So, here’s the most recent comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which is probably worth printing out and hanging on your door. Hang it on the inside if you’re the sort of academic who likes to feel sorry for yourself. Hang it on the outside if you’re the sort of academic who gets tired of hearing your colleagues feeling sorry for themselves.
So, the blog over at the Ronin Institute is honored to have its first two posts by Viviane Callier. Viviane got her PhD from Duke, and is currently doing a postdoc at Arizona State University. In her first post, she discusses the actual value of attending scientific meetings. Here’s a taste:
Meetings are a place where you meet new people, and catch up with people you already know. It’s where you meet someone you think you want to work with, and discover that that person is kind and enthusiastic and supportive, or alternatively is a slave-driving egomaniac. And that enables you to make a better-informed choice. It’s also where prospective employers meet prospective employees. After all, I don’t think I would have been hired in my current job, had I not met my employer at a conference a year ago (and that was before I had started looking for a job).
In her second post, she discusses a critical, but often underappreciated, skill in academia (and life, for that matter): asking for stuff.
Her advice came down to: ask for what you want. Most people are happy to give you what you want if they are able to, and if they know what you want. She also advised to practice asking for things – for example, negotiating a free dessert at a restaurant – sometimes people will be happy to give what is asked for, but it is also important to learn that it’s okay when people say “no”.
Drop by and read the full posts, and join in the discussion!
So, do you like free stuff? Do you like the internet? Well, then, you’re in luck! Starting today, you can participate in The YAmazing Race. What is it? Well . . .
This is a sort of blog tour being run by the apocalypsies, a group of authors whose debut middle-grade and young-adult novels are coming out in 2012. [My wife is a member.] The idea is this: you start off at the apocalypsies website, and it will point you to the page of one of the authors. There, you will read a little bit about that author’s book. Then, you’ll follow a link to the next authors’ page, and so on.
Then, you’ll answer a few questions about the books for a chance to win fabulous prizes!
Fabulous prizes!!!
To quote the start page, “We’ve got more booty than a pirate dressed as Jennifer Lopez!”
Note, although it is a “race,” the contest is about accuracy, rather than speed. You’ve got a week. Read the full rules, and get started here.
What do the authors get out of this? Well, the idea, of course, is to generate some exposure for their books.
What do you get out of it? Two things. First, you might win some free books, gift cards, t-shirts, CDs, and so on. Second, you might discover the next book you want to read. Or maybe the next book you want to buy for your fifteen-year-old niece, who is suffering from withdrawal after having finished the Twilight books.
So, as I wrote previously, the Ronin Institute website is now up. Its blog, which you can find here, is being filled in with reposts of Ronin-related things from here. That’s all done now, though, and future posts will be original. Well, maybe I should let you judge whether or not they’re original, but at least they won’t be copied and pasted from previously posted material.
Also, the budding Ronin Institute is starting to go social. I’ve set up pages on Facebook and Google+. Feel free to like/circle them!
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| Ronin socializing at a Quinceañera. They grow up so fast! |
So, here’s the latest ad from the Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. It asks, if you believe that corporations are people, and you make a living by acquiring and dismembering corporations, what does that make you?
So, here’s a little something that will keep you entertained for a couple of hours. Nietzsche Family Circus pairs random Family Circus Panels with random Nietzsche quotations. Try it out here.
Here are a few samples:
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| Die at the right time! |
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| Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined. |
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So, we’re now within three months of the release date of my wife‘s debut middle-grade novel, Remarkable. One of the interesting side benefits of this has been that she has gotten to know a number of other authors whose debut middle-grade or young-adult novels are also coming out this year. One of those other authors is Jessica Spotswood, whose debut young-adult novel, Born Wicked, comes out from Putnam on February 7.
If you want to get a feel for Born Wicked, the publisher has actually put together a trailer, which you can watch here (Apologies. I could not figure out embedding.)
Also, if you hop over to her blog and comment on this post before Sunday, January 15, you will be entered in a drawing to win one of three advance copies of Born Wicked, or an advance copy of one of three other books: Gilt by Katherine Longshore, Harbinger by Sara Wilson Etienne, and Remarkable by the awesome, unparalleled, gorgeous, brilliant, talented, remarkable! Lizzie K. Foley.
So, get on it!!
So, I can’t decide if these are brilliant and beautiful, or weird and creepy.
Oh, right, I almost forgot: both!
This series of portraits by Photographer Hal is called “Flesh Love.” Apparently, these couples were vacuum packed and then photographed. Then, presumably, dissolved in lye and recycled into Soylent Green.
Here’s what Google Translate has to say about the project:
If the lover and hugged, and sometimes I still Shimaitai melted. Because I realize that, for small spaces and Club has taken a couple in a bathtub. Degree of adhesion of the work is moving into something more dense. By increasing the degree of adhesion as a result, the two applications would be an integral part of community. They almost ended up with this couple and vacuum pack. Has teamed up film sets in the home kitchen. Vacuum at times overlap each shot even more, the body bends each other irregularities and joint community started taking the two applications, we want to represent the couple paid to the form. Steadily shrinking the distance between two people, soon to be transformed into one.
While looking at the vacuum pack is jammed full of people LOVE fresh, if we can join hands to go to the link between people who like these two, not by peaceful conflict like war The world must be. Vacuum packing is only just taking me way. It’s important to link it.
You can see the whole series here.
via Laughing Squid.
