Almost two years since my last update... Shame on me.
I've been at IU for two years now and am in the middle of my fifth semester. Classes continue to go well and I attended a Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans last November in which I presented a poster. I haven't published that research yet, but that should happen late this summer. My qualifier examinations will also be this summer and I must finish these by mid-August because one of my committee members will be leaving town then.
Probably my dissertation work is going to involve task-oriented behavior selection mediated by prefrontal cortex and maybe basal ganglia. My over-arching interest is in the architecture of human and animal volition (by which I mean, essentially, behavior selection), and this tack for my dissertation seems like a good one to take.
In other news, I've been working since the previous summer on an adventure game using the TADS system. Actually, I'm creating a Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG system expansion for TADS 2.0. I will probably enter the adventure I've developed under this in a contest the Interactive Fiction Internet community has for TADS games.
I've written little poetry in the last two years, though I have written some guitar music (short pieces). I'm thinking I will probably leave my Poetry Gallery site as it is (unfinished, unfortunately), but I will try to update my text-only poetry collection more regularly.
Life is not grand, but it is decent. The question of the direction towards which things are tending always looms.
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