nor so wide as a church door

Okay, so I was thinking about doing a recs post, except I am nowhere near all the way through the archive, and already there is the one where the Old Spice Guy is in Beowulf, and the one that pretty much singlehandedly undid the trauma inflicted on me by every short story I had to read in English class (All Summer in a Day), and the one everybody's already recced where bunnies are in space (Goodnight Moon), and the one that fills in some blanks and smoothly fixes some of my least favorite things about the second movie (Hellboy), and the one where Claudia's bonded to the Warehouse and makes things a little better, and a bajillion rec posts on yuletide ANYWAY, and I just have nothing new to say. Yuletide is hearts forever - which is also an unoriginal sentiment, but I MEAN IT ANYWAY. ♥♥♥♥♥ And my treat recipient liked my treat, which means I have not failed at Yuletide forever! \o/

Man, I have got to start leaving feedback. I can even take baby steps, now that the kudos feature is up; I don't have to dive right in and be articulate and thoughtful, which should help with the anxiety thing. **resolve face**

Aaaaand gatorgrrrl digs herself a deeper hole (bonus: translation by nestra). **facepalm** I can't help but sympathize with the urge to explain yourself at length, and I get that having the spotlight of fandom attention turned on you negatively, full-force, for several days, can be really rough. But, look: the conversation isn't going to stop just because you said you were sorry, and getting all sad inside about how you ttly apologized and yet people still haven't magically started acting like nothing ever happened ... is not going to help. Odds are the conversation isn't even about you, your motivations, your intent, or whatever defensive justifications you can muster; it's about what you did. By which I mean a thing that is done; over; complete. Unless you have a TARDIS, you can't change said done thing, so just let people discuss whatever it was, and do your best to learn from the things they're saying.

NB: These "you"s are nonspecific - this applies to a lot of mid-wank/unfunny business apologies.

Also, if your apology contains a line like this: "If anyone has defriended me, I am sorry you felt the need to do so"? Please, please rethink it. To me, at least, it comes off as weird and passive-aggressive and blame-shifting - like, "I'm sorry you got so upset" instead of "I'm sorry I upset you". NOT A GOOD APOLOGY. D: Really, the passive voice in general is probably a bad idea: see the classic "mistakes were made".

(Countdown to me doing something stupid on the internets, forgetting everything I've written here, and coming off like a total failboat: starts now.)

Last final this afternoon - Cognition and Language, which was actually kind of nice, because I'm doing pretty well in that class.

It's weird to be essentially done, even if it doesn't really count for almost two more weeks. I can't say that I really loved college, although I can think of ways in which it was probably really good for me - although I do think that the vast majority of any improvement I've made as a person since freshman year was ... mostly because of fandom, not school. I cried like a hungry, angry baby when I picked up my cap and gown for high school graduation, and not in the good way - in the way where I was pretty much wrecked over everything I was leaving behind. But now? ... Not so much. I mean, I feel sort of nostalgically fond of this place, and I bet I always will. But that's not really the same thing. :P

And I guess this isn't a bad time to round up some WinCon unfunny posts for myself. Given the topic of discussion, there is potentially triggery stuff on the other ends of ... probably most of these links: Unfunnybusiness post; seperis; seperis follow-up; musesfool; tzikeh; sparky77; seperis a third time; mistresscurvy; tabaqui. I don't think that's everything I've read about it, but I got to everything I've read about it through some combination of these posts, so. I'm severely not on board with victim-blaming, but everything I could say about that has been said, and, once again, far more articulately. So all I've got left is to say that I really, really wish people would remember more often to throttle their first defensive reaction to any accusation of wrongdoing, and stop to take a careful look at the actions that led to the accusation, instead.

... Now that I've said that, of course, I'm guaranteed to forget it myself at some future date and end up looking like a complete ass, but. There it is.

Anyway, now that I can cross exams and my own personal linkspam off my list, back to the important stuff: my ladiesbigbang fic.

This whole survey thing really exploded, huh?

I've caught up on a lot of the posts about it between classes and such, and have found it hilarious and infuriating by turns. The "slash is like dudes liking transsexuals" comment was bewildering; the responses to it warmed the cockles of my heart. I think that what throws me the most is the staggering number of hugely broad assumptions they are working from already - they are treating things like givens when they are not actually givens, and that anybody who is supposedly some kind of qualified researcher would not know better than that blows my mind.

I have seen it mentioned that the people behind the survey have implied that, because they were not intending any minors to be involved, they did not need IRB approval. (Although I did not actually follow any specific link to a comment containing that implication, so I have no first-hand knowledge.) If that is the case, then I would like to weep for all the time I wasted filling out paperwork just to get an expedited review of my thesis project by UVM's IRB when no minors were going to be involved.

I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking when I first saw the banners for the survey going around; I've seen that kind of thing before for people's smaller statistics projects and such, and I guess I never really realized that this was at least trying to be an actual official research project. That being the case, the problematic survey items take on a whole new meaning. We spent ages in Measurement of Communication Processes learning about just how careful you have to be about everything when you're making a good survey, including the wording of the items and the various options for the response setup. We had to run our project surveys on a pilot sample and test the validity of the items and chuck the really awful ones and rephrase the only mildly terrible ones and argue for, like, a day and a half about whether we had really picked the right response setup. And that was just for a class project, not for something we were planning on turning into an actual research tool.

Other people have talked quite a bit about the myriad other problems, so: linkspam roundup. I would be so lost by these blowups if it weren't for these roundups.

... And now I have to go to Human Cultures. Sooner or later I will put up a riveting account of my Tuesday, though.

ETA: Obviously I should have checked my e-mail before I left, or I would have noticed I had a comment (on LJ, I mean) before this posted, but somehow my last post about the survey actually ended up in the linkspam. It's like I have some kind of actual presence on the internet or something. o.O

ETA 2: Also, something so basic I forgot to even mention it: every statistics class I have ever taken has hammered home the point that convenience samples are almost totally worthless. Obviously this is a situation where you are aiming to get a particular population, and so a convenience sample, as long as it's taken from that target population, is perhaps slightly less useless than usual, but.