Beyond Selidor

Day 13 – Your mode of transportation
Oops, I skipped another day. I'll try and get Day 14 written today too.

My mode of transportation is...my feet. I don't own a car, and don't know how to drive. In Cambridge, a lot of people ride bikes (it's very like Amsterdam in that regard, being very flat and originally having been fenland). However, considering the last time I rode a bike was in 2001 and it 'steered to the left', I thought it might be safer to keep away from anything with two wheels.

I've always walked everywhere. In Sydney, I walked to and from uni every day, which took about an hour at each end. I would quite happily walk home from parties in Newtown in the middle of the night (much to anya_1984's horror). When I was any further out, I'd only ever catch trains or buses into the CBD and then walk the rest of the way home.

In Cambridge, everything is close enough that you don't really need to use public transport. ('Close enough' for me means that it's at the most an hours' walk away.) This is good, because buses here are really expensive: £3 just for a five-minute ride from the train station into the centre of town, for example. There are no student discounts on buses, which I find ridiculous.

I made the decision not to learn to drive when I was a teenager, and I've found that decision confirmed by my experiences all the time since then. However, it depends on a couple of things:

1. That I live in a town or city with good public transport or where I don't need to use public transport; and,

2. That if I do live somewhere with bad public transport, I have family or friends prepared to drive me around.

If I'd lived in a less central area of Sydney, I would've been screwed. And when I went back to Canberra in 2007, I relied very heavily on angel_cc and catpuccino driving me around, which was very very generous, and probably not something that could've gone on for longer than it did without annoying them.

I love walking. I tend to quite moody if I stay inside too long, and walking generally clears my head, especially the walk from my house to the department and back, which I spend thinking about my thesis and what work I'm planning to do that day.


Day 14 – Where you live
Day 15 – Something you love about yourself
Day 16 – Your first kiss
Day 17 – Your favorite memory
Day 18 – Your favorite birthday
Day 19 – Something you regret
Day 20 – Your morning routine
Day 21 – Your job and/or schooling
Day 22 – Something that upsets you
Day 23 – Something that makes you feel better
Day 24 – Something that makes you cry
Day 25 – Your sleeping habits
Day 26 – Your fears
Day 27 – Your favorite place
Day 28 – Something that you miss
Day 29 – Your favorite foods/drinks
Day 30 – Your aspirations

Okay, have a few links.

Here's a post by Charlie Jane Anders at io9 about why grrm's A Song of Ice and Fire is taking so long to finish. There are two posts by Matt Hilliard on the same topic. Be warned that all have spoilers. I'm not convinced by the argument that Martin's focus on politics was only minor (he's mentioned the Wars of the Roses in interviews) but I do agree that we are mistaken in thinking the Starks and Lannisters are the main characters in the story. This has always annoyed me somewhat, as I have absolutely zero interest in Daenerys and almost as little interest in Jon Snow (in fact, I loved Jon Snow when he was the neglected illegitimate child living with the Starks; I was only interested in him for how he interacted with other characters). I've come to realise that, oddly enough for a fantasy reader, I like ASoIaF for the politics and the accurate portrayal of war, and find its fantasy elements (dragons, 'dark power brewing in the North') extraordinarily boring.

Via Nanaki, this comic from The Oatmeal. I suspect he has experienced way too many occurrences of Ronni's FROTHING AT THE MOUTH CAPSLOCK OF...PEACE AND LOVE for this link to have been coincidental.

Finally, I blogged for the Book Show.