Shit.

Here I turn my head for a second, and when I turn back towards the ‘net again, two months have passed. If I’d had a dollar for every time this has happened (or, perhaps more precise, for every time I’ve done this) in the last three years, I’d probably have… enough for a soda, anyway.

So, again, my sincere apologies for my absence. That I’ve been working and at home with my parents for two months really isn’t much of an excuse; I could still have taken twenty minutes per day to pop in and read your blogs and stuff. (You know, I think I’m going to take a magic marker, write that on a fairly large piece of paper, and then hang it somewhere in my room where I can see it.)

Not that I’ve really had anything to write about myself, though. I don’t think I’ve reviewed a movie since, what, February? And after I finished Lud-in-the-Mist, I could and should of course have reviewed Toll the Hounds, but apart from that I’ve only reread The Wheel of Time in the last month, in addition to reading some non-fiction (for example Herodotus’ The Histories, which is quite fun now that he’s seemingly recovered from his almost pathological obsession with Egyptian cults and rites). And seriously, who wants to read reviews of that?

However, I have bought a couple of promising books lately, so hopefully, reviews will be forthcoming. I’ve got Scott Bakker’s Neuropath lying here, looking scary and tempting; Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains is here; John Scalzi’s The Last Colony too; Trudi Cavanan’s The Black Magician trilogy is tempting me with vague rumours of ridiculously powerful magicians (one of my favourite tropes, that) and equally silly schemes of vengeance; Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein is lying on one of my desks; Glen Cook’s The Black Company trilogy is smiling at me from my windowsill; and that’s just the most apparent ones, or the most recent ones.

If only I can get Rand’s walk to the Cairhien docks out of the way, as well as his subsequent rage-induced journey to Caemlyn, his rendezvous with Rahvin (RIP, Sir Arthur!), and the least subtle Ghost Busters hommage in the memory of man; well, then I might just find the time to pick up a slightly more fun book (or so I hope) and in time perhaps even review it. Who knows.

That is, if studying doesn’t eat up too much of my time. Because, you see, in spite of the fact that I this summer discovered that NTNU (bless them, the sodding bastards — if you’re not going to be an engineer, doctor or psychologist, stay the fuck away from this lousy make-believe university (just a friendly tip)) doesn’t allow bachelor degrees to be bigger than 180-187.5 study points, I’ve still registered for 37.5 study points this semester, and if I’d found a course that fit with my other courses, schedule-wise, I’d probably would have taken more. Dumb shit that I am.

So, for those of you who might be able to pretent to be politely interested, here’s a quick summary of what I’m taking this year:

Hist1505: Historical theory and method. A mandatory course if you want to take a Master’s degree in history (and who doesn’t, eh?). It deals with the history of the discipline, from the early German historians of the 19th century to today, as well as such things as text analysis, source knowledge, and how to write academic papers. I fear I’m going to have huge problems with that last part… :roll:

Hist2125: Ancient Rome. An example of the quality of NTNU humanities studies. At Bergen, if my memory serves me right, they have the course “The Roman Republic”, which is about the size of this one, or possibly slightly larger. At NTNU, we have to make due with one course consisting of thirteen lectures and two movie-showings. Still, this is the course I’m looking forward to the most this term. It probably won’t be as cool as last term’s “Warriors, Monasteries & Catapults — the diffusion of knowledge 300-1300″, but hey. The course’s main book, Roman People by Robert Kebric, offers a refreshing approach to the field, by picking a couple of historical figures to follow through each chapter and thus getting a bit more sociological or something that your more typical political history narrative. Also, there’s talk of a “class” trip to Rome sometime during the Fall, and I intend to press that into my schedule and budget, a dozen term papers of various length be damned.

Eng2155: Theoretical and practical issues of English grammar and translation. I’m guessing this is one of the courses they keep the name of but change the content of every year or so, because this is simply a course that takes a closer look at morphology and syntax than did the introductionary courses. Which is fun, because, you know, phonetics gets kinda boring and, even to me, too nerdy after a while (when they start measuring the velocity of the air coming out your nose when you talk and whatnot), but morphology and syntax… Now, those are fun. Of course, my old flat mate, who was working on his Master’s thesis in linguistics, used to say that if you took a close look at syntax, every syntactical theory turned out to be pants, but seeing as I don’t intend to pursue the topic that far, what do I care? Anyway, fun course this far, at least.

Eng2302: Literature and History. Another course that keeps the name but changes the content. This year it is centred on literary life in Britain in the 18th century, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the far less glorious French one of 1789. So far we’ve read some fiction and some non-fiction, of which the non-fiction was most interesting; twenty pages long articles about the printing and publishing business in the 1700s are a hell of a lot more fun than they sound.

Eng2452: Britain in Europe. A course in British politics, with an emphasis on Britain’s relations to the European Union. The kind of course when I can pretty much just lean back and cruise through on what I’ve learned from Pol1000 (International politics and comparative politics), Hist1200 (An introduction to modern history), Hist 2810 (Great power politics in the 20th century) and Hist2410 (Economic history), as well as stuff I pick up other places. Planning to write the course’s term paper on a discussion of whether devolved British governments best fit into the category of horizontal or vertical separation of power. Sounds like fun, ne?

Anyhoo, those five courses, à 7.5 study points, are what I’ll probably spend most of my time on this term. In addition to a few thousand pages of obligatory reading, I’ve estimated that I’ve got some 12 term papers of variable sizes this term, and as if that wasn’t enough, I’ve promised my sister I’ll read through her Master’s thesis a time or two in good time before her delivery deadline. Oh, and I’ve just ordered seven seasons of some of the best TV ever made. Not to mention that I’ve signed a subscription to The Economist. Man, I’m fucked.

Oh well. At least I’m not starving or anything.