Llanoland

Hey everyone, just a rambling general update today.

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/week/2

Seems that the second week of the year saw me falling off in my listening habits, but still pretty good. I'm recovering from a cold this week so not a lot going on. 

I am thinking of recycling a lot of my YouTube videos for class this semester as I do have a lot of good ones about debate and argumentation. Is it ethical to make students watch YouTube? There are advertisements there. Is it ethical to make students watch ads for a course they are paying thousands of dollars to attend? 

I would think at best we'd have a good video platform at the university level like Vimeo or something that all students could use. I guess we have Panopto, but most students use the Canvas Studio or they just upload the file to Canvas.

Maybe I'm over thinking it. 

https://open.spotify.com/track/3LfZkFQpwt9q2xfXIw2FHC?si=d7ce48ef8ddf4336

We are a week away from classes starting and I'm about a week way from being fully ready. So that's really something.

I'm going to try very, very hard not to care too much about what goes on in there. Offering the best possible class I can and then evaluating evidence presented by students that they are understanding (i.e. forging a relationship with the material) is about all that can be done. 

I'm really wondering if I'm actually going to get away with this 2 sections at the same time = 2 sections for your contract obligation. I really hope so and I certainly expect it to fail but I think I can whip up a mighty fine public speaking course fairly quickly.

It really has to be a spring focused on pumping out some of these drafts. The backlog is too big. The opportunities are there. It just requires a bit less social media and YouTube time. That's really it. Not too much. 

I've been going to the gym; hired a trainer. She told me the smallest caloric deficit with regular short sets of exercise is all you need for massive transformation. Same can be said with writing except the deficit is in other activities you do during the day and short sets refers to typing away (or scribbling with that favorite pen). 

I had a dream involving a creature that looked like this but I haven't run across this creature ever in my life, not even on social media or internet reading. It's called the Antarctic Scale Worm, and it's apparently a deep water predator. 

In my dream, people were wearing this as a living stole, something like a living fashion accessory-pet. I don't remember much else about the dream except it involved a grey-green futuristic research facility that was in the woods somewhere. It was very dark. 

I should try to write down dream impressions when I wake up and see if they lead me anywhere, because this was totally too strange to find this in my feed today.

SCENE 1

Old Man sitting on a weight machine using an old iPhone. He is listening to the handset staring into space.

OLD MAN: Ok well I have to go but if you keep this up you're going to end up in jail just like your mother. Bye!

SCENE 2 - young man and woman walking down the stairs after finishing their workouts

YOUNG MAN: I just don't think that's how you are supposed to run a business.

YOUNG WOMAN: And he has this Polish Flag hanging up in there, like, how is that going to help?

YOUNG MAN: *shaking head*

SCENE 3 - an old man MIKE is vigorously using a rowing machine way too fast. A second old man FRANK enters and walks by him.

MIKE: (shouting): Hey Frank!

FRANK: (stops) Mike, how ya doing?

MIKE: I have some bad news for you Frank

FRANK: (beat)

MIKE: I'm not moving to Massachusetts!

Both begin to laugh the old man muppet laugh and become louder and more animated so much so that a woman who was slowly rowing next to them stops and joins in on the laughter, looking around the gym as she does so.

THE END