Magic: TG: Return to Ravnica

I missed the release events for the Return to Ravnica set, but went along to one of the weekly drafts for the new set. I am not very good at drafting it yet, but it was pretty fun: there seem to be eleventy-million different things you can do, which all stand some chance of working, and two-colour spells just feel rich somehow.

Degree Certificates

When I finally put all my degree certificates in the same folder, I realised I really did have four different degree certificates for basically one four-year course. And I actually know where they all are if I ever need them, although already having a job, that's fairly unlikely.

For the record, that is:

* Bachelor of Arts, for the normal undergraduate course. Obviously Cambridge eschews such new-fangled contraptions such as degrees other than "of arts". Oxford graduates may snicker at Cambridge thinking of itself as "old" here :)

* Master of Arts, also for the normal undergraduate course, but seven years later (assuming you haven't brought the college into disrepute in the meantime), on the traditional-but-spurious grounds that when the system was instituted, a Cambridge three-year degree was supposedly worth as much as a four-year degree somewhere else.

* Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics, for the fourth year masters-equivalent. Which has a very idiosyncratic name, since most people understand either "Part III" or "Masters-equivalent", but no-one ever actually says "certificate of advanced studies in mathematics".

* Master of Mathematics. When Cambridge finally knuckled under to the pressure to be marginally consistent with everyone else, and give out actual masters certificates for the masters course. I still feel like I cheated by doing a taught masters that didn't have a true research component, but it's still true that after four years of teaching, you're not at the frontiers of knowledge yet, and maths is harder to start doing research in, since there often nothing like "a bit similar to the research we did before, but on a new chemical".

"Master of Mathematics" probably has to be my favourite, since even though I didn't become an academic mathematician, it's still a nice achievement, and the title is more sensible that the previous one.

Lizzie Bennet diaries

http://www.lizziebennet.com/story/

Wow, that's awesome. A modern video-blog retelling of Pride and Prejudice. (I'm not sure if I'd like actual video blogs, but I like fictional video blogs as a medium :))

I know people will probably snark at me for applying the same level of literary analysis to something in the medium of a video blog, but I don't think accessible is automatically synonymous with simplistic -- I think often the most interesting analysis is of stuff that the viewers instinctively understand, but you need to understand why.

But what I find interesting is its relationship to the original. It captures some of the essence of the original story, while also living in a world in which Pride-and-Prejudice influenced stories like Bridget Jones exist ("Darcy? Wasn't that the name of the guy Colin Firth played in that movie?"). You'd think it would break the immersion, but it seems to work well.

Often missing in modern adaptions, #1

I only watched a couple of episodes of this so I don't know if these apply to this, but I've noticed a couple of things that people often complain don't really come through in modern adaptions or retellings of P&P.

The first is that "rich" isn't just an abstract concept, the people who want to marry someone rich aren't simply (or aren't only) being greedy, but that even if the family isn't poor by the standards of actual poor people, they're still on the verge of losing their home, and marrying someone rich will likely save them.

This was something mum pointed out to me in one of the BBC adaptions: the Bennets and the Darcys are both landed, but rather than both being interchangeable-upper-middle-class like so many protagonists, the Bennets had a nice house, and some land, but it was basically a big farmhouse, whereas Darcy had a real mansion of echoing corridors filled with marble statues, etc, etc.

And presumably women of that class couldn't really get jobs except on a very ad-hoc basis, so that's why they were inherently broke?

Often missing in modern adaptions, #2

Not as much in adaptions like LBD, but in loosely-inspired things is a recognition that being aloof and distant isn't actually a good thing. Partly because everyone knows the story, they expect the Lizzie and Darcy characters to get together and sometimes forget all the reasons Austen gave the characters to, or not to, get together.

Darcy is attractive partly because they overcome the aloof-and-distant thing, but it's easy to leave that almost entirely out, or to assume that acting like a jerk is sufficient to make a romantic hero/heroine and forget to actually include any bits where the new characters actually like each other.