answer me these riddles three
Classicist, writer, that sort of stuff. Currently teaching Latin to the youth. Yes, my dog's name is Adverb.
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That's what I keep telling my students! Just writing it down helps you remember--and then if you need to review, it's right there, too.
(Mind, I remember hitting the "oh no now I really need to /study/" wall in undergrad myself. Not quite the same as the note-taking wall, but not unrelated. I always took notes, but I'd been sliding by on grammatical shine and cramming for years, until that stopped working.)
Though in my admittedly limited experience, it's never the really /good/ students who are complaining that they shouldn't be forced to take notes because they "already know all this" and "will remember it anyway," it's the students who are going to panic-beg about extra credit after their next test.
The school I'm teaching at actively instructs students in how to take notes starting in... sixth grade, I think? (Earlier if you count the fill-in-the-blank packets to complete during lectures that I've seen used in, like, second grade.) It's still a fight with some students to get them to do it.
As someone with a PhD and some genuine talent in parts of my field, who can be reduced to frustrated madness by a task like "figure out how to get this bit of the shower clean using available tools," I really feel this one.
A lot of people think of “Smart” as a singular axis of raw capacity, and not a complex web of individually cultivated skills. It’s genuinely a problem.
Gonna be banging this fucking sign for the next three years.
My feet hurt and I am worried about how to most effectively define "literal" for my students tomorrow, plus I have about twelve powerpoint slides to make and a quiz to edit & print before sixth period, so, you know. A pretty normal day at work.
I actually can't do a proper alt text for this image because words cannot express how much of a tangled nightmare this attempt at the Julio Claudian family tree is
"Yes, during Homecoming, he did erect a Confederate statue on the field while shouting a full-throated defense of eugenics into the loudspeaker. But what are we supposed to do? Buy entirely new sweatshirts?"
This book is madcap, inventive, thoughtful, and so so funny. I highly recommend.
I have a new book out today! It's a Sapphic steampunk western adventure about the dashing Karen Memery riding to the rescue as Annie Oakley's stunt double in a beleaguered early movie!
IT'S BOOOK DAYYYYYYY (and the crowd goes wild) A long-awaited return to Rapid City and the world of Karen Memory! www.patreon.com/posts/137115...
That's how it feels these days to google anything academic-ish about history, linguistics, or anything humanities in russian. Even the olden sites of the 00s are gone. It's now a vast toxic poisoned landscape where every sentence sips with Traditional Values, Truth, Homeland, and Faded Glory. 1/
You think to take the Great Khan of the Midwest by surprise? Fools.
Proof of walk.
Okay, this is the one I saw and went "Oh yes that would be fun to respond to." Though I have no idea where they saw it before that! Numbers suggest this is unlikely to be the root source of multiple new replies. bsky.app/profile/daph...
I think it was a QT, yeah. I'll see if I can track down who shared it. I did not look at the date!
(And, yes, Dr. Nonsense the alien octopus doing color-based baby talk at Angie the pet dinosaur is, as the protagonist notes, utterly adorable.)
I'm rereading The Folded Sky and this book remains so damn good. I think I need to get a second copy in dead tree form, so that it can casually live on the classroom shelves with many other books available to students during study hall.
Truth.
i wonder who jumped up on the kitchen counter and licked all the butter last night
(I had not realized before doing some tutoring this summer that a very common failure state of early translation with this book's approach is rendering "The noun is verbing in a location" as "The noun is in a location, verbing" and we gotta fix that immediately.)
Almost time to return to the delicate frustration of very introductory Latin learning: "Yes, these sentences are very boring, and it seems like I'm being weirdly nitpicky about your translations. But we gotta do this right or the next steps will be increasingly wrong."
A friend took this at a rally today and I barked laughing.
Death of Stalin is the movie of our age. Not because "haha morbidity" but because it most wholly captures the complex of sycophants who jockey around a powerful dipshit they fear and leech off of.
anyway good night
My friends are a nebula of shining stars. Sometimes I reflect on their kindness, patience, creativity, and brilliance, and consider myself a mere dark vacuum in comparison. But they illuminate me.
(Also, any treatment of slavery that doesn't mention women's work apart from sexual exploitation frustrates me. Cloth, people! Second only after food production in the labour demands of the premodern household!)
oh, to be a thrice-divorced pigeon of a woman sitting at brunch, sporting a six-inch dandadan pin on my fancy fur coat
Since MS Publisher shuts down next month, what's y'all's recommendations to replace it? Short learning curve (similar to Pub) preferred, free or cheap preferred. Thanks! I'm an amateur putting out a 12-page club newsletter each month. #MicrosoftPublisher #NewsletterPublishing #recommenationsWanted
Latest review just dropped! I had the pleasure of reviewing the new English translation of the Valla commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and I unsurprisingly found it the most definitive English-language commentary on the Metamorphoses out there. Check out the review here! doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Watching the behind the scenes on the last Game Changer episode of the season, "Samalamadingdong," and: 1) I think /technically/ embezzlement happened but I'm sure it's fine; 2) The craft & skill here is amazing! 3) Criminal conspiracies WISH they could conspire as well this production crew.
lucky emerging from his cave to shame mankind
Hey NY folks! Public Power NY has actions for you. On Labor Day especially but also all the time.
People are melting down at a Tribune article about CHSD 230 considering adding Arabic to its language learning electives. I wasted time in the comments, which I normally avoid doing since it's useless and awful, but it led to possibly the funniest thing anybody's ever said to me about France.
It's always delightful when you're a little bit nervous about an article title and the editors are enthusiastic about it - in this case "Brothels, Buffs, & Breeding: Sexuality in Historical Video Games."
Happy Labor Day to my parents’ cat Percy, who is working very hard to find the cricket he lost here ten minutes ago.
There were enterprising tamale ladies and dudes with Gatorade and tshirts for sale in the walking stretch between the exit and the bus stop, at least.
Bluesky buddies! I want a bunch of examples for something I'm writing of instances in the last 9 months of the Trump administration insisting on something that was *obviously* untrue - real 'up is down' examples, ideally with news story links to the statement.
The weird French horn is a specific brass instrument I've seen before and used to know the name of, but can't think of right now. I might look it up when I get home.
Piccolo trumpet sounds right! That was my first guess, but with an actual piccolo right by it I second-guessed my memory of that being a real term.
Bongos, trumpet, maracas, trombone, and... two brass instruments I actually couldn't identify. A tiny squished trumpet that's not a Coronet, and then something that didn't look quite like a French horn. Maybe a flugelhorn?
This protest chant band has the drums and tambourines you would expect, but also a tuba and a piccolo. Nice.
The Morning Monty says “come hither,” for he has no sunbeams and he would appreciate the warmth of a good snuggle.
I was very sympathetic! Which is why I spent so much time explaining the issues rather than just grading poorly. But man I burned out hard that way.
Oh that's right I forgot about the increase! But still. (I also remember being taught to never accept less than three cents a word for first rights, ha.)
Cheating on the video you're sending in to prove you're not cheating sure is-- I mean, I haven't had many students like that! But there is a Type.
I checked their per word price minimum and I think that's about triple the "pro rates" floor for SFF writing even before I account for exchange rates that make it higher still.
Decorative gourd season, motherfuckers! (Autocorrect optimistically suggested "mother duckers" but did not insist on it. Maybe it can learn.)
Well I guess it's called doing my civic duty, not doing my civic vacation, huh.
oh no
When university administrators announce that they are excited about something, you know it's going to be super bad
I'm sure that's part, but by far the most trouble I had with it was in an asynchronous online class (which I was adjuncting, natch) that was more than 50% non-trad students: most of my students were married with kids and/or full-time jobs. But then, online async gets more cheating regardless, sigh.
aw fucksticks
113. Thraldom: A History of Slavery in the Viking Age by Stefan Brink Perhaps the most frustrating monograph I have read in a decade. The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber…
You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But The Organisation Is Obliged Under The Equality Act To Make Reasonable Adjustments To Accommodate Your Condition If You Are
The chum bucket is an amazing touch. I hope it gets used for candy at Halloween too.
Saw a person respond to a post of the Night in the Woods “I can throw knives and suck dick” line with “I am happy you are proud but this is just vulgar” and I dunno, if Budweiser could have ads implying women wanted to fuck a dog the knife flinging cartoon fox can talk about playing a flesh kazoo.
There's something really funny about how Gen Z has realised that all you have to do is film yourself making shocked faces and mouthing WOOOOW to hit songs from the 70s and 80s and put it on YT and it's basically a free money transfer service from boomers
Although at least it's nice to see a milkshake duck who's /not/ connecting to some formative piece of media I adored, for once. For certain very relative values of 'nice', anyway.
Look, I bet you can create an accurate citation, and use it in a paragraph without saying it "highlights" or "emphasizes" the point, which puts you ahead of so many people I've taught who "wrote" essays for my classes.
I sigh wistfully but know full well I don't have the energy this month to be helpful on a topic like that. (Or possibly the expertise, let me be honest.) I look forward to the final version, though!
Oh hey I should do a rewatch of that.
anyway good night
I am trying to combine not owning a car with a partial boycott of a few big chains and at the point that I end up going "Well, my option is this big chain or Amazon..." And I'm lucky to at least have the choice.
...Well. This thread was... educational. (And yeah, a cartoonist with multiple mansions used to be a thing, in the heyday of newspaper cartooning. It wasn't even unique.)
Hello it's morning and I have noticed that nobody ever asks my aunt, who is a painter, where she got the idea for a painting. They ask her other questions that are "???" with her process, but not that, and I think that's interesting about what they're assuming about how visual things happen.
the fatal flaw with the Bluesky is dying proposition is that it ignores the broader truth that I am also dying, as are you, and everybody you know. By dying Bluesky lets us know that it’s one of us, that it shares in our beauty and our pain. Grow or die? No, there is no “or.” Bluesky understands
So much time spent begging my students not to say every damn quote "highlights" something, telling them not to summarize things I wanted analysis of, imploring them to reduce the puffery and increase the specificity, and I didn't even start on the overuse of the rule of three--!
...dear god I spent so much time last year trying to get my students to stop writing badly in these specific ways. So much wasted effort explaining the style and content issues to my students when they were just cheating anyway. (I mean, I suspected that anyway...)
September 1—March 1: Roman contract length for winter pasturage, as suggested by Cato the Elder (De Ag. 149.1). While the fields lay largely fallow (except asparagus), landowners rented them out to herdsmen for oxen, sheep, and other animals to graze upon (and fertilize).
So my North Carolina-born husband has tipped me to the Durham version of Storrowing, with a website, webcam, and convenient "Historic Videos" section. 11foot8.com
Found on my walk today. (It fell off the utility pole)
shoutout to folks rolling up in my mentions to tell me basic stuff about the christian canon. is it so difficult for folks on social media to start with the assumption that the OP might actually know what you’re replying with? or, have you tried actually talking instead of competing?
This is amazing. I love crop art
The Morning Monty waits impatiently for the sun to come back.
Finally finished the backstitching on this cross stitch that's been languishing since October when I started packing to move.
Oh look, it's the completely predictable consequences that literally everyone warned would happen, actually happening!
I appreciate the pic change alert!
Today is Independence Day in my country, Trinidad and Tobago, and I wish us all a wonderful day with family and friends! Except for the members of our Trump/Republican loving gov, who canceled the annual national parade & fireworks for no good reason & the PM Kamla, WHO LEFT THE COUNTRY 🤨.
That was my assumption! ...but I said it that way in front of a class of eighth graders who are very familiar with "rizz" as a term, and let's just say it took a while to explain and restore order. So now I need to double-check.
I always feel a little bad about telling a kid they can't do homework for a different class during my class. There's good reason for it, and good reason for my consistency there, but it's such a laudable form of ignoring my class.
I’ve also been seeing more aggressive advertising of late talking about how great something is because it is a supplement rather than a pharmaceutical. I have issues with over-reliance on drugs, but in this case one of the two has to be tested for safety and efficacy, and it isn’t the supplement.
on the one hand, i’m super delighted by this roadside heresiology. on the other, i wonder who has money to pay for billboard updates in this economy.
See, this is a good point. I want to be accurate about why I oppose something! If I thought something was a problem and discover it's not, that's /good/. I can now spend my limited time & energy on real problems instead.
This is exactly what I want AR glasses for, and also why I'm so angry every version of them is always creepy weirdo optimized instead. (I also want a notes field for name pronunciation and pronouns. And a pony, while I'm at it.)
Last night my spouse asked me why everyone on Bluesky was talking about sexy Watto and I was all "Sorry, classes started up again, I am no longer able to explain these things. Maybe next June."
If You Engaged In Certain Activities Last Summer, You May Be Eligible To Participate In A Class-Action Lawsuit And Receive A Large Cash Award, Please Text This Number
I love getting a new book because it triggers an adventure where my brain spins a wheel of fortune to see which of the books I own I’m going to read next. will it be the one I just picked up? the book I bought on my phone on a layover? my friend’s novel I keep wanting to get to? who knows! not me!
I am afraid I have honed this skill since at least fourth grade, and while I've learned not to run into telephone poles, branches remain a hazard.
My school forbids cell phone use for students during the school day (except during lunch for high school) and thus last year I had to deal with kids trying to read novels under their desks/textbooks surreptitiously during class. It was kinda charming. Even their distractions were literacy-improving!
"There’s going to be a couple years where cars are rocketing into highway embankments at seventy miles per hour due to completely impossible-to-predict events, like a dog running into the road, or drizzle."
Vintage chonkus. Photo from my collection, ca. 1950s.
The mascots of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward are Namisuke and Nami, a pair of puppy-sized dinosaur-like fairies with forests on their backs.
I just would it KILL them to invent a BODY that does not keep the SCORE
Exactly. You can always tell who has—or craves—proximity to power by the way they rush to adopt the latest overhyped, over-funded technology.
Eating pie one-handed like this because she’s the boss.
