A memoral for "100 Reasons NOT to go to Graduate School"......

[Strelnikov]

....which has been dead since late 2018: http://wikipedia-sucks-bad.blogspot.com ... go-to.html (This is from my other anti-Wikipedia blog, which I haven't linked to here in years....it's more of an online junk drawer than anything else.)

The 100 Reasons blog is still operating, but for how long?

[Strelnikov]

It's still operating: http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

[ericbarbour]

The full list of 100 reasons will be posted in time

Well, still no updates since 2018. Someone was obviously reading it. Some comments were posted earlier this year.

I could just imagine the rage directed the blog owner over the years from academic people. Now I wonder if someone ran a "revenge program" against them. Would not surprise me if they received constant death threats and anger. Academia is often as petty as a primary school full of bullies.

[ericbarbour]

PS your comment:

The number of genuinely prestigious public universities in the United States can be counted on one hand, probably on three fingers, and quite possibly on one.

And Trumpie-Poo has been issuing threats against Harvard. Partly because he was refused entry back in the 1960s. THAT is petty.

[Strelnikov]

The full list of 100 reasons will be posted in time

Well, still no updates since 2018. Someone was obviously reading it. Some comments were posted earlier this year.

I could just imagine the rage directed the blog owner over the years from academic people. Now I wonder if someone ran a "revenge program" against them. Would not surprise me if they received constant death threats and anger. Academia is often as petty as a primary school full of bullies.

The general consensus is that the blog author finally got tenure and ditched it before the final posts. It reinforces my distrust for writing projects where the author says from the outset that they will be writing a certain number books* or posts and it never gets completely done....which in turn is an extension of my childhood dislike for "quest" TV cartoons (The Dungeons & Dragons show, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, lots of other '80s muck) because those shows always got cancelled before the quest ended.

* The counter is Antonio Scurati, author of the M series of historical novels about Benito Mussolini and the rise and fall of Italian Fascism; he thought he could do it in four books, but it took five. Only the first was translated to English in 2018.

[ericbarbour]

Well....be glad you're not following the Song of Ice and Fire series. First book hit the shelves in 1996. Ol' George Rail Road has STILL not finished book 6, even after twenty-nine years, plus TWO tv series based on the previous books.

Or Wheel of Time, where Jordan was working on book 12 and dropped dead. Then a fan, Brandon Sanderson, took over and churned out four MORE books.

There was a Wheel of Time tv series on Amazon. I watched it and it was actually quite good--and far easier to take than reading 15 fat dense books. Then it was recently canceled after 3 seasons due to "fading ratings". High fantasy is damn popular, but only with a small obsessive fanbase. Make it too long and complicated and general audiences won't sit thru it.

(Never talk to a Tolkien nerd about any Lord of the Rings or Hobbit adaptation. You will regret.)

Makes grad school seem like a trivial thing by comparison. Big difference, you can make MONEY writing fat corny fantasy novels. Almost no one makes good money even if they manage to obtain tenure.

[Strelnikov]

Well....be glad you're not following the Song of Ice and Fire series. First book hit the shelves in 1996. Ol' George Rail Road has STILL not finished book 6, even after twenty-nine years, plus TWO tv series based on the previous books.

Or Wheel of Time, where Jordan was working on book 12 and dropped dead. Then a fan, Brandon Sanderson, took over and churned out four MORE books.

There was a Wheel of Time tv series on Amazon. I watched it and it was actually quite good--and far easier to take than reading 15 fat dense books. Then it was recently canceled after 3 seasons due to "fading ratings". High fantasy is damn popular, but only with a small obsessive fanbase. Make it too long and complicated and general audiences won't sit thru it.

(Never talk to a Tolkien nerd about any Lord of the Rings or Hobbit adaptation. You will regret.)

Makes grad school seem like a trivial thing by comparison. Big difference, you can make MONEY writing fat corny fantasy novels. Almost no one makes good money even if they manage to obtain tenure.

I read The Silmarilion on top of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's trilogy and The Hobbit as a child. I later saw that he was trying to do Beowulf and the Eddas but with a modern fantasy twist, and that he was deep into building conlangs for his Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc., just as Orwell pretty much wrote 1984 as an excuse to build a shrinking language, Newspeak as a thought experiment (how crappy could you make modern English and still get it to work? Use compound words is a pseudo-agglutinative way while stripping all ambiguity.) There is a lot of dross in fantasy, and I missed a lot of it.

Almost no one makes good money even if they manage to obtain tenure. They aren't in it for the money, it's a calling.

They made Scurati's M: Son of the Century into a British miniseries (in Italian, with subtitles), and now MUBI will be bringing it to America, under the title Mussolini: Son of the Century*. Allegedly.


Above: The first couple of minutes.

Below: Mussolini in jail, mocking the Italian legislature. The fourth-wall breaking was not in the novel.



Above: The brutality of the Blackshirts on full display.

Below: How it ends. Literally.



* The sales droids think Americans do not understand metaphor. I think that salespeople never learned think deeply and respect their audiences, more proof that business school is a fraud.

[ericbarbour]

Funny.....a web search for "reasons to avoid graduate school" either point to that blog, or to the websites of major universities showing the requirements for graduate studies/warnings about the costs, or a few "listicles" blathering about assorted issues and non-issues. The blog owner has a near-monopoly on this subject, no one else I can find has written as much.