So much for a regular blogging schedule!

Shanah Tovah, everyone, a few weeks late.

For a couple weeks I was very busy, and then I fell out of the habit.

I’ve also written a second short story, and read…way too many books. It’s funny– I used to work so hard as a graduate student. I had to instill personal boundaries like “no bench work after midnight”, and “if you need to be in by 8am, make sure you’re out by 8pm”, because otherwise that sort of thing happened all the time. These days I have my books, my creative writing, my pets, and a few other hobbies lurking in the background. I sleep every night, I shower every day, and I’m a lot happier. It feels a little like cheating. I have the sense that if I’m not miserable in graduate school, I’m probably not working hard enough.

However, I finally finished Mistborn: The Final Empire. In the space of a couple days, I also read the two sequels. Brandon Sanderson is probably the top name in the epic fantasy genre these days (excluding George R. R. Martin, of course). This Penny Arcade comic isn’t entirely wrong: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/09/30/sanderfuge

His prose is decent, his characterization is not extremely convincing, and large parts of his books get redundant and long winded. By the end of the trilogy, I’d find myself skipping pages at a time, because they were covering old (or annoying) ground.

That said, he can *nail* an ending! Any complaints I had about writing quality consistently disappeared in the last hundred pages of his books. They were all fast paced, surprising, and for lack of a better word, awesome. After finishing the Final Empire, and book 2 “Mistborn: The Well of Ascension”, I was ready to take back anything negative I’d ever said or thought about his writing. They more than make up for other weaknesses.

What is a Hessian

This morning I jumped in a dumpster, so today is already more interesting then yesterday.

I’m moving to a different apartment this weekend, as is one of the other graduate students in my lab. We both needed cardboard boxes, so I suggested checking the corrugated cardboard recycling out behind our building. The cardboard dumpster was mostly empty, and pretty clean. When I hopped in to pull out boxes, the other graduate student was a little horrified, which was definitely the best part of the experience.

I’m still messing around with computer vision/image analysis tools.  Apparently FeatureJ Hessian is great at classifying my samples.  I’m not totally sure what a Hessian is, and the google search results are predictably hilarious. It apparently has something to do with measuring ‘blobs’, but I doubt that means what I think it means.

Yesterday evening I finally got started reading the novel I downloaded a few days ago.  It’s the first in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. I don’t read a lot of epic fantasy these days– I burned out on the genre in my early teens, after too much David Eddings. I heard about Mistborn on a podcast, and it sounded interesting (I’ve been listening to a lot of a podcasts while doing some very tedious image editing). My favorite podcast is Writing Excuses, a weekly panel on novel writing.  Brandon Sanderson is one of the four regular panelists.  Sanderson apparently spent years as a hotel receptionist, writing thirteen novels that would never get published, before his first success.  Now he’s one of the biggest names in the genre.

Mistborn is his second book, and arguably what he’s best known for.  Someone very clever on Goodreads described it as ‘Ocean’s 11 set in Mordor’, which is a pretty accurate summation.
Most reviews describe it as having a clever premise and good worldbuilding, but mediocre pacing and awkward dialogue.  All of this is true, but overall I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
I’ll write a more detailed review when I’ve finished it.