Made charts today which I had to patch together in the GIMP because gnuplot can't plot different equations on different ranges. Also, it's multiplot environment was so bizzarely confusing that I couldn't manage to get anything worthwhile out of it. I may not have been using it for the right purpose. Also in free software, I was looking for and e-book reader - something that would seem somehow like a book, with pages and whatnot, which I suppose I could do with some sort of PDF, but I want to read things which are mostly from project gutenberg and are in formats that I don't know about (aside from text and html, which are boring). Most of the programs I found were lackluster in that they looked like they were written in the early nineties or segfaulted. This saga has yet to be finished.


I wanted to read Beowulf both because of this past weekend's watch all of all of the extended Lord of the Rings movies, wherein a friend was talking about how the books are influenced by Beowulf, and because of the song by the Mountain Goats called Grendel's Mother. I wonder if the epic poem narrative can still be used today. I think it's a very powerful form, and would love to try and make something of it, but I might need to study things like Beowulf and the classical epics a bit more before I can make any sort of worthy attempt.