Weekly Status Update #26: Desideratum

My weekly status update seems to have skipped a week again. If I keep this up, soon we’ll have a bi-weekly status update on our hands! This week featuring: PacificVis, VIS, lunch presentations, meetings and Anaal Nathrakh:

• Ok, I have to bend the rules of chronological storytelling here and make an exception for PacificVis since I found out about this minutes ago. So my PacificVis paper got rejected and I feel like it’s time to curl up in fetal position on the couch, eating cold left-over pizza and crying for the rest of the weekend. But I won’t, well I will still do the couch and pizza thing, but that is normal weekend behavior for me 😉 I remember how badly the first rejection (EuroVis 2012) stung, but after a couple of them, it really gets easier. What does not get easier though, is that you have to do extra work to still try and get it published, just as you are nicely settling into a new and interesting topic. Also, I’ve had times before where the reviewers rejected something, because I did not explain it properly in the paper and they misunderstood, this time though, I am inclined to agree with them. Fuck!
• The week before last week, was a huge Parisian blur, because it was VISweek! From Sunday to Friday I blissfully spent the week listening to interesting talks, meeting cool people, having dinner and drinks with aforementioned cool people and basically having the best times evar. Since the program was so crazy (8am-6pm sessions daily), the whole week seems like one huge blurry day. I tweeted about it during for medvis.org again, if you’re interested. It was really cool to admire the visualization Twitter celebrities [1,2] from a distance 🙂 We still need more scivis people on Twitter though! While exhausting, the unique situation of having 1100 (yes, 1100!) visualization researchers in one place makes for such interesting times that you kind of forget about the exhaustion and go with it. Until the weekend after and you get horribly sick from the sleep deprivation and international germ exchange 😉 I still haven’t recovered actually, but it was worth it!
• This week I had to give a group lunch presentation. It was supposed to be a summary of the cool things I saw at VIS, but since I was so sick, it was really an ill-prepared (literally) presentational (that’s not a word, deal with it) trainwreck. 1/10, would not present again.
• Later in the week, I went to Leiden for a project meeting. Now that is just plain inspirational. I think this is one of the coolest things about my job, collaborating with medical experts and discussing their research and ideas and how visualization can play a role there. With anatomy especially, I love how they are discovering new things still today about the human body. Some people assume that since anatomy has been studied for so many centuries, it’s basically a completely explored field. It’s not true, there are still so many unknown and not agreed upon topics. They can even rediscover forgotten brain parts! I wrote brain farts first, hmmm.
• Alright, I’ll finish up this post with the latest album of Anaal Nathrakh that was just delivered to our house this week (yea, we still buy physical albums). Never heard of them? Just see for yourselves 😉 It’s their most accessible album yet, or so I’ve read ^^ The contrast between the chaotic and epic moments with clean vocals is really amazing. If you prefer not to check the whole album, but want my recommendation for best tracks, check The Joystream or Rage and Red. Not checking anything is not an option, I’m sorry 😉

Right, I’ll get back to my fetal position, Anaal Nathrakh and cold pizza now, have a great weekend and week!