#and i also had an annotated bibliography to write . ..

[fantasybooktournament]

Hi there!

I recently read The Hands of the Emperor because of your poll tournament and I was wondering if you ever did a compiled reveals post because I haven't seen one and I want more books to read.

Thanks in advance 😊

I am thinking I might reorganize the spreadsheets i use with the google answers and post those . .. soon. . . .one day. . . .but yeah I haven't posted them yet and i realize how much navigating tumblr sucks!!

[jackedjacket]

To all the teachers who say stuff like, 'I had a student reference a work in their essay but it sounded fake and when I looked it up, it was! Because they used AI to write their essay!' Are you just not having your students submit bibliographies with their essays anymore? Are you not making these students look up these references in order to write an annotation for it, where they themselves would realize this reference is not real, or are the AI essays also all coming with AI bibliographies? Because I feel like bibliographies would solves some of these problems

[galacticwildfire]

While I've been procrastinating my 3000 word annotated bibliography on the English reformation I've been preparing the acolyte fic I originally planned a year ago (pls don't kill me if you're reading the other wips I haven't updated. I swear they're coming. I tend to do bursts of 50-70k words before changing wips and thus I cycle through them. So updates may not come for few months but once they do there'll be about five or more chapters published like a week apart each)

Since this fic will start ten years before the acolyte (time jump/au origin story) I've been trying to establish set ages for the characters. Osha is solid since she has a canon age (i love the fact that she's not nineteen and is actually allowed to be a woman in her early/mid twenties), Jecki is easy to estimate along with the different masters like Sol/Indara, but Yord. I've been having trouble with Yord.

But I'm no rookie to vague star wars timelines and ages, so I decided to refer to the actors age to get a rough ballpark since he definitely appears older than Osha but can't be too much older due to them being padawans together, only to choke when i realised the actor would've been about 35 during filming, which is the same for manny jacinto. I like the theory that Qimir has some sort of weird age thing going on, and that he's a lot older than he appears to be, but I don't quite subscribe to it since Sol seems to have a moment of faint recognition beyond "oh that's the weird guy that sold Mae poison", to me it seems a lot more like "i felt this presence years ago" and we know that Sol follows regular human aging. So I personally think he met Qimir when he was Vernestra's padawan, and as someone that has personally worked with kids, I could have seen a kid three times a week for three years but I will not recognise them once they've grown a foot and suddenly become a teenager as opposed to being 11/12, the same can be said with the gap from 18 to mid twenties if there's been a big shift in frame/weight/stature. So it makes perfect sense to me that Qimir wouldn't have been recognised if he'd been trained around the same time as Yord (especially since his voice and entire demeanour was purposefully altered to such a degree).

I also think that yord may have had a similar brief revelation just before he died in his exchange with helmetless qimir, that "you" seemed to have more than one layer of familiarity to it (again, it is quite easy to not recognise people you went to school with as a child after not seeing them for ten years, especially if one/both of them were frequently off world on missions during those years which they likely would've been). I'd place Yord as being a handful of years older than Osha (late twenties by the time of the acolyte), with Qimir again being just a little older than Yord. I also have the headcanon that Qimir spent his time as a jedi either A) in the archives studying philosophy and related areas which is how he got into the sith/darkside lore B) lightsaber/physical training. Another headcanon is that he would've kept to himself or been quite isolated either by circumstance or by choice due to feeling a lack of reciprocated connection with his fellow students, as opposed to someone like Yord who was quite content with his life (rip). I also do believe in the Ren theory, and for the sake of convenience in this fic I'm writing he will be referred to as Ren (it will forever annoy the hell out of me that we never got qimir's proper name).

I'm also excited for this fic because it's going to be probably my most sexual one as opposed to my usual slowburn, since I don't think I could do a study of Qimir's character without heavily exploring that fixation with physical desire and the literal seduction to the darkside. I've written for Poe and Obi-Wan and Din, all these objectively good guys (even if Din has his more ruthless moments) and they're usually the more moral one in the relationship, so I'm very very excited to write for a darker and more selfish love interest where there is that corruption aspect.

[gravehags]

i may have gone off on the capstone progress report that’s due today saying how i don’t think the department adequately prepared us for this and that because i was forced to completely scrap my original annotated bibliography, i’ve had to spend the past week and a half finding entirely new sources to write this bullshit lit review on. and furthermore, not only did they not prepare us in the previous semesters leading up to this, they also forced us to learn how to write a lit review not from class instruction, as they had promised last capstone class, but from online guides. girl i am so mad and i know my advisor is going to be like hey what the fuck about it on thursday but idk man. i opened that word doc and let the righteous rage of god and grad students everywhere flow through me.

[crushcrushcrush-mp3]

sorry that's a lot. i also have a 2k word essay due friday that i already had 2 week extension on and have yet to start actually writing

oh omg felt i had a long ass annotated bibliography due yesterday that i had like a week extension on and lemme tell u it’s so much scarier than it is hard. now idk what ur paper is abt and how it’s formatted but i guarantee ur brain is making it 10x scarier and harder than it will be. how i was able to sit down and write my shit was i went to this little glass rooms and put all my phone and bag and shit on one desk and i sat at tbe other with my laptop and papers and i just wrote and wrote like the packet was due next block (which technically when i did this the rough draft was due next block but still) maybe like set up an appointment to go ask questions to ur professor just as a time frame to mark a point to get a certain amount of work done by then. and when ur working see if u can find a little room like that to have to itself and bonus points if there’s like windows and then u can tell urself if people see u off task they’ll be disappointed. and if u can’t find a window like that maybe u could bring a stuffie or figure to watch u and help u stay on task?

[vriska-serketboard]

Ask game, 7 and 10?

7 (favorite board game?): ooh I really like scrabble and bananagrams (idk if bananagrams counts bc there’s literally no board sskkgjgn), and I played rummikub recently and had a lot of fun with it! I also really like mancala, though I haven’t played it in a very long time

10 (something that you’ve created in the past year that you’re proud of [a playlist, a piece of art, some writing, a craft hobby, a social media account, etc.]?): I’ve only written a few fics in the past year but I’m pretty proud of them! I also wrote what I think was a pretty good research paper about some of the defining factors of the homestuck fandom (I got an A- for it but that was probably bc I accidentally left out the works cited page. My prof had us do annotated bibliographies for our research papers which were basically works cited pages + descriptions of the works, but I got confused and though he wanted that instead of works cited page, not in addition to it. Welp, it was still good & I still got an A in the class overall so), and I finally finished this weird kind of knitted thing I made on a rainbow loom bracelet loom with the like finger-knitting stitch idk how to describe it. It turned out pretty well, & I made it into a cowl!

[scarl3ttjpg]

Okay so just a little explanation of why I'm taking so long to update bc I genuinely feel bad for those of you waiting so patiently

I'm in my third year of college as an English education major, so I have a lot going on with writing essays and making lesson plans and so on. On top of that, I'm also doing my capstone project this year so I can graduate with honors. In other words, I have a lot on my plate.

PLUS, I recently started reading One Piece which is more addicting than I expected and it has consumed all my thoughts so tbh I kinda forgot that I was even going to work on the next chapter oopsie...

But I pinky promise that I'll at least start writing something this weekend. I can't promise I'll have a new chapter ready for y'all yet because I need to make really long annotated bibliography for my project :/ (like 10+ sources for that bitch, it's insane).

And other than school, not to go into too much detail about my personal life but I did have a very traumatic experience recently, so I've been trying to kinda just, cope with that (I'm okay, mainly just losing sleep).

tl;dr: Sorry I haven't posted anything new for Back to Square One in a while, I've just had a lot going on between my academics and personal life.

[lambilegs]

hi!! criminology anon here :) i lowkey forgot that i sent a response hahah but hello!!! i've been soo busy with school :') but otherwise i've been good!! i don't regret the long rambles, they're really fun to listen to! and in response to your mock trials in that class, they seem really cool!! eventually i'll get real work experience in my time at university (like i'll be working with local law enforcement on cases). how are you doing? i hope you're doing well!! :) yap session: first off, i'd love to read the paper you wrote for your criminology-related class!! and also, indian and caribbean is an interesting mix!! my mom is white and indigenous and my dad is indian :) THE USERNAME YEAH I CLOCKED THAT IMMEDIATELY i don't speak hindi but my grandma sometimes does and i recognized the word from hearing her say it!! omw to call longlegs lambilegs now hahaha does it happen in a season?: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOUUU for posting the parallels from the fic it was so cool seeing all of them side by side. adding on to how you wrote about seemingly mundane things in the fic, i love books that have "mundane" things in them and have everyone's perspective!! you did a really good job of blending both the romance and the everyday life together!! "i'm afraid of men" isn't available in canadian bookstores? oh damn that's probably why i can't find it hahahah i'm also canadian. i'll definitely have to order it then!! "does it happen in a season?" felt very natural like i could see parts of lee in it that were in the movie and also new parts from her being a young adult. THE RUTH AND LEE MOTHER DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP i love mother-daughter relationships in media <333 and i loved your portrayal of it. ruth is such an important part of lee's life and i love how you integrated her into "does it happen in a season?" and i love hearing maika's perspective on their relationship (honestly i like hearing maika's perspective on the movie as a whole... maybe because i like her voice a bit too much ANYWAYS). back to the "does it happen in a season?" discussion, sharing music is so scary!! i agree with it being scary but all of the music you shared in the series was so perfect!!! and the notes at the end were definitely a great addition to the fic it felt like a good ending to an amazing fic OKAY i felt like this response was all over the place but i hope it's okay :') once again i hope you're doing well and have a nice day/afternoon/night!! - criminology anon 📕

HIIII so I'm gonna reply on text today bc my phone has NOT been cooperating today, and I don't wanna risk it taking a long time to work audios like it did last time ;-; and thank you being so sweet about my long ass audios :") oh, I'm so sorry school has been busy!! have there been any classes or assignments you've enjoyed? OMGGGGG WORKING ON CASES -- THAT'S SO COOL :0 that sounds like such an exciting opportunity, I can't wait for you to dive in. and thank you! I've been doing well -- just been lowkey having an existential crisis about what I wanna do post-uni LMAOOO. and I've been struggling to play catch up on my to-do list, which has made me avoidant, which make things pile up more, so yeah, been trying to break out of that. I had greek history today, and just got home hehe I should do work, but I'm probably gonna write after LOLLL

okay, so this is a part of that assignment (kind of cringing at how I explained myself, but I was a first year so please bear with me 😭). it turned out that it wasn't a paper, it was essentially an annotated bibliography -- to show our prof our ability to find useful sources, I think. omg that's so cool!! you know, I'm soon gonna start a sevika fic that explores desi culture, and it had me thinking a lot recently about being mixed. like, I was telling my girlfriend about sometimes feeling like I'm not south asian enough, but also not caribbean enough, you know? sometimes feeling like I'm in this middle road, and just feeling not fully immersed in either community. idk, do you ever feel that way? if you're comfy talking about it ofc!! AND OMGGG I'm SO happy you clocked it, I was so curious if anyone would. my family speaks gujarati, but I grew up with bollywood so I know a bit of hindi from that hehe. have you ever wanted to learn hindi? :o

OMGGG OFC I'M SO GLAD YOU LIKED IT <33 awe omg thank you so much :") I'm really happy to hear that, I definitely love writing that romanticizes the mundane, and I try to emulate that a lot in my writing. I think it does such a good job at both helping the writer and reader to internalize and highlight all the lovely little things that exist on a day-to-day basis, you know? kind of creates this bouncing affect where it helps us all grow to admire these things more. I know a lot of youtubers who do that, and they inspired me a lotttt for the fic, hehe (I might actually make a list of them soon :o). AND OH NO, sorry, I meant sunburn isn't in canadian bookstores!! I asked a bookshop in the city my uni is in if it was there, and I remember she told me it's been hard to get the book delivered in bulk to there. I think I'm afraid of men tends to be in independent bookstores, especially those centred on queer and BIPOC voices -- at least from my experience. AND OMGGGG fellow canadian!! I get to so excited when I meet another canadian on tumblr HAHA.

omg, thank you so much!! yeah, I definitely wanted to reflect qualities that I think you see in her adult and child versions in the film, like her independence, observance and artistic sense. but, I also wanted to show her going through the growing pains of other things that I could definitely see her having struggled with as a person in her early twenties. like her queerness, her navigating romantic relationships and kink, etc. and yes yes!! I feel like ruth is such a pivotal person in her life, who has influenced so much of her psyche and socialization, so it was so important for me to show that. I'm so glad you enjoyed it :") and omg which mother-daughter media do you like? I also love it so so much. NO, YOU'RE SO REAL LOL maika has such a velvety, soothing kind of voice, and I also love how expressive she is when explaining the film or lee as a character. and she tends to reveal little unknowns about lee in her interviews, so I get so, so excited watching them. like, there's this twenty-something-interview I still need to watch and wanna make notes on, because it's really just maika and talking about lee and that excites me SO much.

omg I'm so glad you enjoyed the music and the notes :"") literally whenever I added the music, I was like, "omg what will people think of my music taste 🤭" HAHA especially because all those songs came to mean a lot to me due to how I associated them with certain chapters and specific scenes, since a lot of them I pictured playing at a certain moment in the fic hehe

OMGGG no no it's more than okay, I had so much fun reading and responding to it!!! I hope you have an amazing day/night too <333

[snellblogs]

Agatha Christie Literary Festival, Torquay September 24

September 16 24

AGATHA CHRISTIE LITERARY FESTIVAL IN TORQUAY

Blog by Lynne Pearl

I was invited to the Agatha Christie Literary Festival in Torquay, South West, by a friend who had tickets for a range of talks.  We were going to ‘Lost Lingo’ a talk by author, Kate Kingold from Chicago.  I had arrived on the little branch line train from Exeter.  It’s like stepping into a novel arriving in Torquay when you leave the period station which is all curly Victorian metalwork and beautiful ornamental pillars, you can immediately see the sea.  This day it was the deepest of blue and above a pellucid blue sky with one or two puffy white clouds.  The sea was restless in the wind, but the sun was very bright for an autumn day.

I made my way to the location of the Festival at Torre Abbey.  What a place for a literary festival, an abbey that had existed on this spot for four hundred years, looking out to sea.  The first building I approached was the Spanish Barn which had housed prisoners hundreds of years ago.  It is a huge old barn and this was where the programme of talks were being held.

I met my friend and we had lunch in the estimable café, on excellent local fare and watched the sea turning deeper blue beyond the green of the Abbey park.  We waited until a half an hour before the talk began and found excellent seats at the front, browsing books and memorabilia while we waited.  The loudspeakers played a series of songs from Agatha’s period, such as ‘Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and English Men go out in the Mid- day Sun’ to set the period.

Our speaker arrived, Kate Kingold all the way from the States.  She described how she had collected Christie’s books from childhood and had won her first volume as a Girl Guide.  Kate had noticed the books was that some of the language and references throughout the many books was now dated.  We may no longer understand what was being referenced or why.  So Kate made it her job to remedy this by creating an annotation of Christies work that is called, ‘AGATHA ANNOTATED.’

Kate gave us a flavour of some the references that she had been able to trace so far, from the first ten years of Christie’s writings.  There are references to historical events and personalities such as the entertainer Goerge Robey and the fact that Lord Roberts disliked cats.

There were also literary references such as mention of Han Christian Anderson, ‘The Tinder Box’ and A.A. Milne’s poem ‘Delphiniums Blue’ about the Dormouse who sleeps in the garden dreaming of Geraniums read and Delphiniums blue.  Characters from the ‘Alice’ books also are referred to such as the Red Queen and the Mock Turtle.

There is also mention of travel such as the Union Castle line of steamships and food references such as making medlar jelly which is a kind of ripe plum.  There are dated references of the phrase ‘dash it all’ and rolls of Kodak film. 

One of the issues for Christie’s books is the move to presentism in the present day which is the re writing of books to present day references and standards, however, Kate is happy to continue her work de coding and referencing the antiquated material in Christie’s novels. 

It was a lively afternoon with an entertaining talk on the work of one of Torquay’s world wide famed authors.

[cassiefisherdrake]

TurnItIn is a great plaigarism checker (my TA coordinator uses it in all the labs I and others TA) but terrible when it comes to AI detection. I have had 2 AI-written papers (one for an entire paper, one for just the abstract), but TurnItIn flagged neither of them. And it is very obvious that both were AI-written not just because of the clearly clashing writing styles but, namely, the topic having nothing to do with our actual experiment. Instead, this AI clearly generated what it thought would be a good experiment using the materials we used, using vocabulary we don't teach in class and is hard to find without a fierce search. So, definitely AI, but not flagged at all in TurnItIn. Turns out, AI checkers are notoriously bad at detecting AI-written posts. Super great at highlighting all of the citations in an annotated bibliography though.

Anyway, something my TA coordinator is considering which you might want to also is making one lesson about using AI to write for you... specifically, about how terrible it is to actually use for any real purpose. One example he wants to hone in on is the fact that ChatGPT makes citations for journal articles that don't actually exist and how it will cite those as sources, not because they're real but because that is what other articles do. It is a language model, not a source model!

An important message to college students: Why you shouldn't use ChatGPT or other "AI" to write papers.

Here's the thing: Unlike plagiarism, where I can always find the exact source a student used, it's difficult to impossible to prove that a student used ChatGPT to write their paper. Which means I have to grade it as though the student wrote it.

So if your professor can't prove it, why shouldn't you use it?

Well, first off, it doesn't write good papers. Grading them as if the student did write it themself, so far I've given GPT-enhanced papers two Ds and an F.

If you're unlucky enough to get a professor like me, they've designed their assignments to be hard to plagiarize, which means they'll also be hard to get "AI" to write well. To get a good paper out of ChatGPT for my class, you'd have to write a prompt that's so long, with so many specifics, that you might as well just write the paper yourself.

ChatGPT absolutely loves to make broad, vague statements about, for example, what topics a book covers. Sadly for my students, I ask for specific examples from the book, and it's not so good at that. Nor is it good at explaining exactly why that example is connected to a concept from class. To get a good paper out of it, you'd have to have already identified the concepts you want to discuss and the relevant examples, and quite honestly if you can do that it'll be easier to write your own paper than to coax ChatGPT to write a decent paper.

The second reason you shouldn't do it?

IT WILL PUT YOUR PROFESSOR IN A REALLY FUCKING BAD MOOD. WHEN I'M IN A BAD MOOD I AM NOT GOING TO BE GENEROUS WITH MY GRADING.

I can't prove it's written by ChatGPT, but I can tell. It does not write like a college freshman. It writes like a professional copywriter churning out articles for a content farm. And much like a large language model, the more papers written by it I see, the better I get at identifying it, because it turns out there are certain phrases it really, really likes using.

Once I think you're using ChatGPT I will be extremely annoyed while I grade your paper. I will grade it as if you wrote it, but I will not grade it generously. I will not give you the benefit of the doubt if I'm not sure whether you understood a concept or not. I will not squint and try to understand how you thought two things are connected that I do not think are connected.

Moreover, I will continue to not feel generous when calculating your final grade for the class. Usually, if someone has been coming to class regularly all semester, turned things in on time, etc, then I might be willing to give them a tiny bit of help - round a 79.3% up to a B-, say. If you get a 79.3%, you will get your C+ and you'd better be thankful for it, because if you try to complain or claim you weren't using AI, I'll be letting the college's academic disciplinary committee decide what grade you should get.

Eventually my school will probably write actual guidelines for me to follow when I suspect use of AI, but for now, it's the wild west and it is in your best interest to avoid a showdown with me.

[umichenginabroad]

Week 4: Lekker, Hè?! (Tasty, Huh?!)

Ahoj všichni!

It’s been a busy week, and an even busier start to the new week, so I apologize for the later post. Welcome back to my life in Praha, this blog focuses mainly on my assignments and weekend trip to Amsterdam! As usual, feel free to skip to sections that are interesting or resonate with you.

Side note: “Lekker, Hè?!” is Dutch for “Tasty, Huh?!” which is in reference to the beer at the Heineken museum (see the pictures in the Amsterdam section).  I got excited to see the word “lekker” after living in South Africa for 6 weeks this past summer. It translates to “good” in Afrikaans (and apparently Dutch too!). “Lekker” was the first word I learned in South Africa, and is one of the most commonly used words throughout the Cape! 

Farmers rolling up in style

According to Rueters, “hundreds of Czech farmers drove their tractors into downtown Prague on Monday, disrupting traffic outside the Agriculture Ministry.” Those that live in the Sokolská apartments woke up to tractor horns blaring. They witnessed the Prague farmer protests against low prices, high energy costs, cheap imports, and EU climate change constraints. Because of blocked roads and other potential struggles for students trying to get to class, school was hybrid on Monday. It was nice to be able to do my first class from home after the long weekend in Paris, but I honestly wasn’t super affected by the protests.

Read, Write, Repeat

Well it’s week 4 so the assignments are piling up. For a CS program, we sure do a lot of reading and writing, two of my least favorite things… (besides when it comes to the blog, I love all you readers!)

For tech ethics, we have had to read and analyze 3 lengthy papers each week discussing philosophical topics in technology and ethics. We go over the important information in class, but are expected to know key points and vocabulary, and must take a written/multiple choice quiz prior to arriving. For my communications class, we just had to complete an annotated bibliography, in which I analyzed, summarized, and reflected on two articles pertaining to recent developments in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Analyzing the articles in my communications class was supposed to help jumpstart research for our Leadership Development challenge project on SEO.

It also feels like we’ve been doing presentations non-stop. In Leadership and Communications, it’s very common for us to get split up into groups, then research and present an assigned topic to the class. Similarly, in Databases, we get time to work on a database design or to learn a new concept (like normalization or regularization), and then present our findings to the class. I’m definitely getting better at communicating on the spot, but this teaching style is becoming quite repetitive. However, I do have some presentations I'm looking forward to in the upcoming weeks: Essential Czech (on a prominent Czech figure), Architecture (on a European site I’ve visited), and Tech Ethics (performing a technology risk analysis).

Staré Město Tour - A Recap (Old Town Square)

This week’s Architecture class tour was in Staré Město. Because of its proximity to the Old Town Square, our lecture was held in an NYU Prague campus building. A couple NYU students sat in to learn about the history of religious conflict in the region, and how it shapes Prague’s secular society today. We started off learning about European Christianization. In this period, churches were built in high gothic style, characterized by tall spires that point to heaven. They would be considered the skyscrapers of medieval Prague, demonstrating the prominence of the Church and religion in high middle age society. The central structure below, St. Nicholas Church, served as the city’s church and monestary for the elite.

St. Nicholas was originally gothic, but was rebuilt in baroque style. Baroque was developed by the Catholics as a new cultural aspect of the Catholic Church to spread art, classical music, and more. The Protestants responded by developing their own baroque art and architecture, which spurred competition between the two Christian groups to expressively spread their creations. Prague begun to be redesigned in baroque style, characterized by high ceilings and open skies, allowing for communication with saints in heaven. Whereas gothic style focused on God, baroque focused on representing the Church as a community.

We then visited the Jan Hus memorial. Built in the early 20th century by Czech nationalists, this memorial offers a modern (re)interpretation of Jan Hus, a national Czech hero. He is depicted as a religious leader and reformer, with Hussite followers to his right. Jan Hus was sentenced to death and burnt at stake, but the Hussite group later developed into Protestant (or Bohemian) Reformation, which was an effort by Catholic clergy to reform the abuses and corruption of the medieval Church, which abused organized religion to obtain power. 

The Column of our Lady, dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus, stands tall beside the Jan Hus memorial. It was built after the 30 Year’s War by Emperor Ferdinand III Habsburg, as an act of thanks to God for saving Prague from the Swedish Protestant invasion in 1648. Many see the column as a symbol of Habsburg dominance and victory over Protestant minorities. However, it needed to be rebuilt after getting destroyed by Czech nationalists in 1918 when the Habsburg state collapsed. The Column is pictured below, in front of the gothic Church of Our Lady before Týn.

Finally, we saw a fragment of original medieval City Hall, pictured below. A political building representing local authority, peppered with religious symbols like apses. It even contained a Chapel inside. This is a mighty representation of how engrained religion was into politics and society in Bohemia.

Amsterdam

On Friday, I traveled to Amsterdam for my friend Samantha’s birthday! I’ve known her since we were young, but we got lucky and ended up at Michigan together. In Amsterdam, we met up with a group of 10 of her school friends who are some of my favorite people at Michigan, but I hadn’t seen them in a while, so I was excited to spend the weekend with them. 

Prior to my flight, we had a mandatory guest speaker, Petr Vaclavek, from the New Venture industry. He is a venture builder, serial startup founder, and creative innovation leader, so it was interesting to learn about his journey in the start-up sector. I was expecting the talk to be more interactive, but it was more of a lecture on the current new ventures environment in Europe. I left IFSA immediately after the speaker for the airport. I flew EasyJet, and was a bit nervous about the dimensions of my bag since they were slightly over the permitted size. Of course they stopped me to check if it fit in the holder, which it didn’t, but it came close enough that they let me through without charging me to put it in the overhead compartment. Funny enough, it actually ended up fitting perfectly under the seat in front of me with dims 45cm x 35cm x 25cm.

When I got to Amsterdam, I tried to buy a transportation pass and shortly after, I hopped on a bus. Unfortunately, although the transaction went through, the pass never loaded in my email. I panicked when I saw people scanning their passes to get off the bus, and literally bolted off the bus at a random stop. I was so nervous I would get fined, but fortunately I did not get caught. I walked the rest of the way (30 mins) to the hostel to put my stuff away before meeting everyone. When I finally arrived at the group, I realized that I wasn’t in the group chat this entire time because my American phone number was added instead of my Travel number. To be honest, I simply thought Samantha was communicating the plan individually to everyone. It doesn’t make any sense to do that, but I didn't ask any questions because it was her birthday plans after all. She thought I wasn’t responding to any of the texts in the groupchat this whole time, but was like that makes soooo much more sense lol. oops!

Because we all met up on the Friday, our agenda was light and we spent most of the day walking around and peaking into thrift stores and local shops with yummy samples. Friday evening, we went to the Anne Frank House, which is now a museum. Though the house was emptied by German troops after the raid, Miep Gies was able to salvage Anne’s diary. Gies later gave it to Otto Frank, the only holocaust survivor of the Frank family, who devoted himself to editing and getting the diary published. The museum recreates the atmosphere and period of their hiding, but Otto Frank refused to refurnish the secret annex. Thus, some documents and possessions belonging to the eight people who hid there are displayed instead. The museum tour was a self-paced audioguide, which I appreciated because it was incredibly emotional and I felt like going through it by myself. I highly recommend this experience if you ever travel to Amsterdam. 

On Saturday, we booked a canal cruise with unlimited wine and beer!  We met some girls on our boat and ended up having some mutual friends which was a fun coincidence. It started to rain, but after a couple of drinks, no one seemed to care. The canals were beautiful and it was fun being on the water. Thankfully no one got sick on the boat…

After the cruise, we headed over to the Heineken Museum. The Heineken Experience Tour was supposed to take 2-3 hours, but we sped through it. One of the workers loved our group, so he gave us free rooftop admission and even more free drinks to top off our two complementary glasses of beer! I actually ended up liking the beer, which is extremely out of character, but I was still unable to finish a glass by myself. 

No better way to end a morning bender than with French Fries, so we headed over to the highly recommended Fabel Friets! They 100% hit the spot. Afterwards, we headed back to the hostel to freshen up and get ready for the night. 

What shocked me the most about Amsterdam was that people were smoking or using substances everywhere, even right in front of cops! I looked it up out of curiosity, and according to CNN, “cannabis and some types of recreational mushrooms are [illegal], but largely tolerated.” This is not the case in Prague or the US!

We packed up our things super quickly Sunday morning since checkout was at 10am, and then headed over to The Pancake Bakery for brunch! Fortunately, our hostel had free storage lockers so we didn’t have to lug our stuff everywhere. The food was incredible! We had an insane spread with omelettes, savory and sweet crepe-like pancakes, and poffertjes - mini Dutch pancakes! Finally, Amsterdam wouldn’t be complete without stopping in a candy shop, so we picked out some candy for flight back and headed to the airport. Samantha flew back to Prague with me since it’s her spring break, and we met up with some other Michigan guys at the airport who were also flying to Prague. It’s always nice having travel buddies, they keep me entertained and on time :)

As per usual, here are some ins (things that are working) and outs (things that have been giving me trouble) for this week.

Ins:

StayOkay Hostel: This hostel was a really nice stay and was able to accommodate all 10 of us in Amsterdam. It had free WiFi, a cheap café, and was located in the center of a beautiful park! Overall highly recommend, but be sure to pack a towel if you want to take a shower!

Sewing Kit: Before leaving, I bought a sewing kit for $7 at Target. It has already come in handy for patching up a pair of jeans and one of my favorite shirts. I'll throw in bonus points for it coming with a measuring tape, which has been helpful with suitcase dimensions.

Dogs: Everyone who visits Prague absolutely LOVES the dogs roaming around everywhere without leashes! I love this for Prague :)

Outs:

O2 data: Soooo my 10GB data plan ran out, but instead of O2 letting me top-up my plan, I had to wait until the 30 day period was over to buy more. Now it’s only letting my buy data on a day-to-day basis… tragic. Will hopefully have better updates on my data plan next week.

Straightening my hair: It’s been nearly a month, and I still have yet to invest in a blow dry brush or hair straightener (shout out Lydia for letting me borrow hers). My hair is very naturally curly, so I’ve been styling it with water and my dae curl cream nearly every day. All you readers with curly hair know that maintaining nice curls is time consuming, but the beauty is worth it!

That’s all for now, I’ll see you next week! 

Na schle všichni,

Reese Liebman

Computer Science and Engineering

Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) CS Tech Career Accelerator in Prague, Czechia

[transmissionsfromthebattlefield]

There's No Trains To Heaven

Things I made this semester: A just barely 19 page long historiography paper. An accompanying 7 and a half page long research proposal with 22 page long annotated bibliography because I found too many interesting sources and had too much to say about them. An 8 page long paper about seditious speech that could have been a little shorter but I had too much to say about that, too. One data research analysis report (with accompanying fun bar graph). A basically functional, entirely responsive website with 7 individual pages (which I'm still putting the final touches on). In between all of this I recorded an eleven song album of nuclear reactor core folk ditties, all by my lonesome.

T’was a good semester.

I also changed my major. Again. This summer I'd declared a second major in history to go with my studies in emerging media and technology with a minor in web design. But I wasn't too sure about the latter degree. Part of why I was clinging to EMAT was plain ol' fear, to be completely honest. Not a crippling or conscious fear, but the oft-restated assumption lingering in the back of my head: it'll make you marketable. If you get a bachelor of arts, you'll either be out of a decent job or trapped in the stressful, low-paying world of education. Get that ~science~ certificate in your life and you'll be rolling in that dough and not destute, unlike those silly B.A. kids.

Well, I don't necessarily agree with that train of thought. Having had the concept of "STEM" shoved down my throat in even middle school, I've grown critical of the importance we place on those fields specifically. As vital as technology and science are, you also have to realize that the social sciences are just as useful to, well, society. Yet such fields are looked down upon. No wonder people nowadays are barely capable of critical thought, take everything (especially media) at face value, and barely know the basic facts about their own country's past. It's because we condition kids to doze off in their classes and not take education on any level seriously, especially not the subjects associated with boring, stuffy things like reading and interpreting and thinking. Too much hard work, let's rah-rah the football team instead.

Learning history and connecting it to the present is one of the most important things you can do to become a more aware citizen, and it's time we stop pushing this culture of self-consciousness over what people think of us because of our degrees or careers and actually work on ourselves to actually get some informed participation in society. As for the career part, my workplace on campus is proof enough to me that studying history can get you a fulfilling job that lets you utilize the skills you honed and information about the wider world you picked up in your studies. It helps you connect with people and their past experiences. It helps you contextualize the world you currently live in. And by studying things objectively, it helps you become a more logical person less swayed by disgusting propagandic appeals to emotion. It just helps you become a better person. Realizing that that is the path I want to take, as opposed to sticking with a major I just wasn't fully jiving with in the name of some enigmatic ideal of making my chosen institution proud or something, is very freeing.

The web design minor is staying because I just genuinely love twiggling around with my little HTML and CSS files and applying my graphic design Skillz in that manner. On the other hand, I've picked up another minor: creative writing. I've always taken my writing abilities for granted; I'm a great writer, I'd say. But only now have I really felt empowered (to use a cheesy term for lack of a better one) to express it in a creative way - and not just in the songwriting department. I think I felt for a while that I had to suppress my "creative" side in order to appear serious to...I don't even know who I was trying to appeal to. But my brain has been firing off in too many directions lately, and has been too inspired by the world around me and my various influences to let my individual perspective linger in the background. I gotta do me.

So I went from English while enrolling --> Journalism because I was under the assumption that all the English majors were going to be Swifties --> Public Relations for a few weeks because I had no idea what I was doing --> Emerging Media and Technology with web design concentration --> History + EMAT + web design --> History major + web design minor + creative writing minor. That's a really weird and still incomplete circle, but it's fun to think about.

[angelsblogx1x]

Self Assessment Blog

Student Learning Outcomes

In my time within this class I have definitely responded to materials from a variety of perspectives and genres. I have demonstrated this skill through each and every one of the writing projects. I have done research from academic sources to popular sources all of which speak on different perspectives. Another time I have demonstrated this skill was during the peer reviewed articles when I would read their(my peers) thoughts, comments and opinions. Each and every one of their writings were different from the next as they would cover a multitude of genres/ ideas. In the beginning of my time in the classroom I had a different mindset in critically reading writing because I would much rather finish the class rather than dive deeper into the what the material was that was in front of me

I have definitely improved in this aspect of writing by revising because before I did not revise at all ( I looked at revision as a waste of time). All of my writing projects have at some point been marked as “incomplete” which have caused me to really assess what was wrong with my writing and what major ideas needed to be fixed. Each and every single time I had gone back, I took the time and revised my paper. For instance in writing project two I wrote about R&B and specifically Usher representing that genre and upon further inspection I was informed that I was missing a lot of key elements such as elaborating on my analysis, strengthening my thesis, and fine tuning what details should and should not be included.

I used to have a very difficult time starting my essay with the intro and thesis as well as procrastinating. I have mended that process that I used to have because I don't procrastinate on doing my assignments anymore (rarely). I have learned to ask for detailed help which for me was a hard thing to do because in my mind it meant that I was too slow to understand what everyone had understood was easier. With the current professor I have learned a valuable lesson to ask for help. The writing process doesn't seem as scary anymore but now it seems like I am able to do it and manage.

I have learned to conduct adequate research and evaluate sources for credibility. I have done this when I did the slides for the final paper which caused me to distinguish popular sources for academic school based sources. As for the writing projects we were required every single time to access credible sources and do research to explain our points and main ideas. The annotated bibliography caused me to dive deeper into the credibility of a source and its purposes and more so its source academically.

I have used research purposefully. I have shown this through writing project two, The Vietnam War where I used a picture to describe and illustrate my points. I used this with a purpose to depict all the elements I wanted to share. I also showed this when I did the writing project 1 where I use Usher’s music video to describe my point well.

Letter Grade :A

[theboarsbride]

Does your school have a writing center you can go to? That might also be a good option for help with your annotated bibliography.

they do!! ......I just procrastinated and haven't had the time to stop by (which is 110% my fault bhsbhsbahahahaha) 💀

i'm just kind of in the 'fuck it we ball' mentality rn. If i were just turning the assignment in I'd be way more chill, i'm just hella nervous because it's a face-to-face meeting and idk what to anticipate

[starryeyedafricangrl]

Week 10

The past week I worked on the Podcast Proposal and similar to the Scene Depiction Paper, I didn’t really have a framework to begin with, so I decided to do some research. I’ve never worked on a podcast before so I began by researching the different forms that a podcast can take. Once I decided that my podcast would be interview-based I then went on to research some ways that I could structure my essay.

I created a Google doc titled Podcast Outline where I compiled the notes from the different sources I found and where I began to piece together what my podcast would look like. Once I was done planning I moved onto the important stage of my audience analysis.

From my research, I learned that audience analysis is a means to get to know the target audience for my podcast and I had already decided that I wanted this podcast to not only reach students in the College of Fine Arts but also students from other departments as well.

I prepared a series of questions and got to contact some people I knew. I ended up with 4 participants, two of whom answered my questions over email, and the other two I was able to interview in person. 

Talking to them helped me get a sense of how students outside the CFA engage with the UK Art Museum and more importantly, I was able to conclude that it was a place that was of interest to them. 

To conclude I had to detail how my podcast would connect with my target audience and for this part, I decided to think of some of the things that I personally found engaging when listening to podcasts I enjoy. I found the main thing is variety; in voices and opinions, in the types of information being presented, and in the sounds that are being heard. And ultimately I wanted my podcast to be accessible, using everyday language that is relatable to this demographic. I ended the Podcast Proposal with an annotated bibliography. I’ve had to write one before in past assignments but this time around I needed a refresher and I turned to Purdue Global which is a great citation source. With that, I was able to complete the assignment.

[thatgirlonstage]

@wormsslime

Running with the idea that your MEMORIES are retained through a time loop (otherwise you have no idea you’re even in a time loop and it’s a moot point) but your PHYSICAL BODY and also all other material objects reset to the start of the day

—I specified studying, not writing papers, bc this is in fact unhelpful for essays but students who just need more time to prep for an exam are getting more time to make sure they remember everything, which is exactly what they need

—athletes can build neither physical muscle nor muscle MEMORY with their time. They can learn some theoreticals, sure, but their actual physical abilities are not going to improve at all no matter how long they’re caught in the loop

—as far as writing goes, oh dear lord. Have you ever actually had a huge draft that you lost? It’s crushing. It’s so crushing. Yes, sometimes things need to be rewritten but a) you usually still keep the old draft for reference and editing later down the line, and b) NOT ALWAYS???? I’m gonna be honest I have no idea how you think this wouldn’t drive any writer absolutely fucking insane. All the time in the world to finally write but you have to do the whole thing again later and idk about you but I do not have an eidetic memory, I am not going to remember all the turns of phrase or details I worked out later. Especially if the loop goes on for days and days. Even for research, sure you could do some reading, but you don’t get to keep a citation bibliography or hold onto any physical or annotated copies of the research you do and speaking from painful experience it’s a BITCH trying to dig up sources again that you forgot to save

Absurdist time loop where a guy gets stuck in a time loop for absolutely no apparent reason and tries all this crazy shit and dies a bunch of times and completely reforms his life and then suddenly gets spat out the other side on a completely average loop with no idea what he did that finally fixed it and the answer is like. There was this one (1) ant that he kept stepping on every cycle without even noticing and he doesn’t notice on the last one either he just stopped for an extra three seconds bc he dropped something or whatever. And then didn’t step on the ant. Either the ant is a wizard or a wizard enchanted it to live forever just to see what would happen. The point is the man never knows about it. As far as this guy is aware time just stopped working for six months and then just as randomly started again. He can speak Portuguese and play the viola now.