Update:

So thanks to a last minute intervention by the Dean of Mathematics at my school, I was allowed to take a different profficiency test, instead of the Computer - COMPASS, I was given the Pen & Paper CPE. I scored an 86% on the CPE test.

I get to keep my C in Math, and I get to go on and take college Math, and continue to go to school!

Thanks everyone for the emotional and moral support.

I am so relieved now, It was such a horrid feeling thinking that my entire college career was shot down before I even finished being a freshman.

No longer a student.

I should now have plenty of time to continue posting completely inane and pointless blog posts which basically no one reads. I formerly was a student, but due to my complete and innate lack of ability with everything related to Mathematics I am now a student no longer. Apparently, regardless of it's value to your field, you simply cannot be considered a 'Well rounded' student unless you have passed a college level algebra class.

The trick to this is of course, schools in the US, apparently universally, issue "Placement tests" to see if you are "Capable" of doing college level mathematics. These tests basically will put anyone who isn't extremely talented in math into a either one or a series of remedial classes. This is what happened to me. It's the reason I put off going to college for so long in the first place.

I passed both remedial math classes with a 'C' but the school system isn't satisfied with that. No. they want you to also pass an "Exit exam" to prove that you have actually learned the material.

I haven't. See, it's entirely possible to pass the class and fail every single test, due to the grading rubrics used. Homework = X%, Quizzes = X%, Tests = X%, Final = X%. If you do fantastically well on your homework, but don't manage more than C-'s for your tests, quizzes and final you can still pass the class.. even if that means you really only know about 68% of the material from the class. The Exit Exam is designed to catch people like me, who the school basically considers to be cheating scum, and toss us right back into the 'Learning support' classes. You see, in the state of Georgia, if you don't pass the remedial class(s) in 3 attempts you get kicked out of school for a year. An entire year! Further, you aren't allowed to take more than 20 hours of "College level" classes while you are still in one of these vaunted remedial classes.

In my opinion, this is basically all a big scam designed to bilk the federal financial aid system. What could be better? have a virtual open door to anyone, of any educational background, and then turf them out when they fail to live up to outrageous standards relating to material that the bulk of the earths population has no use for. You would think they would treat reading and writing with great importance, since you can't even function in a MATH class without being able to read and write. But no. They really don't care if you can read or write at a college level so long as you can find factor a polynomial. Even if this has no bearing on your Major, the school systems in the US don't care.

And it really is across the entire US, regardless of state or institution. They have no choice mainly, if they want to remain an accredited institution, but to force their students to take these classes.

But now that I've failed the 'Exit exam', I am left with two choices, either voluntarily withdraw from school, or retake the class (out of my own pocket) and risk getting kicked out by the school system when I fail the test again. It's exceedingly frustrating as I am a 4.0gpa student who is on the Dean's list, yet I am not being allowed to take any more college level classes due to being deficient in something which is completely irrelevant to my field. This counts for nothing of course, why would it? when the entire school system is fixated on their ever increasing math and science goals. It's all anyone in the admissions office ever talks about. They are, basically, trying to turn our fine educational system into a replica of east Asia's. Learn math and science by rote memorization and to hell with the humanities. Who needs culture, right? Glory to the state!

It's no wonder the US educational system is in such Shit condition. It's no wonder our math and science scores are so low. They try to force people who have no apptitude for them to do them which then drags down the over all averages.The Asian countries figured out the trick on how to game the averages. Simply encourage the kids with no aptitude at math to quit school, thus causing a steady uptick in the Math Scores with ever withdrawal. That seems to be the prevailing attitude here now also, who cares if you can write a 20 page research paper, so long as you can crunch numbers. Fuck the Morals, does it make any money?

Needless to say, at this point I'm a bit upset about the whole thing. I can't help but feel I've now wasted a year of my life pursuing something which is, due to bureaucratic jerkoffery, effectively barred to me, forever. I can't even go through a For-Profit online school to take my required math class since most schools won't accept credit from them.

If you haven't guessed, I'm seriously pissed off about this.

Books read so far.

With the first 3rd of the year nearing a close, I felt I would post a list of what I've read so far. Needless to say, due to school, this list is much shorter than it typically is by this time of year. The last two years I set myself the, at the time, highly manageable, goal of reading 150+ books. 2010 I exceeded that and nearly cleared 170. 2011 I started school in the fall, and it became a truly monumental struggle to meet my goal of 150 volumes, I did it, but only barely.

This year I opted to set my goal lower, 75 books, for the year.  

1. Gardens of the Moon - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #1 - Steven Erikson *****
2. Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson ****
3. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Neitzsche ***
4. The Maker of Universes - World of Tiers #1 -  Phillip Jose Farmer ***
5. The King and the Cowboy - David Fromkin **
6. The Gates of Creation - World of Tiers #2 -Phillip Jose Farmer ***
7. Pigeon Feathers - John Updike *** (Read for school)
8. Quag Keep - Andre Norton ***
9. A Private Cosmos - World of Tiers #3 - Phillip Jose Farmer ***
10. Deadhouse Gates - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #2 - Steven Erikson ***
11. The Things they Carried - Tim O'brien *** (Read for school)
12. Beyond the Walls of Terra - World of Tiers #4 - Phillip Jose Farmer **
13. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan ** (Read for School)
14. The Rise of the West - William Hardy Mcneil ****
15. The lavalite World - World of Tiers #5 -Phillip Jose Farmer **
16. In Love and Trouble - Alice Walker ** (Read for School)
17. The Oracle Betrayed - Oracle #1 - Catherine Fisher ****
18. World War One British Poets - Candace Ward *** (Read for school)
19. 1421: The Year China Discovered America - Gavin Menzies  * (Read for school, Utter Crap)
20. A Vocation and a Voice - Kate Chopin *** (Read for school)
21. Magician: Apprentice - Riftwar #1 - Raymond E. Feist ****
22. Red Orc's Rage - World of Tiers #6 - Phillip Jose Farmer *
23. Memories of Ice - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #3 - Steven Erikson ****
24. More than Fire - World of Tiers #7 - Phillip Jose Farmer **
25. Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones ****
26. Tolkien and the Great War - John Garth ****
27. House of Chains - Malazan: Book of the Fallen #4 - Steven Erikson ***


Currently working on House of the Wolfings by William Morris, Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson and Magician: Master by Raymond E. Feist.

Salon asks, Where are the heros? It's a good question.

So maybe those of us who have been asking this question for the last few years aren't alone per say, but rather we are ahead of the curve. Salon Magazine author Willa Paskin asks in her new column the exact question. Just where are all the Heroes in TV. She states, rather effectively in my opinion, that we have the Sopranos to thank for much of the shift in television. Obviously, the Sopranos cannot be responsible for all of it, but they certainly shoulder a good bit of the blame.

The first wave of antihero shows acted as a statement of purpose about television’s new, serious ambitions. If historically, TV had been a medium designed to sell you soap, to entertain and distract you, a vehicle for commercials, the antihero thoroughly upended that. If you watched Tony Soprano, Vince Mackey or any of the corner boys, cops or drug kings on “The Wire” like they were characters you had seen before, heroes in waiting, you were going to get sucker-punched and devastated over and over and over again. An antihero was an aggressive way to short-circuit viewers’ expectations, to show them they were watching something brave and new. TV could be challenging, thorny, difficult, and there was no better way to convey this than through the challenging, difficult, thorny central character.(Paskin)

I think this quotation is extremely telling, and rather vindicating. I've felt frequently as if I've been shouting into the wilderness when explaining just what my central concern was with so called "Grimdark" fantasy. It isn't that it, or The Sopranos, exists which is the problem. It is merely that it garners so much publicity that it overshadows everything else. It's not as much of a problem now as it was this time last year, before Leo Grin's now infamous essay was published, but at one time it seemed the only authors I ever heard about or saw reviewed were authors who peopled their worlds with variously shaded gray-scale denizens. There is definitely room for those sorts of books and characters, but I feel the point I and so many of the rest of us were trying to convey is, they shouldn't be exulted to the point of ignoring more traditionally heroic characters.

But we are well past the place where thinking people doubt TV’s artistic potential, and well into the territory where the antihero is a cliché. And yet he still flourishes, in shows both good and, increasingly, not so good, even as series like “The Good Wife” and its cynical worldview, or “Friday Night Lights” and its dazzling, wonderful Mr. and Mrs. Coach demonstrate, yet again, that the antihero is not necessary to ambitious television.(Paskin)

If even the watchers of TV are catching on that this has become a cliche I think it might be safe to stop calling it a Hypothesis and start calling it a Theory. But at the same time, Fantasy Literature already has begun to show signs of shifting away from it, even as authors like Bakker, Abercrombie, Morgan, et al continue to write the same, or even darker, books than they were previously. The worst thing these authors could do is ignore the possibility of occasionally having a heroic character and instead beginning to make use of the perpetual novice hack trick of splashing more blood, gore and guts onto the page. 

Further, I think several of the comments on the topic illustrate the more specific problem, that, frankly it's the fault of the reviewers who refuse to look to the more classically heroic programing due to risking their highbrow status by doing so who are to blame. If it weren't for reviewers making a fuss over these sorts of books then likely they wouldn't have gotten quite as popular as they did. Simply put though, these authors were and are providing something different, and typically different is conflated with progressive or some other such term which makes people feel that by reviewing them they too can be progressive or cutting edge. In the end we wind up with a lot of E-Ink being expended to discuss the books which have now become a cliche in and of themselves.

Ultimately I think the lesson that can be learned from this whole thing, now having been on going for years, is that the reader should read what they like, and certainly shouldn't trust a reviewer that something is good just cause.

I'll continue to ignore The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and the rest of Grimdark TV just as I do Grimdark novels. I will continue to go and see Superhero movies, read my boring contrived repetitive farmboy-goes-on-quest books and try to take a few minutes away from the 'Real world' every so often, I don't have space in my life to allow my entertainment to try and drag me down too.

unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.

So the BBC is running a story right now asking just why it seems so many Fantasy characters speak with distinctly British accents. Speaking strictly as a fan of the Fantasy Genre, It is a rather preposterous question to be honest. They act as if they need it spelled out to them that the reason the bulk of the characters in Middle Earth and Westeros speak with a variety of British accents is because, well, they are set in Pseudo Britains. They argue, rather unconvincely, that due to Game of Thrones being based on an American series, the characters should probably have American accents. I could buy this if the series being adapted was Terry Brook's Shannara, set unquestionably in a future north America. In fact, I would be offended if Shannara was adapted and wasn't populated by North American accents. If they ever get around to adapting Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, the author himself was explicit on what sort of accents his characters should have, and I hope, for sake of the strangeness of seeing a bunch of African Samurai's speaking with Texas accents, they honor the author's wishes.

The Article goes on to question whether or not the surge in British Accents in Fantasy is a result of Kevin Costner's abysmal accent in Robin Hood: Prince of thieves, It's an alright question but rather dubious. Fantasy Films have been sporting accents and casting "Foreign" (Non American) Actors for a very long time. Or that perhaps it is in reaction to years and years of British accents being synonymous with villainy in Hollywood. Star Wars being a great late example of this. But Practically every World War II film that didn't force its actors to use bad fake German accents, simply substituted for British.

However, that being said, if you look at the 1977 Rankin-Bass adaption of The Hobbit, the entire cast, more or less, is comprised of Americans, and it worked. At least to me, I felt the voices in The Hobbit were all quite good for the characters. They were believable because it was consistent. Obviously you run into problems when you have a hodgepodge of accents with no discernible reason for them to be different. This was a sevre problem with the recent Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. Every other actor in the film, except Cruise, had a British Accent. It made the Germans convincing, except for Tom Cruise. Why so many Americans, myself included, have so much difficulty with accents, baring caricatured ones, is a mystery.

undercover.

I just found out that the Finnish folk metal band Turisas included a cover of Jethro Tull's Broadsword on the 2 disc release of their recent Stand up and fight. I'm sure those who are more in tune with the whole metal scene knew about this already, but seeing as it is only available on the 40$ import 2-disc release, I thought I would share it with everyone.

The Secret World of Arrietty

I went to see this film last night. As is usual for studio Ghibli films it was pretty much great. It was a cute kids movie without being cloying or leaving the lingering aftertaste of artificial sweeteners. At the same time it also kept from wandering into the soul crushing, entire box of kleenex affair, territory of some of the studio's other films.

Following their adaption of Diane Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle and Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea, we are treated to another foray of Studio Ghibli adapting western Fantasy fiction. This time, Mary Norton's The Borrowers, was the subject of the adaption. As with the previous adaptions it captures something of the spirit of the book. At the same time losing something due to shifting the setting to Japan, which to me, felt some what jarring. Though that likely was due more to the Dub (All animation is dubbed by the way, so don't tell me to watch the subtitled version) choosing extremely western names for a number of the characters. I just cannot see a Japanese boy having the name Sean, or his aunt being named Jessica. And at the same time the landscape was so unmistakably Japanese that I couldn't imagine the film being set anywhere else. These are minor quibbles, It wasn't distracting enough to keep me from enjoying the film.

This particular film was not directed by Studio head Hayao Miyazaki but it didn't suffer for it. It had all of the studio hallmarks, and was clearly part of a larger corpus of work stretching back to Nausica: Valley of the Wind. I really can't think of anything bad to say about the film. On the other hand I can't say that I liked it as well as I liked The Borrowers with Jim Broadbent, or the BBC television show with Ian Holm.

All in All, this being the first Studio Ghibli Film I've seen in Theaters since Princess Mononoke, I had a pretty good time. Disney for the most part does a really top notch job in the dubbing process and in bringing attention to these films. At the same time some of the localizations (such as the names) were jarring in ways that they wouldn't be if the entire movie had been localized (which it wasn't). If you haven't seen it, or if you have kids and want to show them a movie which has deep themes to it but won't leave them distraught or hyper active after they finish watching.. I recommend the movie.