politically correct behavior devoid of compassion for humanity as a whole is a callous performance and nothing more

@chronic-conjuring these don’t get to stay in the tags

Remember that comment about Trump and his cultists? That “Trump gave them permission to be their worst selves, and for that they will never abandon him”?

Yeah. Same pattern of behavior.

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

1. The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)
2. The Monster of Sentan
3. The Witch’s Cat
4. Raise Both Children
   
5. Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)
   
6. Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)
   
7. My Arch Nemesis Cynthia
8. Pirates and Mermaid
9. Eindred and the Witch
10. The Demon King
11. The Cornerwitch
12. Grandmother Beetroot
13. Apocalypse Daycare Worker
14. Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon
15. New Year Saga
    
16. A Story About Changelings
17. Ranger in the King’s Forest
18. The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit
19. Goblin Men (Canines)
    

I am in love with you /p

What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time

Oh, love that story, adding it to the list:
20. Princess Talia
and adding a few more contenders
21. Thyme
22. The Monster under the Bed
23. A Meaningful Death
24. Humans are unstoppable…until they aren’t
25. The Monster under the Fridge
26. Antler Guy
27. Cleric slamming healing spells

Adding a few more I remembered: 
28. The Frog and the Scorpion
29. HSTHETE
30. The First Witch in the World
31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by Forests 
32. A Faerie taking a Name 
33. The Dragon on the Farm 
34. Synovus & Menace 
35. Raising the Anti-Christ 
36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of Earth (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved) 
37. Doctors without Borders…in Space! 
38. The Villain-Wrangler 
39. The Last Contact 
40. The 100 Parent-Point Children 
41. And the Heavens Wept 
42. The Night Gentleman 
43. The Serpent God and their Priestess 

44. No One Showed Up for the Last Storytime

Wow! @writing-prompt-s contributing to like half of these!

I can hardly take any credit for these stories! But I love sharing them. Unfortunately I cannot read all the prompt responses so please tag me if you want me to reblog a story that resonated with you so I can give it a little boost :)

Just use Firefox.

The more people who use Firefox the better! It's got versions for the desktop, android, and iphone, all free. In addition to ublock origin there are thousands of addons. You could also consider using one of Mozilla's paid products, such as their VPN, or donating to the Mozilla Foundation, in order to ensure they're able to keep going.

Not to be Old on main but I remember this exact thing happening in the late 90s and early 00s. I remember it very well. Microsoft pushed out all the browser competition with Internet Explorer, at which point both browser and web innovation stagnated for years because why fix something that's broken if everyone is using the broken thing anyway because there are hardly any other options. If you want to know how bad it was, Internet Explorer did not have browser tabs and it certainly did not have any sort of adblock. And everyone just lived with it.

I am watching the exact same thing happen with Chrome in real time today and that's why I always reblog these posts and sometimes am extra annoying and add on to them. I don't want to see it happen again because it sucked. Please use Firefox. Use it on mobile too (it has browser extensions!!! Including ad blockers!!!) And reminder that Edge/Brave/Vivaldi are all built on Chromium and you should not be using those either. Those browsers will show up as Chrome on tracking analytics and it does not help the overall project, which is showing web developers that Chrome is not the only browser people are using.

Your passwords and other useful things transfer to Firefox, btw. Go make the switch. You have nothing to lose.

Most websites that tell you they need Chrome to work are lying, even if they block you from accessing them if you're not using Chrome. They just do not want to support the dev work to optimize for anything else, or may have a special deal with Google.

Fortunately, there are Firefox extensions that just basically tell websites "yeah, I'm definitely Chrome. don't worry about it"

Please note I have not used either of these, because adblockers and script blockers are good enough at disabling those annoying messages.

lol

I've been using Firefox for years. I love it.

(And DuckDuckGo for search. The flaming fox and dapper duck are friends)

Okay, so you start by identifying the work that you're going to write the paper on. Most lit classes will announce in the syllabus that you'll have a paper due at the end of the term, and usually it will be a text that was covered in the class. The FIRST thing you should do is skim the wikipeda pages of all the assigned readings. One of the BEST things that you can find on a wikipedia page about a work you're considering for a research paper is a section discussing debated meanings or controversy about the text - this means that there is a LOT of material on the work you're going to break down.

The reason to do this at the start of the class is twofold: One, it gives you more time to prepare for the paper, Two, you should know what the readings assigned at the end of the term look like before you panic and choose a work that the class has already covered. I have been in twenty English classes where pretty much no one went over the works assigned for the last couple weeks of the term. This is a mistake! Those works are usually assigned late in the term because they're what the rest of the term has been building to in terms of complexity and meaning, which, again, probably means that there's a metric fuckton of research on those readings.

Anyway. I'm doing my paper on George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," which you can read here if you want to play along with this post.

The next step is to read the work. If you have already read the work earlier in the class, now is the time to go back through and skim it to re-familiarize yourself with the text. You are making very big, very general notes. The notes that I made on this read-through were things like "baited," "performance of empire," "the ugliness of empire," and "performance to one another." You're just getting the biggest, vaguest ideas out, because now it's time to do your precis, which is not as precise as that name would imply.

The way that I approach a precis is as a very, very, very broad statement about what I think the work is saying and what I want to say about it. In this case I think Orwell is saying that imperialism is both cruel and pointless, that it is mutually degrading to those subject to empire and enforcing empire, and that it makes the world worse. Cool. Orwell doesn't like empire, that's not a surprise.

At this point I have a general idea of where I think I'm going to go with this paper (in the direction of performance; i'm going to talk about the way that Orwell fixates on empire as performative) and it is time to go dig up research.

*nineteen articles later*

The reason you do your precis before you do research but that you do not write a thesis statement before you do research is because you need to guide your search, but you don't want to box yourself into a corner by only looking at one specific argument. For instance, for my Austen project I am examining radical politics in Austen's work but I have bought books written by biographers who understand her as a conservative as well as a whole book of marxist criticism of Austen that considers her a conservative; that is not totally in line with my reading of her work or her politics, but it's important to see what arguments people who *aren't* totally in line with my view of the matter make.

So what I have done for this Orwell paper is searched my school library's database for terms like "Orwell and Empire," "Orwell and Violence," "Orwell and Authority," "Orwell and Policing," and "Shooting an Elephant."

I went through the results from most to least relevant for each search, and opened them all in other tabs. I didn't read them, or even skim them, I just opened the database link to the articles in another tab. You DO NOT need to read every single one of these that you open, you do NOT need to read them one at a time before choosing to open another.

Okay, so, now that you've got a bunch of articles to sift through, you start an annotated bibliography. The way that I *personally* do this is to start by putting the info I will need to cite each of these articles/books/etc, into a document. I also create a new folder and download everything that I possibly can.

Two of my sources were books that I have institutional permission to view but not to download, so I have those open in my browser.

Downloading is an important step. Download, download, download. Don't just leave these up in the browser and close them after you've skimmed them and decided they aren't necessary - download them because you could get a third of the way into your paper and realize that, actually, that WAS a necessary part of your paper and downloading will save you the hassle of trying to go find the paper online again (this is also why you START this process by getting the citation/publication info into a document).

At this stage you have STILL not read any of these documents. You are still NOT going to actually read them for at least one more step, you are going to start by skimming.

Your next step is to just skim each of these documents to see if they are *at all* relevant to your research paper.

So, for instance, that paper on "Landscape and the mask of self" is actually a paper on *geography,* not a paper on literary criticism. There's a good chance that it is not going to have anything to do with my topic, so I am going to skim it [pause for skimming] and after skimming it, it's an intertextual exploration of geography and Orwell's story, history, and other writings on empire. This text *IS* relevant to my paper, which I now need to note in my bibliography document.

I'm not going to completely read this paper, yet, or pull any quotes out of it, I just make a note in my document that it touches on themes that will show up in my paper.

Then I move on to another document and skim it [pause for skimming] and it appears that "This Side of the Barricades" is okayish background on Orwell that I might use if I really need to justify a statement, but is more journalistic than literary and is not really on the subject of the work that I'm discussing. It is not useful to my paper, so I make a note of *why* it is not useful in my document.

What I also start doing at this point is sorting out "useful" and "not useful" with visual cues. I use a highlighter in my document, and I also change the titles of the PDFs so that they will be sorted in my file explorer with useful stuff at the top and less useful stuff at the bottom:

And that is all for the moment. I'll write more once I've skimmed all my possible sources but I'm getting worried that tumblr is going to crash and eat this post.

If you need to skim a BOOK rather than an article, that is also a multi-step process.

First, you read the table of contents to see if the ToC has any direct references to the subject you're exploring or has any chapter titles that touch on the issues you're looking at. "Doubleness and the Value of Decency" has a section titled "learning how to write about Orwell" and includes an exploration of Burmese Days, which means there's at least a bit of material that is in the correct ballpark for what I want to talk about in this book.

After you read the table of contents, skip to the end and read the index. Look for your subject.

The story I'm writing about is referenced three times, so I can hang on to this book and move on to skimming other works, but there is not going to be a ton of material for me to work with here.

The other book that came up in my search has a whole chapter that plays off the title of the story I'm researching:

But the book as a whole doesn't seem useful, since it's about politics in post-9/11 America. So Just in case, I'm going to skim by checking the first sentence of the first few paragraphs of this chapter.

• "George Orwell did not have a good opinion of the language of politics."
• "Ten years before penning his analysis of the emptiness of political language, Orwell, in his first great essay, told a story from his days as a subdivisional policeman in British-ruled Burma."
• " 'Don't think of an elephant,' advises linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff."
• "Our inability to not think of an elephant illustrates the way language frames work."
• "One of the ways negative political attacks work is they can force the target of the attack to invoke the negative frame while denying it."

These are all the first sentences of the introductory part of the chapter. This is not useful for my assignment, I don't have to look at this book anymore. But I WILL make a note of why it's not useful in my bibliography document, and I will note how and where the other book might be useful.

PRO TIP: as you are skimming and checking, check the bibliographies and works cited sections of what you are skimming. One of the papers I've downloaded is referenced in one of the books I skimmed and in the bibliography of another paper. That likely means that it is VERY relevant and means that I'm going to pay more attention to it when I do my first full reading of it.

ALSO PRO TIP: As I'm selecting what sources to skim I typically work backwards from the sources I think I'm less likely to use to the sources that I'm more likely to use. I'll typically check the things from the geography journals, ethics journals, and political books first before I move on to articles from books with Orwell as their sole topic, articles that directly address what I want to cover in the title of the article, etc.

I find that it saves time to first narrow down the field of what you'll be looking at, instead of immediately diving into things you want to take a lot of notes or pull a lot of quotes from. It's really easy to end up spending an hour looking at a twenty page paper, get a lot of good info out, then step back and realize you have another fourteen papers to go through and lose some steam. Knock seven less useful papers out of the way first, THEN dive into the good shit.

For the record, here's how to skim a paper:

1 - Read all the titles of all the sections

2 - Read the first paragraph, then the first three sentences of the next three paragraphs.

3 - Read the conclusion.

4 - Either text search or just look through the text for words relating to your area of focus (in this case I'd probably be looking for "white" "empire" and "imperialism").

5 - If you're still not sure if the paper is a good source for you or not, read the first and last sentence of a few paragraphs.

This *should* be enough to give you the general idea of what a paper is about, if the author is in the same ballpark as you are in their interpretation of the text, and if it's going to be a text that you can work with.

For instance, skimming the geography paper didn't mean that I read the whole thing, but I read the headers and some of the pullquotes and the conclusion, and in handling the text I almost put it aside because it uses the kind of academic language that drives me up the wall and that seems particularly ironic when applied to Orwell. I decided to keep it because it has some very pertinent-seeming sections, but I know that when I deal with it, it is going to be frustrating to read.

One of the papers that I've got in the "maybe" pile is there because its analysis is from a feminist lens instead of a postcolonial lens and so it focuses on patriarchy instead of on imperialism.

One of the papers in the "no" pile is there because its tone is too unacademic and it reads like something out of Time Magazine.

This is what you're looking for in your skimming. "Does it address the topic I'm researching?" "Is this a paper that *I* can understand?" "Does the paper explore the topic that I'm researching in a way that is relevant to my approach to the work?" You're *still* not reading these papers. That still comes later.

Okay, you (I) have completed your first skim of all of your potential sources. You have pared down your field considerably - now it must be time to read the papers, right?

Wrong!

Probably at this point in your research, the plan you had in your precis has changed. I am still interested on writing about Orwell and Empire, but skimming has made me more attentive of stuff that I had been overlooking before. There *IS* an element of performance that is important to the story, but now I think that's maybe a paragraph or two of something that's a larger point. So I rework my approach a bit: George Orwell doesn't like empire, sure, fine. That's not a surprise. However, for someone who doesn't like empire and is talking about how evil it is, the narrator of this work sure does hate the Burmese people a lot and there is, in fact, a lot of racism going on here.

Four of the papers that I looked through discuss this, and two of them discuss it in depth. So, okay, now I'm writing about Orwell and Empire and Race and the performance of whiteness. Cool. Keep your new approach in mind, and then organize your sources in a new document in order of most to least pertinent to the argument that is taking shape in your head.

As I do my first skim, I have a 4-tier system, Good, Okay, Okay I guess, and Nope. I started with 19 sources I was looking at, immediately dropped that to 17, and now my "good" and "okay" list have a total of ten sources, so I only move the top ten over to my new document. If you have fewer than ten "good" sources keep some of your "okay I guess" sources on the new document.

The 4 Tiers of Supporting Material are something like:

Good - Talks about the work that I'm exploring extensively OR another work by the same author on the same subject; explores the work through the analytical lens that I'm using to approach the topic; explores the same concepts that I'm looking at, but also makes me consider new concepts about the work.

Okay - Talks about the work I'm exploring and/or other works by the same author on the topic. May explore the author in question as part of a larger conversation comparing other authors (Kipling and Forster were common in this, all three being English authors who had written about the British in India). Perhaps uses a different analytic lens, or is slightly off-topic in terms of approach (cross discipline geography paper and paper from the utopian studies journal aren't Lit papers per se, but they'll do).

Okay I Guess - Mentions the work you're researching as a footnote in a larger discussion, uses an analytical framework in the same neighborhood as your approach (a marxist approach to a work you're examining through a postcolonial lens is probably going to have one or two lines you can use; a psychoanalytic paper might not).

Nope - Off topic, irrelevant. The name of your subject might come up but is not discussed. Using this paper in your assignment would be a disingenuous grab for sources because you couldn't find enough pertinent information and your professor WILL notice this.

So you have sorted all your papers into a different document and you have ordered them from most to least helpful, surely now is the time that you actually read them, right?

Wrong! Open your two best sources and look in their bibliographies.

These weren't in my initial searches, now I need to see if I can go find them. [pause for searching] I don't have institutional access to Stephen Ingle's paper, but I was able to just find Mohammad Sawar Alam's paper online and download it. After a quick skim, it gets added to my bibliography.

So now, surely, it must be time to read these papers?

Nope!

Now it's time for you to re-read your primary document, this time you're making more notes. And I'll be back later when I've got more notes.

At this point in your writing process you should be miserable and doubting yourself. Don't worry! That's normal!

The tension and doubt that you are experiencing are because you are changing how you thought about the work in the first place.

Personally, I'm torn between the feeling that Orwell intentionally made the speaker of "Shooting an Elephant" exceptionally racist in order to underscore the idea that the Raj was specifically structured to amplify and widen racial divisions and the feeling that Orwell was just pretty racist.

I'm not personally familiar with enough of Orwell's works from this era or specifically about empire to say, and this is something on which my sources are conflicted.

This is made more difficult by the fact that this work is alternately described as an essay and as a story; whether it is a work of pure fiction or if it is supposed to recount an actual incident is debatable, and that makes a difference because that would clear up if Orwell is narrating his own thoughts or if he is narrating the thoughts of an unnamed speaker who shares exaggerated versions of Orwell's opinions.

I can't make up my mind yet, and I don't have to, because now it is time to read my sources.

Please note, I am now several hours into working on this paper, I have read the work that I'm analyzing at least four times, and I do not yet have a specific thesis.

When you are writing a paper like this you *DO NOT* settle into a thesis that you're going to argue for until you are DEEP into the process.

So now, let's go through the steps of reading some literary criticism together. This is an active process even on the first read, and this is part of why your annotated bibliography is going to be *annotated.*

I'm going to start with Alan Blackstock's "Narrative Hysteria" essay, which I am delighted to have found under a digital commons license, so I can link it here for you to read along. Blackstocks' essay approaches the work of three English writers discussing the British Raj. Blackstock is examining these authors through a feminist lens. His discussion of Orwell is largely limited to the novel Burmese Days, which I have not read, but Blackstock is discussing empire in Orwell, so this is fairly relevant to my research. This is one of my "okay" sources. I have already done a quick skim of the essay once, so I know the discussion of Orwell is limited to pages 193-199, and that there is some talk of empire in the conclusion; I noted this in my annotated bibliography when I was doing my first fast survey.

This is one of sub-optimal sources, so I am not going to read it multiple times.

Start by carefully reading the first few hundred words of the essay. You want to know what the paper is talking about to know how relevant it is to your research, but you don't want to waste time reading a few thousand words about a book you're not familiar with by an author who you're not reading. I don't need to read Blackstock's analysis of Kipling to parse his thoughts on Orwell. So read the introduction. [pause for reading] Having read the introduction, I see strong parallels between the portrayal of empire in Burmese Days and "Shooting an Elephant." I'm going to need to be somewhat familiar with Burmese Days to get more out of this, so I am going to read the Wikipedia plot summary of the novel; the novel comes up in other sources I have so now is a good time to get a basic handle on the story.

Now that I've read the introduction and a summary of the work that this essay is primarily discussing, I am going to skim the discussion of Kipling and then start reading the section on Orwell. (Even if Kipling isn't relevant to my research, essays are often internally referential so likely the section I care about will refer to the section on Kipling).

Because I am only going to read this once, I am going to do it with my annotated bibliography open in another window, and I'm going to copy potentially relevant sections of text into the annotated bibliography as I go.

When I started today my annotated bibliography had 438 words just for the citations of the 10 collected sources. After reading the Orwell section of Blackstock's essay I now have 788 words. I'm going to skim the section on Forster and then read the conclusion closely.

I am now laughing because the entire conclusion is relevant to my paper and I have added another 400 words to my document, including two citations made by Blackstock that I may need to cite if I cite this section of his conclusion.

However, the whole purpose of reading this source was to mine it for resources and close the document and never have to open it again. I have a brief note about what Blackstock's essay is about, four long sections of the text copied into my bibliography that I may quote in my paper, brief notes about each of those sections explaining why they're relevant to my research.

The point of reading Blackstock's paper in this way and collecting the quotes in an annotated bibliography is to close the paper and never need to open it again. All of the sections of this paper that are useful to me are now in one place with my notes about my thoughts on in. When I sit down to put my arguments in an organized essay I do not want to have to flip back and forth between ten documents and page through them looking for the quote that I need and struggle to remember if it was in the essay on empire written by the Iranian sociologist or if it was the one written by the American geologist.

Your annotated bibliography is the most work that you will do on any research paper. It is where you transcribe or copy relevant text quotations, it is where you make your arguments to yourself, it is where you will eventually copy or transcribe the sections of your primary text to figure out what in-text evidence there is for the argument you are making.

Okay. We have read one paper. I have two papers listed that I've determined I need to read twice and nine other sources that need a reading similar to this one. I'll see you when I'm done with the other sources like this and it's time to go through a close-read paper.

Depending on what kind of obsessive weirdo you are and how prolific the author you're researching is, please be ready for your "fast reads of mediocre sources" to involve reading a minimum of four more essays from the author that you will have to incorporate into your paper. (I am currently less convinced of Orwell's racism than I was this morning and it has a lot to do with several essays and one book discussing Orwell's repeated use of animals as representatives for oppressed people because he was aware of and disgusted by the fact that the English - himself included - could forgive racism but drew the line at animal abuse).

So I'm not precisely back to the drawing board, but as I read further I am continuing to adjust my expectations for how my paper is going to come together and how many sources I'm going to include.

This part of the process is IMPORTANT. It is REALLY important if you're later in your college career and are writing about a subject that you ostensibly know well, but it is still important even if you are just supposed to be writing for a low-level class. Part of why you cast a wide net with your research is to broadly familiarize yourself with the state of the research on your subject. I mentioned earlier that I wasn't personally familiar with enough of Orwell's work to comment on the combined topics of racism and imperialism, but the scholars who have written about this have written a lot about it and conveniently discuss the same works a lot - my "okay" sources on Orwellian Comedy and Doubleness and Decency both heavily referenced the essay that I just linked and the introduction to Doubleness and Decency has a whole section on race in Orwell. Now I know that instead of searching that book for "Shooting an Elephant," I need to search it for "Marrakech" to get the information that is pertinent to my topic. I'm going to continue reading the introduction and once I'm done with that I will repeat my process of searching the index for references to the texts I'm now adding to my pile-o-references.

Okay. So.

This is a hard thing you may encounter if you are researching a compelling subject that you are personally interested in that has a significant amount of controversy.

I have now read three more essays by my original author because I found myself profoundly disagreeing with one of the sources I was looking at. I have now also found two more external sources, one of which is a full length book of criticism that I'm 28 pages into reading.

If you are experiencing this, you are experiencing scope creep.

What you do at this point is open a new window, put the new essays and sources into that new window, minimize it, and go back to your annotated bibliography. You have to put on blinders. You will get through those other sources eventually, but if you just keep indiscriminately researching you're going to fail to write your five page essay because you got engaged in writing a fifty page thesis. If it's REALLY that interesting you'll still be interested in writing about it later, and if it was REALLY that pertinent to your paper it would have showed up in your first search of the subject.

This is another place where your annotated bibliography can come in handy: I found myself profoundly disagreeing with a specific postcolonial interpretation of Orwell that I don't think is just poorly argued, I think it's a willful misinterpretation. Now is a good time for me to prioritize reading other papers that use a similar lens to see if they seem similarly disingenuous to me.

(There is a difference between disagreeing with an essay's conclusions based on different readings of a text and disagreeing because you think that an essay's premise is based on a blatantly incorrect or uncharitable interpretation of a work; the first can still be helpful in making and shaping your argument, the second is more troubling and less useful.)

BUT! As you go, if you find that something is totally useless and you have not added any text extracts or notes to your annotated bibliography, remove the citation! As it turns out the geography paper had a citation on nearly every line and was extremely up its own ass, and the ethics paper was a fine ethics paper with nothing to say about literature. I don't have to worry about those anymore, so I'm removing sources as I'm collecting more sources to look into.

Okay, so of the original 19 sources that I found, five have survived my reading and weeding process and are alive and well in my annotated bibliography.

The document has gone from under 500 words of pure source listings to over 3300 words of notes and copy/pasted citations.

For the record: I will likely use significantly fewer than a thousand words of direct quotation in my final paper. I will probably use under 200 words of direct quotation. What I have done is I have pulled significant, multi-paragraph chunks out that will give *me* the context I need to ensure that I'm using the quote appropriately to inform the reader and make my argument. The reader will see very little of this actual work, but an experienced reader reading an experienced writer will know to assume that this is the level of effort going on in the background.

So, enough about that, now on to my four new sources. We're going to explore the exciting world of readmores today, because first we're talking about how to read your subject-author's further writings and chuck those in your bibliography as supporting evidence.

So this is going to be "how to read a short story or essay by your subject author to include as supporting evidence for your argument"

In particular, I will be looking at Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn," which is linked so that you can play along if you'd like.

Keep reading

The next piece that I'm reading is another work of Orwell's that is set in Burma; it is just under 2000 words long and it has been mentioned by at least five of the authors who I have been reading for my research project, so it is important to include. Because it is so short I am actually going to *read* the thing, so here are the instructions for reading a short work of fiction/personal experience essay/letter that you will be citing in your research paper.

This particular work is George Orwell's "A Hanging," and is linked if you'd like to read along.

Keep reading

By now you should have looked away from your assignment for a moment then looked back to realize that it's due in about 72 hours.

Now is time to do what I call "brute forcing your source." This is how to "read" an entire book on a tight deadline.

Keep reading

Okay, so I've now read several academic essays, several works by the author I'm studying, and have read four chapters in two books about this guy, as well as dug out old newspaper columns and letters.

Now I sit down and hammer out a thesis, right?

Nope! Now you pare down your research!

My annotated bibliography is now almost nine thousand words long. That is MUCH more material than I'm going to be able to effectively use, so it is time for me to make a new document.

THIS document is going to be getting close to the bibliography/works cited page that I'm going to be using in my final paper, so I'm going to make sure that each citation is in proper MLA format, and, because I'm going to try to do this correctly, I'm going to go in alphabetical order.

So this:

Becomes this:

Which isn't a huge change but formatting is a really silly thing to get dinged on, so modern MLA specs it is.

At this point, my annotated bibliography is a mess. It's full of random notes and some of the quotations that I have copy-pasted are a mess. It's fifteen pages, and scrolling back and forth to look for quotes is going to be a nightmare, especially because I've got chunks of text that are hundreds of words long. So what I'm going to do is pull out the highly-quotable segments of the text that I've copied and copy that into my new document, which I'm calling my works cited page.

So this:

Becomes this:

and I end with a document that is five pages long and just over 2500 words and there will be no last-minute panic about whether my works cited page is properly formatted.

Now, finally, I've done a ton of research and found a whole pile of references and read all these articles and BOOKS for this one assignment, now, surely, I sit down and write a paper, right?

You fool.

Now I read the original work one more time and begin transcribing pertinent passages that I will reference in my essay.

Last One (until I get the essay back and republish this mess as a single document that you can link to instead of a scrolling nightmare; i'll put it in my pinned post when it's done)

Keep reading

I regret to inform you all that the walrus is a delinquent.

In attempting to climb aboard a dinghy in Tenby it capsized it.

It then proceeded to Tenby harbour where it tried to climb aboard a fishing boat.

Incredibly, this is not an April Fools

Today on English People RUIN Everything, a bunch of English tourists from Essex and Leeds broke covid-19 regulations and travelled to Tenby over Easter to try and see Wally (so named after Where’s Wally) and crowded him with jet skis and surfboards and stuff, so he’s not been seen since Monday. We don’t know yet if he’s moved to a secluded spot again, or left Wales entirely.

But, you know, I doubt we were going to have Wally for much longer anyway, since they need to head back home again at some point. Godspeed, Wally. May your fish be ever plentiful.

The English went back home and Wally came back to Tenby! We stan a true Welsh icon, folks.

Some facts about Wally:

• She is named after Where’s Wally because she is hard to spot
• She was previously in Ireland, and then secluded beaches in Pembrokeshire, but has really taken a shine to Tenby, which is a delightful village
• She has a scar on one flipper but it’s long-healed and doesn’t seem to bother her
• She is the southern-most walrus ever spotted in the wild!
• The current theory as to how she got here is that she fell asleep on an ice floe that drifted south, but she’s not bothered about returning yet
• She’s believed to be two years old
• Her gender is still a bit of a mystery but we seem to be leaning female

This story on Wales Online claims she’s believed to be male, but then uses female pronouns. It also features a video of some Welsh people chatting about Wally, including a child whose first language is very clearly Welsh and by the end of his part is struggling to think of things to say about the walrus in English.

WALLY UPDATE!!

The Western Telegraph has opted for male pronouns, and is being very firm that Wally is male, although other news outlets are still all over the place. But what has Wally been up to the past few days?

• He is rapidly gaining weight, and is still giving no cause for concern to either of the organisations watching him (which are the RSPCA a bit and Welsh Marine Life Rescue a lot; this is funny though because a walrus is so far outside of the wheelhouse of either of those organisations like we’re all just guessing here, lads)
• His delinquent ways have continued - he has now attempted to climb onto multiple buoys (all unsuccessfully) and at one point nearly got a mooring rope stuck around his neck. 
• Has he learned from this?
• FOLKS HE HAS NOT!
• He is now a Fashion Icon. He has surfaced multiple times wearing accessories in his moustache. Mostly this has been shells, but three days ago he upped his fashion game by wearing this starfish:

What an Icon.

The photographer of this picture, one Amy Compton who has been Wally’s official photographer since the start, has been making these delightful Wally masks (inset). They sell for £5, of which £1 goes to Welsh Marine Life Rescue. If you would like your own Wally mask, contact her here!

My mother came for a visit today and we checked and Tenby is an hour away from me, so we went for a Lovely Day Trip to Find a Walrus.

Friends, I took the shittest photo there has ever been of a Walrus. But I absolutely did get to see em.

A lifeboat wandered by to check em out at one point, and ey just… sank. Just dropped below the surface like Homer Simpson moving backwards into a hedge. After a while the boat left, and Wally surfaced again.

I can now confirm that ey really, really likes blowing water around like a whale, and also kept eyeing up that buoy next to em.

Also, I had entirely forgotten how comically beautiful Tenby is, but that’s an aside

Time for a Wally Update!!!

It’s only a little one, but apparently we’re getting Serious about this walrus, lads - the police are now stepping in to say that anyone interfering with Wally (examples of this interference to date: throwing things at him, taking boats and paddle boards out to him, throwing fish overboard to tempt him closer, etc) is committing a criminal offence and we must send evidence of Assholes to them. So that’s fun!

Meanwhile, the tense stand-off between the RNLI and Wally continues over Who Gets To Use The Lifeboat Slipway. Here is a picture of Wally in full delinquent mode.

What a public menace.

Time for the weekly Wally news!

Here is the problem with 2,500 lbs of predatory sea potato using the slipway of a lifeboat station as a spa bed: sometimes, canoeists get in trouble near Stackpole and need rescuing and then some underwhelmed Welsh coast guard is going to have to try to chase said predatory sea potato off the slipway so they can launch the boat.

Here is the problem with that scenario: an underwhelmed Welsh coast guard basically views 2,500 lbs of predatory sea potato as a sort of ornery gelatinous cow, and so will try to do this with, and I am not making this up, a broom. But a ton of overgrown seal has no fear of brooms, so the attempt is not entirely successful under time-sensitive conditions while canoeists are actively drowning 10 miles away.

Solution? An air horn.

Which did work long enough to get the boat out, and then Wally clambered back aboard barely minutes later and fell asleep again. So trick learned, I guess.

Anyway, since I’ve apparently become Tumblr’s primary Wally journalist, I thought I’d go for a cheeky visit again today so I could report on their condition FIRST HAND (you’re all welcome, I have incredible integrity). Today I tried using a binocular over my phone camera with was extremely stressful and moderately successful - and I have two pieces of NEWS.

Story the First

Two dinghies with divers aboard suddenly turned up and sailed right up to them. There are Welsh Marine Life Rescue volunteers everywhere, and one woman immediately yelled “YOU ARE TOO CLOSE. MOVE AWAY.”

Everyone on the cliff went silent. The boats went closer.

“YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW,” yelled the beachmaster. “MOVE AWAY.”

Tumblrs, they did not.

“CAN YOU HEAR ME?” she yelled. “MOVE AWAY.”

At which point, the whole fucken cliff starts joining in, because Welsh people are Like That.

“Move away!”

“Leave ‘im alone, mun!”

“Move away, butt, what you doing!”

“He’s the size of an ‘orse, bois, can’t you see ‘im from here?!”

“Bloody move you fucks, you’ll scare ‘im away again!”

(That last one was, I swear, an eighty year old woman.)

The boats, suddenly being yelled at by a whole cliff of Welsh people, sailed away. Later, we followed the beachmaster who was now on a mission, and found her with a couple of community police officers ripping the shit out of the divers. It was very satisfying.

Story the Second

I mentioned my binocular and phone trick. It came in handy. At first it gave me some very satisfying shots for a distance picture on a phone camera:

But, you know, whatever.

But THEN I got this picture:

which I got 0.256778 seconds before that majestic Arctic beast of purest beautiful nature untamed FELL OFF THE SIDE OF THE SLIPWAY LIKE A CAT THAT GOT TOO CLOSE TO A TABLE EDGE

Wally was fine, the seagull to the right was traumatised.

This is not an update as such but my friend Chris who I took with me to get the scoop on Wally on Sunday had a real camera with him, and he has produced a WAY better photo than I did, and I want you all to see Just How Louche a Walrus is capable of looking:

Handsome boi

Okay, so this post went from 24,000 notes to 40,000 overnight, and I am getting a lot of important scientific queries about Wally! So I shall call upon my expertise as a skilled journalist of huge integrity and also a genuine, actual lecturer in environmental science to answer them all as best I can. I shall also use pictures.

1. When did this happen?

I have included many links in this thread to news articles on Wally, each of which is dated, so you can check those for accurate dates; but, xe turned up in Ireland in March 2021, and then made hir way to Pembrokeshire, Wales end of March. Xe reached Tenby a week or so later in April, and now refuses to leave. As of this update (6th May, 2021) xe’s still there and chillin’ - my friend Chris’ louche photo there was taken on Sunday the 2nd May. 

I shall date all updates from now on. Apologies for this uncharacteristic lapse in my journalistic performance. I have let Wally down.

2. “Oh my god do you guys call Waldo Wally?!??”

Folks!! Folks so many of you are doing this!!! But here’s the thing!!!

Where’s Wally is a British series and that’s the original name!!! It has been translated and regionalised around the world, and the name was changed in 28 of them!! A sizeable number don’t even sound like ‘Wally’!!! In France he’s Charlie! In Lithuania he’s Jonas! In Arabic versions he’s Fuḍūlī!!!

Yet only one nationality is repeatedly reacting with astonishment while assuming theirs is the one true original version!!! Guess which one!!! You have to stop!!! Especially the few who have responded with out and out swearing and aggression when I’ve explained!!! THIS POST IS ABOUT A WALRUS!!!!

3. Is Wally okay in Wales? Does xe need to leave/be moved?

Xe’s currently fine - an Arctic walrus can handle water temperatures of up to 15 degrees celsius, which West Wales is certainly currently accommodating. Xe was also distressingly underweight when first spotted fresh off the ice floe, but we’ve been monitoring hir health and xe’s roughly doubled hir bodyweight and is very healthy. I asked the fishmonger in Tenby if xe’s affecting the catch and the nice man said no and sold me a lemon sole for my mam. So right now, Wally is doing great, all needs met, with no real clashes with other stakeholders (i.e. fishers and that) except for, you know, the one (i.e. the lifeboat people).

However, high summer in Wales is warm enough that the sea will top the temperature threshold. So, we’re expecting Wally to leave by hirself in a month or so, if xe doesn’t decide to move sooner. Whether xe decides to swim all the way back home, or xe starts just moving north along the western coast and next turns up in the Isle of Mann or Scotland to continue hir holiday of the Celtic Ring remains to be seen. But, xe’ll do it hirself eventually, so it’s down to us to just keep hir happy and healthy for as long as xe chooses to stay.

4. I think Wally is female!

Yeah, maybe

5. I think Wally is male!

Very possibly

6. I think walruses have no concept of gender!

Almost definitely

7. What’s Walrus in Welsh?

They’re not native, so the Cymricisation “walrws” is getting a lot of use - but, Welsh is nothing if not poetic, so in official literature it’s “morfarch”, which means “sea stallion” or “sea knight” depending on your dialect.

8. Did they really use a broom and an airhorn on Wally?!

Here is a forlorn coast guard attempting to shift hir with a broom:

And here is the same coastguard attempting to shift hir with an airhorn:

9. I cannot believe this walrus is a delinquent!!!

Very well. Here is Wally’s criminal case file, including photographic evidence of two boarded boats and hir mugshot:

Update time! Datestamp: 10th May 2021. And as this post is becoming hellishly long, I think it’s probably best if I start using Read Mores after a couple of inches of scroll space. Uh, sorry about the rambling length, folks, I apparently just have a lot to say about a walrus and also many pictures.

Anyway, Wales is weathering a storm at the minute, so the sea is currently pretty rough - turns out, Wally likes staying out at sea during this time because they’re a sucker for a wave machine, and same, Wally, same, wave machines are banging. What this means is that they aren’t about much at the minute, but as the sea calms over the next few days the prediction is that they’ll return to the slipway, climb aboard and then drop spark the fuck out for a few days to rest.

SO, speaking of that SLIPWAY and the CRIMES of this delinquent…

Keep reading

Alright, gang, BRACE YOURSELVES because there’s a Wally update incoming!

And it may be the last! Or maybe not, it all depends on what Wally decides to do.

Anyway, it’s 26th May 2021, and to tempt you to click the Read More, I offer these two photos of Wally actually being induced to finally fucken move after the underwhelmed Welsh coast guard had the bright idea of spraying him gently with a hose to mimic rain:

Elegance and grace. What a majestic creature.

BUT, my friends, there have been DEVELOPMENTS!

Keep reading

OKAY SO I KNOW I SAID THAT WAS THE LAST BUT

Datestamp: 30th May, 2021. Uh, Wally has decided on more shenanigans, starting, I shit you not, with continuing that trip of the Celtic Ring by going even further south to fecking Brittany, in France, and yes! Yes, I did make that joke! I did not expect it to come true!! But here we are!!

In fact, he overshot Brittany and hit the town of Les Sables d’Olonne, a bit further south along the coast. Where, NATURALLY, he promptly found a brand new slipway to terrorise, and a brand new piece of maritime safety infrastructure to block.

French fishermen report that he seems “interested” in their boats, and we all know how that will end.

Except, it seems his crimes are starting to catch up with him. Warning for news of minor walrus injury under the cut (he’s fine, no pictures).

Keep reading

This walrus will not let me rest. Just let me rest, Wally. Let me sleep.

Datestamp: 3rd June, 2021. You’ll all recall that the last we saw of our hefty oceanic bandit, he got hit by a boat while trying to steal it in France, as he so often does. Oh no! we all thought. What if Wally is hurt! We hope he recovers! We hope he learns to leave boats alone, and also turns the fuck around and swims to cooler waters!

Folks, he has learned ZERO LESSONS.

HE’S IN LA ROCHELLE

Quote from the local Gendamerie: “Checked Friday, May 28th by the nautical brigade in the port of La Rochelle, this walrus has been uncooperative.“

HOT OFF THE PRESS (I am a journalist of superlative integrity, it is often said)

Datestamp 5th June 2021, and he’s in Spain. He’s in Spain. He’s headed for fucken Galicia after all, lads. He’s heading south. Given that my every joking prediction has so far come true, I’m terrified to make the obvious joke that he’s heading for Patagonia. GO TO SCOTLAND, WALLY. GO TO FECKING SCOTLAND.

Anyway, here’s a clip of him in Bilbao, northern Spain, and also, there’s some extra news: after months of back-and-forth and guesswork, we do now have concrete evidence of Wally’s sex, including photographs. NSFW pics under the cut.

Keep reading

Captain’s log, star date 14th June 2021, and he’s in Santander. No, not the bank. The Spanish city, capitol of Cantabria, which is interesting given that Cantabria IS A CELTIC NAME, so the journey continues. Asturias and Gallicia beckon.

Here is a picture of him having climbed aboard yet another boat.

And this article has a link to a video of him boarding a pier back in La Rochelle, to the bemusement of some French fishermen (side note, it is very endearing that the Western Telegraph, a Pembrokeshire newspaper, is still closely following Wally’s adventures).

WILL HE GO BACK NORTH?!? Well, let’s see how he feels once he’s done Galicia.

Do you love the colour of the walrus?

Anyway, folks I have MIXED news. The good news is, after spending a worrying month heading closer and closer to the equator and then vanishing for two weeks, our fave oceanic chongus has finally, mercifully, turned the fuck around! He’s coming back home apparently, and has turned up in the Isles of Scilly, a small chain of islands off the toe of Cornwall. Hopefully, he’ll take a week there to feed and rest and then continue his journey north. We may yet see him make landfall in Scotland.

Here’s the bad news:

HIS CRIMES CONTINUE.

O em gee

Be like wally

As of 3rd July 2021, Wally is NO LONGER WELCOME ON THE ISLES OF SCILLY

And efforts are being made to discourage our delinquent walrus from staying in human-populated places because he poses “huge risks to himself, livelihoods and potentially human safety”.

Airhorns used to work in Tenby, Wales, but he’s decided he’s not bothered by them anymore. And because he is a lazy boy, he likes to ride boats rather than swim, which has caused a “number of working and pleasure boats on the islands of St Mary’s and St Martin’s have been sunk or [to be] damaged”.

“He may prevent emergency response vessels from being immediately operational or cause serious injury or worse if he capsizes a boat with people on board.”

Dan Jarvis from BDMLR said: “It is causing a lot of angst in the community, especially for those whose boats have been damaged.

“It is becoming a really big issue in that harbour and we need to do something to discourage him from being in it.”

After consulting with the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration in Alaska, measures being considered are barriers to stop him boarding boats, and acoustic deterrents above and below water.

“No-one has ever been in this situation in this country before, we don’t have animals that are this big. It is extremely unique,” Me Jarvis said.

“The welfare of the animal and the safety of people are paramount.

“It is hoped that by discouraging him from being around the inhabited islands, he will choose a more secluded wild site, and that he will soon be rested enough to continue back north to his native Arctic.”

Looks as though Wally is being given his marching orders.