\o/

Subject: [girl] gets smoked by professor
From:    [redacted]
Date:    Mon, March 3, 2008 10:22 pm
To:      [redacted]
Cc:      [redacted]

[girl]'s been disrupting her Psych class with [professor]. She and
[professor] have been having it out over email and [her] stupid ass has
replied all to the entire class and so this is getting sent out to pretty
much every frat.

On Feb 21, 2008, at 11:22 PM, [girl] wrote:

Hi [professor] - Thank you for this email because I was overly
discouraged/ frustrated after lab today. I have been working hard all
semester to participate as best I can and fully engage myself. I am
extremely interested in psychology, and do my best to stay on topic
butsometimes it is HARD over such a long class period. It is really
hard as astudent to try to add meaningful commentary and hear the response
"that is completely irrelevant" from a professor. I thought that in psych,
nothing is irrelevant, there are always confounds to experiments that
should be discussed.

I am a curious learner, I like asking questions and
bringing in new ideas - I understand that you are interested in your own agenda
as a teacher, that's your duty, but isn't it also your duty to give the
students who desire it active time to participate and feel
appreciated?

After today, I have no desire to participate in class anymore
because of how you made me feel. However, thank you for your apology, its greatly
appreciated.

[girl]

PS I truly was not talking at the end of class - a lot of the rest
of the class was and that sound builded up. I know when to be quiet, pay
attention, and listen.

And the response:

Hi, [girl],

        your email deserves another response from me. You're right in
general that the instructor should give students who desire it active
time to participate and feel appreciated, but apparently it's time
for at least one instructor to be a little more brutally honest with
you since you can't seem to take a hint. It's also the instructor's
obligation to keep the class on track and keep any one student from
dominating the conversation/discussion, ESPECIALLY when that student
continues to disrupt discussion by being off-topic and not
understanding the point of the discussion.

(1) You (and your group) were definitely a continuing distraction and
annoyance througout most of the class yesterday and it was really
ticking me off. It made it difficult at times for the entire class to
hear and attend to the presentations of other groups. Perhaps at the
particular time I addressed your group, you weren't talking. I don't
know. But it is a fact that your group was disruptive during most of
the class's attempt to discuss other groups' projects, and then when
you were paying attention to others' presentations your contributions
were largely off-topic.

(2) you truly don't seem to understand the difference between simply
wanting to contribute noise/talk instead of contributing something
productive and on-task. It seems to me as an instructor and to the
rest of the class in general that despite your enthusiasm for
participating, your contributions are mostly off-topic and
distracting, as if you talk before thinking, or as if you're really
not understanding what's going on. Yesterday was an example of this.
I repeatedly tried to tell the class as a whole, and you in
particular, that your personal experience/intuition about the
possible results of a study and the underlying explanations for those
results was not the topic or point of the discussion. After several
weeks of trying to politely listen to your input then having to
return the conversation/discussion back to real point, I think it was
about time someone did indeed shut you down a bit.

If you really think that "in psychology, nothing is irrelevant," then
you need to do something else with your time. If you really think
that you "know when to be quiet, pay attention, and listen," you are
sadly mistaken and I can't imagine I'm the only instructor or fellow
class student that thinks this. There's a real and important
difference between constructive engagement and participation in class
and simply talking about what ever tangential information pops into
your head. Clearly I took the wrong tone in my previous email. I was
hoping that by taking an apologetic approach it would lead to a
productive conversation (with give and take) about your behavior in
class. Instead you seem to think that you're not at fault at all, and
I find that just another bizarre example of how clueless you can be.
I withdraw that previous apology -- it was not warranted nor deserved
-- and simply ask that if you continue to attend lab, do not continue
disrupt class and attempt to dominate the discussions.

[redacted]
Visiting Asst. Prof,
Dept of Psychology & Dept of Math & Computer Science
[redacted]
(###) ###-####

I can't imagine what kind of synaptic misfire led to the utterance of this gem:

I want to fuck the world. Stick my dick in a volcano.

Assuming he goes to school here, he will, ostensibly, acquire a degree, and be considered an "expert" in his field of choice.

In light of volcano-fucking, the above realization scares the shit out of me.

Pictures unrelated:

Instead of

• cleaning my room
• writing one of 5 papers I have due in as many days

• reading the growing stack of books and articles that would, ostensibly, help me write those aforementioned papers
• transcribing any number of interviews from back in October

• working on any of several features pieces for Destructoid that are currently clogging up my Google Docs docket
• honey-doing my way through a long list of errands
  
• or, heaven the fuck forbid, actually playing video games

Japanese snowman?

Like a small child on Christmas day, the implications associated with my new toy are vastly overshadowed by how fucking cool it is; which is another way of saying that I haven't come to terms with the sizable dent in my point-mass pocketbook. 

Topher has created a monster. He's gotten me and mines addicted to interested in vinyl toys, what with his Bastardino icon and his Tirehead-dog-thing-humping-his-360. After buying some for the missus, signing up for the Tomopop newsletter (what is Tomopop?), and playing with Castle Crashers, I'm pretty sure I'm hooked.

Thankfully, web 2.0 is a vast labyrinth of deep links upon deep links, leading me to various and sondry (that's the Middle English spelling. I'm taking a Chaucer class, but more on that later) factoids, pichurrs, blog entries, and this video.

Colette's c-blog --> Colourlovers --> Digg --> Video.

While studying for my for my Astronomy exam (P.S. I helped discover a fucking comet!), I came across a star named Thuban, in the constellation Draco. With my encyclopedic knowledge of Final Fantasy X -- I played it for 173 hours; I ought to know something -- I remembered that this was also the name of the last, terrifying optional boss in the Arena. I had a suspicion that the names of celestial beings might pre-date 2001, so I went searching.

And what do you know -- Thuban is the Arabic word for "dragon!" And it's the constellation Draco! Thuban is a Chinese Meth Dragon!* My connections, let me show you them!

Anyway, I've strayed significantly from the topic of this post: how did I found out what a Thuban was? The T entry in the myth alphabet book. Not only was it informative and interesting, but it was accompanied by this stellar image:

Trogdor!

I love this so hard. I'm glad that whoever chose to compile this didn't use the same old Greek and Roman and Norse gods and chose to mix it up. Most of these are Slavic, Eastern, or Irish -- a refreshing change from Ares and Thor. I mean, you guys are cool and all, but Kevin Sorbo isn't. Not only are these really cool, indie, low-fi deities, but they're all accompanied by fantastic artwork, each featuring the cutest amorphous blobthing I've ever seen. Seriously, take 15 minutes and scroll through all of these.

Unfortunately, there's no author information to be found, so I don't know where to mail the handjobs and the human sacrifices. That's really about the nicest thing I can say about a serendipitous find. It's just so good.

*There is some speculation that the actual phrase is "Chinese Myth Dragon" but Dragonite smokes hella meth, and you all know it.

So -- I've never filmed myself before. Let me clarify -- I've never filmed myself before and put it on YouTube. That shit is for crack-addled teenage girls and pretentious boobs. Seriously, nobody gives a shit.

But.

What if someone did give a shit? What if half a dozen someones gave a shit? What if making videos of yourself is an incredibly effective procrastination tool?

One of the good things about the whole Destructoid thing is that, once you're a part of it, you can relate, at least on a few (perhaps perfunctory) levels, to everyone else there. We might not all like robots, or toys, or flannel shirts, but we all like Destructoid enough to have signed up for it and to check out where the mascot came from.

For the record, I didn't plan for the fucking robot to stall out at weird times and interrupt me when I was talking. I also don't know what compelled me to a.) use this take or b.) do this at all, except for the fact that it was more fun than studying.

I like to think that when you break your YouTube cherry, it's acceptable to compulsively watch yourself over and over. But, that might be my raging egocentrism talking.

My new desktop image, as soon as I get a new desktop

1 comment

It's been a long month.

Between exams, totaling my car (and all of the consequent hassles -- insurance, getting new glasses, shopping for a new computer, etc.), receiving word that I won't be going abroad next semester, and general just-too-much-ery, I haven't had much time to chronicle the goings-on of the internet in this handy dandy blog-cum-social network. The Flaming Lips are great, but I can't just leave them up for months at a time.

In an effort to efficiently remedy this situation, here are a collection of images that, for various reasons, I deemed worthy to leave in the digital Purgatory of my inbox. Sure, they'd get posted eventually, but when? The time of The Ascension is now!

Part of what I've learned during my tenure at Destructoid is that it's polite and considered good form to link back to the original source of compelling and interesting content. Alas, the problem with your friends peddling their sweet internet wares via e-mail is that filenames don't leave manageable paper trails. While I'd love to give credit where credit is due, I'll leave it to karma (as opposed to ad hits) to repay whoever is responsible for this cornucopia of jawsome.

Poking around Ectomo instead of tackling a huge and sexy to-do list, I stumbled across this Flaming Lips video. Thank you, Ross Rosenberg, for reminding me of this delightfully quirky and endearing tune.

But, seriously, he's right. It would be bad if the robots won.

And since I'm here, check out this sweet tattoo:

The Kraken

2 comments