To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

I was expecting 102 today to go pretty well, but it exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. Woot! I had everyone read a chapter from Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture (one about Star Wars parody fan films that touches also on fanfic and musical fanvids, as well as his usual focus on folk vs. mass vs. pop culture), and they really got into it. We had a great discussion about why people write fic and make vids, whether it's fair use (I have several business majors who went into spiels about the added market value fan creativity can bring to a franchise, which was interesting to everyone, I think) and how it ought to be treated. I have about seven who are very interested in all things sci-fi and very willing to talk, which is fantastic, especially after my very not-talkative classes last semester. I even had more that I wanted to get to today, but we ran out of time, which never happened last semester.

For Thursday, we're reading an essay about why sci-fi is so attractive to pre-teens and teenagers, and also how it permeates fans' lives (include a section on conventions) and watching Galaxy Quest. Should be great fun.

Then I went to Modernism class and...it wasn't too bad. We all had to summarize our reading responses, which was nerve-wracking--particularly as other people were all "secondary exegesis" and "artistic autonomy" and I was like, "Modernists thought Einstein was cool"--but could've been worse. We shall see what happens on Thursday.

To top things off, it was gorgeous yesterday and even more gorgeous today (I think we hit 60+F). Lovely day. But now I must read Yet More Theory. Oh, well.