This Is By Far My Favorite Safety/warning Sign Btw. They Really Went Off With This One

I plan to do just that, and cancel it at the end of the free trial. If there's a "Why are you leaving?" question, I also plan to say that it's because I support the WGA strike (I really don't know if it would matter, but it can't hurt).

Not a question, but I wanted to say out loud that I managed to see the first episode of Sandman on a flight recently. I haven't had cable TV since 1998 and never had a Netflix account, not since *looks at wrist* they started mailing CDs in little red envelopes howevermany years or decades ago. But I'm seriously thinking about finally caving now, simply because of how good that first ep was. Having been braced against giving Amazon any unnecessary money for years, the privilege of actually seeing an episode of Good Omens might take a bit longer, unfortunately, despite being here on this site and witnessing a ton of Posts about it. It is a tease, let me tell you.

just saying.

Why not do a free trial when Good Omens is released?

I don't remember the context, except that it's definitely in a book by either Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett, but there was a hair salon that went through a litanie of names, all of them some sort of pun. I also don't remember any of the puns in English, but one of them in French was "Je fais ce que Cheveux". It's been my answer ever since when someone asks rude question about my hair.

Anyway I want to know all of the puny coffee shop names now. They're second-hand names. They should be in a pun shop.

My take is that both have a finite amount of commitment in them, and put it all into each other. They don't have enough left for a pet, long-term goals, or an address

since Arthur isn’t a fan, would John be inclined to any animals in particular? he strikes me as a cat-lover, maybe for the shared temperament

No, neither like animals

EDIT: neither are pet people should be a better way of saying this. They can empathize with any creature (lily) and they care about creatures, but they’ll never have pets.

the relationship between Vetinari and Vimes is sooo funny, because it is extremely aggravating for literally everyone involved. Like at some point they have this kind of companionship, and neither of them are really happy about it ?? they have mutual respect for each other and for both of them it's the most annoying, head-ache inducing thing in the entire world. they are besties and both of them are mad about it. it's " help my weird boss keeps promoting me against my will and teaching me the ways of Evil" and " help my commander that I employed to annoy the rich is making my city better and teaching me the ways of Good". their lives are so entangled with one another they literally couldn't be any closer. their mutual dislike is so important actually because it helps them to hold one another accountable. that little bit of mutual distrust is CRUCIAL. they are actually the epitome of love, and wow do they hate it. they absolutely loathe it. my favourite relationship to be portrayed anywhere ever.

I've just finished watching Interview with the Vampire and I can't believe Daniel passed up the opportunity to point out how high the Paris Covent would score on the BITE model of cults.

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?

Salut, c'est re-moi. J'ai trouvé d'autres troubled birds

The fact that in the year of our lord 2019 Aziraphale didn't know know what an answering machine was tells me that he hasn't called anyone else in his entire life.