My Take Is That Both Have A Finite Amount Of Commitment In Them, And Put It All Into Each Other. They

In the late 2010s, I once car-pooled with someone whose car 1. Had a cassette player 2. Only contained a Best of Queens cassette. I spend the whole car ride ( several hours) wondering if I should say something. Since this was in France and I had never met another French person who had read Good Omens without me recommending it first, I didn't say anything, but I still think about it from time to time.

Q: What inspired you to have Crowley’s Bentley tapedeck turn everything into “The Best of Queen”?

Neil: Back in the days when all cars had cassette decks Terry Pratchett and I both noticed and talked about the fact that we had The Best of Queen tapes in our car we could not remember bying. And our theory was: all tapes turn in The Best of Queen. (x)

Everyone is for a descriptive approach to language rather than a prescriptive one, until there is the slightest disagreement abot the meaning of queerbaiting. At that point, you'll have the smuggiest people in earth acting like the meaning has been uncontroversially established through decades of academic consensus, and any dissent is tantamount to denying Gravity.

This is harder than choosing a major

I figured the vendiagram between OFMD fans and Good Omens fans was just a circle so all my OFMD followers could still enjoy this poll.

Edgin + being completely normal in his reactions to Xenk

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?

While I generally agree, I am going to go against type and share one thing that did always bug me about the Discworld: a lot of the ordinary protagonists turn out to be scions of important families. Vimes is first introduced as an alcoholic cop, but by Feet of Clay he's the descendant of the man who led the revolution against monarchy and killed the last king. Angua is an "ordinary" werewolf in Men at Arms but the daughter of one of the three most important families in Uberwald by The Fifth Elephant. Even the Weatherwax family is several times referred to as one with a lot of innate power (I am excluding Carrot from this because the fact that he is The One True King was always the joke).

It doesn't mean that there aren't characters who are, in fact, common folks. Or that these changes aren't very interesting directions for the characters. But it's definitely a pattern.

I think that the real reason that Terry Pratchett is my favourite fantasy writer is that he’s the only one who really centres working people in his stories. I mean, Game of Thrones is almost entirely about the antics of rival aristocrats; Harry Potter is heir to two family fortunes and the subject of a prophecy and goes to an elite boarding school; even the Hobbits (save Sam) in The Lord of the Rings are minor gentry. Meanwhile, who are the main protagonists in Discworld? A recovering-alcoholic cop; an old peasant woman who lives in a cottage; a conman who was forced to take over the post-office. Pratchett writes entire novels about classes of people that other writers treat as background characters. He’s not condescending in his depictions; he’s willing to show enlisted soldiers as people, rather than arrow-fodder; and he’s aware that even ‘simple peasants’ know detailed information about things that wizards and knights can’t be arsed to care about; that everything about the world takes a hell of a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes and that most people never see, And he makes sure that you know this, too.

I've started Master and Commander, and 2 hours in I have the following to report:

They're doing the fastest Enemies to Friends to Shipmate Speedrun.

Each of them infodumping in turn, then talking about music.

They have the following DELIGHTFUL exchange, about Castillan and Catalan (as best as I can remember it):"But they're quite similar? A putain, as they say in French? - Oh non, they're different languages. And a patois, if you please. - Oh ? I'm sure the other word exists, I think I've heard it."

A guy who Jack is talking to for the first time snitches on another by saying that he's gay. Then asks what Jack thinks of this "buggery business".

For the record, Jack is against it, but doesn't like to see a man hang for it. It turns out that Lt Snitch doesn't really have anything concrete, it's more of a vibe-based accusation.

I'm letting all nautical talk gently flow through me without making any impression. I think Maturin is doing the same.

I have some extra audible credits. Would you recommend using them on the Aubrey-Maturin serie?

always

Chapters: 9/14 Fandom: Malevolent (Podcast) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Arthur Lester/John Doe, John Doe & Parker Yang Characters: Arthur Lester, John Doe, (Characters to be added as they appear) Additional Tags: longfic, Rescue Missions, Dark World, Spoilers Through Coda, Slow Burn, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, AU - Canon Divergence before Coda, Corporeal!John, John POV, Arthur POV, CW: Temporary Death of Several Characters (Most of Which Are Dead Before The Story Starts) Series: Part 2 of a universe that doesn’t care and people who do (Lighthouse) Summary:

After the events in Innsmouth, Arthur has been given a weighty sentence: Kayne, sending everyone he ever loved to the Dark World. Arthur flees Earth to do what he can. Though John is left behind, he vows to find him again. Arthur tries to save those he loves and a furious John tries to track him down, it becomes clear that fighting against an eldritch god is a game you’re destined to lose - and it might not just be Arthur’s loved ones who need saving.

that moment when you’re reading a history book and get jumpscared by an eerily familiar name from Discworld. pterry strikes again

context: Wynkyn de Worde (along with William Caxton) first popularized the printing press in England

BOOK: How To Be A Tudor by Ruth Goodman (pg 13)