8/12/2013 Lughnasa Honey Moon
Obviously Ancientrails remains down. This form of instant communication has its pluses and minuses. Big plus: write it and publish it. Right now. Big minus: when it’s down, everything going forward waits. So it’s instant except when it isn’t.
Worked on various tasks like reorganizing files, finishing up to do list stuff from three months ago, watching the last of the New History for a New China lectures.
This New History MOOC has some startling things to say, if its data actually supports them. For example, the lecturer today claimed that the justification for the Chinese Communist revolution, land distribution overwhelmingly in the have-a-lots hands, up to 90%, turns out not to have been the case. The implication? The Chinese revolution was a top down revolution engineered by a revolutionary organization, not a from below uprising. This is definitely surprising. Their use of data and their sources did not always seem to justify their conclusions. Too few data points, or data supposedly used as comparative, but actually comparing unlike things. Or, in a few instances, the data simply did not conform to the conclusions based on it. Weird.
So, I’m loafing and inviting my soul. To what? Not sure, but it feels fine right now. I have poked around in some of my short stories and other novels to see if I might start revising other work. I could/can do that, just don’t know whether I want to start right now.
