FreakLegion

61 ms·

691.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
Most of Shakespeare's plays are also (vastly more successful) copies of other works. The idea that copies aren't successful is rubbish. Ideas are easy--it's the execution that matters.
692.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
Nota bene: 1. Informal fallacies are highly sensitive to context. Even ad hominems can be valid under the right circumstances. 2. In actual arguments, trotting out fancy-sounding fallacy names is rarely the correct play. You'll either be wr
693.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
Updated. Sorry about that!
694.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
There's no trick to technical publishing. If you write a solid proposal and sample chapter and there's a market for the book, you'll get an offer. Edit: If you're actually interested in writing, let me know. In a past life I worked for a pu
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
Hell, it's not even necessary. You can make something people want, or you can make people want something.
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
A fair amount of this is like Strunk & White in that it's bad advice made to look good by a disingenuous example. For instance: Avoid using nouns as verbs. [...] avoid saying "He authored ...", instead say "He wrote ...". avoid using
697.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
Your odds might not be so bad. It's a tough market for anyone working in traditional (read: overcrowded) areas [1], but there are precious few folks working in the intersections, particularly between the arts and sciences [2]. Of course, yo
698.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
I can't say I've seen any seminars that were quite so specific (plenty of conferences, though!), but now that you mention it I have seen a few built around someone's work in progress. Those were, as a rule, amazing experiences, with the cav
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
Those are research topics, not items for a curriculum. Certainly they have the potential to make interesting papers, but they're far too narrow to support an entire course of study.
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
Yes and no. Some people call ablaut verbs irregular, but almost all of them are in fact regular. They only seem irregular because there are relatively few of them left to group together [1]. But I'm not aware of any language with a single p
701.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
It's a little more subtle than that. There are usage differences between the perfect and imperfect tenses in both "hung-hanged" and "driven-drove," between active and passive constructions[1], etc. Unfortunately, most native speakers aren't
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
Not only would I drop the F-bomb in the presence of the new boss, I dropped it at my interview. And I got the fucking job.
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
My path was similar, although I didn't move to technical writing until two literature MAs and the first half of a PhD burned me out on academia. Technical writing pays well, particularly if you're a coder and can document APIs, write exampl
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
There's no confusion. The two senses of the word don't overlap; they can be used unambiguously in their own contexts. Unless you think people are also "confusing" things when they say "I like my coffee sweet" and "What a sweet little girl"-
705.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
What an odd series of replies. Surely you all realize that: 1) Whether astroturfing does happen has no bearing on whether it should happen, and 2) Examples of people astroturfing are an argument for having the rule, not an argument agai
706.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
Absolutely. My current employer never asked for references, and in fact, they didn't even get my full legal name until after they'd hired me (no background check, in other words). Luckily it's not an issue in my case, but even so, this is a
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
As to your 1.: Let's assume you're being honest and it isn't sock puppetry. It's still basically astroturfing, and I, at least, don't want to see that here. If entire communities are allowed to flock to Hacker News to upvote the latest post
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
I liked the part where he called Naomi Wolf Naomi Watts. Because, you know, it's just a blog, so why proofread?
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
This is par for the course when dealing with PayPal, unfortunately. Many, many people have had the same problem -- some famously, like Notch with Minecraft. Even when you aren't dealing with significant sums (Minecraft had $750,000 tied up
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by FreakLegion 15y ago
Rhetoricians have actually been talking about this for more than four thousand years. Everything's performance.
711.
by FreakLegion 15y ago
Same here, but 11 years for me. So many things in life can't help but be complicated, it's nice to simplify where you can.
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by FreakLegion 16y ago
I can't speak to how easy PragProgs is to work with, but it seems their 'much higher royalties' are just creative bookkeeping. Where other publishers base royalties on a book's gross, PragProgs uses net. They're somewhere between traditiona