I did, by the way, get to SCCS. Kit took care of upgrading my WordPress software. The problem was with Fugu in fact, and not actually a problem so much as a quirk in the way it handles deletion of directories. He also kindly modified this theme to include tags, which you can now see at the tops of posts. Plus, he changed something with permissions that briefly allowed me to upload photos in the old WordPress, but with the new upload system of 2.5, I’m getting a different error message when I try. One of these, days, I’ll be successful.

Had my last seminar on Monday, and my last Movement Theater class (which was actually a joint performance with the Movement Theater II class of pieces we’d been creating throughout the semester) last night. Now it’s just two Greek classes to go, and then just studying for finals. Today was the end-of-year Classics picnic, which featured excellent food and a skit parodying the Agamemnon and much discussion of what this year’s Classics T-shirt should be.

Housing didn’t end up being terrible. By the time they got down to the last hundred or so Juniors, all singles were gone, so they opened up the singles waitlist. Most of the remainder elected to go on it, which meant that the part of my block that will be here next semester managed to get the last two (pretty sizable, actually) available doubles in Mertz.

Anyway, if all goes to plan, I’ll only be here a semester anyway. In the spring I want to study at ICCS in Rome. From what I’ve seen in my research of it and what I’ve heard from several people, it’s a great program, and while it’s pretty highly rated in academics, the workload is not bad compared to Swarthmore. I think I could do with a break, especially in Rome. Half of the program is a course that involves multiple field trips per week to go look at old Roman things, so I’m excited.

I’m also trying to figure out what to do in the summer after the program ends. I had originally planned to make a bunch of money sometime between now and then in order to stay in Europe and travel for a while. After speaking with Professor Turpin, however, my new plan is to find some sort of summer program and get the college to pay for it through Classics Department or general Humanities funding. This is a while off, so I have plenty of time to consider, but I’ve been looking at archaeological digs, mainly in the U.K. I’d kind of like to go back to Germany or the Czech Republic, though. If I could come up with my own interest and write a convincing enough plan, I could probably get funding for whatever I wanted, actually. I just need to figure out what that is.

Well, it’s been a while since I posted. A week or so ago I was trying to write a post about how to make a small alcohol burning lamp that Bevan and I put together a while ago, but WordPress was uncooperative in photo uploading. Also, I haven’t yet managed to update to the new version of WordPress, but that seems to be more the fault of Fugu, which won’t let me delete the old files. Eventually, I’ll make it over to SCCS and see if they can be helpful.

I handed in my final seminar paper this morning, having pulled an all-nighter to finish it. This is the second one I’ve done on this paper, unfortunately. The other one was a couple weeks ago when the previous draft was due. The paper’s been keeping me pretty occupied since then, so I’m hoping to have a little more free time now that it’s done.

Previous to that, on Wednesday evening, I saw a showing of the documentary Second Skin. It’s about massively multiplayer online games, and how they affect the lives of a few different sets of people. I enjoyed the movie. It looked at gaming from several different perspectives, and let the viewer decide what his or her stance on the issue was. I also found it to be well-filmed and well-edited for the most part. It followed several different story lines, and while the three main ones wound throughout the movie, others were only brief interludes. These gave the film a choppy feel at times, but admittedly, I’m not sure there would have been a better way of integrating them into the rest of the movie.

The film was being shown at Swarthmore because one of the producers is a Swat alumnus from 2000. It debuted at South By Southwest, and the production team is currently looking for a distributor. Hopefully people will be able to see the movie soon. (Anyone out there who works for a distribution company should take a look at Second Skin.) In the meantime, the trailer is available on the film’s website.