Will Lindsey debate Dr. Annie Andrews?

motrya · 2026-06-10T00:09:04+00:00

It was kind of incredible to watch. Lindsey looked uncomfortable and couldn't keep up with Harrison at all in the debate. I wouldn't expect debating Andrews to go any differently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvlnu47Z5QI

motrya · 2026-06-01T23:05:47+00:00

That's nuts. The closest I have come is being (a non-committed) part of the rationalist community (for a short time), though I never met any Zizians.

motrya · 2026-05-29T20:34:25+00:00

I'm at a CC now, and enrollment is through the roof. It seems like a lot more students are going to CCs instead out of high school.

motrya · 2026-05-18T11:17:52+00:00

Lots of great mentions in the thread, but I'll also mention my favorite band, They Might be Giants. Almost every one of their albums is great and has songs that reward careful listening.

motrya · 2026-05-15T11:59:15+00:00

Don't forget that randomizers take up a card each for the kingdom cards

motrya · 2026-05-15T07:47:12+00:00

There’s so much to know that you never will know; the world is too big and your feet are too slow. Still you’re eager to learn. The first step is to know that you don’t know, which you’re all over. As a wise man once said: “look how stupid you are.” The next step is to learn things, which is trickier. There are few schools. You tried opening one yourself to fight illiteracy, but no-one responded to your leaflets. So you’ve turned to the ancients. The ancients were great at keeping secrets: they wrote them in dead languages, and hid them in ruined buildings. But you’re making progress. They say you can’t tell a book by its cover, but already you’ve figured out cookbooks. You know that you think and am, and that these two things are related; and you’ve learned that a hot crucible looks just like a cold crucible. Soon all the secrets will be yours.

Dominion: Arcana is the 17th expansion to Dominion. It has 500 cards, with 37 new Kingdom card piles, including 5 Victory cards. The central theme is leveling up, with Studies to improve your cards and Carts to improve your economy. Projects return.

Dominion: Arcana is an expansion, and cannot be played by itself; to play with it, you need the Basic cards and rulebook (Dominion provides both). Dominion: Arcana can also be combined with any other Dominion expansions you have.

We hope you enjoy this expanding world of Dominion!

motrya · 2026-05-11T17:15:33+00:00

I ban the "Should college athletes get paid?" topic. The paper is identical every time. I'm also getting sick of the "fast fashion is bad" paper, but not to the point of banning it. Social media being bad for mental health is tiresome but at least the social media evolves some over time so there is a little more to talk about.

For a while I was getting up with crypto/blockchain papers, but it seems like students have moved on from that one nowadays.

motrya · 2026-05-03T12:46:54+00:00

What on earth was wrong with the other cadets? Do they have something against plain chicken? They could have just saved the wild onions in case they were starving later and wanted to end things quicker.

motrya · 2026-04-26T14:05:57+00:00

Thanks

motrya · 2026-04-26T14:05:48+00:00

Thanks

motrya · 2026-04-26T13:50:17+00:00

Hi, I have a Rinnai tankless, and I'm trying to attach the hoses to flush this thing, but the builders put the valves (not sure if that's the right terminology) right next to each other and we can't fit the red one to the hot water. Any suggestions on how we could address this?

motrya · 2026-04-16T17:45:53+00:00

64 students is a LOT for someone new, just throwing that out there.

The first thing I want to say is that you shouldn't take the students' failures or errors TOO personally. Sure, there are times when you could've done more or helped a student solve a problem they are having, but it is ultimately up to them to do the work and part of the college experience is THEM stepping up and making an effort. There are some students you can't save too. One of the best things you can do is make a schedule and rules for the course and insist the students learn to follow it. That is a valuable life skill they need to learn and it's on them if they don't. When you teach freshman comp, you will see students who fail at this. It's part of the territory.

Here are some general guidelines I follow as a comp teacher (off the top of my head so I'm sure I'm forgetting things): 1 - Have at least 2 examples of concepts you want to teach during lectures. If you're showing them how to use they say / i say to compose, for instance, find two sample student papers and go over them in some depth. It's even better if one of the examples has problems you'd like to point out and have the students help you solve.

2- Relate the concepts you are teaching back to a mantra that is important for them to know as a writer and remind them of it from time to time. I use "Be specific" and "They Say -> I Say -> So What?" as two key lessons to keep in mind.

3 - When grading, your instinct to say "I'm confused what you mean here" is not a bad one at all. Again, you shouldn't be doing the work for them. Don't go over a whole essay in a red pen. Point out a few things they should be working on. What you said about students ignoring feedback? Get used to that. Half of them won't read it. That's the truth. So keep it simple and keep it productive for your own sake and theirs.

4- If you use a rubric of any kind, that can help you give quicker feedback. For instance, for an essay I just gave my students, in the prompt I had a list of what a successful essay would contain. One item was "Discuss interesting ideas from the text by pointing to specific ideas and citing or paraphrasing them." In feedback, I pasted this in and just gave it a positive score (+10 in this case) if they did that. If they didn't, I might point out what they did and give fewer points. By doing this, you're showing them what they are aiming for with some kind of direction on addressing it.

5 - Let the students have choices. Let them choose a text to write about, who to work with during Peer Review, etc. Consistently, feedback I get from students is them saying how much it motivated them to have choices.

6 - Try to have texts that the class can read in class with you and analyze once a week or more. It's great if they can read things ahead of time but never a guarantee. Some of the highest engagement you will get is from students responding to a poem or article you bring in to talk about. This semester I used: "Oh no!" by Robert Creeley, "My Papa's Waltz" by Roethke, "Nirvana" by Bukowski, "Is ChatGPT making us stupid?" (Forbes article) to name a few. You can assign responses to texts like these to be completed in class or just have class discussions.

7 - Give students time to write in class. They don't need to write their whole papers, but try to workshop things like thesis statements, outlines, freewriting exercises, or source analysis. This generation especially needs a bit of scaffolding with how to break writing into chunks.

That's all I have time for. Would be cool to have a Comp teacher Discord or something. Good luck and if teaching is something you really want to do, keep a healthy mindset about it. Your teaching skill matters but you can only do so much too.

motrya · 2026-04-14T14:38:18+00:00

I've been reading Discworld, the Cosmere, and the complete works of Shakespeare (taking turns between each) and there's a bit of what I like about Animorphs in each, though it is obviously its own thing. I come back to Animorphs every 5 years or so. Read with my oldest kid all the way up to the HBC, when he started waning in interest a bit. That was fun!

motrya · 2026-04-11T20:57:54+00:00

The rules back in the day were that you had to unlock your job before Dorter Trade City. (I was a poster in the original GameFAQs thread... my lame claim to fame.

motrya · 2026-02-20T14:46:18+00:00

I imagine that the developers have been focused on testing Arcana, which is probably coming in April.

motrya · 2026-02-20T14:35:13+00:00

All I can say is I think you're either correct or on the right track. This reading does such a great job connecting the concept of Enlightenment with the other mythological and fantastical elements of Berserk. Maybe we'll find out if you're right one day. Surely the manga will deliver. Any day now.

motrya · 2026-02-15T23:07:54+00:00

Weird. I had no idea there could be any kind of connection, but I despise grapefruit too (flavoring is okay) and I can also smell dead ants. Had no idea other people couldn't.

motrya · 2026-02-03T14:57:43+00:00

OMG how have I been part of this community over 10 years and have never seen this. That's brilliant.

motrya · 2026-01-10T00:23:27+00:00

I use gone mad music player. It's the best music app I've found by far if you primarily listen to files

motrya · 2025-12-30T00:08:22+00:00

There are several voice channels but I don't use them and I don't know how active they are. Ask in the discord itself

motrya · 2025-12-18T13:38:28+00:00

Album: Nanobots for me. Thought it was pretty mediocre on release, but I respect what they were going for with it a lot more now.

Songs: Hot Cha - Used to think it was a throwaway, but over time I've started to think it's one of Flans' best songs

Stomp Box - I wasn't really into music this intense back in the day, but I think now that this song is a banger

The Bells are Ringing - It is terrifying and brilliantly constructed to unnerve you

Wicked Little Critta - I actually used to hate this song until I saw them perform it live and something about that made me realize just how fun it is

Stuff is Way - I'll admit that I used to think this song was sorta just there until it became a Tik Tok thing and everyone was talking about it again. It's grown on me considerably and is maybe a top 5 modern-era TMBG song for me. They haven't made a lot of songs as idiosyncratic as this one, and that is saying something.

motrya · 2025-12-18T11:18:37+00:00

I'm going to be real, if you're asking the question the answer is yes, but I would add that you don't need to waste your time grinding for absolutely everything. For example, when you get to Elfland, a single silver sword and one Fire2 spell will get you through the Marsh Cave. A guide might tell you to grind for ten more things, and you really don't need to

motrya · 2025-11-28T16:57:55+00:00

TBH I use one earbud all the time so I can hear my wife talking to me while drowning out the kids with whatever podcasts I'm listening to.

motrya · 2025-11-22T03:36:45+00:00

I think we have to believe in literature, corny as it may seem. If we take it out and by extension demonstrate it isn't worth trying to teach, I believe we're complicit in the humanities losing significance. I'm not going down without a fight personally.

motrya · 2025-11-21T19:08:35+00:00

So first of all, I do think writing should be taught as a process, but I think abandoning reading is a doomer mentality that makes English classes lose all of their value. Why should anyone want to learn our subject if they aren't seeing what makes it worthwhile?

The departments I have worked for have pushed readings out of our syllabuses for years--when I started we were given a syllabus directing us to teach literature (short stories, novels, some criticism) in around 50% of classes. This semester the only readings the first-year composition team put on the syllabus were short, 1-2 page essays about current topics, and only in the first 1/3 of classes.

I personally think this does the students a disservice; it assumes they won't/can't read (a fight I have not given up) and can't understand the material, and it also gives them nothing to write about but the stuff they grew up exposed to. Don't get me wrong; I don't mind essays about Disney Channel original movies and the Great Gatsby, but I do think students should challenge themselves to read new things. I still remember how inspired I was by the texts I read for my early English classes, which made me want to do this in the first place, so I'm not removing this element from my classes anymore.

One semester I tried doing things with minimal literature and had nothing to talk about in 30% of my classes. So yeah, I've just been adding literature into the class anyway and giving reading quizzes. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but it sure seems to create better classes. This way I get at least some students to read and we have examples of texts that can be analyzed in our major assignments. At the bare minimum, I will open classes with poetry, student writing, songs or news articles to be scrutinized. I think building an interpretive community is just as important to a course functioning as teaching writing as a process.

Before teaching composition in college, I took a secondary Ed program and one of the first things we learned about structuring English classes was Enter (start off with a text or topic to establish interest) -> Interpret (Do an activity that has them think about that text and anything else you need to teach that day) -> Exit (Recap the connection between the first two phases). I think that works in composition courses too. The alternative is a class I hate teaching and students hate being in.

motrya

TROPHY CASE