get to pick the curve, being the guy in the middle is a wee bit uncomfortable.

I remember in seventh grade when I ruined my perfect score in woodshop with a sub-optimal salt shaker. I started crying right in front of a guy named Blaine who would later get a minotaur tattooed on his calf and had to claim through a veil of snot that I had sawdust in my eye. So what I'm saying, folks, is I feel you.

...though of course the question is whose words are doing the failing here. The thing about grad school is that, alongside everything you read that stays with you and quietly changes everything, there is the batshit. This is one example. It doesn't help that I'm reading it at a dead sprint, having started it today and needing to finish it by about this time tomorrow. Which is to say, tomorrow's Backseat Phillip will probably be another screenshot from this bonkers-ass novel.

Long day today in which I did few of the things I'm strictly supposed to do and many things that seem the most useful. Today we were prototyping the "prototyping of speculative ideas," about which, again, more later. Digital editions of medieval crafting manuscripts... life is maybe suddenly more like The Elder Scrolls? #wrongcentury

Less from a marriage than at the very beginning of one. Relics from that most surreal of months arrived in the various mails this week: the full complement of wedding photos and the long-awaited Tallinn/San Sebastian travel posters. We rode a ferry like the one in the Tallinn poster, from Helsinki to Tallinn. When we finally boarded after a harrowing morning, we found a floating wonderland: nobody sitting down except in front of a slot-machine or bar; Baltic Elvis impersonators; one man winning bingo twice in one sitting and managing not to tear his shirt off and run around the room---he didn't even break a smile. I'm pretty sure you can see his glum, bingo-winning face through one of the portholes on the poster....

I didn't make a Gmail account (or a Facebook, or a Twitter...) for my cat because I wanted her to have a robust web presence. Though, if it contributes to that, I'm all for it. I just needed a name for all my dummy accounts so everyone doesn't know I'm listening to Fergie (or whomever) on Spotify and ordered enough delivery to get a free Seamless snuggie. And test a broken Twitter API for this account, for example. So to the NSA, it looks like one S. Buck Polefrone-Day orders a lot of food in and listens to a lot of crap, and collects a lot of spam for someone who has never received a piece of personal correspondence....

I have to make myself useful somehow, so these days I find myself as the family webmaster. The boss-as-hell Katrina Day has been kicking her way into pretty much everyone's newsfeeds with her new project Lady Parts, a blog that exposes the substratum of misogynist representation in casting breakdowns throughout the acting industry. While she does that, I occasionally install a friendly Twitter button. But stay tuned; a DH working group at Columbia (on whom more later) has plans to back online feminist activists who have been hacked, and we'll use rapid-response migration to Jekyll and GitHub Pages to join the fray. Surely what I've learned in the construction/compulsive maintenance of this blog can be put to some use....