Subject: Quiz Bowl
Author:
Posted on: 2017-05-27 01:29:00 UTC
The National Quiz Bowl competition is this weekend in New Orleans. I dropped my oldest off this morning for the trip. Go Cyclones! Plus, New Orleans!
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Friday Forum: A Long Time Ago... by
on 2017-05-26 10:46:00 UTC
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Yep, we're back again. This is the thread for you - whether you be the newest member (that'd be laggycat) or the oldest oldbie (hi, Kaitlyn!) to talk about the week we've just had. Discuss anything and everything, and remember to have fun!
Please remember that, when it comes to the state of the world, not everyone will agree with you. You're free to state, discuss, and defend your viewpoint (provided it does not violate the Constitution), but please don't use that fact to attack others.
Fandom News
(Link)
This week is the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Wars: A New Hope. In honour of that, Vanity Fair released an anniversary edition, complete with four gorgeous covers featuring the cast of The Last Jedi. We have one with Rey and Luke on their island, one of helmetless!Phasma, scarred!Kylo, and slimy!Hux, one of Poe, Finn, BB-8, and new character Rose Tico... and one of General Leia Organa. Dangit, now I'm sad again. :(
Silly News
(Old books & old phones)
Eight years ago, someone borrowed a book by Roderick Bailey from Dudley library, in England. This week, they finally returned it... to Boone County library, Kentucky, USA.
Nobody knows how or why this happened, it's really surreal. Dudley library's theory is that they were worried about the overdue fine - but as they point out, that's actually capped at £4 anyway. ^_^ (You'll be pleased to know they've said Boone County can keep the book.)
Meanwhile, Nokia are even more out of date - they've just made a new version of a phone they phased out in 2005. Yes, the 3310 is back, complete with rubber buttons, no touchscreen, and... Snake! Well, I'm sold. :D
Serious News
(Link)
On Monday evening, a concert in Manchester, England, was attacked by a suicide bomber. 22 people died, mostly young people, including one eight-year-old.
The UK terror threat level has been raised to critical, and the police have made at least eight arrests connected with the attack. Meanwhile, there's been controversy: the bomber's name was shared with the US government, and leaked to the US media despite the police not being ready for it to be made public yet. Photos of evidence from the crime scene have also been leaked in the same way; coming on the back of Trump's provision of highly classified intelligence to Russia (which is widely accepted as having burned a key intel source), it's no surprise that we've now chosen to stop sharing any information on the attack with America.
The (suspected) bomber, Salman Abedi, was 22 years old, British-born and of Libyan descent. I have absolutely no idea what has to be going through your mind to lead you to blow yourself up to kill children, and frankly, I'm glad I don't understand it. I don't want to.
In some ways, this is worse than the 7/7 attack back in '05. That had a higher death toll, but at least it felt like an attack on infrastructure - it struck at the trains, the buses, trying to paralyse the capital. This... is just horrific.
Not News
Just one of the many moments from the party I threw, inspired by this conversation with Iximaz. :)
hS -
Music recommendation. by
on 2017-05-28 02:30:00 UTC
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVBT6wktF5E
Probably safe for work.
Reminds me of the Battle of Helm's Deep, a little.
I read the Futhark on the cd cover once. Part of it is "Bring me my broadsword, bring me my cross." -
Help scientists by looking at pictures of cute penguins! by
on 2017-05-28 02:15:00 UTC
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Yes, really.
Seriously, it's pretty fun to do, and it helps science- so like, what are you waiting for? Classify those penguins! -
I have clicked on many penguins. by
on 2017-05-30 17:51:00 UTC
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It was fun. I mean, seeing a ton of very similar snow-and-rock pictures in between the penguin pictures was less fun, but when the penguins show up...boy, do they ever show up. Also, I can't believe there's a penguin type called Macaroni.
~Z -
I have helped! by
on 2017-05-30 13:55:00 UTC
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I looked at 15 images, and... 2 of them had penguins in. :-/ But I helped!
hS -
Not important. by
on 2017-05-27 04:13:00 UTC
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I don't remember what year it was, but I remember playing snake and trying to read a LotR paperback in my car because we weren't supposed to work when it was raining. (The team of us were to photograph every house in the county.)
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Quiz Bowl by
on 2017-05-27 01:29:00 UTC
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The National Quiz Bowl competition is this weekend in New Orleans. I dropped my oldest off this morning for the trip. Go Cyclones! Plus, New Orleans!
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9th at Nationals! by
on 2017-05-30 19:09:00 UTC
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So the first two days of the tournament are qualifying rounds to get into the final tournament. They played six games and had to win at least four to get into the finals. They won five of the six. One of only three teams to do so. The next day is single elimination, and they lost in the first round, but that still put them at ninth. It is so exciting, and he has one more year to try again.
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I'm writing my fic again! by
on 2017-05-26 22:49:00 UTC
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I have a RWBY fic on AO3 that's been lagging for a while, but I finally got back into the swing of writing it!
Also, I have never responded to one of these before, so I don't know how they work, exactly.
When I was like five years old snake was the COOLEST thing to me. Also, so were cellphones, because I was five and they had all of these BUTTONS. -
I started a ridiculously long fanfic project! (nm) by
on 2017-05-26 20:27:00 UTC
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Me too, strangely enough. (nm) by
on 2017-05-27 00:31:00 UTC
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My reactions, as usual by
on 2017-05-26 16:16:00 UTC
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To the fandom news:<br>So Rey gets trained? Wouldn't that be useless, since she already uses the Force better than Luke did before he was trained? ;P<br><br>Not-so-stealthy stabbing aside, Wikia's Fandom newsfeed has an article about how Wookieepedia came to be. It's a really interesting story; I'll put a link below my signature.<br><br>Funny story, when I saw Kylo take off his helmet, I expected his face to be all messed up like Vader's, so it was a definite surprise when he turned out to be completely fine and in fact rather handsome. I made a Scratch project out of it that day and made several people laugh.<br><br> To the Silly News:<br>What in the?! I have no words for either of these! XD<br><br> To the somewhat humorous part of the Serious News:<br>Yup, we Americans can't keep our mouths shut about anything, especially any real-life occurrences that we can compare to fiction in any way. Life is a giant action movie when you're an American (or at least a stereotypical one), and we love spoiling everything for everyone. (Haha, I'm thinking Hetalia thoughts while I'm typing this. Hetalia makes everything better.)<br><br> To the psychological part of the Serious News:<br>It's kind of the same stuff behind every other terrorist attack, or really anything destructive in general - for some reason or another, you feel as if the target deserves to suffer, and you feel it strongly enough that you put effort into actually making them suffer beyond bullying or harassing, instead of just fantasizing as teenagers are wont to do (part of why DAVD exists is teens writing fanfic about making their enemies suffer in the most gruesome and painful way possible). I'm guessing the target here was something along the lines of the world itself, otherwise he would have been aiming for infrastructure like the 7/7 you mentioned or important buildings like 9/11 over here. Whether there was any mental disorder under all of this is not clear to me, since he was 22 and studies show that the human brain does not fully develop to adulthood until age 25. He could have just been immature and really, really fed up with life. Who knows - I'm not a psychologist or anything, I just find it interesting to examine people's motives.<br><br> To the Not News:<br>The Vader facepalm, though.<br><br>-Twistey<br><br>Star Wars anniversary article/the story of Wookieepedia: <a href="http://fandom.wikia.com/articles/40-years-star-wars-lore?src=swm">http://fandom.wikia.com/articles/40-years-star-wars-lore?src=swm</a><br><br>"Kylo Ren in a Nutshell", in case anyone wants to watch: <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/92928830/">https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/92928830/</a><br><br>The studies I'm citing in the psychological thing: <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164708">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164708</a> -
More on the psychology (Long!) by
on 2017-05-26 17:14:00 UTC
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(This is probably going to come out wrong and make me sound really messed up, but we'll go with it.)
Part of why most of us don't understand why someone would do something like that is because we're lucky enough to be in a state of mind where we see other humans for what they are - people with feelings and thoughts. In order to conduct one of these attacks, often times the attacker has to lose sight of their target's humanity before they follow through with the attack, otherwise they'd just talk themselves out of it. (Although there are some cases where the person does the thing, heavily regrets it, and then does something to sabotage themselves, usually suicide, although there are some cases where the killer kills themselves for a different reason and ahhh it's just complicated.) While these kinds of attacks are indeed very dastardly actions, it doesn't take as twisted of a mindset as people think, let alone pure evil - we're all pretty much human, and everything we do is for a reason (which is why characters need reasons too. Psychology and fanfic go hand in hand! :D). No one is an entirely good or bad person, and thus morality is purely based on comparison, whether to the average, to another famous figure, or to one's own ideals. When enough people agree that the bad actions outweigh the good, judging based upon deeds and spoken words, they are deemed dangerous and are dealt with as such.
Argh, there's a lot more that I want to say, but that'd make for a really long post, and it's hard to put it into more words. The human brain is a strange contraption, and as we develop as a species, it will continue to get stranger.
-Twistey -
I started writing a novel this week! (nm) by
on 2017-05-26 16:15:00 UTC
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Awesome! (nm) by
on 2017-05-26 20:02:00 UTC
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I said this in the chat last night but... by
on 2017-05-26 12:25:00 UTC
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One of the victims of the Manchester attack went to my uni. Is very sad
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re: Star Wars by
on 2017-05-26 12:20:00 UTC
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Weirdly, the thing that caught my attention the most in your Star Wars post (at 3 A.M, in my defense) is that Captain Phasma is actually coming back. I rather figured she was just going to be in The Force Awakens, and disappear. Then again, I seem to have it in my mind that her actor is a fairly big name? But I'm not aware enough of Earth happenings to know who that is, or even if I'm correct in thinking that—but if I am right, it makes sense they would want her to continue appearing.
I wonder if she'll be a minor role again, or if she's going to become a personal nemesis for Poe—a Boba Fett to his Solo, as it were?
I would love muchly for that old style of phone to come back in style. I hate having a fragile mini-laptop in my pocket all day at work, having to keep it from bending or getting wet every moment. My older phone was much more durable. Then again, I do need the weather app to know the day's high temperature, so I know which animals need their misters turned on on a given work day. '~' Guess I can't always get what I want, but if I try sometimes, I just might find I've got what the animals need.
—doctorlit still thinks cell phone developers need to prioritize high durability over low weight and small size. -
Captain Phasma by
on 2017-05-26 14:39:00 UTC
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I was kind of surprised that Phasma did so little in TFA, after having been hyped up so much. I am glad she is back, because it means they can fix that.
Also, Gwendoline Christi, who plays Phasma, is no stranger to armor. She also plays Brienne of Tarth in HBO's Game of Thrones.
-Phobos