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My Survey of Japanese Film class requires that we submit all of our papers through a service called Turn it in! This service apparently distills your paper down to the delicious chewy center, and compares that deliciousness with the flavor of papers that have been submitted before, noting any similarities and flagging you felonious as the case may be. I don't have any major gripes with this in theory, excepting the fact that my tuition is likely paying for this service. What troubles me are passages like the following from the Services Faq:
Can Turnitin be used for instructor or institutional archiving needs?Yes, we do archive all papers submitted to our database by registered users. Extended use of our service builds a comprehensive archive of papers and ensures that students will never recycle papers from previous classes.
So, basically, they're keeping my papers forever...and since when is it a crime to utilize past research in a new context? My real beef, though, is this sneaking suspicion that they'll use my papers in conjunction with their search algorithm to assess future papers. Which means that I'm paying for a service, though in very small part, with my tuition, to heavily scrutinize my papers via automation, distilling my paper into data for future analysis of other kids' papers. My academic work, then, is being given away for free to help feed a commercial venture for which I have no input, information, or control, and from which I will see no kind of monetary return.
Fucked. Up.
Posted at: 22:00
[path: /school] permanent link
broken chords can sing a little
We watched A Page of Madness in film class on Wednesday. Apparently the only known prints of the film were thought to be lost/destroyed for about 50 years until a copy was found inside a barrel of rice...somewhere in Japan *totallypaidattentiontoclass*. And what a find! The movie was... intriguing, but very hard to watch. It was a silent film, with no cards, featuring the most repetitive, discordant soundtrack. Based in an insane asylum, it followed a man who recently left his wife, causing her to go insane and drown their infant child. She had been committed, and he had taken up a janitorial position to watch after her. There's no real cohesive whole, mostly just short bursts of scenes, not directly related to each other, with interspersed flashes of light. The introductory text indicated that the 1920's Japanese audience found the 60 minute movie exhausting...
Me too.
Posted at: 18:00
[path: /school] permanent link
Found this today at work, which eventually progressed to downloading the mp3s and listening to them on a loop for several hours with Justin. Turns out, 12 years had no effect on my spot-on memory of every last lyric. So I'm sitting next to my roommate, passionately singing along with my fucking eyes closed. This somehow then leads to MC Hammer: 2 Legit 2 Quit, This is the Way We Roll, s Family finally climaxing with Danger Zone. Sweet Justin was paranoid that our hubris, blasting Danger Zone at 2AM, would surely rouse the gods of The Crossing to play it every night for the next two months. I fear no song from the Top Gun soundtrack, I say bring it.
Posted at: 22:00
[path: /yt] permanent link