watching Community again

...and all over again, I'm struck by just how unusually good Abed was/is, as autistic characters go. I think he is still the only character I have ever seen who would tone up the robot impersonation when it was useful, or who was cheerfully capable of stepping into an acting role and putting on a totally different persona when it was fun, or who was insecure not about who he was, but about whether people would stick around and find who he was interesting.

I ought to go back to watching The Good Doctor, come to think of it. But--Abed's special, and part of why Abed is special is that Abed's not particularly special, but his perspective is so clearly formed by someone writing out rather than someone looking in. And I still haven't seen anything remotely like that in the--hell, it's been almost ten years since Community kicked off. People didn't know what emoji were yet. It was revolutionary then and it still is, for all it's a flawed show (but then, what isn't?).

oh, son of a bitch

I was spending my day sitting down and going through all my playback acoustic data for my mice. This is my second chapter, I'm supposed to graduate in the spring, my PI keeps reminding me that I have to make progress, and... well, it's a pretty complicated thing I'm trying to do. I've had several errors that have set the work back by losing animals so far, and I'm very, very animal-limited: my singing mice only have litters that average ~2 or 3 pups per litter, and there are a number of experiments going on that are using the animals our colony does produce.

( Long story short, I think I might have about 25% of the runs I thought I did. )

Anyway, I have lost a truly staggering amount of the behavioral data I thought I had, and I will be spending a large part of tomorrow desperately tinkering with my hardware and trying to make the thing go before I contact my boss and ask to replace some component of hardware and/or explain that I've had yet. another. setback.