Return of the Revenge of the Son of Saying Hi to Josiah!

[Pikachu127]

G'day, mates!

I surprisingly have no homework (but there's a lot of home work to be done around the house... namely setting in the tiles for the kitchen). Actually, I do have homework, but... eh. We're making camera obscuras in photography, and we need to decorate them. Thinking of some idiotic theme that suits me. How about the Kanto Dex Holders and Mario and Luigi and Wario and Waluigi? Stupid, but I'm kinda desperate. Oh well.

Best of wishes to all of you!

[Josiah]

Hi! I know a lot of college professors run students' essays and research papers through and online system that compares them to others, but there's still plenty of ways to cheat if people really want to. Though, if you're willing to put that much effort into cheating you might as well just do the work in the first place. I think laziness is a bigger problem in college than cheating is. Especially since cheating carries much harsher penalties than it does in public schools.

[Pikachu127]

I was gonna say "G'day mates" but I realized I already said it.

I'm at anime club right now (how fun! I get to torture my friend who's playing Minecraft.) I'm about to play Nitrome with my friend (he went away. Let me call him back. Here he is. Never mind actually.) Watching D.Gray Man. *shiver* Personally don't like it (as compared to Lucky Star. Wait, what did I say?! I'll counteract what I just said by saying I also like Gurren Lagaan. Who knows if I who knows if I misspelled that or not.)'

Blast. It's time to go. D:

Sayonara!

[Metalheadz]

Hi! Thanks for the hints, Josiah.

Surgery is tomorrow! I'm quite stressed about it, when I really shouldn't be. Well, everybody does have at least one surgery in their life, so I might as well get it over with. I'm more afraid of the pain afterwards, since wisdom teeth removed will leave a mark on you for about a week from what friends say.

Peace out!

[Faustgy]

'Ello.
Ever since school started for me, it's been rather hectic. I'm still in the process of adapting to the new year, but things seem to have calmed down a bit.

Josiah's right about the topic of cheating. On another note, from what I've seen so far, usually students cheat because they had procrastinated on their work, and when they're running low on time for projects or reports, they resort to cheating.

And Metal, if you want to know what it's like in college... Well, one of the things I can say is that it's best not to procrastinate. It's easy to get away with it in high school. Heck, I've done it plenty of times myself. But in college, it's a whole different story, especially if your college has a quarter-system rather than a semester-system. You actually don't spend much time inside of classes (I think the most time I had to spend for a class in a week was roughly 6 hours), so it feels like you have plenty of free time. Use that "free" time to study, preview the work, and work on any assignments you had received. For one of my classes, I had about a nine days to write up a C++ program, type up a report about said program, and complete a five-problem homework assignment. I would estimate that the programming part itself took me 2-3 hours total, including testing and fixing errors. The report was rather easy, so it took me less than an hour to complete. The homework assignment was, surprisingly, what took the longest time. Four of the five problems, I was able to solve rather easily (though one took me around an hour to figure out). The last problem took me six hours. That's almost more than what the rest of the assignment took combined. By the time I figured that last problem out, I had roughly three hours left to spare. Now, if I had procrastinated on that assignment, I most definitely would have been in trouble.
While college professors are generally very helpful, they will not take any excuses.

That kind of pressure is what usually leads to cheating, unfortunately.

[Josiah]

Hi! The rule of thumb that they always tell you in college orientation is that you should expect to spend 2 hours of time studying and doing homework for every hour you spend in class. And, with your average class being three credits (3 hours per week) that means spending 9 hours each week per class. (Note that if you're not on a standard semester schedule that can change things up.) How well the rule applies depends a bit on your study habits and the classes you're taking. For most classes, I was able to get all my work done on time and get goods grades with a considerably smaller time investment. But only for some classes, there were others which took a whole lot more time, especially around mid-terms and finals. My brother, on the other hand (who also gets good grades), tends to spend more time than the recommended amount on just about all his classes. In general, after two or three semesters you can start to get a pretty good feel for how long any given assignment will take you to complete and schedule things accordingly but, as Faustgy was saying, you never know when you'll run into something that ends up taking a whole lot longer than you thought it would so it's always good to get an early start.

The nice part about college is that you can choose your own classes and, to a certain extent, set your own schedule as well.

[Saber Knight]

Hey.

So, today in AP English we got back an in class essay.... and I literally dropped the paper in shock. I got a 98. A 98! Which is ridiculous, since my last essay was a B+ despite him only marking one thing wrong on it (not to mention the HOURS I spent tweaking that essay and sending it to smart adults for review). Ahhh, I was SO excited!

Anywho, our final band competition is on Sunday. We've got quite some work to do... I've been taking charge and taking the rookies aside to do some work on their marching. Fun stuff!

[Metalheadz]

Hi!

Thanks for the advice, Faustgy!

Great job on that AP English essay, Saber! Keep up the good work. Good luck at the competition, too!

Oral surgery is done now, and my jaws hurt. Getting my wisdom teeth removed was worth it, though. I hope I'll be fine at the band sleepover tomorrow with my friends.

Peace out!

[Josiah]

Hi! My favorite magazine, Shonen Jump, is going fully digital in the spring. It looks like they're trying to make the transition pretty smooth and they're planning a weekly format which is close behind the releases in Japan, which is nice...but digital? I've already had two magazines I subscribe to go digital (and another half digital) and I just don't like it. I can't carry a digital magazine around when I'm walking around my apartment, going to the pool, etc. Plus, I already spend way too many hours each day staring at a computer screen, I don't like to do all my reading on one as well. I may be a video game designer but I have no desire for everything to go digital.

Congrats, Saber!

[SuzuTitor]

I can't carry a digital magazine around when I'm walking around my apartment, going to the pool, etc.

Nonsense, mobile version.

...I'm going to miss physical books.

[Siranae]

That sounds awesome Sab-wait when did RP Week happen?!

I'm not spending as much time here as I would like to.

Anywho, I don't want to jinx it, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of the workload here. The only thing I've got to work out now is sleep. At the moment I'm sort of just holding off on it until the weekend. Today I actually slept until 12:30. I haven't slept that late since...I guess when I was an infant. But I feel great now!

So Shonen Jump is going completely digital? Thats...odd. Well, I guess not seeing as how many things are viral nowadays, but still, manga is usually read on paper right? (Well, when it comes to One Piece I sort of have to read it online. But everything else is in paper.) Y'know, now that I think about it, I've been seeing a lot of comics doing this actually. When I was at Comic Con there was this booth for Comixology, this thing you could subscribe to and read comics on your computer or mobile device. (By the way Comic Con was amazing. I had this giant stupid-looking grin on my face the whole time and was laughing a lot.)
But yeah, I can see how reading on a screen is going to take some getting used to.

[Josiah]

I can't carry a digital magazine around when I'm walking around my apartment, going to the pool, etc.

Nonsense, mobile version.

Hi! That only applies if I have a suitable device. At present, Viz's reader software only runs on PCs and the iPhone/iPad. I don't have an i anything and probably won't be getting one anytime soon. Besides, I wouldn't want to read manga on a phone (too small) and while an iPad is fairly portable, it's also fairly expensive and a whole lot easier to damage than normal book or magazine. I don't know about some people, but I'd never take a $300+ piece of eletronics to the pool, beach, or the like. The chances of it getting damaged or stolen are just too high.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that physical books aren't going away in the forseeable future. Yeah the Kindle and Nook are doing decently, but there doesn't seem to be any real danger of them replacing regular books entirely. And Viz, fortunately, didn't announce any plans to only release graphic novels digitally. Even when it comes to magazines most of them are still only or at least primarilly released in print. All except for the ones I read...

As for Shonen Jump, Viz has been getting a mostly negative reaction to the annoucement from everything I've seen so far. Will that change their minds? Probably not, but I can hope...

[Silver]

I doubt they'll go full digital, more likely they'll let you choose between print and digital. They'll probably have a reduced price on the digital version since it's much cheaper for them to send out some e-mails than it is to print a million copies and mail them out everywhere. I'm all for digital books, magazines, newspapers, and the like - save the trees, you know. I just don't want real books to fully die out. And they're in no danger of doing it any time soon, but someday...

[Josiah]

Hi! Agreed. Nothing wrong wit e-books, magazines, etc (though I dislike the fact that many of them cost just as much as a printed copy). But I still want my hard copies. And, fortunately, they shouldn't be dieing out anytime soon.

Unless Viz changes their mind though, Shonen Jump will be going full digital in the spring. The last issue is scheduled to be either March or April (can't remember). And the current plans for the digital version spells a lot of changes besides the format. They're planning to go weekly and run things only a couple of weeks behind Japan. Not sure if the articles are staying or if it will be manga only. They also didn't say how or if they're going to catch everything up, and I'm going to be even more annoyed if they just suddenly jump One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach way ahead and make me wait months for the graphic novels of all the intervening chapters to be released. They're also changing the lineup. The three I already mentioned are staying, but they're dropping Yu-Gi-Oh 5D's and Psyren and starting Bakuman and Toriko. I'm not at all happy about the loss of Psyren and while I've got nothing against Toriko and Bakuman (which I've been meaning to read), I'm going to have to buy around 20 books to get caught up.

[Siranae]

Yeah, eBooks do have their merits, especially the saving trees part. I got a kindle last year, and it's been pretty great. But it's a little different for me when it comes to graphic novels or books with pictures. I ended up buying a paper copy of this one book I wanted to read because it had illustrations in it. Also it was at a Borders that was closing so the price had been reduced a lot. But a lot of Borders have been feeling the effect of the eBook market and have been closing. My sister went by that same one after it closed, and she said there was a sign in the window that said "Don't come crying to us when robots take over the world" :P It's starting to look like what happened to the CD stores. But you're right, it's definitely going to be a while before paper books fall to the wayside, if they actually do.