Fangirlin' It

I'm sure many of you have at some point enjoyed the web comic xkcd.  The artist who draws it makes a great case here:

Gah, I can't take it anymore.  I read SGA fic by a lot of different kinds of authors.  And, while often the pieces are very good, the details make the fic, and a few details always bug me and are very common.  First, everyone in the military is not a 'soldier'; soldiers are in the Army.  The correct general reference for someone in the Air Force is 'airman'.  Marines are either 'marines', 'jarheads' (so named for the haircut they give you in basic), and Navy are 'sailors' or 'squids'. 

Second, not all officers went to a service academy.  In fact, a very small percentage of military officers went to the service academies.  Most did ROTC in college.  As a corollary, all officers in the military have at least a bachelor's degree, and many, like pilots, have advanced degrees.  These are not stupid people.  Also, as a completely unrelated thing, not everyone from the South has a drawl or doesn't use correct grammar. 

Third, fraternization regs only apply to two military personnel in the same chain of command.  They do not apply to civilians at all. 

Fourth, and this is Stargate specific, the Ancients' ban on interference was only for ascended beings.  I see this in a lot of fics, so I know a lot of people don't remember this.  The non-intervention policy does not apply to corporeal, mortal Ancients.  

Okay, I'm glad I got that off my chest.  I know people don't intend to make these mistakes, and a lot of them aren't aware that they are mistakes.  I think there's an LJ comm that is specifically for people who have questions about military matters; don't remember the name of it, but it's there.  Wikipedia is also rather helpful for these things.  Don't take offense at this, okay?  Just, these things have bothered me for quite a while, and I felt the need to get it off my chest.  We'll save the rant on how people don't know colloquialisms because they only ever hear them rather than seeing them printed for another day (except, it's worse comes to worst; it means if something that's already bad gets worse--you can't have worse come to worst.  'Comes' in this instance elides the 'to pass' that should be there as in 'comes to pass').  

(Also, 'should of' etc. doesn't exist; what you're looking for is the contraction of 'should have' which is 'should've'.  And you can't pluralise something by adding 's to it; that makes it possessive.  And if something already ends in 's' you pluralise it by adding 'es', as in Jones becomes Joneses.  To make Jones possessive you just add an apostrophe, Jones'.)

Okay, I lied about the lack of a grammar rant.  Sorry.

Well, so far I really like this class; the professor is funny and interesting and the other students seem really cool.  I was a little worried about this, so this is a relief.  The professor is talking about the assignments right now, and I'm thinking, 'Sixty-page chapters?  No biggie, not after that WWII class!'.  This is a good feeling.

In other news, we've already been here two hours and I haven't lost my focus yet.  Of course, we aren't doing a real class today, so that's maybe not an entirely accurate prediction of classes to come.  

It seems like every class ever starts out with you being behind on the reading already because you don't get the syllabus or whatever beforehand, and this is no different.  I've got three chapters to read for today and three more for next Tuesday.  Then I've got a class that's actually on Thursdays, which I won't actually go to until the 12th.  The professor did say that we should be getting out a little early, which will be nice.  Oh, this is nice, we just noticed that the three chapters for today are essentially an overview, and there's no actual assignment associated with it.  So the work that's due next Tuesday is on the second set of three chapters.  Whew.

Now we're starting.  Hm, I think I will probably be very bad at knowing when a client is lying to me.  I have this really bad habit of believing things people tell me, even though I know better.  It's weird, because when it's not someone actually telling me things, I'm a very incredulous person--I don't take things on faith, period.  But when someone is sitting there telling me things, unless the story is so unbelievable my ten-year-old cousin couldn't have come up with it, I'll probably believe it until someone else points out, 'You know, that's probably not true.'.  ::facepalm:: 

Wow, as a paralegal, you can get paid to troll facebook, etc., as part of gathering information--that makes your job really easy.  Thank you, social media.  So, let this be a lesson: if you don't want it used against you in court, don't put it on the internet.  Some paralegal will find it. 

This state was the first in the nation to have a certification process for paralegals--wow, we're normally not this forward-thinking here.

Twenty 'til nine, now.  I'm getting a little ready to stop concentrating.

Hm, at the end of all this, I can call myself an NC Certified Paralegal or and NC State Bar Certified Paralegal.  It sounds pretty good.  :) 

It's weird thinking I'll only see this professor six times--one class per week for six weeks and it's done.  Each class is like that; this last history class was a little like that in that we met once a week, but a semester is a lot longer than six weeks. 

Quarter 'til.  These desks are a little uncomfortable because they don't let me stretch my legs out.  Wow, one part of the paralegal profession trademarked Certified Paralegal, so they invented a new word--certificated--to make up for it.  Certificated, guys.  I just, no.  Quit making up stupid words when there are already words in the English language to express your thought.  Or at least let someone who is more talented create the neologisms.  

Nine on the dot.  And we are done.

Well, I start the first class for the paralegal certificate tonight at 6, so I have to go eat dinner right about now (it's only 4 here!).  It's all the way down in South Park, and I'll have to fight traffic on 77 and the Brookshire, which is why I have to leave so early.  I'm a little nervous, but I keep reminding myself that I just got a college degree, so I can do this.  Yes.

Guys, I did it, I finally graduated!  The ceremony was today, and it was awesome.  Well, except for the part where I'm pretty sure the crowd at my high school graduation was better behaved.  It's like these people have never been to a graduation before (which is impossible, since obviously their kids graduated high school to get to college in the first place).  It was so bad that most of the names they called were impossible to understand. 

It was a little weird, because I'm so used to Davidson's small graduations; not only have our final grades not been reported (yesterday was the last day of exams), but we don't even get our diplomas until February--in the mail.  So we crossed the stage rapid-fire, handing a card with our name on it to the dean of our college, who read it as we crossed, briefly shook hands with the chancellor, and were off.  It took about an hour to graduate ~1200 PhD/masters/bachelors degree students.  But it was still pretty neat, and my dad and stepmom came all the way from Alabama to see me.  We all went out to lunch before and dinner after, with ice cream cake and sparkling wine (not together) at home.  It was a lot of work, though I suspect that cleaning the house for all this was more work than this semester at times, and I feel like I richly deserve this after so long.

Ah!  I have now finished all my work except for preparing a short synopsis on my research to share with my class when we turn in the history paper next Thursday.  I still have to give my presentation on my English paper, but all the written work was turned in today.  The history paper, barring any cosmetic changes, I finished just now.  It's 19 pages, with a cover page and two pages of bibliography.  I really think it's the best paper I've ever written.  I'm considering asking my professor if he thinks I should submit it to an academic journal.  He was really impressed with my initial draft, and the final paper is over 12 pages longer than that, with much more detailed information and analysis. 

I'm really getting excited about graduation, y'all.  It's next Saturday, which is so much closer than it sounds!  Mom has gone all out for this; I think she may be more excited about it than I am.  It's been so long, and I'm really glad this is finally (almost!) over.  Then I have to finish up the application for the paralegal class, and (hopefully--crosses fingers and toes) I will be able to get a real job in an attorney's office in six months.  

This is cool; our professor is letting us text or email or whatever people while we're in class as part of the discussion on whether we're 'tethered to technology'.  (We totally are.) 

Well, it's a little late for Halloween, but if you're looking for something horrifying, try the book I'm reading in my history class: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  I've had to stop reading this before bed, guys.  Seriously, this is the most sickening thing I think I've ever been exposed to, and it's worse because it actually happened.  This actually makes the Western idea of what the Nazi concentration camps were like look like a picnic in spring, it's so horrifying.  This is the stuff that makes you go, "Oh, god, I never, ever wanted to know that," but someone's got to learn it.  I kind of just wish that someone wasn't me.

In other news, I finished my rough rough draft of the English paper (the one on the portrayal of the military in SG-1 and SGA) this morning.  We were supposed to 'workshop' each others' drafts; pass the draft to someone, they fill out a sheet about it, repeat.  Well, the people in my class are a bunch of slackers.  I mean, even more than I am.  In my group of four, I had six pages (missing some detail from a few sources and a conclusion for the eventual 8-10-page final paper), and one person I think had three pages.  The other two people had two pages.  One girl didn't even get to her actual thesis statement!  ::facepalm::  I finished up the rough draft to turn in this afternoon; it clocks in at just over 8 pages right now.

Now I have to really get going on the paper for said history class.  I really need to sit down and devote about a day to going through all my research material and making dedicated notes.  Then, I think we have a 10-page draft due soon-ish.  Yikes.  This paper is not horrifying, however; it's on British home front propaganda, official and unofficial and officially unofficial.  It's actually fairly interesting (to me) but I won't bore any of you with it.  

Well, I did something rather stupid last week.  Ubuntu had been having problems for about a month with the main part of their update server; I think maybe someone had hacked it.  Anyway, I decided to move from the LTS (long-term support) release to the newest one.  I should have known better, really; a while back I did this, and it didn't end well.  This time, the 'upgrade' not only messed up my screen resolution, it also got rid of all my drivers for the wireless card and the ethernet connection.  So, Catch-22, I couldn't get the drivers because I couldn't get online because I didn't have the drivers. 

I took the laptop over to the store that fixed it back in December (when Dell proved exactly how absolutely useless they are) and had to leave it there over the weekend.  It turned out that the problem couldn't be fixed without a fresh install.  Fortunately, the guy had fixed a long-standing problem I've had where the stupid thing wouldn't correctly automount USB devices, which has meant that I've been unable to use flash drives, my (very nice) external hard drive, or my iPod.  So, I asked him to back up my files and re-install the LTS release.  $150 bucks later, I have a fresh install, working USB mount/unmount, and several updated packages that I had been wanting but didn't have the skill to install successfully on my own.  (I really need to take the time to learn the basic BASH commands and stuff one of these days.)  Lesson learned: don't get impatient and move from LTS until there's another LTS release.  It never works out.

Is anyone else having problems reloading their Livejournal friends page?  Mine keeps staying at the same posts, even though I know that several new posts should be showing up.  It just started doing this not too long ago, so I'm hoping it'll be resolved soon, but in the meantime it's annoying.