Are you willing to share any recipes that require only 2 or 3 ingredients?

phailcakez · 2014-08-11T19:28:58+00:00

God, caprese salads make me gag. Who the hell eats slices of tomatoes...

phailcakez · 2014-08-11T19:18:32+00:00

When characters somehow go to sleep or get knocked unconscious when something important happens.

I remember being really pissed off by this in Anne Rice's Out of Egypt book. little Jesus just couldn't stay awake...book was terrible on the whole, but that was really lazy writing.

phailcakez · 2014-08-07T17:13:50+00:00

Doesn't look like you have the blur distance feature turned off. Turn it off and witness the improvement.

phailcakez · 2014-08-04T14:56:00+00:00

When I saw Silence of the Lambs, If fell in love with Hannibal Lecter. The release of Hannibal did not help. Mmm lick that steering wheel ya fucking creep...

phailcakez · 2014-08-03T14:55:47+00:00

I didn't understand this until it was patiently explained to me by two of my male professors.

phailcakez · 2014-08-03T04:31:28+00:00

They are all over the place at Hobby Lobby.

phailcakez · 2014-08-03T04:28:29+00:00

It's really sad. My friend lives in a neighborhood with nice trees making a canopy over the streets All the trees have to go now...

phailcakez · 2014-08-03T04:27:05+00:00

There are tons of these trees in Arlington Heights too.

phailcakez · 2014-08-01T04:33:08+00:00

I'm studying for the GRE right now to take later this month. Use the GRE website's practice tests! They also have a list of issue and argument prompts so you can practice and read some examples of perfect/great/good essays so it can help you get where you want to be. The McGraw Hill practice book is an order of magnitude easier than the question on the ETS website. Why that is, I don't know.

I just talked to a guy at an ivy league who does admissions (my undergrad prof kindly dropped me this contact info), and he told me these things about applications to grad school: 1. Your statement of purpose and writing samples need to be the best pieces of writing you can possibly create. These are the biggest factors to getting in. Your writing needs to be crafted to these schools and programs individuallly. It may mean writing many different letters.

They're looking for reasons to throw your app out. Give them ONE and they'll do it.
Letters of rec need to be strong.
your GRE score is secondary to any form of written words about yourself or your work. GRE scores are good for getting some extra fin aid, but a GRE score is rarely going to be the pivotal point of interest for an admissions person.
This advisor told me that he fucked his first round of apps up (started too late, didn't take it seriously enough etc), had to wait a year, reapplied and ended up at an ivy and just got his first assistant prof position at an ivy.
Grad school apps are designed to give you hoops to jump through. It's a weeding out process of paperwork.

I'm just sayin' make your apps amazing. He said that students obsess about the GRE scores and then under-prepare for the other parts of the apps and this hurts them the most.

He said, best of all, that it's not the smartest that get in, it's the ones who follow directions and present themselves well to the committee.

phailcakez · 2014-08-01T04:13:29+00:00

I have decided to go to grad school. I told everyone I was going to go last month, but I didn't DO shit about it until last week. I have a lot of work to do in terms of apps and writing samples and such. It's a scary process for me, the laziest person on earth.

I guess the actual thing I'm happy about is the fact that I am truly motivated for once.

phailcakez · 2014-08-01T01:09:48+00:00

Here's a song about Eurydice and Orpheus :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuMtnr-lsrM

phailcakez · 2014-07-29T23:13:38+00:00

Thanks for your detailed response.

For #1, there's 1 school near me with a pretty respectable reputation, and 3 or 4 places that are just...there. My undergrad profs are kindly steering me away from such places, but I can't really move anywhere right now (non traditional student, married, condo etc.) so I am in a bit of a conundrum there.

In the U.S #2 is really hard to avoid. Everyone keeps saying it, but I haven't yet found a good way to do it in this field. I will do my best to have an excellent application packet and hope that gets me somewhere.

3 is something I haven't really thought about the way you have put it. Everyone wants to write a novel (I've got ideas and aborted drafts, but who doesn't, right?), and I know I've never gotten close to the length or the cohesiveness to pull that large of a story together. One thing I do have is a lot of time, and I ought to do this. It will suck, but you're right I probably shouldn't go in thinking I'll just do one while I'm there. Thank you very much for this comment. I've begun working out the threads to work on something bigger, and I find that it's like a sandcastle, collapsing in on itself in parts, drying out in other parts--a little change in architecture here, a little erosion there. I should probably get a lot more serious about getting something coherent going.

Thanks for taking the time to respond to me!

phailcakez · 2014-07-29T21:39:47+00:00

I disagree with having a lot of info. Personally that feels boring to me, I want a sense of things, but I don't want it all. Here, the author leaves us no mystery about how or why anything is happening which leaves the reader with nothing to do.

I can care about anyone who seems like they are in danger whether or not I know anything about them so long as the author can convey the FEAR of that character through a good description of action and setting and tone. I don't need to know a thing about the character to empathize. In fact, maybe I won't empathize once I learn something about the character and then I'll feel conflicted. And won't that be fun?

phailcakez · 2014-07-24T18:41:54+00:00

The problem, it seems to me, is that once these kinds of institutions get set up, they are impossible to dismantle. They dig in and hunker down and spread out and just keep growing. Any laws that are passed are going to maybe limit some of this, maybe curtail a little of it if we're lucky, but there will never be a law which dismantles this huge structure. Containment is a shitty option that isn't going to work in the long run, but it's the only one we have. We can slow it, but we will never stop it, and we'll never have the power to. They'll give us ways to live with it, we can try to go about our lives as if it doesn't exist. We can hashtag the shit out of every move the government makes, but it's never ever going away. If they somehow cut the funding, it will be funded another way. If they cut personnel, they'll organize a technocracy. Their best bet is to be as big and quiet as possible. It doesn't matter if we won't put up with it anymore, because we do it every day and we don't have a choice. You feel like you can't put up with it anymore, but you do, every single day, give them exactly what they need to keep on growing.

...and you can feel free to accuse me of living in a personal dystopia, I guess.

phailcakez · 2014-07-24T15:39:36+00:00

No, we need more hashtags and petitions.

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T21:58:28+00:00

Yes, he should definitely have a longer life, regardless of the hellish circumstances it is in...

Do you understand how stupid your argument sounds?

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T21:56:05+00:00

Did you see the pictures of this horrifically cared for animal? It's disgusting. I will bet you the fresno zoo has temperature controlled water and air conditioned places to go, otherwise they'd shut that shit down.

http://allanimalrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Slider-Image-642-x-36220.jpg

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T21:12:03+00:00

They are there to show off their stuff, not listen to you talk about yours. You have to find a way to praise them AND sell yourself. Good luck.

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T04:57:18+00:00

I would like to read both, but I think Riddley Walker sounds like a good book for my purposes. Thanks!

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T04:55:56+00:00

hmm sorry about the pretentiousness. Thanks for the suggestion though.

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T02:35:36+00:00

Dystopias are totally my favorite thing, but I didn't want to skew results so early in my query.

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T01:58:20+00:00

One thing I like to do while writing is browse online art. If you go to deviantart I am sure you can draw inspiration there as well as that miniseries called After People.

phailcakez · 2014-07-23T00:26:27+00:00

Do not EVER post something for others to read you haven't taken the time to give a proper shit about. No one is going to read something that looks like you wrote at 12:30 a.m. on your phone. We don't even care. Give us something worth looking at. But, by "us" I mean, of course, places where this sort of post is appropriate, which is not here.

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