Bjorn

To be honest, the thread title grates on me the way almost any internet humor that depends on substituting similar sounding words like that. In other news, France, the bastion of free speech where millions rallied in unity to not be bowed by terrorism. In this country where people shared and published Charlie Hebdo's work far and wide, so that the terrorists could not win. The country to which all have looked for leadership in this moment...has been arresting people for shit they be saying and drawing.

Thanks. She does have a clinical diagnosis, and so is eligible for an assortment of aids, including taking tests in testing centers, extra time, etc. Unfortunately none of those really seem to make much of a difference for her. Her input/output for text is just different than most of the world around her, and all the extra time or a quiet room can only compensate for that so much. The frustrating thing is knowing how little any of this matters once you're out of college. Her mother is extremely dyslexic (worse than her by a fair shot, to the point where she has me copy edit even simple Facebook posts and emails for her sometimes) and she's found success in multiple areas. Her mom did get through college, but took light class loads and didn't really start until her mid-20s when she was a bit more mature. That's another thing that I think makes this really hard for our daughter. She knows her mom made it through this whole process, with less support, and pulled it off. So she's looking at herself and wondering why she can't do it. It also hits her hard because she's in a family with a whole bunch of higher education. Those of us with just bachelor's degrees are the underachievers. There are multiple people with doctorate degrees in the close family (grandparents and uncles/aunts), so there's even higher feelings of failure if she can't get through a bachelor's. It's easier for me to face my own obstacles in life than it is to watch her struggle with hers and feel helpless.

The one with all the red lights staring back at me convinces me the robot apocalypse is closer than I thought.

So, I'm a bit of a loss and would appreciate some thoughts from other people. My daughter is in her third year of college. She transferred from a 4 year university to a 2 year last fall, as things had not gone well for her the first two years, and we thought the smaller school would let her regroup. She's smart, super serious about her studies, a great kid. But she's dyslexic, and tests like shit. Every semester has gone the same, the professors are impressed with her, she starts with A/B grades, and then the midterm and final just wreck her grades. She's changed majors three times, trying to find something that clicks better for her, where the class work matches what she can produce in an academic environment. She got an email today saying she was being put on academic probation. Five semesters of this, and her self esteem and confidence are just getting wrecked. She's moved back home with us to save money. Yeah, shes an adult and not much younger than some of you on here. She's going to have to figure some of this out on her own. But she's looking to her mom and I for advice, and I feel like I'm running out of things to say or do. I'll always be her cheerleader, and support her in whatever decisions she makes. I dropped out of college around her age, and it took me years and years to get my footing back under me. I didn't finally get my bachelor's until I was 30. I was hoping her path would be smoother than mine. Blargh.

I quit DA long before finishing it, but I remember being pretty surprised at how varied its combat could be. I went through one section of the game deciding I was only going to murder enemies with traps. Stealthed, you could nuke whole encounters instantly, even if it did take a bit of time to set up. Without the combat variety, I don't think I would have played it as long as I did.

Kind of depends on what the focus of the degree was. Being able to write and communicate well are skills that are applicable to so many fields. If you know how to market yourself well, an English or Writing degree can be useful.

You might live in hell, but I have to live next door to Missouri.

Normally I don't like stuff about dogs, but this is intriguing.

On postal codes, could it also be an issue with trying to play nice with international shipping companies (both public and private)? I don't ship to Ireland often, but I know I've had a few cases where I had problems getting an address to take in my shipping program because it's relatively non-standard compared to a lot of countries. I'm also dumb and forgot to put my name in. I didn't actually mean to be anonymous.

Spoilering the main part of the post in case anyone's not in the mood to read about something super infuriating about rape. A friend linked me to an academic article from the '60s that's the granddaddy of victim blaming, but with a thin veneer of academia and science.

I don't often walk out of a theater seething mad, but when I do, it's probably a movie with Vin Diesel. Which is weird, I think the guy is pretty cool. But I hate a bunch of his movies.

Thankfully the final entry in Riddick is an unquestionable turd. So there's that.

Curious about contemporary reviews of Crystal Skull, I found this nugget from Ebert:

Who the fuck is my D&D character?

What do you get when you mix sex toys and dogs?

An interesting collection of political cartoons from Arabic/Muslim publications showing solidarity with the victims of Charlie Hebdo.

I absolutely love Pacific Rim, because it's ridiculous and fun, but manages to do all that without being dumb or offensive in the way a lot of action movies are.

Seconded on the thanks, one of the things I know I haven't seen enough of are perspectives from the French (or at least not ones that I could read, since I'm not fluent in French).

FWIW, I appreciate you having joined these boards. These forums are honestly the only really good long form discussions I've ever had online with people I don't already know offline, and you've been a welcome addition to those conversations. On the general subject, I fall on the "social media is a double edged sword" line of thought. Yes, there are major fucking problems with it. But it's also introduced me to ideas, perspectives and people I wouldn't otherwise know. It's allowed me to maintain relationships that otherwise would have lagged, to the detriment of my life.

To be fair, it's arguable that the thread title is more in keeping with the philosophy of Charlie Hebdo than treating it with dire respect would be. I mean, CH traded on being purposefully shitty and offensive, at least sometimes in the face of other people's tragedies. Second, the issue is in people celebrating or praising a publication that in any other context would be decried as racist. It's possible to decry the murders without lionizing the content. To mourn the dead without canonizing them. But in a lot of places, that isn't what's been happening. The content is being heralded as the pinnacle of free speech. At the start of this thread, I was skeptical that CH was as bad as one or two posts on the Internet were making it out to be, mostly because I had never even heard of it before this week and I know better than to jump to any conclusions because of what one person on the Internet wrote (thus fitting into the dumb white liberal willing to preach about free speech). But as the week has gone on, more knowledge has been spread about CH and a bunch of people's reaction to the work has been to praise and propagate it, I've come around. People's reactions to this have been shitty. Period. Atrocities happen to innocent people every fucking day. In corners of the world most of us don't even know exist. And yet we have no grief, rage or even care about those people. But some Europeans who drew shitty cartoons die, and the western world loses its fucking mind. Like, have people not been paying attention to the awful shit going on around the world for...a long fucking time. Like how the student activists in Mexico were murdered, by cartels who are mostly funded by Americans. Where were the signs that read, "We are Mexican students who wanted to make our country better." I guess that's not the kind of free speech people worry about protecting. The kind of free speech by young, not-white kids trying to change the world. No, we need to worry about the racist old fucks and their shitty cartoons. Point being, thanks for posting that man. It actually did clarify the thoughts going around my head. Edited to add: This post is much angrier sounding than what I usually try to write here. But the comparison between the massacred students in Mexico versus the massacred satirists in France got stuck in my head earlier today and has been rolling around there building up steam. If you want to talk about courageous heroes of free speech, just look to the activists and journalists trying to do good work in that country. Those folks know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are risking their lives. Every single day. And yet a bunch of them manage to keep pressing on. And you know the violence there is silencing so many people. And a bunch of the people worked up about Charlie Hebdo have given little to no thought to people like those students. Their peers aren't getting hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep pressing their work forward. No one is holding signs with their names. And the more I thought about that comparison, the angrier I got at some of the rhetoric that has been going around this week.

Damn, I had some eBay Bucks, and was going to make a bid on it just for the fun of it, but it's already $125. New listing if anyone is curious (still NSFW). Also, on the "reading comprehension" skills of KiA, a bunch of them got mad at this Polygon article about the animator for Mass Effect originally starting with a female model, thus proving FemShep is the real Shep.

Oh, no need to google, that's what bookmarks are.

That's a good way of stating it. In other news, the media fund Google was obligated to create in France (long story) is going to be making a $300,000 payment to CH, and a bunch of other media outlets and companies are also looking to chip in money, both to keep it operating and to fund next week's 1 million copy print run. If it ends up displaying more of the racist caricatures they seem known for (which seems plausible), it will be interesting to see the response to other companies and organizations funding the print run.

Waitaminutehere...if I irritate gg enough, they'll mail me a dildo? I mean, who doesn't need an extra dildo laying around, even if it's just for decoration (cause I'm not going to use one that some stranger sent me in the mail). Here's a reddit post that collected a bunch of Twitter links about the dildo (reddit link is safe, Twitter link, obviously NSFW). And here's the eBay auction itself (again, NSFW). That auction will probably be killed within the next day or two, as it violates the community guidelines. Even as an autographed item, it probably has to go in the semi-hidden Adult category. Edited to add: And yep, got killed within a few hours: