Also, for all the newbie professors out there: a syllabus is not just a greeting and a list of assignments. If you haven't given your students AT LEAST your office hours, your late work policy, and your preferred method of being contacted, then you have not given your students a syllabus it's just sparkling announcements.

But really. Sir. SIR. You teach Speech 100. This is one of the most basic classes with like, 20 of the most widely available accepted textbooks and you want me to pay sixty dollars for a pdf of a book that you rewrite every semester so that there are no previous editions?

Buddy this is interpersonal communication, not introductory rhetoric. Why is one of your *four* total assignments about Socrates?

Maybe it's the fact that I've taken Spch 100 interpersonal communication three times already, maybe it's the fact that I grew up with somebody who taught Spch 100 interpersonal communication from 1981 to 2018, but buddy what the fuck are you doing?

"Some of our lectures will only be available for 24 hours so it is up to you to stay on top of it."

Friend, you are teaching an asynchronous online 100-level class at a community college during a pandemic. Get off your high horse, a third of your students are probably parents. There is no reason whatsoever to limit access to course materials to 24 hours unless you are doing it to be a controlling asshole.

Also YOU published your class a day and a half late! You don't get to publish your class late with an incomplete syllabus and tell students to "stay on top of it." Especially not since that means that people have two fewer days to buy your PDF textbook and only one full day to prepare for your mandatory 1pm on a Tuesday zoom meeting!

Why do you require me to have access to a printer for an online class? Oh yeah it's because you expect me to print out and draw on sections of your $60 ebook.

SIR. No thank you.

Kids, new students: this is a level of bullshit and disorganization from a professor that you do not have to put up with. This is a neatly ordered series of red flags that say "this professor is going to be absolutely unbearable."

"This Class Is Not A Safe Space"

"Discussion question: If you are MALE say four things that you think females normally say. If you are FEMALE say four things that you think males normally say."

Prager U vid is one of three total resources on the topic of climate

Chris Rock "How to keep from getting your ass kicked by the police" video as part of the "conflict resolution" unit

Democratic-Capitalism-Exceeds-Socialism-in-Economic-Efficiency-as-Well-as-in-Morality-by-Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali.pdf (Paper by the Hoover Institution)

This uncredited image:

The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism - Scientific American.pdf

A video on the "proven" techniques of how to spot a lie from the author who owns this webpage (time to update your security certs, Pamela):

And just for shits and giggles, the first assignment is due one month into the semester so you'll have no idea what his grading style is until well past the add/drop date and that assignment is the only one that requires the $60 pdf textbook that he wrote. This is HIS description of that assignment:

Purpose – To check that the student has completed initial tasks; included, but not limited to: 1. Having access to the textbook. 2. Demonstrating that the student has interacted with the text. 3. Reading and understanding the text.

Buddy.

No.

Every department has That One Fucking Asshole who everyone wants to see gone but students tend to complain about personalities or "why is my speech teacher assigning an economic ethics paper published by a conservative think-tank funded by the Waltons" and that is not how it's done. The administration may agree that he's an asshole, but "he's an asshole" isn't a good enough reason not to renew someone's contract and go through the time and effort to bring in a new hire.

So you get them on bureaucratic shit. "Published his course late," "did not provide office hours," "did not provide a way to communicate and did not respond to calls, emails, or canvas messages," "set required meeting times for asynchronous courses" - THIS is the shit that the administration can pin a professor to the wall on because it isn't student said vs. Professor said.

He came in midnight, who can describe his beauty,

As soon as I beheld him I was filled with joy,

Who, your husband?

No, the moon.

✦

Kept him on my bosom the entire night,

And tasted his various flavours thoroughly;

At dawn, I removed him.

You mean your beloved?

No dear, a necklace!

✦

I was lying on the bed, when he appeared in my eyes, 

Oh, he let me have such fun on the bed, 

Who should I tell my fun now. 

Was it the beloved?

No dear, a dream!

✦

When he enters my bedroom buzzing,

He approaches and wakes me up,

As if whispering the mantra of parting.

Who, your lover?

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).

We know they had remarkable vision.

We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.

We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.

We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it's colors, and it's tail rings (which one would argue would be it's "iconic feature."

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We've found pigmentation in scales and skin. We've completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We've figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by "accident" by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it's life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from "rocks" than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is "We can't possibly know anything about these animals," then you don't understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They're only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as "proof" that paleontologists don't know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)

Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).

What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….

yeah. corporations just want our money.

but here’s the thing: once upon a time, they didn’t. they didn’t sell to us. they were just as greedy but we were so beneath them they didn’t want money if it came from us. they asked us to leave the store. they refused to bake cakes for us. they refused to rent or sell us housing. a lot of queer kids were made homeless or DIED because they thought it’d always be that way, that the world would always hate us.

corporations being sluts for our money, and openly showing the homophobes that they prefer our money over theirs, is a GOOD THING and a sign of progress and I will die on that hill.

absolutely support small businesses and indies. but Jesus don’t flat out refuse to give money to a corporation for celebrating pride, because that’s what the homophobes literally want people to do and in this dystopic society you (and I’m dying inside as I say this) NEED corporations on your side because of the sheer scale of their influence. WE NEED THAT INFLUENCE.

Some of it is even more recent. The epidemic of queer children suicides hitting the news? That was last decade. It’d been going on for much longer than that but at one point our fight had progressed enough the media started reporting on it and the suicides even went up for a while, and I was on tumblr when that happened, that’s how recent it is.

So how can I sneer at corporations showing support widely when kids dying used to be normal?

I can’t even fully attribute the motivations corporations rainbowing up their logo as completely for money. There’s probably queer people who put their jobs on the line and fought for the company to DO that.

So whenever I see someone going “UGH the corporations are pandering to us again”?

that’s

that’s a good thing!!!! how is that NOT a good thing???

If a company is rainbowing their logo up but doing homophobic shit behind closed doors, the answer is not for them to stop rainbowing up their logo, but to stop doing the homophobic shit.

including the very real lyrics “oh, we’ll emasculate him slowly/all the better to enjoy/how delicious to humiliate the boy”

Disney why

So Hungary, as you may've heard, has put out some anti-LGBT legislation that would ban the depiction or promotion of homosexuality to people under 18. It's not quite law yet but it's just got to get through their president Viktor Orban who is, unfortunately, a shit.

Meanwhile, football, no the other kind of football- the one with the round ball, is currently having a big European tournament. Euro 2020. Yeah, they didn't rename it. Doesn't matter. Germany were due to play Hungary last night in Munich and they asked the governing body of the tournament for permission to light up the stadium in a rainbow. Like this:

But they said no. Specifically, they said no while dressed in a rainbow pfp and claiming that the rainbow isn't a political symbol:

And Germany, bless them, looked at that and said, ooh bitch it's on now.

Munich city hall got out the banners

Here are the fans going to the match

The German captain Manuel Neuer in his rainbow armband (which UEFA had previously made noises about disciplining him for, because they're bastards all around)

A brief selection of the many stadiums across Germany that lit up in solidarity

And last but not least this absolute madlad who ran onto the pitch during Hungary's anthem

"Say you've never read Sandman without saying you've never read Sandman."