Down the Rabbit Hole
14/03/2014 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaThere's Izzie ever so innocently seeking converts for the Cult of Cthulhu over at a certain Coursera science fiction and fantasy forum when this wicked tale far from Wonderland appears on the screen.
Thana Niveau makes such amazing videos for cultish Cthulhu Carols. Izzie had no idea that she has other twisted tastes too.
And yesss. That infernal but fabulous course is the main explanation for so many serpent absences of late.
There are other online temptations such as the Edx "Effective thinking through mathematics" and "The Science of everyday thinking" which has some very entertaining tales about dark satanic messages in heavy metal music and means of manipulating memories. Oh what a malleable and gullible thing is the human mind.
The Sci fi course takes a ridiculous amount of time but it is a most valuable asset for any aspiring writer. Not just the selection of fascinating tales from ancient and more modern times but the requirement to write essays about them limited to 320 words.
It is also a confirmation of ancient serpent habits. Screens are for dabbling, dawdling and dipping. In spite of reading some materials on the tablet or Big Mac, for actually remembering and enjoying the stories, I have invariably resorted to old dead tree versions from assorted libraries.
The course has just reached the half way mark and Izzie's got to pull her socks up. The peer reviewed marking system is ridiculously unrefined. With a mark of 3 for form and another 3 for content for each essay, there's no room for nuance at all. But four scores of four so far and one single five when a certain Cat has a trophy room with fives and sixes all over the place is enough to make a serpent emerald with envy.
On the radio today they mentioned that the world wide web is celebrating its 25th birthday this very week. It's just as well that Tim Berner Lees was not Bill Gates or it would be a very different and much more boring beast indeed. If he had taken the mean and petty path of patenting, here's wondering how things would have turned out. Much the same with big padlocks everywhere or something totally unlike the present incarnation?
Got to thinking how Cyberia is paradise for knowledge junkies of all sorts. The present time will likely be seen as a golden age for massive open online courses where one can learn from the best in the business with the cost of nothing but one's time and the occasional excess bandwidth charges from pesky internet service providers. But when I think that less than ten years ago even the cheapest and nastiest dodo dial up was $30 per month, then even with $10 excess charges, I am still much much better off.
Must be back slinking in those forums looking to lure the innocent into the serpent's lair.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-16 08:19 pm (UTC)Funny that my reading habits are exactly opposite - I actually have a few of these books in paper versions, but I've reread all of them on-screen, it feels so much more convenient.
The satanic messages course sounds intriguing, but the link leads to the content-less page, probably it requires to register on the edx site before seeing anything of value, and I'm too lazy. I'm currently doing the logics course at Coursera (the 1st unit is more-or-less like Ram Neta's stuff from the Think Again course, but more complicated, and the presentation is a lot more exciting) and 2 programming courses at Udacity (they're self-paced) but that's it, for the time being. I have this feeling that I mostly consume, and it's time to switch to creating... not that talking about it counts toward doing.
I've no idea if the current freedom of the Internet will last; it may fall the victim to the politics even more likely than the economics. Maybe we should try to learn as much as possible while it's accessible...