Archives: Tweets

@GeekinKorea It’s a slog. You get faster with time, limit comments to major issues (or skip for work that clearly isn’t edited or proofread), use editing marks, and develop a detailed rubric? A lot of specific issues are standard and recur a lot! @GeekinKorea Alex’s advice is good too.

Also, teaching them to extract template sentences and analyze sample paragraphs pre-solves some common structure issues.

Oh, and re: hunting out cheaters—one can learn to enjoy it as a sort of tactical challenge. But I still find it annoying, tbh.

What it’s like to return home—to the US—amid the New Normal. This essay’s worth your time… twitter.com/joemilanjr/sta…

@PimpMyShoggoth Ha, I’ll get to it eventually…

@PimpMyShoggoth Ha, I’ll stop. 🙂

But I have sometimes thought about that Traveling Wilburys weekend as some failed evil occult ritual of some kind that got foiled by, I dunno, the wrong kind of amplifier or a power outage or the fact they used a CD on repeat instead of vinyl.

@PimpMyShoggoth Oh, I was never in a fraternity myself! (They didn’t exist where I did undergrad, and I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway.)

I just had an apartment in the neighborhood during one year of grad school (walking distance to Concordia U, where I went).

@PimpMyShoggoth And I feel this about lots of popular music, but their songs especially felt like bloodless cliché, drained of all fire & passion and vitality: the rock analogy to what’s now called “smooth jazz” I guess? But I was a late-Coltrane/Stravinsky/Ornette Coleman kid, so…

@PimpMyShoggoth To this day I don’t know why I didn’t just call the police about the noise disturbance. But this was the “student ghetto” near McGill University, so obnoxious noisy behavior was pretty common. And I’d never called the cops before, I guess.

@PimpMyShoggoth Yeah.

@PimpMyShoggoth This is not particular to them, but: being forced to listen to them way too many times would be the main reason. Every city I lived in as a kid had one local FM station, and they all played classic rock, and a few of their songs (especially *that* one) ad nauseam. @PimpMyShoggoth Also, when I was in grad school, the fratboy idiots down the road once set up speakers on their balcony and blasted Traveling Wilburys for almost an entire weekend, at a deafening volume. When they took a break from the TW, guess what they played instead?”The Best of the Eagles.”

I’m at a loss for words a lot these days. (Like the rest of the planet, I’m weary of standing by and watching the insanity unfold… and hoping this inhumanity is stopped. But from here, there’s not much I can do to really help.)

nytimes.com/2020/10/30/us/…

Gotta love when a non-native speaker of English lectures you for using English correctly and then suddenly escalates to literally accusing you of war crimes for calmly explaining, “Oh, no, that’s not what that means in English, you’ve misunderstood me.” Ah, the joys of the web…

@tweetsbymoi If only I could hire 엉덩이 탐정 to solve this case, and mete out the usual pungent punishment into the faces of any wrongdoers!

If only!

So happy to learn you reprinted Dougal Dixon’s AFTER MAN in hardback, @breakdownpress! It’s a great book and I need to get a copy of the hardcover.

I wonder if you’ve got plans to also do THE NEW DINOSAURS or MAN AFTER MAN?

breakdownpress.com/store/after-man

@tweetsbymoi It reads like the promotional text for a specific hotel in Singapore.

@tweetsbymoi Nah, it reads like slightly imperfect ad copy all chopped up and woven together ever-so-slightly imperfectly. My guess is either too many distinct sources and modifications for it to trace. Maybe typed from a print source (pamphlet) and modified slightly.

TFW when you’re 100% sure the content in this student’s assignment is plagiarized (because too-perfect grammar and idioms in EFL student writing is often a clear tell) but for some reason you can’t find the source.

Worse than your average dungeon trap in any RPG. Brrrr. twitter.com/HapaxLegoman/s…

@sfsignal No, there’s no Amazon in Korea so we see the US site, but pricing is different for regions outside the US. That said, the pattern I’m used to is that Kindle books on sale are usually like $1.99 instead of $0.99—but I’m seeing $9.34 for this book right now!

@sfsignal (I mean, I’m viewing on Amazon US but from outside the US.)

@sfsignal Ah, okay. Sometimes the sale prices are applied to other regions, but I guess not this time!

I found this interesting and useful. But I’m still not stepping into a classroom till I’m vaccinated if I can help it.

english.elpais.com/society/2020-1…

@sfsignal Hm. It’s not $1.99 from where I’m viewing the site. :/

@ahimsakerp I didn’t know, and also, geeeez. Those are super creepy.

@isasv It’s seen more seriously in the literary world—but there have been some big plagiarism scandals even there. But in mainstream magazines and the like? It was Yikes.

@isasv I think a certain amount of it happens when people are hitting the last minute and desperate… or when they’ve gotten the habit because they got away with it for so long. (Plagiarism wasn’t seen as serious at most unis here till recently; I expect some profs still shrug at it.) @isasv In fact, some mandatory text on plagiarism was added to my current uni’s syllabus template just a few years ago. Indicates the newness of the concern and how endemic the issue is. A decade ago, students told me being caught plagiarizing often meant a C or a D, not an F.

@isasv We have Turnitin but it doesn’t automatically kick in for every assignment and I find usually suspect stuff is easier to find by simply grabbing a line of text and searching the Korean search portals. (Stuff will sometimes come up there that doesn’t come up on Google.) @isasv We have Turnitin but it doesn’t automatically kick in for every assignment and I find usually suspect stuff is easier to find by simply grabbing a line of text and searching the Korean search portals. (Stuff will sometimes come up there that doesn’t come up on Google.) Since @isasv Since my students are writing in a foreign language, it’s usually pretty obvious when they’re trying to pass off someone else’s writing as their own. That’s when they don’t accidentally leave breadcrumbs, or (often) mess up the copy+paste job & forget to strip the formatting.

@isasv Yes, but only hosting that shitty reality show I hear he used to be on.

@Keffy Yeah, I agree.

You can live in our reality, or the alternate universe where Orville Redenbacher got excited after reading and not understanding 1984, changed his name to Orwell Redenbacher, and later ended up ruling one-third of the world under the dictatorial moniker Big Popper. Choose now.

The worst part is the student chose something unnecessarily difficult to translate, and probably suffered more than they otherwise would have just writing a simple paragraph of their own. It was a *formatting* exercise, after all.

Notice to students: It’s a bad idea to plagiarize. But it’s an even worse idea to leave material in the document that makes it even easier for the instructor to track down the source of the material. (In this case, the student took some non-English text from the web, translated it to English, but then left the original and easily-Googled non-English material in the document.)

@mythopoetica Yeah, I’m recording on 2013 iMac and get fine quality.(Though I do boot from an external SSD and that makes all the difference.)

I do find adjusting my screen display dimensions down helps save space and reduces file size., which can help a bit with quality.

@mythopoetica Yeah, might be worth a try. I found prerecording into a video painful in some ways, but a lot easier in terms of being able to check the content and be sure of what students end up hearing/seeing.

@mythopoetica Really? I thought for one-on-one meetings it’s unlimited?

(My students have been recording their midterm exams using Zoom—work onscreen and a shot of their face in the overlay, and are uploading 2+ hour videos.) @mythopoetica (I mean, it’s possible they all signed in via SSO and are under the university’s site license, but… I’d be surprised!)

But no, when I search it says there’s no time limit on one-on-one meetings.

@mythopoetica Urk. If you need to just straight-up prerecord the lecture with slides, you can do that using Zoom in a solo session. (We had some proprietary Korean software for the purpose—screenrecording with slides and an optional video box for the lecturer—but Zoom’s just as good.) @mythopoetica (At least that way you avoid platform issues and can test/check what students will be seeing.)

@mythopoetica I sympathize. That was me last semester, churning out lecture after lecture. Hang in there!

Yikes, this is… :/ twitter.com/SweetRivenge/s…

RT @donwinslow: Jesus. It just doesn’t stop. twitter.com/mxtaliajane/st…

@story_magician Ha, no.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tale_…

You gotta give it to Beatrix Potter, this is a solid opening:

“It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is ‘soporific.’ I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuces; but then I am not a rabbit.”

RT @Ursidice: A Conversation At Midnight is a mini RPG where players take on the role of guests at a séance, trying to contact the dangerou…

Not a good year to botch the flu vaccines, guys, really. But it’s 2020, so… 🙁

koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20…

Update! Apparently “The best one is The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and Mrs. Tittlemouse.”

Also, he declared, “I’ve decided to watch just *one* [episode of] Peter Rabbit because it’s a *little* dark out now.” ?

@jeremiahtolbert Or maybe a monolith we can all jump into to escape this worldline and return to the correct one?

Anyone arguing this wasn’t racist is full of crap. It’s obviously racist.

But what I tripped on was that this moron doesn’t realize China ≠ Japan. (He’s using well-known racist stereotypes of Japanese people to mock Chinese people.) https://t.co/bHJnlb6Ajj Note: getting your racist stereotypes “right” in your racist diatribe doesn’t make it “better”—it’s still racist and unacceptable, obviously—but lazily mixing up your racist stereotypes somehow does makes it *worse* and *more racist*.

@nkjemisin I did assume they were set on future-Earth, but it was a very background assumption. (And yeah, I assumed it was a “dying earth” book set in an imagined Earth-future, but hearing otherwise isn’t a shock or anything.) Got book 3 on the way, finally.

@JustinHowe It is great!

@JustinHowe That’s kinda genius!

@JustinHowe @tweetsbymoi @pintsizehorror Someday! (I’ve never read lots of comics but maybe once I have a tablet to read some one…)

If our son’s screen time wasn’t limited, he’d be bingeing the old BBC Peter Rabbit episodes. My mom gave us some of the old DVDs, and now, suddenly, he *loves* them. It’s a nice change of pace from robot fights, Octonauts, and Captain Underpants.
https://t.co/KrekATdVwF The nicest thing is that the series got him interested in the books, and now he spends hours leafing through the Beatrix Potter collection I got him last year. (In between Teen Titans comics, Dog Man, and the endless piles of dinosaur books he plows through every day, of course.)