And when we go, we'll go across all the margins

First off, welcome dgraymanxxx and jubilee_berry!  I'd totally do an intro post, but even though I've already done two already, they're both sort of out-of-date, and they were made at a time when I still didn't quite know what the hell I was doing with an LJ.  (Well, in some ways I still don't, but it's gotten better.  XD)  I shall be making another one fairly soon, which should hopefully be a little more permanent.  ^_^;  (And from now on, I'll try to welcome new friends by name around here.  So if I never did that with you, I'm sorry.  :<)

I've been procrastinating like hell on my work today, but after I only got three and a half hours of sleep last night working on yet another geology lab report, and because of my radio show tomorrow morning, I need to go to bed early tonight, so there's not much I really can do tonight anyway.  Having tomorrow (mostly) off, as well as a little bit of a reprieve on my work, certainly helps.  :3

Anyway, here are some cool things that have been going on lately:

--Friday night was the Dorothy Roberts lecture I talked about briefly in the last entry, which was absolutely amazing.  It was about how there has been an increasing tendency in our society to see race as biological and genetic rather than social, which has led to a focus in the scientific community to view the differences in health outcomes between the races as inherent, as well as various medicines and other treatments meant to be tailored specifically for people of certain races.  She went on to argue that by downplaying the "social determinants" of health (i.e. discrimination) in that way, it ignores the need for social change and reinforces racial inequalities (sort of like a kinder and gentler eugenics).  It was very fascinating, thought-provoking stuff.; she had to cut off some of her lecture because she ran out of time, but honestly I could've been there and longer and wouldn't have minded one bit.

--Saturday evening, our anime club finally started our lineup.  Here's what we started watching:

• Durarara!! -- Yeah, we've started watching this again, not that I mind one bit, of course.  ^_^;
• Planetes -- Out of all the ones I haven't seen so far (which would be the rest of them), this one looks the most promising.  It's a sci-fi dramedy about space garbagemen (hey, someone needs to take care of all the space garbage and debris, because that stuff can cause serious damage to spacecraft!), specifically about an idealistic, starry-eyed, underachieving young woman who's the big corporate behemoth's garbage department's newest employee, and it's totally Better Than It Sounds™.  The first episode flowed smoothly and was very engrossing (and surprisingly realistic), and I can't wait for more!
• Full Metal Panic! -- One of those "Really young elite military sergeant is tasked to protect a girl with superpowers from terrorists by going undercover as a student in her high school, and hijinks ensue, and giant robots are somehow involved too!" shows.  I've heard a lot of great things about this show, so I found the first episode rather underwhelming.  It's basically an excuse to have a battle-raised character in a mundane high school setting -- not that this doesn't have potential, of course.  I'll have to watch a few more episodes before I can really judge it all that well.
• RahXephon -- A.K.A. "that Evangelion ripoff."  I've always wanted to see it for that reason alone, but the first episode had a lot of really cryptic and confusing stuff going on (and it isn't really successful in making you care about figuring it out), so I'll also have to reserve judgment until I see more episodes.
• Kare Kano (A.K.A. His and Her Circumstances) -- A rom-com about a girl who painstakingly puts up a façade of being a star student, who develops mixed feelings for a boy who's an actual star student, and doesn't seem to give it much effort.  Hideaki Anno co-directed this one after he did Evangelion, and you can definitely tell it's a Gainax anime.  This show seems to be really haphazard and all over the place, which doesn't always have to be a bad thing, but I feel this one tends to go overboard with all that, by moving too fast and being random for randomness' sake, which gets really annoying after a while.  I'll continue to give this a shot, but I can tell already that this is no School Rumble.
• Highschool of the Dead -- The zombie apocalypse hits a high school, and the remaining uninfected ones try to survive.  This show is a paean to shock value, an experiment to see how far the writers and artists can go to objectify women as often as possible, and how much blood and exposed skin they can pack into each episode.  If a show has a good story, memorable characters, and a great way at keeping your interest, I can forgive all the fanservice.  But seeing as this show is nothing but fanservice.......well.  (I must be one of the only few male anime fans in the world who inwardly cringes at fanservice.  I never liked it, and I never will.  :/)  I'll probably follow this one through to the end, but don't expect me to be all that enthusiastic about it.

To anyone who's seen any of these (other than Durarara!!), what did you think of them?  Do they get better as they go along?

--Sunday afternoon saw our strategic gaming club playing Dominion.  It's a card game, which ups the geek factor by about a million, but it's awesome and y'all should totally check it out.  I had a lot of fun, even though I kept on losing miserably.  :V

--I'm trying to open my Monday nights for meditation, and even though I still haven't done a lot of it (and I only really feel comfortable doing it once a week right now), I've really been enjoying it!  I do want to try it on my own at some point this week, though, in between all the readings and research I need to catch up on, along with everything else.  >_>;  It's also started to make me curious about Hinduism and Buddhism, two things I never thought I'd be curious about.  I noticed there's an intro class on Hinduism that's being offered spring semester, and depending on whether or not it can fit my schedule, I'm definitely thinking about taking it.  ^_^;

Oh yeah, and I've been having a lot of tea lately (hot tea, not just the iced tea I'm so fond of).  I think I've had more tea in the past three weeks than I've had in the rest of my lifetime.  And I'm really loving it, even if my tongue is not.  8D

All right, let's cap off this already long entry with another meme, this one stolen from the ever-amazing edge_chan:

( Another one of those survey ones..... )