Prepoceros

I don’t read Slashdot, but John does, and today he showed me one of the funniest grammar smackdowns I’ve ever seen. In a thread about New York City and Apple having similar logos and something happening and/or not happening blah di blah, one poster said

actually I hope it goes the over way. Apple needs to be shown that not every apple is their’s.

The two logo’s don’t look anything like each other. NYC’s is missing the giant bite for starters.

And a few comments down someone else replied

Damn, dude. An apostrophe doesn’t mean “Look out, here comes an S!”

Love it. Quick and awesome.

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Tonight I’m blogging from bed. This is apparently what it takes to get an update out of me these days, so you’ll have to deal. Besides, you can’t stop me; I’ve already locked the door. Though I guess if you had the time machine required to stop me publishing this *after* you read it, you could just get here *before* I locked the door. But clearly you didn’t, so nyah.

Sam is fascinated by the moving text. I didn’t think dogs “got” things on screens, but every time the little worm of words starts crawling across the page he perks up his eyebrows and stares at it. Hee hee, and he follows the cursor when I wiggle it around the screen. Hoo boy, I don’t know which of us is more easily amused.

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I’ve just submitted my final paper in Roman Historians. The three assignments together came out to 8309 words, in the end, most of which were written in the last 24 hours, of which I slept almost two. Let it be known that I do not recommend this experience to anyone.

It occurs to me that I am now done with spring semester, as my last final was yesterday. That’s a weird feeling. I’ll have more time to appreciate it in the morning—right now I’m drained, and my achy eyes can barely focus on the screen. I’m going to go email my professor my apologies for my tardiness and then crash. Kerrrrrrrplunk.

Today, writing about Polybius, I have seized an opportunity to casually refer to a certain stage in a government’s evolution as a metastable state.

This is easily the high point of my day. I have written about 2300 words of this assignment so far, and it has taken me five days. I have about 5000 words more to write in the next 25-ish hours. I have a final this afternoon, so even if I don’t sleep, that’s still only 20 hours or so. I wish I would write faster—I can do the math on this one, and it makes me want to punch things.

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P.S. Wouldn’t it be nice if metaphory (second-syllable stress) were a word?

Gritten? Gritted? Grit. This is the South, after all.

I have 1500 more words to write about Polybius, then 2400 more about Sallust and Plutarch. Then I really ought to learn some PDEs before tomorrow’s exam.

Suddenly I feel compelled to organize my kitchen. I can see the mess from here. I would also like a chili cheese coney and many many tater tots and a hot fudge sundae and some chocolate cake and a donut.

I will not get up. Will not will not will not.

I have just finished the first draft of my Chaucer essay sixteen whole hours before I’m supposed to turn it in. I started writing it last night, TWO DAYS before the due date. I don’t remember a time in the last six years when I’ve finished a first draft *before* going to sleep on the night before an essay is due. Snaps for Natalie!

This does mean that I haven’t finished my two Roman Historians writing assignments, but I’ll take essay-deadline victories where I can get them.

My thoughts exactly. Jebus.

Since I’m a Stats dork, let’s start with a quick rundown of November’s numbers:

Days: 30
Posts: 31
Links: 44
Comments: 19
Unique visitors: 1362
Hits from the NaBloPoMo Randomizer: 164
Total words: 10138
Fewest words in one post: 2
Most words in one post: 1256
Median words per post: 236
Posts published before noon: 4
After 11 PM: 19
After 11:50 PM: 9
Median timestamp: 11:13 PM
* Footnotes: 24
Exclamation points!: 21
WORDS IN ALL CAPS: 46
That thing where I use a question mark on something that’s not a question to indicate rising intonation?: 19

There are your cold, rational numbers—now, how did forced posting make me *feel*? In short, mildly stressed. Midnight deadlines do not mesh well with my procrastinatory style. No matter when I got home, “come up with a NaBloPoMo post” was always the next thing due, which would make it the first thing I could not-do. The plan was that I’d bang out the day’s post first, then move on to homework and chores and whatnot. But I didn’t have any ideas for a post right then, so I’d just read a few blogs, maybe watch a couple videos while I brainstormed . . . and then all of sudden it was minutes to midnight and I’d accomplished nothing. Not that I was a chore machine before November, but nightly posting deadlines didn’t help.

As both of my readers can attest, the quality of my November posts was, um, substandard. Out of those 31, I would’ve considered only twelve or thirteen inflictable on the world in an ordinary month. Blog “inspiration,” to put it pretentiously, usually pops up while I’m out and about, not while I’m sitting in front of a blank screen at 11:50. Long, edited, multi-day posts weren’t possible during NaBloPoMo, or at least they weren’t for me. Someone who planned better and started things earlier, maybe keeping a few working drafts going at all times, might have been able to manage it, but as you can see in the stats above, “starting early” is not my forte.

I don’t mean to bash the ‘Mo. NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo, and all the other NaBleeBlooBlahs out there are fabulous ideas, IMHO, and good motivational tools (if you can find one that fits your aspirations). The difference between WriMo and PoMo is that the former’s are writing deadlines, whereas the latter’s are publishing deadlines. While this is certainly better suited to a communal experience (which is what blogging is all about, yes?), it sure makes for a lot of unedited crap flooding into the ’sphere (at least from these fingers).

Would I do it again? Sort of. I like the idea of blogging every day, but I wouldn’t commit to *publishing* every day. In one sense, yes, this blog is my personal sandbox, but it’s my *public* personal sandbox. It may be my inalienable right to write boring blah-di-blah that’s not worth anyone’s time to read if I want to, but I can just as well save that crap to my hard drive or write it in a paper notebook.

NaBloPoMo: an experiment worth trying, and worth adapting. I’m looking forward to next year’s NaBloWriMo.

It’s funny how I only notice all the crap stuck in my keyboard when I’m trying to write an essay. Gosh, I should really clean that out . . .

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Link? Let’s go with Salon. (Yes, you have to sit through the ad, but only once a day.)

Since last year’s pseudo-NaNoWriMo effort was a near-complete failure, I’ve decided to go at it from a different angle this time around. I’m falling in with the scores and scores of bloggers who’ve agreed to participate in National Blog Posting Month, officially hosted at the fabulous Fussy, which you should all read anyway, yes you should. Visit the official site here.

The only rule is that you have to post something to your blog every day. I usually post three or four times a week anyway, so I’m not expecting this to be a huge stretch for me, though it will be an exercise in discipline, which goodness knows I could use a smidge more of. There’s no crazy word count expectation like those crazy novelists have, but at the end of the month I’ll add it all up so I can have a big shiny number to look at and wonder how much I could’ve accomplished if I’d put those words towards something productive.

For the last few weeks I’ve been considering several variations on blank-blank-blank-Mo: making a new video every day, posting a new photo to Flickr every day, cooking something new every day…you get the idea. Although I thought for a while that I’d do ALL THOSE THINGS AT ONCE, I eventually came to my senses and chose the option at which I was most likely to succeed. I’ve demonstrated much over-ambition in the past, so it’s probably good to start small. The fancier projects can still happen next month, if this one goes well.

I’ve been idly trying to come up with a theme for this month, a series of posts I could do that would hang together somehow, would explore every nook and cranny of some part of the world in nauseating, exhaustive detail, but so far I got nothin’. If anyone has any brilliant theme ideas, I’d love to hear them.

It’s not too late to join the fun yourself, if you’d like. Don’t have a blog? You can make this your National De-Lurking Month. Every day, comment on a different blog. Simple, yes? It could be one you’ve been reading for a while, or one that’s new to you. To facilitate this, I think I’ll post a link here every day to a blog I read and would recommend*. Today’s link already happened, but in case you can’t be bothered to scroll up, I’ll remind you again to go read Fussy. Damnit.

Off to bed. Will I post actual content tomorrow? Oooh, suspense.

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* I hereby declaim all responsibility for any addiction or loss of contact with the non-interwebby world that may result. If you’d like to be one of my linkees, or if you think I might link you and would rather I didn’t, let me know.

Remember that Blogger SAT Challenge thing I mentioned a while back? Well, the scores are in, and the results have been published on a blog created just for the Challenge, which you can visit here.

Even if you didn’t write an essay for the challenge (and I haven’t heard from anyone who did), you should go check it out. All 109 essays composed for the challenge are posted, and the general blog-reading public is invited to rate them (to compare their scores with those given by us “expert graders”).

The broad-brush, general first impression of the results? Bloggers are no better than high school students at writing timed SAT-style essays. Much discussion is sure to follow on the site, on Chad’s and Dave’s blogs, and elsewhere on the statistical breakdown of the scores, common characteristics of blog-writing and how those mesh with the goals of the SAT, the validity of the test for measuring writing skill and college-readiness, and of course what this means for our students, the fabric of our society, and the universe as a whole.

I have to zip off to school now, but I’ll certainly be commenting on all of this later, probably both here and at ScienceBlogs. The standardized-test dork in me is totally psyched.