C’est Juste Pour Dire Que La Jeunesse Emmerde Le Front National, Bisous

Is this anything?

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smbc-comics.com

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - What It's Like

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - What It's Like

maths enjoyers and bug enjoyers and horror movie enjoyers and so forth all need to come together and unite against the common enemy of people telling you how much they hate something as soon as you mention you like it

So Universal Pictures may have just intentionally over-pruned all of the city owned trees in front of their LA corporate office in an effort to fuck with the WGA/SAG-AFTRA picketers during what is predicted to be the hottest week of the year so far:

And the LA City Controller is looking into it:

Once again it looks like it's time for:

So I'm relistening to Malevolent, as you do, and this will forever be one of my favourite interactions ever:

...

John Atkinson Grimshaw - Nocturnal harbor scenes

I was right

I am not trying to ruffle any feathers, but I have to say this before Season 2 comes out, so I can act smug when I’m right. Here is my number one prediction for Good Omens Season 2:

There won’t be a voice-over.

Now hang on. I know it’s a controversial opinion. Let me explain.

I have noticed that virtually every adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s books has some sort of voice over, either diagetic (like Going Postal, where it’s part of the framing device) or non-diagetic (Hogfather). And I get it ! If you’ve read any of the Discworld book and have this weird brain quirk where a part of you is always thinking about how this would translate on screen, you’ve probably noticed two things:

1. There’s visual humour in text form. How ? This man was a genius and a will be missed forever.

2. There’s so much that just can’t be translated on a purely visual level. The footnotes! Should we just leave the footnotes out ? They’re so great! They add so much to the world in general. There are running jokes that only appear in the footnotes ! Should we just accept that it won’t make it to screen ?

Yes. I’m sorry, but yes. Some things will be lost. Maybe you can integrate one of these jokes as recurring background events ? A lot of people are not going to notice though. There’s an expectation that the reader will read all of the words, while the viewer may not see all that’s happening on screen (although, to be fair, you will be noticing new puns on every re-read for years in the case of the Discworld).

(In comparison, adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s work are less prone to voice over. If I remember correctly, Coraline didn’t have one. Sandman starts with a bit of voice-over from the main character, but nothing more after that. I don’t remember any in American Gods. MirrorMask has left me nothing but the memory of a fever dream, so I can’t be sure. )

This is not to say that the voice-over in season one was pointless. It establishes the tone, to start with. If you remember, the opening narration is about the age of the Earth, in which we learn that it was created on the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., and therefore learn its star sign. It’s a good way to show that yes, there are angels in this, and demons, and the garden of Eden, and if you want to think too hard about this, they’ve got you covered. But if you think that these depictions are either blasphemous or religious propaganda, it might be a good time to learn to take a step back (and a joke, in my personal opinion).

But there are definitely instances of narration that would never have happened if season 1 wasn’t a book adaptation. I am thoroughly convinced that Dog’s experimentation with chasing and being chased by cats would have been screen only. Maybe a scene. Maybe something happening in he background. Who knows.

And here’s the thing. Season 2 isn’t the adaptation of a novel. I remember a tweet by Neil Gaiman about how he and Pratchett had a sequel plotted out, but even that isn’t season 2. According to the same, tweet, Season 2 is how we get there.

My number 2 prediction is that there will be a an intense heist scene during which Sadie and Dottie both try to steal some incriminating letters unbeknownst to each other.

There may come a day when I get tired of making these, but it is not this day

I am happy to inform the public that there is a dataset of hair salons with puns in their name. It's all in French, but I can only applaud the effort and I hope that one day, similar work will be done for coffee shops, if only to simplify the work of authors wanting to check whether or not something is taken.

data.gouv.fr

Coordonnées des enseignes de Coiffure comportant des jeux de mots cocasses dans leur appellation - data.gouv.fr

Ce jeu de données contient, au format geoJSON, les…

Names include such gems as Faudra Tiff Hair, United Hair Lines, Lucif'hair, No Peigne No Gain, and my personal favorite, Queer Chevelu.

On Plagiarism and Academia

Welp, I watched hbomberguy's new video (just like everyone else). And... I loved it! (Go figure) It's a great video, he's genuinely funny and presents the information in an engaging way (I barely even noticed it had been four hours), and we need the information he presented very badly to remind us to independently verify the things we're listening to. But something that he said really struck me because it's something that I'm dealing with in my offline life right now. Disclaimer: this is a hypothesis generated from my own personal observations and experiences and isn't meant to be a sweeping statement of every single academic institution across the entire world.

He seemed really surprised that no one (or very few people) noticed that the Youtubers he was calling out were plagiarizing other people. Like. Really surprised. And at one point, he made the argument that maybe that was because plagiarism was viewed only as a problem in academia, so people assumed it wasn't a problem online and weren't looking for it.

And that hit a chord because the thing is, at least in my small corner of the world, I don't think that plagiarism is a problem in academia. Or, rather, I don't think academia views plagiarism as a problem anymore.

So, if you've been following me for a while, you know I have a whole tag about my struggles in grad school. I've been a grad student for the last six years at [insert major university here], and because my lab doesn't have any funding to pay me, I've been employed as a TA all six years to pay my salary. At this school, in my department, TAs are expected to proctor exams--every single exam for the course and frequently one additional exam from another class.

If we see cheating, we're not supposed to call it out in the middle of the exam. Instead, at the end of the exam, we're supposed to take the student's scantron and hand it over to the professor and give them an estimate on how certain we are the student was cheating so they can pass it on to the university, which, in every syllabus of every class, states they take a hardline stance on cheating and plagiarism. (Yes, I know I'm talking about cheating on exams, which isn't the same thing as plagiarism, but I swear I'll loop back around to it in a minute.)

During the first exam I ever proctored during my first semester of my first year in 2018 (this was three weeks into the semester), I caught a student cheating. Like. Blatantly cheating. Cheating so badly that over a dozen separate people came up to me at the end of the exam to tell me that she was cheating, just in case I hadn't seen it myself. I did exactly what I was supposed to.

I took the student's scantron.

I turned it into the professor and told her that I was 100% certain and had witnesses to back me up.

She gave it to the university.

...And the university came back and said that they weren't going to do an investigation and were just going to let the student take the exam again, this time with a different proctor because they felt I was biased against this student because of the "very serious accusations [she] had leveled against [me] of singling her out for her race." (Newsflash: the student cheated again with that different proctor and got away with it again)

During that first year that I spent as a TA, I reported eight different instances of cheating across six separate exams. Every single one, I was 100% positive that the student had been cheating, and on five of the occasions, I had student witnesses to support my accusation. The university tossed every single accusation out without even a cursory investigation or even filing a report. Oh yeah, really hardline stance there, university.

For the most part (and partially because of distance learning), I stopped reporting cheating, but I tried one more time this past spring to report two cheaters and got back the same result that I did my first year: not even an investigation to see if there was any merit into my claim because they're "busy."

I don't report cheating to the university anymore. They've more than shown me that they don't actually take cheating seriously even when I have more than a dozen people supporting me. Even when I have students half out of their chairs to see what the person in front of them is writing. Even when I have students with their phones out on the desks, looking things up. The university doesn't care, so why should the students?

So how do I loop this back into the discussion on plagiarism? Well, yesterday, while grading my students' final papers, I ran one of them through a plagiarism checker, and it pinged the radar. Two sentences were a direct quote and hadn't been listed in quotations or been cited in the body of the text. If I scrolled through the (long) list of citations at the bottom of the paper, I could find the source, but if it hadn't pinged the checker, I would never have known that those two sentences weren't their own.

The lack of the quotations and the source after the quote is what kicks this over the line into plagiarism, regardless of the source in the later bibliography (the same thing that got Illuminaughtii in trouble on hbomberguy's video). But I was willing to assume it was an honest mistake, and so I emailed the student to ask them to please add the proper citation and resubmit the paper.

This should have taken the student maybe--at most--five minutes to fix. Literally, all it needed was a set of quotation marks and a parenthetical aside with the author's name and year.

Instead, I got a response from the student telling me that they were very busy, it was finals week, and they weren't sure when they could get to it. Oh, and by the way, what grade would they get on the assignment if they didn't fix the source?

It was a stunning lack of regard for the error they'd made on their original submission, and now, because I'd brought it to their attention, if it wasn't fixed, it was willful plagiarism--and we both knew that! They can't claim ignorance or an accidental mistake anymore. We both know that they're passing off someone else's words as their own!

I emailed them back and told them if it wasn't fixed, it would be a 0, and then I messaged the instructor and asked her what happens now? Her response was as disheartening as my previous experience with the university's response to cheating: they'll dismiss it, regardless of their supposed hardline stance, and nothing will happen. Don't even bother reporting it; the most we can do is give the student the 0 I'd already threatened.

So there you have it. This particular university doesn't care if you cheat or plagiarize. Academic dishonesty doesn't mean anything to them--and the students know it. Every year the topic of cheating comes up with my students during my office hours, and every time, the students complain about how their sorority sisters and football team members and fellow classmates get away with cheating over and over and over again because they know the university won't do anything about it, so why should they bother maintaining any kind of integrity? I even asked them if they reported it to their proctors and instructors, and while I got back a few yeses, I got even more why bothers. What's the point of reporting it if nothing is going to happen?

To loop this back into hbomberguy's video, I don't think as few people noticed the plagiarism as he thinks. I think quite a few people noticed (and looking through the comments on the various videos of the James Somerton scandal, not just hbomberguy's, I do see more than a couple comments along those lines). The thing is, I think they kept that to themselves. And though I do think that part of that has to do with the mob mentality of fandoms on the internet and the fear of getting attacked for pointing out something shitty that someone else is doing, I think a lot of it also comes down to this: plagiarism is thought to be an academia problem, therefore the way the academics respond to plagiarism should be what we look to to deal with the same problem elsewhere. But if the way the academics respond to plagiarism is to ignore it and sweep the reports under the rug, then why would we ever think that Youtube, of all places, would deal with it any better?

My cartoon for the Guardian Books autumn reading special.