That Moment...

When I did districts my Senior year of Cross Country the top 10 runners in the district received a ribbon or medal if they placed 3rd/2nd/1st.
I got called up as 10th place winner. When I got up there they realized they'd made a mistake and I actually got 11th place.
Though there were like 240+ runners.
Tell him to run faster.

 

TMW you catch a glimpse of your reflection in the monitor whilst watching porn and think 'Oh grow up'

 

TMW you dream one of your characters cheats on their Significant Other...with you, their writer.

 

My mum used to have one of these, it's probably a tad wrecked now, but nevermind.

 

TMW when I must now hug and kiss you all.

Somehow...

With my whale fins...

Without crushing you all...

Tell you what... <gives you all a big, breaching splash of >

 

TMW you write a rant to the Not Happy Thread and then go like 'fuck it' and delete it.

I guess I just needed to get it out of my system.

 

I know this is probably properly entertainment thread, but TMW you realize (yet again) how badly some (screen)writers fail to do their research. Battle: Los Angeles came on cable last night, and in the opening bits they say that Staff Sergeant (E-6) Nantz has his twenty years in and a bucketload of medals.

Twenty year staff sergeant? I had to look up the exact figures, but the minimum time in service to be promoted to E6 is four years time in service. The minimum for Sgt. Major is 10 years time in service. Now, those are for the supermen who get promoted faster than light, but the average time in service to promotion to staff sergeant is 10.4 years, and the average for promotion to 1st Sgt/Master Sgt (two promotions after SSgt) is 18.8 years.

SSgt Nantz is a shitbird from hell, I don't know if you could even be retained if you'd been promoted that slowly.

Source

 

On that note, I've a bone to pick with you and @zoupskim, among others. You people have ruined my ignorance enough that I notice things like that much more than I used to. So...thank you. But it does bug me when a military-themed piece of entertainment doesn't do its research, to the extent I can spot it. Those kinds of mistakes can ruin a perfectly not-horrible movie or book.

 

TMW when between me drawing my own characters and playing Horizon: Zero Dawn, I’m likely never gonna be writing any time soon.

Le’ crapbaskets...

 

Ah, but at least you are gaining Deep Personal Satisfaction in your daily endeavors. If only there were a video-game forum to post in, your life would be wonderful!

 

Wait until you notice the barrel bushing in the newest King Kong.

 

That moment when you realize that it is not really about what some jackass and/or locally popular artist who can afford an internet connection happens to write on facebook about one of your business partners inappropriate behaviour 12 years ago that should cause such panicked commotion. But unfortunately the noise of such an empty post void of any real consequence will no doubt necessitate the call for a staff meeting tonight by my young partners who think that every opinion expressed matters. Hell, I have other fish to fry on a Sunday night than having to listen to this type horse shit concerning some drunken grab ass behaviour which occurred over a decade ago. I promise to keep my mouth shut as long as I can during this new age discourse while these youngsters debate what we need to put forth as a response "on line".

It is scary when you realize that the generations which are coming up to speed after yours may likely be a few sandwiches short of a picnic with their repetitive inane babble stemming from a fucking private facebook post that most patrons of your establishment will never see.

Maybe it is time for me to completely retire, because I can't seem to keep up with this fucking false sense of urgency about how important everything is and how you have to deal with stuff that never seemed to matter before we got bored with what actually mattered in our lives just a few years back and how we are now perceived by strangers. The times they are a changin'. I am out of time obviously, and I am sure to be a relic by next week, and I do understand that I am actually at odds with all the hype generated in the here and now. I obviously no longer qualify as relevant, at least in the new sense of the word. Oh well, my loss I guess.

The decline of any empire is usually fueled by an increase in the individual's sense of self-importance. We are really at the end of this gig in North America, and despite what "the man" would like us to believe for marketing purposes, - no one human being is worth more than another.

I am going to sleep now in hopes that I may wake up in better spirits.

 

I probably won't see it. "God-sized" monsters just don't do it for me. On that note, though, it bugs me when warriors of any kind engage those kinds of beasts with automatic rifles and light machine guns. That's like if the USS Abraham Lincoln sprouted legs and started bending San Diego over a barrel; you can't tell me the sailors and marines are going to stand there and shoot at it with M16s and M9s. Hell, from what I understand, even a strafing run from an A-10 would just piss it off.

For all the "stand and fight" mentality of the military, I think any warrior who saw a big-ass gorilla like Kong would have two priorities, probably multitasked:

1. Shit themselves.
2. Run.

 

TMW your students develop a sudden attack of critical thinking.

Critical and independent thinking aren't a big thing in Japanese culture, so often questions that start with "What do you think" end with the class frantically flipping through their textbooks, trying to find the "correct" answer to the question.

But today I assigned them to prepare and give a short oral presentation on a Good person. The unit is on WWII and the Holocaust, so the people they were assigned were:

1) Oskar Schindler
2) Wilm Hosenfeld
3) Chiune Sugihara
4) Albert Goering

After five or so minutes of research, team one has a hurried conversation and calls me over.

"Prof. Asch, we don't think Schindler is a good person."

"What? Umm, okay, why don't you think so?"

"He spent lots of money on his own luxury, and he was married but he had many girlfriends."

That's definitely an original way of looking at things.....

 

Wait, I thought Georing was a Nazi and an overall bad dude. Am I confusing him with another Goering?

 

Hermann was Hitler's right-hand man, but his brother Albert was a generally righteous guy who helped quite a few Jews and dissidents escape the Nazis, sometimes by playing on his family connections.

 

Ah, now I understand. Thanks. World War II history isn’t exactly in my field of study. I didn’t even know Hermann had a brother.

 

That moment when somebody asks if you have a good head shot for your book, and you start explaining that well, yeah, you write zombie fiction, so you've got lots of...

Oh.

You meant an author photograph.

Killjoy.

 

TMW you are stressed to the eyeballs and drowning in paperwork trying to refinance your house to pay for your daughter's junior year of college.

 

O

Oh what a nice parent to go into more debt yourself to pay for your child's college. Hopefully, she is also pulling her share of the weight too.
I think this is wonderful as I do not know of anyone who did that for their child. It seemed you paid for college yourself through loans, scholarships, work study, etc or your parents were wealthy enough not to need to borrow. You have found the middle ground.

 

She has a scholarship that pays for half her tuition, but she's not qualified for much financial aid (which includes work study) other than a couple of small subsidized government loans because of our household income. Which I get - we're not exactly struggling, but an extra $15K a year doesn't just fall out of the sky either. She does have a couple of jobs on campus (tutoring and giving campus tours) but the hours are limited and she has a full and challenging class load. She does work pretty much full time during the summers though.

I was the first person in my rather large extended family to go to college, and my parents worked extremely hard to help get me through all four years. It set me on a rather successful path, so we're hoping the same will be true with her. It's looking pretty good so far with only two more years to go.

 

TMW your good friend, fellow author and mentor gets a shout out from Christopher Rice on his FaceBook page for the first book in her 5 book m/m romantic suspense series! She's over the moon and I don't blame her at all!

 

TMW you're checking on some student plagiarism and you realize how rampant the problem is on the net. I had a suspicious passage in a research paper, chucked a sentence into google and found the original.... somewhere. The paragraph was on several different sites and a multitude of blogs, all unattributed. I suppose I could have found the original original if I'd wanted to, but I just printed out the one at the top and stapled it to the student's paper.

Sigh.