(1) Henge proliferation. Now a huge ritual arena has been discovered near Stonehenge. You almost end up thinking Stonehenge, which used to seem quite big in itself, was nothing but the cherry on top….
Researchers find hidden remains of massive Neolithic stone monument, thought to have been hauled into position more than 4,500 years ago
The Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project has transformed how archaeologists view the ancient site, which sprawls over 4 sq miles of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The main monument stands at the heart of a landscape rich with burial grounds, pits and chapels. Last year, researchers found the remains of 17 new chapels and hundreds of other archaeological features scattered across the site.
Two huge pits have been discovered in a two mile-long monument called the Cursus that lies to the north of Stonehenge. The pits seem to form an astronomical arrangement: on midsummer’s day, the eastern pit’s alignment with the rising sun and the western pit’s alignment with the setting sun intersect where Stonehenge was built 400 years later.
The rise and fall of the newly discovered monument at Durrington Walls suggests that buildings were modified and recycled since the first stones were laid around 3100BC. A large timber building encased in chalk is thought to have been a house of the dead where defleshing was performed as a burial ritual.
(2) This unnaturally leads us to Dr. Faustus AU’s The Call of Cthulhu – for beginning readers at Deviant Art.
(3) I sure didn’t score very well on Revolvy’s The Batman 1960s TV Show quiz. Must have missed more episodes attending choir practice than I thought.
(4) You won’t need an alarm to wake up once you have the spider clock – you’ll be too scared to go to sleep.
In Arachnophobia, the clock has been reimagined as the body of a spider, its mechanical movement engineered to sit partially outside the body as the spider’s head, where it can be viewed and admired as it sits on a table, or mounted to a wall.
(5) Idaho Public Radio offers advice for writers from science fiction author David Levine.
David D. Levine is the author of the upcoming novel ‘Arabella of Mars’ (Tor 2016), as well over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo Award.
We spoke with Mr. Levine at the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane this August, and asked him what advice he had for aspiring writers. “Persistence is the only thing you cannot do without,” he said.
(6) Galactic Journey’s idea is intriguing —
Imagine living through the post-Golden Age of science fiction and fantasy. What would it be like to experience this journey at the plodding, one day per day pace?
Though I’m a bit disappointed with its 1960 Worldcon report — [September 6, 1960] The 1960 WorldCon in Pittsburgh!
Of course, I wasn’t actually present at the con, it being held some 2500 miles away on the 17th floor of the Penn Sheraton in Pittsburgh. But I know people, and I have access to a million-dollar ‘fax machine. Thus, even though the custodial staff is just barely finishing its sweeping up after some 300 attendees had a roaring great time, I am already able to bring you this report:
The primary purpose for a convention is to allow fellow fen (plural of fan) to mingle. Gordon Dickson likens it to a Gentleman’s Club where adventurers can meet and compare notes before heading off back into the wild. Fred Pohl calls it a family gathering.
It looks like the demographics of fandom match that of publication: women are in the distinct minority, but they are present and often outsizedly significant.
Not sure what the point is of a report that doesn’t acknowledge the names of anybody but the pros (not even all of those pictured are named).
If somebody is writing a throwback account of everyday life in the genre, I’d expect to see more evidence of research from sources that aren’t available online. Harry Warner Jr., anyone?
(7) Brandon Kempner at Chaos Horizon has worked up a new estimate of the number of Sad and Rabid Puppies based on the 2015 nominating data released at Sasquan.
(8) Django Wexler has coded an E Pluribus Hugo simulator.
Important Caveat: I am not a voting theory expert! Smarter people than me have thought about this. However, I am a programmer of sorts, and interested in this stuff. So, I wrote up a thing that runs the EPH algorithm on test data. (I obviously don’t have access to actual Hugo data!) I thought other people might get something out of it, so I’m posting it here.
Here is the EPHConsole project as a Visual Studio ’13 project.
Here is the compiled self-installer for the EPHConsole project.
Here is the EXE file, which should work if you have .NET installed on your machine.
(9) I like Joe’s attitude.
https://twitter.com/joethepeacock/status/640973827145494528
(10) Chuck Wendig has found the silver lining in all those one-star reviews people have dumped on his new novel Star Wars: Aftermath.
Others have suggested that there may be a campaign by some Legends fangroups to “raid” the book’s reviews to tank its ranking with these one-star reviews — an interesting tactic that does indeed tank its actual review score, but not its sales ranking given that Amazon algorithms are interested not in the quality of the reviews but rather the attention that the reviews and the book get. (Meaning, a passel of negative reviews actually elevates the book’s overall sales ranking. Which in turn garners it more sales. Amazon reps have been clear with me on this point: buyers buy books with reviews, period. Not good reviews, not bad reviews. But rather: quantity of reviews impress buyers to make purchases. So, leaving a ton of bad reviews actually increases the book’s sales. Ironic, and not likely what anyone supporting such a campaign intends.)
Ben Lindbergh at Grantland outlines the basic problem for Extended Universe fans:
It’s an apt title for a story at the intersection of two climactic events concerning the galaxy far, far away. The in-universe aftermath is the power struggle that succeeds the destruction of the Second Death Star and the loss of the Empire’s Sith-heavy C-Suite at the end of Return of the Jedi. But the book also arrives amid a meta-aftermath: the Alderaan-like extinction of the old Expanded Universe, which started as a supplement to the movies and soon outstripped them in scope, sprouting into a story-surrounding-the-story that spanned thousands of years and unfolded via hundreds of books, comics, and video games from 1976 until 2014, when Disney decided to clear the decks for future films by declaring all that came before non-canon.
(11) Police are circulating the photo of a person of interest in a sexual assault at Dragon Con this weekend.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution —
Atlanta police are asking for the public’s help identifying a man who may be connected to a sexual assault at the popular sci-fi convention Dragon Con.
Officer Kim Jones said the female victim was in town for the convention and was sexually assaulted early Sunday “by a white male wearing an FBI baseball cap.” The man reportedly introduced himself as “Gary from Marietta.”
Police also released a photo of the suspect. Further details about the incident were not immediately available.
Dragon Con draws tens of thousands of people to Downtown Atlanta each year, many in costumes and other paraphernalia celebrating comic books, movies and pop culture. This year’s festivities began Friday.
In an emailed statement, Dragon Con media relations director Don Carroll said it is the convention’s policy not to comment on “specific incidents.”
“Dragon Con is proud to offer a safe and inclusive convention for its members that is free of harassment or assault of any kind,” the statement said. “We work with the Atlanta Police Department all year to develop and install procedures to prevent issues such as these. If and when they occur (we) insure they are handled by the appropriate authorities. APD is on site throughout the convention.”
Anyone with information about the alleged assault or the person of interest is asked to contact Detective R.C. Sluss at 404-546-4260. Tipsters can also remain anonymous — and be eligible for rewards of up to $2,000 — by contacting Crime Stoppers at 404-577-TIPS and crimestoppersatlanta.org.
[Thanks to JJ, Andrew Porter, Eric Lindsay, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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@Simon Bisson
But the most impressive are the neolithic passage graves like La Hougue Bie.
Many of them are exposed dolmens and menhirs, but La Hougue Bie is still under its mound, and you can crouch down through the passage and feel the weight of the millennia over your head.
Had the same feeling at Gavrinis in Brittany, where you not only can but must touch the carvings from 3500 BC as you go through the passage. Absolutely magical.
@KestrelHill
You can still access the site as long as you’re part of a tour. I think it’s a liability issue.
I went about 8 years ago and was able to touch the stones and walk between them. First time I have had that feeling of immense age.
Wait, the pups are claiming that “wrongfun” is their coinage? Um, no, nope, nyet. Tabletop RPG gamers have been tossing that insult at each other since at least the USENET days, and I’m sure that it has been used by a great many other communities over the same time period.
This is probably the worst cover I own:
(and since the link isn’t showing up, at least for me, it was the 2005 edition of Tumithak of the Corridors by Charles Tanner, with a cover that appears to have been taken directly from the cover of an 8th grader’s math notebook)
When I last taught, students who wanted to ignore me had to make do with reading the campus newspaper, staring out the window, or napping. But serially–my wife is still teaching, and the students she sees using their devices are not taking notes but texting or web-surfing or following their social networks. (Interior smart classrooms don’t have windows to stare out of, and the student paper only comes out twice a week. Life is hard.) It woudl be nice if they were taking notes–from exam results, I’d say that for a sizable minority, attention paid to class events (or the syllabus or the readings) is pretty patchy.
This is not really a “kids these days” rant–I started teaching in 1966, and though the proportion of offenders and the favored means of slacking off have changed, the fundamental behavior of college students hasn’t evolved all that much. I do recall suggesting that polite students have the decency to keep the paper flat on the desk rather than propped up in front of their faces. I’m not sure what the 21st-century version of that would be. Mute the sound on the YouTube videos?
Thank you for referencing my column. I am sorry that my recounting of this year’s PittCon was not 100% satisfactory. I will be happy to provide a full refund.
In the meantime, you (and your readers) might enjoy my several hundred other articles on current science fact and fiction. 1960 is proving to be an exciting year!
Kindest regards,
The Traveler
galacticjourney.org
From the age of about seven until my mid teens I was having terrible nightmares about Children Of The Stones – I thought I’d never be free of it. I watched it again a few years ago (with great trepidation) and I think it was mainly the discordant choral music that scared me.
I went to Stonehenge for the first time last year and didn’t enjoy the experience much – it felt too theme parkish with hundreds of tourists taking selfies in front of the stones (me included :-)). Avebury was much better and I enjoyed West Kennet Long Barrow too but was disappointed by the lack of wights.
Totally unrelated to the Scroll today, but I had a vaguely surreal moment at the airport last night–I went to pick up a friend who was just getting back from DragonCon, and we were joking about how the whole flight (which was direct from Atlanta to Minneapolis) was probably filled with congoers, and Bill Corbett and Trace Beaulieu turned out to be standing next to us waiting for their baggage and joined in the conversation. 🙂
I know that they’re local and that they were at the con, but it never occurred to me that I’d bump into them at the airport. They were very nice in our brief interaction, and my friends assured me I didn’t go gushing fanboy too bad.
Uffington White Horse is the UK pre-history remnant that really fascinates me. Just about all other surviving hill figures are actually early modern at best, but there are references to the White Horse far earlier than that, and fairly recently they’ve been able to solidly date it to the Bronze age. And what makes that fascinating is that chalk figures are ephemeral. If not scoured every few years they will be overgrown, and they will entirely disappear within a half century or so.
So for 3000 years, even as waves of migration and invasion swept through, even as religions waxed and waned, through vast technological and agricultural revolutions, somehow enough cultural continuity survived that every few years the locals went out on the hill and scoured the chalk clean again.
MattY: The question of whether or not to mark the first book of a series as the first book of a series isn’t necessarily in the hands of the author. It’s a common enough gripe – Sarah Monette had that issue with her Doctrine of Labyrinths series, and hated it – but some people in marketing departments seem convinced it sells fewer books to mark book 3 AS book 3. That those buyers are then pissed off and buy fewer books if they can’t tell where in there series they fall never seems to occur to them. “ha HA, tricked you!” is NOT good marketing, whatever it’s extreme short term success.
McJulie: The spider species I’m most likely to put outside is the same species that lives all over outdoors in our neighbourhood. Other than territory battles, i can’t see too much harm. Also, can’t bring myself to care much. They’re just too darn big. Little spiders, I’ve grown to be able to leave alone. Or squish, but I’m doing that less, too.
They’ve done studies, and found that not only do people who use laptops and devices to entertain themselves in class (rather than to take notes) do worse on tests of information retention, so do other people sitting behind and beside them. That is probably a lot more true an issue than it was when students napped or doodled. *
I wonder if it’s possible to ask students to put devices in ‘airplane’ mode?
*I doodled because I could listen and draw when not taking notes, but not listen and write. So I got writing done in band class… but that’s another rant for another day.
i am a history buff… However, when I hear about a larger stonehenge I cant help but think about the neolithic era tax payers who had to pay for this White Elephant. Even if there is no currency, unpaid and forced labor is a tax. I would have been more concerned with not dying in neolithic era than with building stonehenge.
If you think about it rationale its a total waste of resources. Give the low economic output and how manu hours per dau people had to spend aquiring food and shelter.
Its not like then had excess income and could afford to go to tecreation of egyptian pyramids in Las Vegas. Or fund a magic kingdom home to a talking mouse.
If I ever sit down to wrote fantasy for fun. Ill have a conservative main character who keeps it real. Dude this big magic dome we are building is a waste of our tax payers money. I would keep it a little toung in cheek.
@Lenora Rose: A long time ago (mid-1990s?), I was trying to read Glen Cook’s Garrett, PI, series, and it drove me insane to try to figure out the proper reading order since the books weren’t numbered, any inside-cover listings were incomplete and out-of-sequence, and in some cases he’d published multiple books in the same year.
I feel somewhat guilty about visiting Gozo twice in the last year and not visiting one or more of the temples…
That’s great! I look forward to having back the hour I spent reading the column, Googling the material available about Pittcon online, and thinking about what else you might have accessed with a little more effort.
That’s true customer service.
just imagine being a fiscally conservative orc in Morder. Telling Sauron that rebuilding Angband is s total waste of money. Then telling him that attacking the elves costs too much. They are self deporting to the undying lands.
@GSLamb: If you wish to shield your (handwritten) scribblings from even the eyes of ROT13-fluent geeks, it may also be advisable to cobble together a personal cipher from scratch.
(Tangentially, handwritten ciphers > typed ciphers, especially when it comes to those with invented or hodgepodged characters, because those not in the know will have a harder time distinguishing the natural variations caused by hand-writing from the deliberate, semiotically significant characteristics.)
—
ed: @Lenora Rose: The angle of a laptop screen makes it much easier for neighbors sitting behind to see its contents whether they wish it or not, and of course, colorful dynamic images (video games or videos and such) must be more distracting than static, monochrome scribblings of any kind. I am always amazed to hear about people playing actual video games in class, to be honest. It seems to do both the game and the class a disservice!
Even if there is no currency, unpaid and forced labor is a tax.
They weren’t a capitalist society, and thinking about them in such terms is a mistake. The point was not to accumulate abstract wealth, but to live well. The current evidence is that the culture that built Stonehenge was quite rich, from a neolithic standpoint, and that it was less forced labor than a big party. They drove flocks from a large swath of Great Britain to the plain as winter closed in and feasted very well indeed; one of the clues is that no one bothered to crack marrow bones or use them for soup, just ate the meat and threw away the bones. There’s similar evidence for the pyramids. When the wet season closed in and there was nothing for young men to do but make trouble with each other, they were sent off to build pyramids, eating and drinking very well (lots of meat and fish) and forming work teams that competed against each other for the honor of doing the best job.
When I went back to school to get another master’s after many years away, I was the only one taking notes with a pen and a notebook. I noticed in one class (a larger class full of undergrads they made all the master’s students take for no reason I could decipher) most everyone was using a tablet, 80% of which seemed to be open to Facebook or Snapchat or something. The professor used a lot of power point and the kids would just take pictures of the power point slides with their iPads and then go back to FB or their texts or whatever. The tests in that class were idiotic, anyway, lots of multiple choice asking about tiny details, so I don’t see any way the tablet children could’ve passed. Who knows? I got an iPad and started using that for all my note-taking and (thankfully) didn’t have to take any more undergrad classes. I did have to teach, though, which was another trial.
I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today. Who can understand anything they say? Kids, they are disobedient, disrespectful oafs…
Lenora Rose –
No worries, I threw some blame in the publishers direction as well in my original comment. I don’t know why 3/3 would scare folks off, it just encourages me to get the other books. I am sometimes driven off by # our of # or Part of the (insert character name) Series only because I try to check out Indie published books sometimes and it feels like 90% of them have that on there and that gets tiring.
With The Mechanical I was annoyed but loved the book. With Time Salvager I wished it had the warning on it because I might’ve just stopped reading it and gone onto another book instead of slogging through to a non-resolution.
I’m sure anyone who’s seen a small town’s thriving downtown area turned into a ghost town after Walmart arrives can relate.
I doodled because I could listen and draw when not taking notes, but not listen and write.
Being a dinosaur, all my notes were on paper. Math and physics notes got illustrations. Doodles were for general-ed non-useful classes (econ 101, psychology, that kind of thing). I still have some of the notebooks, and the math texts (which acquired notes because wide margins).
The act of writing-it-down seems to help stick things in memory.
Students don’t realize that it is possible to guess what they are doing on their laptops without seeing the screen. If the rhythm of the typing does not match the lecture or discussion and they never look up from their screens even if I’m drawing a diagram on the board or asking a question or their classmates are engaged in a heated debate—email or fanfic writing. If they’re scrolling without any typing—shopping, social media, reading fanfic—probably the latter two if they’re smiling at their screen.
When I want to take notes in meetings without other people being able to read them I either use mirror writing or a non-Roman script.
Amina: I’m reminded of a bit in Sailing to Sarantium where a chariot racer intuits that there was a crash up around the curve because of the changing play of light on people’s faces as they turned their heads to gawk.
Also, apparently M.A.R. Barker wrote some of his Tekumel campaign notes in Urdu to keep his players from surreptitiously reading them.
There was one case where I picked up a book and started getting REALLY EXCITED by how daring the author was being with storytelling. Beginning the story in medias res! Referring to rich backstories of the characters without spelling them out! The troubled love story was just *there* from the beginning, there was no meet cute, no tedious blow-by-blow, and …
And then I started noticing that this author’s prose and characterization really weren’t living up to this very daring plot. And whenever totally new characters and plot elements were introduced, they weren’t given this refreshing treatment, but were given the same dull this-happened-and-then-this-happened description that would be expected of a pretty pedestrian work of its genre. By the time I was about halfway through, I was thinking, you know, this is starting to seem less like a bold storytelling experiment than the unlabeled second book of a not very good series in which I haven’t read the first book.
Which, of course, is exactly what it was.
@Joe H.
It’s Urdu that I write my secret notes in!
Mind you, the last faculty meeting I was at was so pointless that I spent my time trying to construct a 4×4 magic square without bothering to hide it from my neighbors.
Re: covert notes — when I was in school, I was still fluent in written Quenya. So I’d write in that.
As an arachnophobe myself, I am sure that spiders are fascinating creatures, and that they fulfil a useful purpose in the planetary ecosystem. I am happy for them to fascinate others, and to fulfil their ecological purpose somewhere a long way away from me. If any spiders happen to be reading, thank you for your attention.
I’d also like to thank the people who linked to those bad book cover sites, which seem set to consume all my available free time for some days to come. Well, thank them or punch them, not sure which.
I take most of my notes on paper, because the computers at our stations aren’t connected to the internet. And USB devices of any sort are verboten. Sorta limits your options.
PJ Evans wrote:
For more on this, see the upcoming short story written by PJ’s significant other, “You Actually Are a Dinosaur, My Love”.
Kyra: I have had exactly that experience, much more often in pre-internet days where you just had to go by the back cover of the book, or read whatever chunk of a series your library had on hand.
Now if nothing in the book description tells you that it is part of a series, the reviewers sure will.
Spiders: I have no problem living with them. They eat the mosquitos and other pesky bugs that get inside (frequently, since my enthusiastic but not very bright dog hurled himself through the bottom part of the screen door). What I hate, hate HATE with a burning passion is walking through spider webs. I just had a big shudder even typing it. It happens all the time as a patrol officer checking behind buildings and for weird noises in people’s backyards, and as a supervisor, one of my main commandments to myself was NOT to scare the rookies by screaming like a girl when I walked into one.
I walked into one on the side of the RV the other day and it was a STRONG one. Ugh. I was picking bits of it off me for a good 5 minutes afterward. My only comfort is that the spider lost hours of work too. That will teach her to build across our walking paths.
Livescribe. Best of both note-taking worlds. Also great for interviews, where a glowing screen tends to stifle good conversation.
Another convert! Brother!
Guess – I do like the idea of Sauron’s financial controller. I’d probably have him keep coming up with more and more complex ways to defer payments, until Mordor is basically a giant war bonds bubble. In the epilogue Gandalf would audit the books and discover the whole thing was days away from collapse.
Kyra on September 8, 2015 at 10:38 am said:
There was one case where I picked up a book and started getting REALLY EXCITED by how daring the author was being with storytelling. Beginning the story in medias res! Referring to rich backstories of the characters without spelling them out! The troubled love story was just *there* from the beginning, there was no meet cute, no tedious blow-by-blow, and …
And then I started noticing that this author’s prose and characterization really weren’t living up to this very daring plot. And whenever totally new characters and plot elements were introduced, they weren’t given this refreshing treatment, but were given the same dull this-happened-and-then-this-happened description that would be expected of a pretty pedestrian work of its genre. By the time I was about halfway through, I was thinking, you know, this is starting to seem less like a bold storytelling experiment than the unlabeled second book of a not very good series in which I haven’t read the first book.
Which, of course, is exactly what it was.
The daughter&daughter-in-law were reading an ebook I’d lent – I think it was The Goblin Emperor.
They reported liking it, but having some troubles with its experimental narrative structure.
Told me that once they’d gotten enough read to figure things out, it was fine.
This struck me as odd.
It ends up that somehow it was delivering the content, chapter-by-chapter, on shuffle.
@lauowolf. That kind of reminds me of at least one Moorcock Jerry Cornelius novel…
Re: Dragon Con: I really, really hope that they find the guy. It seems like almost every year there’s a similar story that comes out of that particular con (even after the founder was finally bought out). Jesus, get your shit together, DC.
I feel the Marks’ pain. There’s a reason I have this nick.
Currently working on the tragic tale of a person who means to pick up a coin, but picks up an item of clothing instead. If You Were A Dime I Saw, My Glove.
I thought I’d mentioned it in one of the other threads a couple days ago along with my list of problems. Some day I’ll figure out how to find my comments & do links here.
Cliffhanger 1st in series books not labeled as so tend to be harshly treated by me. I know the author had no choice (well could have self-pubbed) but it’s a trick I’m losing my patience with. Trad pub might want to spend more time with actual readers/the real customers to learn about what really works with marketing to us rather than talking to bookstore buyers.
I really do wish publishers would put series numbers on books & make them big on kindle covers. I sometimes buy an entire series but for whatever reason don’t get around to reading it. Going through a 14 book series looking for the 1st to read is a pain. Having to do this over and over again for each book in a series… Well it better be really good. /end rant
“You’re not going to put up these ugly stone blocks here, are you? You can’t do that, I’ve got ancient lights on my cave. Well, what is it anyway? A henge? Well, what’s a henge? You may call it megalithic culture, I call it vandalism. You realise this is about the last nesting place for mammoths in the whole of Wessex?”
I think Saruman’s economic adviser would be quite interesting. The book even hints at Saurman engaging in some kind shady pipeweed import/export scheme.
I think he probably got the men of Dunland hooked on nicotine which helped subsidize his massive investment in industrialization. Now if Saruman had got on better with the dwarves he could have sold his energy crisis (a natural outcome of sudden industrial growth) with coal instead of wood. I get that the wood looked cheaper (really just the cost of getting his uruks to chop down bits of Fangorn) but fossil fuels would have given him a better basis for his industry (particularly as he was treating the forest as a non-renewable resource).
A coal based Orthanc economy would have been a more substantial power in Middle Earth and would have been less dependent on Mordor and would have not made the fatal error of angering the ents. No assault by the ents and Saruman would have survived the War of the Ring intact.
Arachnophobes, you can order a bug catcher, a soft trap on the end of a stick, so you can deposit the offending party outside with minimal trauma to either of you.
I was gone for a week on a family emergency. Returned to pick up the mail to find an elaborate web built between the stove hood and the stove. I felt a bit guilty about knocking it down.
TooManyJens, are you the same TooManyJens who used to read Balloon-juice.com?
That’s me. Still read it sometimes, but the bulk of my internetting time has shifted elsewhere.
Tasha Turner, that’s exactly the reason that I habitually rename series books in Calibre. “Endless Series 09-More Fraught Happenings” “Endless Series 10-A Glimpse of Hope” “Endless Series 11-Hope Dashed”….
Granted, some publishers insist on changing what they’re calling the series name midstream (I’m looking at you, Ring of Fire/Ashanti Shards!) but as long as *I* keep the name consistent, I don’t care. If you decide to do this, do be careful to rename open-ended works with 01, 02, 03 rather than 1, 2, 3 in case it goes past 10; some readers sort 10 between 1 and 2….
Oh, that reminds of the epic novel I am working on about a woman who tends to fall in love with inanimate objects. She is dithering between one paramour who lives in the equipment for an RPG and the other in a toolbox in the shed. It is called “If you were a die…NO! A saw!…my love.”
@Camestros Felapton
My girlfriend, who is a fashion designer, wants to open a little shop where she can do custom designed t-shirt patterns on the premises. I supported her, saying ‘if you want a dye in-store, my love…’
When I first went to college in 1986 I didn’t really care if my teachers knew what I was doing. I was an “adult” and I treated my teachers with just as much respect as they treated me with IMHO at the time (take with bags of salt). In some classes this meant I was a student who participated respectfully. In other classes I obviously read romance novels. I dropped out after a year as I felt my HS teachers were better than most of my college ones.
When I went back to college in my late-20s for a life-experience degree I expected my teachers to treat classmates with greater respect as many students were as old or older than our teachers and had many years of experience in the topics being taught. I was shocked when our teachers tried to treat us like we were 18-year-olds. I’m not sure how much impact my class had on changing the program but I know it changed some teachers thinking. As class liaison I was told by the administrative person at the school they’d never had so many issues come up. We were vocal & our teachers also complained about us. It’s hard to teach students who’ve worked 8-10 hours, driven right from work, and have a no food/drink policy at a conference room in a Holiday Inn.
This is all to say – I’m not sure the students think they are “getting something past the teacher” or just don’t care. I suspect it’s some combination.
Randomly, apparently the Sad Puppies have graduated to Twitter right wing royalty.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_JnIbjBnzes/Ve45T3FCZxI/AAAAAAAAB9s/bDNBnFBTwkE/s1600/whateverdork.jpg