@Mitch Edicts? More like edits :p

@Laurel Haha you clearly knew what you were getting into, congratulations.

@Randal'Thor Thank you. I'm just waking up and the first thing I do is open ELU. :)

@NVZ Congrats!

Holy crap... it's 2022 and all this shit is still going on.

What is?

Hey, hi again! In professional communication, emails and such, I read that cheers, best, and take care are the new normal. Irrespective of that, why would you consider cheers "upbeat" or "pleasant" and do you generally construe it as including thank you on top of goodbye; would you write at the end of some email, "thank you" followed by "cheers"?

I use cheers all the time and I like how it sounds, but I'm no native speaker. Does it sound great or soft or something and why though? Is it because you would think of drinks?

For me, it's that sound sort of waving, maybe ee is pleasing in English.

Not the most upbeat of topics but hey. Anyways, thanks!

The Russians keep shelling cities while negotiating for peace.

Are they negotiating in earnest? Who knows?

@CowperKettle It's interesting how they are trying to target civilian officials.

Let's hope Ukrainian officials will be careful to hide their locations.

Yeah.

I wonder whether Russians will emigrate to Ukraine, once the war is over and the worst of the damage repaired.

@CowperKettle hstoday.us/featured/…

coolio 😎👍🏼

@tchrist Dear me

Why is the magazine named "Atlas Obscura"? Were there ever any female Atlantes? I'm positive that even the cartographic sense was always a masculine noun.

@CowperKettle There's a saying in Hindi like "Dug mountain turned out to be a mouse"

Hi dear all :)

Russian attacks continue after peace promise.

Is anyone really surprised?

> "Chernihiv still has no electricity, water supply and heat. It won't be easy to restore this infrastructure. None of the military buildings were targeted last night. They kept attacking only civilian infrastructure," the governor said.

@RobustosupportsUkraine No

Also he said we will focus bombing on other areas?

There is something black in the lentils

@Cerberus oh. haha. nothing new. Well, I mean the Russian insanity is probably part of it.

@CowperKettle No. Basically it means someone dug the whole mountain by doing lots of hard work in hope of finding something valuable or precious but instead it was a mere rat/mouse!

Not sure this exists in English.

Much ado about nothing

I think it means same.

There's another which says "Making a mountain from seeds of mustard"

Congrats on new avatar Matt

Could not guess.

@Welcome to the peonage, @Matt. I liked your orc better, but I can understand why you wish to be incognito, at least for a while.

thanks :D

@Vikas That sounds a lot like the very common "Making a mountain out of a molehill" which means worrying about something to a great extent about something that is not at all important.

@MattE.Эллен New avatar... who dis?

I'm not deliberately this way, I globally updated my profile and now the wrong avatar has replaced my orc

I can't seem to get it back

@Mitch Yeah same. I couldn't find right words.

some weird Gravatar issue

@MattE.Эллен maybe some refresh thing?

I thought that, which I why I'm this weird geometric pattern. The Gravatar for the rest of SE is my big pink face

I used gravatar years ago, haven't given it a thought since. It could be running the World Bank for all I know at this point.

it's show the right image in the selection, but the wrong image when I select it

maybe you have to add the picture specifically as a gravatar item?

I wonder what the financial model for gravatar is? How do they survive? What happens if they pull the plug?

I mean big whoop we all have names, so they're only supporting 1) fun and 2) easy recognizability.

@Mitch I will try that

I tried uploading the gravatar from the gravatar site, and now I have three options :D

at least I look right

@MattE.Эллен Maybe some crypto-currency hackers decided to make your orc into an NFT. Now you have to buy it back for hundreds of thousands.

What are you going to do with all your free time now? Learn a new language? Write an opera? Travel?

All of the above, surely.

@RobustosupportsUkraine I expect that's correct. you can't trust those scammers!

@Mitch I will have to spend longer on my chat messages, as I don't have unlimited editing time.

@RobustosupportsUkraine Mozart did it so sure it's possible

wait... did he ever write the librettos?

Heh, if Mozart could do it, I guess that means anyone could.

I'm convinced

starts writing

Salieri couldn't! Or maybe he could but nobody cared because he wasn't Mozart

Actually, the film Amadeus is unfair to Salieri. He was actually a better friend to Mozart, and Mozart like him a lot.

Still, it was a great film.

And F. Murray Abraham was a splendid villain.

Hey what rhymes with "Stabbed in the face with a circular saw"

That's as far as I got

"And he stuffed that saw in his circular maw"

Lost both my eyes to a metalic claw

takes notes

also..."dumm diddy dum diddy dum diddy dum"?

I think the chord progression there is passable for the moment.

And "The crow looked on with a peculiar 'Caw!'"

Disfiguration left me very poor

You are but a shadow of your former self.

It's almost like it writes itself

well, I suppose the hospital bills more than the injury

@Matt your avatar is a more sickly shade of green now. Is that intentional?

not exactly

@M.A.R. He likes to think of it as more reserved

His avatar is '80s avocado refrigerator color.

Or something like that.

I'm hoping I'll be my orcish self in the next hour or so

@Mitch "And it chopped his rectangular jaw"

eat more green peas

@MattE.Эллен I hope so. Because if it doesn't, your membership in The Cook Kids is in jeopardy.

a lot of green peas

😯

a lot

@Vikas West Africa I think

@RobustosupportsUkraine they're playing by the aggressor playbook

@M.A.R. no spoilers!

Just watched Upgrade. It was pretty fun!

@M.A.R. I cant reply

I have a car, but still no spoilers.

Nothing very grand but very entertaining

@Vikas by the end of today we'll be done with the words and most of the music. Now we have to cast it.

Today's Wordle is another 4/5 guessing game.

Obviously I will be playing the part of Brad Pitt, and Sophia Vergara and Scarlett Johanssen will be playing Sophia Vergara and Scarlett Johanssen as my two wives.

@RobustosupportsUkraine I've already solved wordle today. I did it in one guess. the word is

pusillanimous

@Mitch That throws me off. It's sson, not ssen

Wordle Worldle confuse me

I think all these word games would be more fun if there was an actual person behind the scenes choosing the word specifically to get under people's skin.

@M.A.R. You have your dreams, I have mine

I think I'll make impossidle: 7 letter answers, 6 letter input

@Vikas The way I remember it is that 'Worldle' is entirely unpronouncable

@MattE.Эллен make the word 'impossidle' and I'm in.

@Mitch I can.

There's no impossidle word in my dictionary! 😜

@Vikas When you finally were able to pronounce it successfully, what superpower did the gods bestow upon you as tribute?

@Mitch including the quotes?

time travel? super strength? mind reading?

@MattE.Эллен it doesn't make it any harder for me

I still can't do it

@Mitch You mean there's not?

lol

@Mitch Hope they will.

@RobustosupportsUkraine Is there ever a sequence like it's a message from some prisoner in a maze?

does it ever rhyme?

@Mitch Uhm I don't get it.

does it ever make dad jokes by a sequence of innocuous word choices?

The superpower that I crave is to be able to revoke someone's driver's license on the spot: "Leave the keys, dude, you're walking home."

If not then throw it to the flames

or whatever Hume said when he got fed up with other people bullshit

I can tell you what I said when I got fed up with Hume's bullshit.

@RobustosupportsUkraine Oh shit... does that happen enough that you'd use it?

@RobustosupportsUkraine Go on

@Mitch It's not an everyday thing, so it's not like being a mod on ELU. It's just the occasional usage that would be immensely satisfying.

@Mitch "If you were an ex-Hume, David, I would not exhume you."

@RobustosupportsUkraine Maybe your superpower could also include automatically calling an uber -and- bringing an extra (sober, naturally) driver to take your (I mean their) car home.

That would be cool

@Mitch Hey, you, get offa my cloud. This is my fantasy, and I'll decide how it works.

@RobustosupportsUkraine Look man, my cloud is right next door. I wanna see how this movie ends.

It's not a movie, it's a series. It doesn't end.

types a message and the presses backspace

@RobustosupportsUkraine Nice. Like the supervillain the Underminer "I am always beneath you but nothing is beneath me!"

@RobustosupportsUkraine Sometimes that works. Sometimes not.

Something like that.

Like La Casa de Papel

each season was an awful attempt at dragging on the plot to extend just a little bit more.

that looks like a typo

@Mitch And I saw people here posting on social media during last season: "Wow what a season! Perfect ending!"

Zweigenbaum?

@CowperKettle More probably "tree twig" or something like it. Surnames are weird.

maybe there's a tree that drops a lot of twigs?

Zwergenbaum?

Well, although Zweig is a cognate with twig, it really means "branch" in German.

So it's like someone is Hans Treebranch. We have names like that in English.

Cf. Wainwright.

Still it could be 'laurel' or 'ash' or 'walnut'

Waterford.

Fuckup.

Oakley.

Oakley being from "Oak lea" meaning "Oak meadow."

Fielding, meaning field

Butterfield, meaning butter field.

Cantlay meaning celibate.

lol

I knew a kid in college named Mark Butterbrot. Butterbrot means "sandwich" in German. So naturally I called him the Earl of Sandwich.

@CowperKettle Heh, small world.

@RobustosupportsUkraine Are you people close enough in your colleges to call each other nicknames?

I swear I'm doing something wrong

@M.A.R. Close enough with your friends, yeah.

America is the Great Informality.

@CowperKettle He has a point.

And how many such friends?

Like, anyone in your milieu?

Most people in your class, naturally.

I dunno, there isn't really anyone in the class I'm hostile to, but I'm only on friendly terms with most people

Meaning the awkward perfunctory nod and smile. Maybe it's the pandemic.

It's the pandemic

I'm rather proud of those.

@Mitch Well you say that, but I can't think of people in our class ever being that friendly to each other.

The art is in the suggestion of a naughty word, putting it in the mind, without actually stating it.

It feels like a small-scale society, with all the gossips and jealousies and "howdy neighbor!"s, but none of the camaraderie

@M.A.R. well...

then maybe it's you

Thank you

Opens a bag of chips

It depends

it's being friends that allows nicknames not college

and if you're not around them enough to become friends (which may be because of covid, or may be because you just don't do that kind of hanging around each other a lot in college in Iran) then it's harder to get a nickname

Sure, but I mean, I feel like there's this barrier of . . . what, awkwardness? that prevented people from breaking their ice the small amount of time that we managed to meet each other

It's curious, though, that high school was more formal than college for me. I went to a Catholic prep school, where everyone called everyone else by their surnames.

And now I'd like to be friends with more people but it doesn't happen.

Have you considered bribes?

the American college experience is mostly in the dorms where people are living together. More likely to make friends and then to nicknames

@RobustosupportsUkraine Nobody handles cash anymore

@Mitch I checked some years old chat history and I saw you repeating one sentence again and again 🤣

And now I forgot what was that :(

I saw yesterday when I was searching something else

There's nothing new under the people who are idiots

@M.A.R. Business idea: a phone app for bribes.

Woohoo! I got my wings!

It was related to Bush or Trump I vaguely remember

@M.A.R. I stopped repeating 'people are idiots'

@Mitch Well, my friends circle from high school was, until the connection to most of them has been severed, fairly okay in size. Then they just moved on, except one or two, and we occasionally meet each other and chat.

I don't know why

it's never not true

but it's mean

@RobustosupportsUkraine Tinder?

and I mean it

Everyone has ample reason to say "people are idiots" these days, and the beauty is in the ambiguity of "people" and "are"

@M.A.R. I'm thinking maybe call it Baksheesh.

@RobustosupportsUkraine Great idea. India has a terrific market for it!

I know exactly who those people are

So anyway, I dunno if it's just me, but I also feel like even people in dorms are more distant with each other than I'd expect. The friends circles are much smaller, you'd only allow a couple of people way in, everyone else is standing next to the door.

So I do have a couple of "close" friends, and even their faces I haven't seen for quite a while. But I was expecting, I dunno, a close circle of at least half a dozen friends. Almost no one in the class is like that. Not with people from the class.

Now I think this is your cue to say how our generation is ruining everything

@M.A.R. Maybe it's different in Iran. But here, when one sets off for the university, one goes out looking to make new friends.

@RobustosupportsUkraine It's a different dynamic for sure, but how different? Is it because of the entrance exam? The Asian family values and the high expectations? No idea.

It took me years to find this link/button.

I mean, Konkur has induced complete breakdowns in teenagers.

I was always looking for a link to return to main site. I could not find it until yesterday.

@Vikas Don't sweat it. The chat is full of things to click and drag around

I think the design/UI needs to be updated. It could be better.

@M.A.R. Yeah many small features

@Vikas Can you come up with better UI that still has all the clickable things?

@M.A.R. Right now it looks small, maybe because logo is longer.

Matt's broken orc head toy avatar is back again, yay

@M.A.R. I expect it's different everywhere. In Japan, there is insane pressure to get into a good university, but once entrance has been achieved, many students just coast.

@RobustosupportsUkraine Same here, except I suppose the globalization is far from complete, so even if every student is trying to rebel against the goody two shoes orthodoxy they're unsure and uncomfortable about how other people think. What you end up with is idealists who enter the university and figure out all the cool kids are burning books and crosses. You have to be an idealist to pass Konkur. It's not the right mindset for friendship I suppose. It creates this paranoia of persecution

It's very difficult to try not seeing it through my own glasses. I'm probably failing at it.

We don't have crescents. I dunno what the equivalent of a cross would be in Islam

@M.A.R. well...it could be previous generations ruining it for you

@Mitch Ruining friendships? They sure are adamant on making Konkur an even bigger mental toll, for sure. Every teenager that passes Konkur is hysterical, it's hard to describe it. It's like Andy doing the Jesus symbol thing at the end of Shawshank.

@M.A.R. maybe that was an unconscious reason for banning symbolism in Islam?

@Mitch pretty conscious reason.

@M.A.R. no I mean ruining the culture (whatever that is) so that it is more difficult to make friends

People improvised of course.

I kinda can blame Steve Jobs, because I think typing culture is taking away from in your face culture.

@M.A.R. I do expect it's different under a totalitarian (or near-totalitarian) government.

Under a democracy people can afford to be naive longer.

Theoretically totalitarian

They would if they could

@M.A.R. I meant the reasoning was unconscious that by not having symbols in paintings or sculpture that they couldn't be trashed in public.

Unless there was a lot of trashing such prior things in public at that time

and then it would be an obvious reaction.

@M.A.R. Is it truly that difficult to pass?

@M.A.R. It's not like there's thought police there (like there was in East Germany)

@Mitch No, not trashed . . . If I remember my theology right, they were very conscious about cross-toting Christians and whatever the Jews were toting right from the start. At least that's what the books said.

People improvised, as I said. The marks on foreheads from too much praying became a sort of cross in itself. But it wasn't as easy to tote

This religion was trying to avoid that sort of symbol as a barrier to hypocrisy.

@Cerberus I think the adjective "difficult" doesn't do it justice. More like the people that pass it are no geniuses, and it could be much easier to pass (but not easy), but there's a conscious effort from teachers and shills and all sorts of middle men that have turned it into some psychological war.

@M.A.R. OK so you mean it is not super difficult, but teachers and other parties make it out to be much more difficult than it is?

@Mitch There were rich and powerful men in the beginning who might even have been smart enough to run a campaign against Islam that involved more than torturing converts. But they were so fixated on the invisible God that they didn't try to find other symbols. Maybe they did? History is not a reliable narrator there.

@Cerberus Yeah exactly. The idea is: A nation is pretty big. Selection becomes difficult, because many teenagers study. India's JEE enables selection by making the exam ridiculously advanced, throwing in stuff the students are supposed to learn properly after passing JEE. Konkur makes it about semantics and petty tactics that trip you, and ridiculously inadequate time for the test. Almost anything that would prevent you from answering questions is fair game.

I feel like a lot of halal/kosher laws were because some old guy one day said 'Hey, pork is great and all but maybe can we skip it for once' and other people though 'He's just being nice, he doesn't like pork at all' and then the next people though 'Wow, he hates pork' and then 'maybe we shouldn't eat pork around him' and then 'why aren't we eating pork? it must be bad for you' and then 'we shouldn't eat pork, stop asking why'

All I'm saying is that it started out with someone being nice.

So stop being nice

and have some bacon

But what Konkur teachers do, is they make it super competitive. It's like, if I'm learning German, I'd be constantly sent a notification from Duolingo that "you're the 156,708th most fluent German learner in the Middle East." It's pointless and designed to drive me crazy and give up on the whole thing.

@M.A.R. there is something to be said for making a test to have a good normal curve with 50% being the average, and to get that you have to make parts of it hard (or even impossible).

There are all these mock tests that keep ranking you in your city, in the province, and nation-wide. They tell you how you would do if this was the real thing, and in which year, and which majors would be available to you.

But that is a bit demoralizing for students, where prior training has always been for as many people as possible to get high learning

eg you want everybody to be able to read, not 50%

@M.A.R. there are psychological difficulties with metrics like that. for some it is motivation, for some it is demotivating

@Mitch I have two major issues with Konkur: 1) The petty strategies that a student learns to employ to be able to answer Konkur questions is useless everywhere else. It has no meaningful relations to what the student will be studying after Konkur. 2) The examiners just went and decided to make the whole thing more difficult. There was no management, no awareness. This enables charlatans to toy with students' psyche as much as they want.

@Mitch If it's always in the four digits it's always demotivating. Speaking from experience.

A nation is too big.

@M.A.R. I was using duolingo last week and I kept getting notifications saying things like 'User x just passed you, you're no longer in 2nd place' and I'd go and move myself back up, and then a little while later someone else would take my place, and I'd revisit and do some more.

This week I'm like 'Go to hell'

@M.A.R. Hmm that sounds very Anglo-Saxon.

Treating children or students as each other's competitors.

@Mitch Except Konkur is very halal and doesn't go to hell

Having rankings of which children do best at which subject.

And the grace period is several years.

@Cerberus We learn from the best

That would be anathema here, ranking children against each other.

@M.A.R. I didn't say it out loud.

YOU CAN"T MAKE ME THINK THINGS

to be fair, yeah you totally can

@Cerberus If no one is first then every one is

the nail that sticks out gets hammered down

@Mitch We do not have "first".

You do your best, you get a mark, and if it's high enough you pass.

The adults always make it worse. They're not the ones taking Konkur, and Konkur becoming this abomination is a pretty new phenomenon. So everyone expects from the student, it's rather easy to track the "progress", blame the student for every shortcoming, and not even attempting to understand what's going on.

@Cerberus everybody is back around fifth or sixth?

I don't know what that means.

But we do not have rankings in school.

You wouldn't know what other kids' averages were.

@Mitch To give you some perspective, the experimental sciences Konkur has 650000 participants each year, and fewer than 5000 of them will go to medical school.

Do you have a separate school for medicine?

Here it's just a programme at university.

It's also similar to JEE, which has 1.2M or so participants, and a few thousand get where they want to go.

Part of it you will do in an academic hospital, I praesume.

@Cerberus we don't really have rankings public, except there is the concept of valedictorian, the one single best person in a class. Anything below that is not known

Yeah we do not have that.

There are no rankings, neither public nor known by teachers.

@Cerberus I dunno, the terminology gets confusing. Medicine has its own building, its own faculty, everything

So do we (pharmacy)

Sure, building and faculty.

@Cerberus well individual teachers must be scoring homework and tests and adding them so they know some kind of standing

But that's just because a university is split into different departments.

The website is for "Tabriz University of Medical Sciences", including the medicine and pharmacy faculty, among others

@Cerberus The ministry of health overlooks the operation of TUMS

@Mitch They will calculate each child's average grade when reports are due. But they wouldn't make a ranking.

The ministry of science overlooks Tabriz University

@M.A.R. Hmm that looks like a separate university for medicine and pharmacy, then.

Are you planning to write a novel today? :P

@Cerberus And other stuff of course.

@Vikas I'm the next GRRM but don't tell anyone

I'm sure.

@M.A.R. Oops. Not a big GOT fan.

One of those small hand fans

Anyway how did we get here. First I was pouring my heart out about the scarcity of friendship, then it was about crosses and crescents, and now Konkur

I almost forgot it.

We still have this in our home but not used since many years.

@M.A.R. Someone has to be, since the original owner has abdicated that post.

@Cerberus Right? All sorts of bitterness and rivalry, and no good guidance, because most teachers are focused on their image (if you don't teach Konkur material, you probably suck)

Hmm.

Here teachers are supposed to all teach roughly the same stuff, leading up to the central exams.

I've said this before I think, the students that pass Konkur the very first year are noticeably different from people that didn't make it the first year and have had time for self-reflection.

The former group are even a bit manic

If you poke around my messages from, not sure, 2017 or something, I was a bit manic probably.

Mom's special boy is suddenly not so special anymore. Your entire worth becomes how you do in a five hour long exam that you prepare for a year or more.

Hmm.

Five hours?

That is very long!

The central exam is three ours here.

Well, per subject.

270 minutes, I think?

Is Konkur just one big test for all subjects?

And 270 multiple-choice questions.

Nine subjects.

All multiple choice?

Yep, but some would of course require a bit of calculation

Hmm odd.

Some math questions would require several minutes

@Cerberus It's all corrected with machines

So if your approach is correct, but you make a small mistake, you get zero points for the question?

We have some multiple choice in our exams, but most of it requires you to write out stuff.

@Cerberus Yeah. There are questions in the biology section with a header "How many of these statements are correct?" followed by four to six statements. The choices would be something like 1, 2, 3, 4. You get one wrong, the whole thing is bust.

I see.

As I said, as long as you don't answer it and some brainiac with extra hours in their day does, it's fair game.

Suppose you had a mathematical question worth 4 points. If you only give the answer and forget to write down your calculations in the praescribed manner, you maybe get 1 point. If you have everything right except you made a small error somewhere so that your final answer is wrong, you may get 3 points.

But see, this is all constructive criticism about how the questions are formulated. Easily dismissed with "Sorry, no other choice. Computerized correction"

@Cerberus That sounds so fair my tooth ached.

Hah.

I think our multiple-choice questions are mostly about reading comprehension, which is about half of the questions for the modern languages.

There can be multiple-choice questions sprinkled across other subjects, too.

I wish everything were multiple choice, I always score better on those.

To a student under duress, it's just one extra reason the whole thing is unfair and one extra bit of demotivation. The grown-ups don't even try to be persuasive: "It is how it is. Deal with it."

Very middle Eastern attitude, if I may say

@Cerberus Don't get me started on the English section

Hmm.

Anyway, thankfully, my dysfunctional kidneys saved my dignity, and now I'm the genius with a run of bad luck those years ago, when I had to retake Konkur two extra years. And it's grating, because everyone loves putting you in their little well-defined categories. Now I'm a source of distress for my younger brother, who will be taking Konkur in a year and half.

Poor he.

How are your kidneys doing?

Or kidney?

@CowperKettle: The similarity between Russian propagandists and Trump supporters is even worse than you think.

@CowperKettle LOL

But I understand you're from Russia you would never be able to guess it.

😅

@CowperKettle Yes. You just have to "rotate" it using your hand

But it makes your hand pain soon so you have to keep changing your hands

@CowperKettle Yes.

Life would become very difficult without this as there were lots of power cuts a decade ago and you would use this to overcome sweat

Are there many fewer power cuts now?

@Cerberus Yes. Power cuts are common here unlike developed countries like USA.

And now summer is coming so more power cuts :(

We usually have those invertor battery backups for basic purpose.

I remember once there was a power cut in USA and it got published in news paper. It's so uncommon there.

Do you also pay online for almost everything these days? (Since last 2-3 years)

@Vikas Are there many fewer now than ten years ago?

@Cerberus Yes. If you mean there are less power cuts now as compared to past.

But usually they are not long lasting. 30 minutes or 1 hour max. And sometimes 5-6 hours maybe once every 2-3 months.

And when there's heavy rain storm, sometimes power lines get damaged so it can take even 12 hours to fix it. But it happens very less.