I updated my list of Hungarian popular-science articles; I hope this isn’t getting repetitive for non-Hungarian-speakers! FYI – I don’t recommend Google Translate for Hungarian in its present state: when I sent a friend of mine an anti-racist essay, said friend managed to conclude with the aid of automatic translation that it was a racist essay! Uh oh.

I need to thank Dash (of Expanded Horizons fame) for recommending “Biblical Hebrew mistranslations” as a topic, the article is already available and it’s proving to be quite popular. Thanks again!

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If you are in Hungary, I have a conference presentation at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Linguistics next Thursday morning. I’m going to talk about the necessity of applying formal linguistic methods to semiotic data in light of the recent Indus Valley controversy. It’s going to be a short presentation that’s intended to be thought-provoking, it will have amusing pictures and oddball references.

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A bit of squee about projects I’m involved in: nyest.hu just reached 1000 Facebook likes yesterday (like it and win random stuff!), and World SF News had this to say about Expanded Horizons: “Expanded Horizons has become the premier webzine publishing international writers these days, and their latest issue is a strong one, including two Apex Book of World SF II contributors! Check out stories from Hungary, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Hong Kong and the Philippines at this great publication“.

Donate for Expanded Horizons, we’re all volunteers at the magazine and all donations go toward paying our contributors! Teaser: the next issue is going to feature, among other things, interviews by Muslim and Arab authors we have previously published. In the meanwhile, the Muslim/Arab special issue of Apex Magazine is also out!

I also got She Nailed a Stake to His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (edited by Tim Lieder) in the mail and read it last weekend; I wonder if I can find a market for a review… This sort of stuff should be reviewed as often as possible – the more biblically-themed fiction, the merrier! Now I just need to find some time to finish writing that Bible space marine story…

I had my thesis defense a few days ago (master’s in theoretical linguistics), I got an A, it went fine. I don’t know anything about the graduation ceremony… but this is one step up from when I originally enrolled in this program.

Crazy anecdote from several years ago: I went to the admittance exam, two rounds, everything went OK and I got a good score. Then I got a notice from the university administration that despite my score being over the threshold, I was not admitted. No further explanation. Huh? The next day I called the department – they told me I was in, I told them I apparently wasn’t! Confusion ensued. In the end it turned out that an administrator thought the university did not even have a theoretical linguistics program and sent out similar notes to several prospective students. Augh!

I hope they realized by now because I’d like to receive my diploma… sometime… It did take a bit longer than expected because in the meanwhile I finished a different master’s program, started a PhD and also had an unfortunate illness. *sigh* But it’s finally over, I graduated, happy joy! Now on to publish my thesis results.

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I’m quite busy right now and I have a deadline at hand, but I also have content for the site, so I’ll try to do updates more often!

I did not forget about Amesirun either, but unfortunately it had to take a back seat to work right at the threshold of completion. The game is mostly finished, I just need to put it together, compile the executable and send it out to closed beta. (Thank you for everyone who volunteered! I even got someone to test the Mac version, which I did not even want to release because I could not test it myself.) Hopefully next week!