I haven't noticed that. I did briefly learn a set of Norse runes when I was a teenager. I wrote my "Book of Shadows" with them, but I've forgotten everything already, and even then I had trouble reading what I had scribbled.
It actually turned so "straight," you started to get the usual intolerant assholes too: this one time around ten years ago, I was there with my uni friends and after a few I go take a leak. As I'm at the urinal, this African dude (or at least he had a golden Africa necklace) stepped next to me to answer nature's call, but while we stood there, taking care of business, someone walked past us behind our backs to the stalls, and I heard a smack. The African guy looked at me all confused and went "that asshole just slapped me! He just slapped me in the head!" I asked him if he knew the guy who slapped him and he said no, never seen him before, so it was pretty obvious it was a racist act; he didn't slap me even though I was just as close. Anyway, we were both done by then, so we zipped up, stepped over to the stall where the racist guy was hiding, and, being really quite drunk, we started calling him out, banging on and kicking the stall's door etc. but the guy inside was quiet as a mouse and didn't come out, so eventually we gave up and parted ways in good spirits, but still... so much for a place of tolerance...
Embarassing as it is, I don't even remember the runes in my tattoo anymore. I can read it 'cause I know what it means, but if you asked me to write down those runes out of memory... fuhgeddaboudit.
There're rubber dome keyboards, there're mechanical keyboards. It has to do with the switches for the keys. Mechanical keyboards have more responsive tactile feedback and, depending on the switches, make a loud ass clicking sound. It's one of those things, if you get me. ETA: For instance, you're average laptop (actually I would suspicion any laptop due to space) has rubber dome keys. If you take a key off, there is a rubber dome that, when pressed, communicates that the key has been pressed (for the computer).
My cocktail cabinet is almost replenished. Just tequila and rum to go. I have a feeling I may not be often sober this summer.
I say there's three things we don't need: lucidity, consciousness, and a liver. Knock 'em out all at once.
The liver is a bad seed anyway. When do you ever hear of the liver doing anything good? You only hear bad things. The liver is like the North Tulsa of the body...
Oh man, I've been studying for my MA less than a week, and I already feel like I've learned so much! Feels good man!
Fill that brain! Stuff that brain! CRAM that brain full of Master's-level knowledge and wisdom until it's spewing out your ears and someone mops it off the floor behind you and sells it on Ebay as a cure for utter denseness and pig-ignorance!
Feels good man! We've been put straight into the deep end and studying theory. Over the next two weeks it is in relation to Shakespeare's sonnets. Which also means learning the sonnets. This is the first time I've really closely read them, and mapped out fully the inter-sonnet connections, and little sequences. It's interesting. They a really inconsistent bunch of poems, actually. Some of them are awful. And reading them with a historical, Cultural Materialist approach has made me notice things I completely missed before in more casual readings.
I had a friend once who did a Master's in English. I was discussing it with him, and he said he loved doing his undergrad English degree, because they actually read literature and discussed it, and wrote about it. He HATED doing his Master's degree because instead of reading literature, they read literary criticism (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, etc.) and had to discuss and write about that. He hated it. Who wants to write about Barthes when Shakespeare is available? Who wants to write about Derrida when Pynchon is available?
I honestly agree more. There is a lot of literary criticism and theory on this syllabus. To be honest, as an undergrad we did theory too, and did Derrida and Barthes, and the theory I responded most too wasn't those guys - but Marx and psycho-analysis. They felt more 'active', their ideas had really changed things, while Barthes and Derrida felt too much like some kind of abstract seminar. Also doesn't help that they were terrible writers of sentences.
On the other hand, there is tremendous value in analyzing the analytical process, with a view to discerning what approaches are enlightening and which are mere pedantic masturbation. Higher learning focuses increasingly on process as opposed to individual or aggregated examples. Amassing data isn't useless, but pales next to understanding how to generate new data with a high information density.
