OPEN BAR: it rubs the lotion on the skin or it gets the hose again

[Cain]

Who's up for some Afghan crime drama serials?

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/features/letters-from/law-order-afghan-victims-unit

Or, alternatively, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaHKiRb0VPo

[Junkenstein]

Nice find. I get the feeling that this:

Spend time with practitioners and one notices a lot of repetition; all told, they remain narrowly focused on boosting the supply of trained lawyers, civil servants, and other elites.

Is the heart of the matter though. The legal profession is easily one of the most lucrative in the western world and provides the function to effectively sanction (financially or otherwise) those who it finds guilty. Judges being shaped to become the new warlords?

[Cain]

And if that doesn't quite satisfy your need for foreign crime drama, I'd like to recommend Salamander.

It's set in Belgium.  No, actually Belgium.  And if you know anything about what I've written about Belgium...it's the most corrupt and seedy place in Europe, bar none.  Yes, even Italy (though I won't lie, it's close). You could also class this as a conspiracy thriller...which as you know, I am a fan of.  And Belgium's got enough real political conspiracies to blow the mind of any Alex Jones-following simpleton.

[Reginald Ret]

And if that doesn't quite satisfy your need for foreign crime drama, I'd like to recommend Salamander.

It's set in Belgium.  No, actually Belgium.  And if you know anything about what I've written about Belgium...it's the most corrupt and seedy place in Europe, bar none.  Yes, even Italy (though I won't lie, it's close). You could also class this as a conspiracy thriller...which as you know, I am a fan of.  And Belgium's got enough real political conspiracies to blow the mind of any Alex Jones-following simpleton.

Oh? Sounds interesting. Is it a book? I don't think googling salamander will get me anywhere

[Cain]

TV series.  BBC 4 is currently showing it, with English subtitles.

[LMNO]

The people in my philosophy class are AMAZING. This week's assignment, along with writing a brief analysis of an article posted by the instructor, was to simply write an argument using ten different fallacies, chosen from a list of about  14 fallacies. That was it. In order to complete the assignment, we each write our argument, then identify and explain five of the fallacies used in a classmate's post.

This assignment has been posted since Monday. As of right now, only myself and two other students have posted their arguments, and both of the other two just used the same two fallacies over and over and over again. I can't finish the second part of the assignment unless somebody who actually understands it posts an argument. 

The benefits of master-class trolling, ITT.


To tell the truth, this assignment interests me.  Ten fallacies?  How long is your essay?

[Reginald Ret]

The people in my philosophy class are AMAZING. This week's assignment, along with writing a brief analysis of an article posted by the instructor, was to simply write an argument using ten different fallacies, chosen from a list of about  14 fallacies. That was it. In order to complete the assignment, we each write our argument, then identify and explain five of the fallacies used in a classmate's post.

This assignment has been posted since Monday. As of right now, only myself and two other students have posted their arguments, and both of the other two just used the same two fallacies over and over and over again. I can't finish the second part of the assignment unless somebody who actually understands it posts an argument. 

The benefits of master-class trolling, ITT.


To tell the truth, this assignment interests me.  Ten fallacies?  How long is your essay?

Something to do here?

[Cain]

Dishonored part 6 is up http://youtu.be/E55gvM1Y-XY

This one's a little more exciting.  I finally find a use for whale oil and grenades!

[LMNO]

Dishonored part 6 is up http://youtu.be/E55gvM1Y-XY

This one's a little more exciting.  I finally find a use for whale oil and grenades!

I'm not ashamed to say I've found myself anticipating these uploads.

[Suu]

I'm about to enter the world of making medieval soap (yes, they had it, and didn't just bathe once a year) and perfumes. I had to promise the boyfriend that I wouldn't make my own lye*. Where's the fun in that?  Other than that, what could possible go wrong? Add lye to water, don't breathe, add to olive oil, pour into a wooden box. Wait two days, pop it out, cut into pieces, set aside for a month... SOAP.





*Lye is extremely easy to make, but caustic as fuck. I could use it to ret flax and dye linen also, but all of this is a terrible idea when living in an apartment.

This is relevant to my interests. Would like to see how it turns out.

The perfume is trickier. I basically have to enfluerage my own essential oils, since I don't have a still. So far I've tried infusing lavender in vodka and then diluting in water, which makes a nice facial astringent that was used, but the fragrance isn't "sticking." I can do rose water, I make it all the time for brewing and cooking, but lavender, even though extremely fragrant, is harder to draw the aroma out of. Once book from the 16th century recommends that if I'm going to make a lavender essential oil, it takes 12 days of infusion in the olive oil, changing out the flowers every 3 days. 

...Either way, I have now washed my face with lavender vodka water. The shit I do for my hobbies.

[Junkenstein]

On a vaugely related note, I recently re-read "Perfume"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume_(novel)

I now imagine Suu as a modern day Grenouille.

[Cain]

Dishonored part 6 is up http://youtu.be/E55gvM1Y-XY

This one's a little more exciting.  I finally find a use for whale oil and grenades!

I'm not ashamed to say I've found myself anticipating these uploads.

Thank you.  I still have no clear idea where this particular game is heading, but I have some small ideas.  That black book, for example...I'm certain it has nothing to do with Emily.  When we went down to the basement in the previous episode, we overheard two Overseers, also talking about getting a hold of the book.  Now why would they want it?  And why, in the dream sequence with the Outsider, did a guy who looked just like Pendleton appear to be holding Emily hostage?

[Suu]

Strawbery Banke got back to me! They're forwarding my info to the archaeological and curatorial departments to see when I can start putting in some hours!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The people in my philosophy class are AMAZING. This week's assignment, along with writing a brief analysis of an article posted by the instructor, was to simply write an argument using ten different fallacies, chosen from a list of about  14 fallacies. That was it. In order to complete the assignment, we each write our argument, then identify and explain five of the fallacies used in a classmate's post.

This assignment has been posted since Monday. As of right now, only myself and two other students have posted their arguments, and both of the other two just used the same two fallacies over and over and over again. I can't finish the second part of the assignment unless somebody who actually understands it posts an argument. 

The benefits of master-class trolling, ITT.


To tell the truth, this assignment interests me.  Ten fallacies?  How long is your essay?

Who knew THAT would ever come in handy? 

It's incredibly short, more or less one fallacy per sentence. It is by no means a difficult or even moderately challenging class, I spent maybe two hours a week on it and half of that is listening to the lecture while I flip through the book.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'll post it, actually. Here is the list of fallacies:

-faulty analogy                      -red herring

-post hoc                              -appeal to tradition

-slippery slope                      -begging the question

-hasty conclusion                  -ad populum

-ad hominem                        -false dilemma

-straw man                           -equivocation

-two wrongs make a right      -appeal to pity

To make it EXTRA easy for our classmates, we are actually tagging each fallacy with a number, so that they can go "Hmm, lessee, looks like #6 is a red herring, because ____" and I kept it VERY STRAIGHTFORWARD AND OBVIOUS. Like writing for children. Literally, I wrote this as if I were writing for an audience of average ten-year-olds.

I think that two things are gong on here; one, I don't have this much exposure to other people's writing in the classroom, only online, so while they are probably just as clueless in the classroom I am not exposed to it as much, and two, at this point there are no dumb people in either of my other classes so I'm not as used to them.

Backyard chickens are popular in the city these days, but they're a terrible idea. For one thing, if we allow city dwellers to keep chickens in their yard, we've opened the gateway to urbal livestock farming and the next thing you know they'll be keeping donkeys and ostriches in their backyards, too. How would you like to wake up one morning to your neighbor's horses neighing and cows mooing?(1)

Keeping chickens in your backyard is like trying to raise salmon in  your bathtub; it just isn't the right place for them. (2) If you want more evidence that chickens just don't belong in the city, look at the kind of people who want to raise chickens – I'm talking about pot-smoking hippie types, you know the ones. (3) What do you want your city to be like: A clean, civilized urban center, or a barnyard overrun with rats and disease? (4) Why, a young family tried their hand at raising chickens is St. Johns, and not a month later, their son contracted chicken pox! (5)

When is this city going to wise up and stop treating its backyards like stockyards? (6) Civilized people have eschewed keeping livestock in urban centers since we first invented modern sanitation (7) and nine out of ten city dwellers have no interest in keeping backyard poultry of any kind anyway (8 ) so it's time we eliminated this potential public-health scourge from our cities. Chickens are a known carrier of salmonella and for our own safety we should eliminate them from the city scenery. Think of your elderly and frail neighbors... what if they were to contract salmonella from eating contaminated eggs? (9) And the poor chicken farmers who are trying to make a living selling eggs to grocery stores – is it fair to strip them of their ability to earn a livelihood? (10) Ban chickens from the city!