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Twilight Sparkle ✨

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Blog Comments posted by Twilight Sparkle ✨

  1. Honestly, I truly wish I had more time to personally spend in Octavia's Hall, as there is an awful lot of creativity in there. There are a few ideas I have for improving the zero-reply situation, but it boils down to a lack of user engagement in those areas of the site for some strange reason:

    • users will feel too shy to be the first to reply to a topic and... you know, start a conversation (because forums are all about conversation, right?)
    • artists will feel unappreciated and give up on posting art here, leading to fewer potential conversations to be had

    From what I've seen in my own trips through Octavia's Hall, it seems that Fan Art gets most of the attention. Topics generally get some level of attention there; Fan Music, Other Fan Works, and particularly Commissions seem to be littered with near-zero consumer interest.

     

    This isn't a good thing, either - we all like discussions as much as the next brony, but personal replies mean an awful lot to an artist. Having dabbled in the arts myself, I can say with absolute certainty that an artist who receives fifteen critiques - even partial or relatively short ones - is much more likely to stick around and become a valued MLP Forums community member than one who posts their pride and joy here to the metaphorical tune of tumbleweeds.

     

    But frankly, short of introducing some kind of Zero Reply Topics Hunter initiative, I'm not sure what I can do to remedy this. I'm completely open to ideas, and would highly appreciate any you guys can come up with, no matter how large or small.

    • Brohoof 6
  2. Google is trying to get everyone on the Internet to open up and attach their real name to their online identity. They want to get people to move away from screen names to names that mean something in the "real" world.

     

    While the principle isn't exactly unsound, the masses have had many years to become accustomed to the ability to craft their own online identity however they please and cast it off at a moment's notice. The idea of using a personally identifiable "handle" online where it is exposed to the entire planet is simply an alien concept to many.

     

    I'm not trying to justify Google's little offer there, by the way - only trying to provide some insight on the fact that there's more to the decision than Google being out to personally ruin your day. If there's one thing people assume far too often online, it's that the people and/or companies operating their favourite websites personally attack them every time something is changed. Hell, I've had to endure that kind of heat myself here with MLP Forums.

     

    Why not use the little "Send Feedback" link at the bottom of each page on YouTube to tell Google that you find their "offer" annoying and inaccurate?

  3. I think the best way to think of atheism is to perceive it simply as another belief. I do believe that "we're just an accident and on our way to rot in the ground," as you put it, but I don't find the atheist way of explaining life and the universe's existence depressing or conducive of mean acts.

     

    If anything, it only emphasizes how precious and short life is, and makes me want to do as much good as possible in the world during the short time I have to be here.

     

    Just as you cannot rule out that an afterlife exists, it is equally impossible to rule out that it does not exist. Personally, I find the biological explanation of all life being an overly convoluted version of the reaction C6H12O6 + O2 → CO2 + H2O, that simply stops when a chromosome's telomeres have divided in half one too many times, a lot more plausible than any explanation involving a soul, life force, or equivalent entity that transcends your physical composition of proteins and enzymes.

     

    Just a different school of thought, really. I can completely understand that this way of thinking isn't for everyone; so while I don't believe in anything supernatural, I'm perfectly willing to accept that other people do, as long as they are not adamantly trying to convince me that their beliefs are "better" than mine.

    • Brohoof 5
  4. I think it has to do not so much with the sensor's quality and moreso with its physical size. There is only room for so many photons on a cellphone-size image sensor, so it seems reasonable to me that it is simply impossible for such a small, tiny camera to capture enough light in dark areas to form a quality image worth looking at.

     

    Really, I'm a bit saddened at how many people actually settle for the quality of phone pictures. Admittedly, some major improvements have been made in recent years (the iPhone 4S makes for a fairly decent low-end camera in mid- to bright-range lighting); but our family's $250 (at the time - probably ~$120 now) 14-megapixel Sony Cybershot still knocks quality out of the park in just about every possible lighting environment. The camera is smaller than a phone, but the actual lens and sensor make up around half of the unit's volume.

  5. Don't left-click download links. Right-click them and use "save link as" or "save target as" to force the file to be saved. Then, use Windows Explorer to open the zip files - you do not need WinZip, WinRAR, or any other archiving tool to work with these.

     

    Avoid using Internet Explorer's "Open" or "Run" feature when downloading an installer of some kind... it can sometimes cause trouble.

    • Brohoof 1
  6. Huh? What's the extra pay? It's just normal classes but instead of kids being in Year 11, they'll be doing Year 11 Bio, Year 12 Chem, Physics, Maths Methods and Adv.Gen and Year 10 English. I don't see what you have to pay for.

     

    It screws with the government's intention of neatly packing children into annual packages of graduates, innocently titled "Class of 20xx". As if the year you turned 18 is your defining trait as a student. Someone taking too many high-level courses too early may graduate too early, leaving a gap in their destined "Class of 20xx" student body.

     

    Schools (at least BC schools) receive a certain amount of funding per student and per class; and having discussed the matter to some extent with my grade counselor, I was a little taken aback by just how much the funding rations played into the administration of the school, often suppressing the quality and personalization of each student's education.

     

    For example, they cannot operate classes with fewer than 25 students (with a few specific exceptions) because the Ministry of Education writes those off as a waste of time, refusing to fund them. The school also does not receive any funding whatsoever for students taking fewer than six courses in a year, which is a situation I very nearly ran them into with my habits of taking stuff that's ahead of my grade.

     

    With how low the school's budget actually is, I honestly cannot blame them for wanting to be eligible for every extra dollar the Ministry throws their way. So they need to place some restrictions on how freely their students can shuffle between courses in the interest of self-preservation.

  7. That's why in Alberta we have something called the "Gifted Program". It lets students who are have higher skill then their grade practice skill from higher up grades. 10X better than normal school.

     

    The Gifted Program is a national thing in all of Canada. It feels like being a test subject at times. My grade two teacher (who developed a personal vendetta against me because of it, by the way) saw that I exhibited some of the "symptoms" of a gifted child and had me tested. I tested positive, and my parents received a huge letter in the mail explaining to the letter what challenges anyone dealing with me - themselves included - would face. "Symptoms" like asking too many questions, defying orders, and challenging superiors.

     

    On the upside, it did allow me to skip five years ahead in a subject no questions asked. I will never forget the look on my seventh-grade teacher's face when I strolled into class two hours late, my excuse being that I had to take the German 12 provincial exam that morning. The score came back a gleaming 100% several weeks later.

     

    It's almost disturbing how unusual people can perceive you to be for having a proficiency that doesn't correspond with your biological age.

     

    Then again, if my classmates' English essays I marked for my English 11 teacher last year were any indication of the academic proficiency of the average person my age... my case probably is unusual enough to warrant being slotted into the Gifted Program.

  8. Sweet, so I'm not the only guy on the planet who finds they can concentrate and work much more effectively at night!

     

    It's hard for me to get away from my computers when studying because I rely heavily on them for school. I take a laptop to class and write a lot of notes on it. That isn't really a problem unless I'm super-bored, though (in which case I tend to find myself drifting to Skype and MLP Forums).

     

    Music objectively distracts me, however. I'm not sure if it's because I have over a decade of formal musical education which automatically clicks me into attentive listening mode, but I've found I work most effectively with faint background noise - not absolute silence, but just something going on somewhere near me, but not too near. The noise puts me at ease without inviting me to focus on it.

    • Brohoof 2
  9. I don't know what's in it yet, although I assume the Canadian Calculus 12 isn't too different from the USA's. I expect to get a course outline in a day or two, after I've gone to my first class.

     

    I keep hearing that calculus can be either that one course that completely legitimizes 12 years of preparatory math to get to it, or that one course which makes you want to set every math book in the world on fire and exile yourself from the subject forever. It all comes down to the teacher you get, and hallway rumour has it that my calculus teacher this year is of the latter kind...

     

    I was seriously looking forward to the subject until I found out who's teaching it. >_<

  10. I know you're younger than me, but you seem to be hellishly far ahead in... everything.

     

    Have you been through Calculus yet? I recently found out that my school's "good" Calculus teacher isn't teaching the subject this year, leaving me stuck with the "bad" teacher who tries everything he can to make his weekly 200 minutes with you a living hell. I'm probably gonna need a lot of help in the subject... :(

  11. My thoughts exactly.

     

    The existence of homework should either be justified, or teachers should accept that students won't see value in it.

     

    In my personal experience, the best teachers hardly even give a damn about homework and instead focus on making each and every lecture meaningful and memorable. When the time comes to quantify your proficiency in the material, they pay much more attention to your performance and attitude in the classroom than how many pages of homework you did.

     

     

    But some kids need to practice and it's really hard to practice while learning something new.

     

    Operative keyword: some. Some kids need a lot more practice than others. I'm of the opinion that homework needs to be demoted to purely optional practice that does not factor into your grade. Instead of being encouraged to do all the homework, students should be encouraged to do as much of it as they feel is necessary. It will work wonders to separate the wheat from the chaff.

    • Brohoof 1
  12. You must have an all-star cast of teachers to feel this way about weekends, Bronium. I hate school for the most part, myself, and weekends are the only times when I can actually get something productive and educational done. :(

     

    It should be acknowledged that I have a couple of excellent teachers who are fantastic educators I enjoy learning from. But for the most part, school feels like an exercise in either brain rotting or mindless memorization to me.

    • Brohoof 1
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