I’m back on campus at Carnegie Mellon University. Can you believe it? It’s really strange to be back here. I rode the bus from where I live, in Greenfield, and to my surprise I wound up catching the ending of the Freshman Orientation Event. There were hordes of 18 year olds. Loud, overly peppy, semi-euro sounding pop. Bright lights, big sounds.

I was hoping to get to the Hunt Library after work, but alas, it seems that they aren’t open late this week. During the school year they are open 24-hours a day. It’s a little unhealthy… But it is good to have a space like that here, where people will wind up all night anyway.

What am I doing here at CMU? Research on Visual Language Theory.  I’m exploring it’s intersection with comics and seeing if I can create a thoroughly researched treatise on how comics can or cannot manifest the things that we expect traditional notions of language to do. Embedding clauses, representing epistemic knowledge, indirect reference, indexicality, among other things!

At the moment I’m trying to accumulate a big pile of research materials. Among these materials are core linguistic texts to re-establish my footing as it pertains to syntax, morphology, and semantics. More on this research soon.

Things were really quiet at work. It seems that there are many big changes underway where I work, despite the workdays being relatively calm. Jenn is doing good. She’s working on an a t-shirt design that we will be selling online soon for Comics Workbook. We did a lot of meal prep yesterday so it was a calm night eating together and watching a little TV.

I’ve started listening to Brian McCollough’s Internet History Podcast. The narratives between the oil, rail and steel barons + the colonial conquest of the world by Europe and the capitalization of early structures on the web. Claim the land. Rent the land. Rule the land by economics… Relatively unformed thoughts right now, as I’m only up to at Netscape’s 1995 IPO.

talk to you soon. take good care of yourself, now.