Jean-Marie Le Pen Est Mort 💖

Ducks quack loudly before a rain. 📰 🦆 

that moment when you’re reading a history book and get jumpscared by an eerily familiar name from Discworld. pterry strikes again

context: Wynkyn de Worde (along with William Caxton) first popularized the printing press in England

BOOK: How To Be A Tudor by Ruth Goodman (pg 13)

I am happy to inform the public that there is a dataset of hair salons with puns in their name. It's all in French, but I can only applaud the effort and I hope that one day, similar work will be done for coffee shops, if only to simplify the work of authors wanting to check whether or not something is taken.

data.gouv.fr

Coordonnées des enseignes de Coiffure comportant des jeux de mots cocasses dans leur appellation - data.gouv.fr

Ce jeu de données contient, au format geoJSON, les…

Names include such gems as Faudra Tiff Hair, United Hair Lines, Lucif'hair, No Peigne No Gain, and my personal favorite, Queer Chevelu.

Since we're all talking about plagiarism now, I'd like to share this video which came out last year about a paper accepted at the CVPR 2022:

For the people not in the know, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference is the biggest conference in computer science. Last year, in 2022, the paper featured in the video got accepted. A few days later, this video was posted. The first author, a PhD student, apologized and the paper was retracted and removed from the proceedings. Hilariously, the first reaction of the co-authors, including a professor at the Seoul National University, was to say that they had nothing to do with it.

My point here is that scientific papers are not rigorously checked for plagiarism, and a background in academia tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not someone will be diligent in avoiding plagiarism. The biggest difference is that there are consequences if you're caught.

I also don't want people to be too harsh on the first author of this paper, or to think the situation is equivalent to the whole Somerton debacle. For starters, you don't get paid for publishing papers, you (or more commonly your university) pay the publishers. But the phrase publish or perish exists for a reason, and everyone in the field wants to get published in the CVPR, because it's supposed to show that you're great at research. Additionally, the number of papers and the prestige of the venues they're published in criteria on which you will be evaluated as a researcher and a university employee.

The way I see it, there are basically two kinds of plagiarism that are shown in the video. The first one concerns sentences that are lifted completely unchanged from other papers. This is bad, and it is plagiarism, but I can see how this would happen. Most instances of this appear in the introduction and on background information, so if you're insecure about your mastery of English and it's not about your contribution anyway, I can understand how you would take the shortcut of copy-pasting and tell yourself that it's just so that the rest of the paper makes sense, and why waste time on phrasing things differently if others have done it already, and it's not like there are a million way to write these equations anyways.

Let me be clear. I don't approve, or condone. It's still erasing the work of the people who took the time and pain to phrase these things. It's still plagiarism. But I understand how you could get to that point.

The second kind of plagiarism is a way bigger deal in my opinion. At 0:37 , we can see that one of the contributions of the paper is also lifted from another paper. Egregiously, the passage includes "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first [...]" , which is a hell of a thing to copy-paste. So this is not only lazily passing other people's words as your own, it's also pretending that you're making a contribution you damn well know other people have already done. I also wasn't able to find a version of the plagiarized article that had been published in a peer-reviewed venue, which might mean that the authors submitted it, got rejected, and published it on arXiv (an website on which authors can put their papers so that they're accessible to the public, but doesn't "count" as a publication because it's not peer-reviewed. You can also put papers that are under review or have been published on there as long as you're careful with the copyrights and double-blind process). And then parts of it were published in the CVPR under someone else's name.

I think there's also a third kind of plagiarism going on here, one that is incredibly common in academia, but that is not shown in the video. That's the FIVE other authors, including a professor, who were apparently happy to add their name to the paper but obviously didn't do anything meaningful since they didn't notice how much plagiarism was going on.

I am not trying to ruffle any feathers, but I have to say this before Season 2 comes out, so I can act smug when I’m right. Here is my number one prediction for Good Omens Season 2:

There won’t be a voice-over.

Now hang on. I know it’s a controversial opinion. Let me explain.

I have noticed that virtually every adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s books has some sort of voice over, either diagetic (like Going Postal, where it’s part of the framing device) or non-diagetic (Hogfather). And I get it ! If you’ve read any of the Discworld book and have this weird brain quirk where a part of you is always thinking about how this would translate on screen, you’ve probably noticed two things:

1. There’s visual humour in text form. How ? This man was a genius and a will be missed forever.

2. There’s so much that just can’t be translated on a purely visual level. The footnotes! Should we just leave the footnotes out ? They’re so great! They add so much to the world in general. There are running jokes that only appear in the footnotes ! Should we just accept that it won’t make it to screen ?

Yes. I’m sorry, but yes. Some things will be lost. Maybe you can integrate one of these jokes as recurring background events ? A lot of people are not going to notice though. There’s an expectation that the reader will read all of the words, while the viewer may not see all that’s happening on screen (although, to be fair, you will be noticing new puns on every re-read for years in the case of the Discworld).

(In comparison, adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s work are less prone to voice over. If I remember correctly, Coraline didn’t have one. Sandman starts with a bit of voice-over from the main character, but nothing more after that. I don’t remember any in American Gods. MirrorMask has left me nothing but the memory of a fever dream, so I can’t be sure. )

This is not to say that the voice-over in season one was pointless. It establishes the tone, to start with. If you remember, the opening narration is about the age of the Earth, in which we learn that it was created on the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., and therefore learn its star sign. It’s a good way to show that yes, there are angels in this, and demons, and the garden of Eden, and if you want to think too hard about this, they’ve got you covered. But if you think that these depictions are either blasphemous or religious propaganda, it might be a good time to learn to take a step back (and a joke, in my personal opinion).

But there are definitely instances of narration that would never have happened if season 1 wasn’t a book adaptation. I am thoroughly convinced that Dog’s experimentation with chasing and being chased by cats would have been screen only. Maybe a scene. Maybe something happening in he background. Who knows.

And here’s the thing. Season 2 isn’t the adaptation of a novel. I remember a tweet by Neil Gaiman about how he and Pratchett had a sequel plotted out, but even that isn’t season 2. According to the same, tweet, Season 2 is how we get there.

My number 2 prediction is that there will be a an intense heist scene during which Sadie and Dottie both try to steal some incriminating letters unbeknownst to each other.

Seconding the recommendation for the Critshow, but to give some more mainstream examples, there's also Jack Harkness from Doctor Who and Torchwood, Hob Gabling from Sandman, and a character from Misfits whose name I can't remember because it's been years.

immortality through not being incapable of death but by coming back to life after you die no matter what is such a cool power like it’s just so fucking metal. you can rip me apart if you want, i’ll rise from my own viscera and all you’ll have done is piss me off

In the late 2010s, I once car-pooled with someone whose car 1. Had a cassette player 2. Only contained a Best of Queens cassette. I spend the whole car ride ( several hours) wondering if I should say something. Since this was in France and I had never met another French person who had read Good Omens without me recommending it first, I didn't say anything, but I still think about it from time to time.

Q: What inspired you to have Crowley’s Bentley tapedeck turn everything into “The Best of Queen”?

Neil: Back in the days when all cars had cassette decks Terry Pratchett and I both noticed and talked about the fact that we had The Best of Queen tapes in our car we could not remember bying. And our theory was: all tapes turn in The Best of Queen. (x)

Discworld Elysium part 5

p1 p2 p3 p4

If you are an avid Discworld reader, you remember that the premise of Jingo is the sudden appearance of an island in the middle of the sea.

Say hello to Graham Island, a real thing that happened in the 19th century. An island rose up in the Mediterranean, stayed there just long enough to be claimed by England, Spain, Sicily and France, then sank back. The whole thing lasted less than six months.

hey say something nice to me