Oy, the rabid fangirl has struck again with me finally breaking down to buy Dragon Age 2 last week.  I've almost beat it once, and I'm in the middle of the second act with my second character (yet somehow, between both characters, I STILL managed to not get Fenris as a companion.  Fail on my part.  Ah well, I haven't created a warrior yet...).  Like most sequels, it's not as good as the first one in many ways, but I still <3 it.  This review does a pretty good job of breaking down why it's so epic (except, since I haven't dealt with Fenris, I ignore the Anders bashing. He's a guy who likes cats, what can I say?) [link] touches lightly on the attachments made with the characters, which brings me to the next couple of topics.

Grad school for me starts in September, I'm nervous as hell, but I'm looking forward to it.  I'm a geek and being out of school has made me miserable (yah I know, lame.  Hey, my friends didn't call me Hermione for nothing way back when).  I'll be specializing in creative writing, so my thesis will be a novel or a collection of short stories.  I suck at keeping short stories short- I'll say "Oh let me write a short story for this!"  and 20 pages later I'm barely halfway through.   Oh well.  Anyway, despite the fact that I'll be doing fiction for my thesis, I've been toying with some more "academic" ideas for a while.  

It's no secret to those who know me that I can tend to have said aforementioned fangirl tendencies.  I've dabbled with fanfiction a couple of times personally, but I do read it and I also really enjoy fan art.  I'm thinking of writing a paper on fandoms;  why we make them, popular themes/ stories, mode of presentation, etc.  I don't have a real solid idea yet, but considering all the fanverse stuff for just about everything that's out there, I thought it'd be interesting to study.  

Which means I'm looking for ideas and people's thoughts.  I'd love (and eventually would probably have to) do a kind of survey with both people who create it and the people who partake of it.  I guess this is kind of a call for volunteers and for more places other than fanfiction.net to look for some material.  Like I said, this won't be my thesis but I've thought of using this for my dissertation in a few years;  I'm just putting out some feelers early

In other news, it's just about swimming time again!  And I've almost been married for 3 years o_0  Where the hell does the time go?!!