BF2S Forums DAST Chat

Dilbert_X wrote:

And you've added a new verb to the english language

To uzique (yoozeek) v. - To waste ones life on some pointless task with no prospect of kudos outside a small but irrelevant clique or remuneration beyond pocket money.

eg: "He was an OK guy, but then he uziqued his life away playing minecraft and losing at online poker"

My psychopathic Will and force-of-personality will undoubtedly lend well to the real-world of money and men and power and career opportunism.

This was actually all just a big mental exercise for me, preparing me for the absolute non-challenge that will be the rest of real life, post-bf2s.

And let's be honest, posting long diatribes and funny little word-games on a forum for a few years, whilst I pegged off two degrees with an intense focus on formal and professional writing, could not have been all bad. It wasn't all time wasted. I'll be sure to drop by to do some promotion when my first book hits the shelves. It's going to be a psycho-thriller dramatising the life of an interior-ally dead engineer who has sold himself on the myth of a middle-class life and is now facing an existential abyss. The narrator will be infallible, of course, and it'll be full of clever formal tricks.

AussieReaper wrote:

I don't think it is actually uzi.

There's capital letters and punctuation.

That's not like him at all.

Maybe his doctor supervisor didn't like 70000 words with no capitals and no punctuation.

aynrandroolz wrote:

globefish23 wrote:

AussieReaper wrote:

I don't think it is actually uzi.

There's capital letters and punctuation.

That's not like him at all.

Maybe his doctor supervisor didn't like 70000 words with no capitals and no punctuation.

He did however approve of my regular use of the word 'mong'.

For e.g. "Stephen Dedalus, by all common accounts the most introspective and sullen of schoolboy-mongs..."

I'd think he would prefer the full version of the word, but I guess punctuality was more important in this case.

[/sarcasm]

Last edited by Trotskygrad (2012-09-04 12:43:08)

aynrandroolz wrote:

Trotskygrad wrote:

aynrandroolz wrote:

He did however approve of my regular use of the word 'mong'.

For e.g. "Stephen Dedalus, by all common accounts the most introspective and sullen of schoolboy-mongs..."

I'd think he would prefer the full version of the word, but I guess punctuality was more important in this case.

[/sarcasm]

Actually they are just called the Mong people, or Hmong for alternate spelling.

Well I'm guessing despite your excellent academic credentials you'll never receive an offer from the National University of Mongolia.

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

or he's making a joke

and I wasn't?

You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about and it's actually quite embarrassing.

Famous academic scientists and mathlords enjoy more "glamour" and "fame" than English dons? Lol what sort of fucking school do you go to? There is no glamour in any academic publishing. It's boring, stuffy, traditional, and interests nobody outside of a very small circle. Also I don't know how you're hanging your hat on so many tired, empty clichés about science/math academics whilst completely ignoring the huge ready supply of equally trite and meaningless clichés about humanities academics and their cloistered ivory-tower world of pomp and privilege. This arbitrary dichotomy in your mind ultimately stems from the (false) assumption that 'progress' can only be made in concrete, empirical, positivist leaps forward, rather than in any sort of cultural or social or philosophical sense. Which is exactly the sort of assumption that somebody with a hugely deficient education of rather narrow limitations would make. There are two sides to the coin of human progress. To assume that scientific discovery is the sole and greatest way forward is to privilege an ideology that has only even been around for just over a century.

Introspection into society? That phrase doesn't even make any sense.

And no, an English degree is not about spending 4 years reading complicated books so you can get a secret 'bonus level' (great job!) of 'subtext' that nobody else in the world does. Why the fuck would anyone deign to spend 4 years of their life doing that? That's more like one part of a high-school English class. This is like me asking a doctoral-level university candidate in Maths or Engineering about Pythagoras... and then implying that is all there is to know and research about geometry.

I'd answer your questions in full but I feel like I'm talking to a 14 year old. I shall correct you (because you are wrong) in the totally hilarious assumption that more science/math research at university level gets "coverage [in] the outside world" (what does that even mean? in the media? at breakfast tables in the morning? geez that's a great measure of success) than English/philosophy/classics research. Less than 1% of it ever makes an impact on the pop-culture or mainstream consciousness of the time. I don't think anyone in any discipline or field of academia really gives a fuck about that stuff.

P.S. Your last post was even more stupid because you were conflating the (H)mongs with the Mongols - two ethnically diverse peoples. The National University of Mongolia I imagine is full of Mongols, not Mongs.

edit: lmao Jay. Jesus H. Christ.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-04 14:08:11)

aynrandroolz wrote:

Ty wrote:

aynrandroolz wrote:

Oh and not really. I get told pretty often that you sad fucks are still mentioning me (which is really quite sad)....

Piss in the punch bowl at a party, people will probably talk about you. Just don't try to convince yourself it's an accomplishment.

Well on the last two pages I count no less than three users that have quotes or phrases of mine in their avatar/header space.

I've practically bequeathed to you an entire new language in which to express yourselves.

Piss in the punch? I'm the oxygen in the air you breathe, Ty. Wake up and smell my roses.

"Wake up and smell my roses?" This act gets tiresome. If you build your self-esteem from this sort of thing than more power to you. That doesn't change the fact that you are an egotistical little twat who's not as smart as he thinks he is and has the emotional intelligence of a mollusc. This talent of yours for making every thread about you is just provocation and speaks more to your desire for attention than having anything interesting to say.

You're an intelligent enough guy Uzique and I don't necessarily dislike you but you can be a very sad individual.

Ty wrote:

aynrandroolz wrote:

Ty wrote:

Piss in the punch bowl at a party, people will probably talk about you. Just don't try to convince yourself it's an accomplishment.

Well on the last two pages I count no less than three users that have quotes or phrases of mine in their avatar/header space.

I've practically bequeathed to you an entire new language in which to express yourselves.

Piss in the punch? I'm the oxygen in the air you breathe, Ty. Wake up and smell my roses.

"Wake up and smell my roses?" This act gets tiresome. If you build your self-esteem from this sort of thing than more power to you. That doesn't change the fact that you are an egotistical little twat who's not as smart as he thinks he is and has the emotional intelligence of a mollusc. This talent of yours for making every thread about you is just provocation and speaks more to your desire for attention than having anything interesting to say.

You're an intelligent enough guy Uzique and I don't necessarily dislike you but you can be a very sad individual.

Christ you people are braindead when it comes to reading. That entire post was blatantly facetious in the most over-the-top way.

Making every thread about me? Are you aware why I came back to write a response? I feel like you're missing the whole point. I resented being used as some foil for the emotional insecurities of Jay, as some yardstick for the engineer's annular-congratulathon. No thanks. It's hardly me jumping into a three page debate on the Republican nomination to talk about myself, is it?

Trotsky, I think you super over-rate science/maths academia and don't know enough about humanities academia. They are both cloistered and divided from the 'real world'. Yes, there are journals like Science. Do you not know of any of the 'famous' journals and weeklies to do with academic humanities? Just because the format isn't the scintillating media-friendly 'present a new piece of information to world', it doesn't mean there isn't a grey-area translating academic research into erudite popular appeal for the generally well-meaning and well-educated. None of this stuff is rock and roll. To picture the science and maths fields as some dynamic, exciting and 'thrilling' place to work in, whilst the humanities and other classical subjects rot in monotony... suggests frankly that you've never been on a campus. I think it reflects a wider naïveté that all young first-year undergrads have about their subjects and life-paths. Look at RDX's post earlier in this thread about engineering: you picture changing the shape and face of the world, but 90% of it is paperwork and petty bureaucracy. This is no different in an academic career-path. You are massively over-selling the lure of science research to yourself. I'd seriously reply to your initial post if it wasn't draped in this sort of blinkered faux-idealism, where 90% of the work in responding is just in being 'real' about academia as a whole, rather than getting around to really inform you of anything about English or philosophy or classics or whatever.

Oh and my point about Mongs was a late-response to the ongoing joke. Nobody uses the term 'mong' nowadays as a shorthand, anyway, 'mongoloid' is basically an archaic expression (in its pejorative sense). Mong is the modern usage, and, well, in the ongoing doctrinal debates between protofascist Prescriptivists and postmodern-relativist Descriptivists, I fall into the latter camp. That's a very boring and academic putting-to-bed of the joke, I know... a little taster of the life ahead of you as a cutting-edge scientific superstar.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-04 14:58:11)

A PhD thesis is a (hopefully) publishable book to be doing full-time, anyway. Every good thesis gets an academic publisher and ends up buried in university libraries forever and anon.

I haven't been misinterpreted continually. You just haven't read things. "Still check here"? No. Not at all. I laid out quite clearly what brought me to this thread in this instance. I play very frequently with BF2s'ers, and it gets mentioned in passing, idle small-talk and laughs. Androoz posted before me in this thread which should make it patently obvious that he told me about this thread (anyone who has androoz on Xfire will know he is basically a human RSS feed, to an obsessive degree). So your view of me as this guy that egotistically thrives on comments is very wrong. As I also said earlier in this thread, the only reason I felt compelled to 'come back' and actually post this time in particular was because of its timing: less than 12 hours after finishing my MA thesis, I read a post saying I've "taken the easy path through life", by Jay, of all people. It was a delicious opportunity to bask. Hardly me constantly checking these forums. It was the first time I have visited for long enough to want to reply in ~6 months.

Oh and I requested a ban in the first place because of a comment made on the temp forums, which was basically a sort of 'I dare you' / 'I bet you won't!' bind. Which I gladly took up on the challenge of. For a moderator you should really be more assiduous in your reading.

As for the opening "why do you care?", this is the greatest and longest perpetuating fallacy of all Internet discussions. To relish in and enjoy correcting Jay on the Internet about his factual wrongness is not 'to care'. I am not emotionally troubled or even challenged by his remarks. It's entertainment. Posting on a topic on an Internet forum doth not a care maketh. That's the oldest, dumbest assumption in the book.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-04 16:10:22)

aynrandroolz wrote:

Trotsky, I think you super over-rate science/maths academia and don't know enough about humanities academia. They are both cloistered and divided from the 'real world'. Yes, there are journals like Science. Do you not know of any of the 'famous' journals and weeklies to do with academic humanities? Just because the format isn't the scintillating media-friendly 'present a new piece of information to world', it doesn't mean there isn't a grey-area translating academic research into erudite popular appeal for the generally well-meaning and well-educated. None of this stuff is rock and roll. To picture the science and maths fields as some dynamic, exciting and 'thrilling' place to work in, whilst the humanities and other classical subjects rot in monotony... suggests frankly that you've never been on a campus. I think it reflects a wider naïveté that all young first-year undergrads have about their subjects and life-paths. Look at RDX's post earlier in this thread about engineering: you picture changing the shape and face of the world, but 90% of it is paperwork and petty bureaucracy. This is no different in an academic career-path. You are massively over-selling the lure of science research to yourself. I'd seriously reply to your initial post if it wasn't draped in this sort of blinkered faux-idealism, where 90% of the work in responding is just in being 'real' about academia as a whole, rather than getting around to really inform you of anything about English or philosophy or classics or whatever.

I don't picture them as exciting, etc. In fact, I've worked in close proximity to people in multiple research fields, been to multiple research fairs, and have read a lot of those oh-so-exciting research posters presented at conferences.

My entire action-packed cliche-ridden description of the Science vs. Humanities field is a simple reflection of the fact that Science, despite being "divided" from the real world, produces research that helps explain how the physical universe works. The appeal of such research is apparent to the layman. That's why scientific research is much easier to present to the media.

However, the appeal of humanities research to the layman is almost never as apparent (in my rather uninformed opinion)

I worked with people exploring the ways to rehabilitate people who suffered Traumatic Brain Injury. We explored the ways the brain drove motor functions through using machines with haptic feedback. While the exact methods through which we conducted research were probably very hard to explain, the end result of the research is pretty easy to explain: "we're trying to determine how TBI screws up the passages through which your brain controls your hand".

Trotskygrad wrote:

aynrandroolz wrote:

Trotsky, I think you super over-rate science/maths academia and don't know enough about humanities academia. They are both cloistered and divided from the 'real world'. Yes, there are journals like Science. Do you not know of any of the 'famous' journals and weeklies to do with academic humanities? Just because the format isn't the scintillating media-friendly 'present a new piece of information to world', it doesn't mean there isn't a grey-area translating academic research into erudite popular appeal for the generally well-meaning and well-educated. None of this stuff is rock and roll. To picture the science and maths fields as some dynamic, exciting and 'thrilling' place to work in, whilst the humanities and other classical subjects rot in monotony... suggests frankly that you've never been on a campus. I think it reflects a wider naïveté that all young first-year undergrads have about their subjects and life-paths. Look at RDX's post earlier in this thread about engineering: you picture changing the shape and face of the world, but 90% of it is paperwork and petty bureaucracy. This is no different in an academic career-path. You are massively over-selling the lure of science research to yourself. I'd seriously reply to your initial post if it wasn't draped in this sort of blinkered faux-idealism, where 90% of the work in responding is just in being 'real' about academia as a whole, rather than getting around to really inform you of anything about English or philosophy or classics or whatever.

I don't picture them as exciting, etc. In fact, I've worked in close proximity to people in multiple research fields, been to multiple research fairs, and have read a lot of those oh-so-exciting research posters presented at conferences.

My entire action-packed cliche-ridden description of the Science vs. Humanities field is a simple reflection of the fact that Science, despite being "divided" from the real world, produces research that helps explain how the physical universe works. The appeal of such research is apparent to the layman. That's why scientific research is much easier to present to the media.

However, the appeal of humanities research to the layman is almost never as apparent (in my rather uninformed opinion)

I worked with people exploring the ways to rehabilitate people who suffered Traumatic Brain Injury. We explored the ways the brain drove motor functions through using machines with haptic feedback. While the exact methods through which we conducted research were probably very hard to explain, the end result of the research is pretty easy to explain: "we're trying to determine how TBI screws up the passages through which your brain controls your hand".

The simple point is that culture and intellection and philosophy are far more interesting and far more rock and roll than empirical science and 'discoveries' to certain people, and vice versa. They are two sides of the same coin of human knowledge, and one isn't necessarily 'better' than the other. The assumption that a scientific journal explaining away the concrete realities of the universe 'adds' more to the quality of human life is completely wrong. In a practical/technical sense, science may lend more help to everyday discovery and invention, yes. But to take that and say it's automatically more interesting to the layman is not true at all. The universe is awe-inspiring, but many people are just as affected and interested in grander philosophical debates and metaphysics than they are in rational explanation of physics. You are just taking your personal preference and assuming everyone else shares it (they do not). The 20th century has actually seen the biggest threat to metaphysics in the history of human knowledge - from new theories of quantum universes to proceedings in analytic philosophy and language theory, etc. - which has seemingly brought all of human study down to the resolutely material. Many people recoil against this and prefer the metaphysical and the Romantic. Some people would rather read research dealing with Kant and Descartes than they would read dry explanatory articles in Science magazine. You singularly fail to grasp this. At the end of the day, explaining away everything in the universe from the scientific (empiricist/positivist) position is not going to make everyday life and human experience more intrinsically valuable or meaningful. This is what I meant by my comments that you are parroting the ideology of science, which is the ideological (and hence political) aspect that science has assumed in a secularised post-19th century world; science has taken on, for many, the role that religion once fulfilled. This is over-extension of its meaning from mechanics and physics into, again, the realms of metaphysics and the transcendent. Science is a marvel of the modern technological age, but the Enlightenment tradition that has brought us to this point in history valued more than just experiment and observation. This is something that a broad and proper 'traditional' university education will teach you, beyond the narrow confines of A3 posters about neurology (which is fine in-itself, of course, and noble and worthy and difficult and demanding and all of those things; it's when you leap from that benefit of scientific research to conclude that it's the de-facto 'most rewarding' academic pursuit that you risk making your Professors laugh at you).

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-04 17:34:50)