QUESTIONS
1. Which household chores do you like to do and which do you avoid?
2. What one special talent would you like to have?
ANSWERS By: Austin Smith
1. There are no regular chores I really avoid doing, but that’s really because I have no one to share them with. I do hate anything that involves plumbing though.
2. The ability to get an almost super human amount of work done, that would be such a nice thing to have.
There are a lot of pencils out there, and it seems there are even more cheap pencils (that isn’t possible, I realize, but it made sense when I was typing it). How good can some of these pencils be? Today I’ll be taking a look at the Paper:mate Mirado Black Warrior Pencil.
The pencil body is simple and round, which is surprisingly not a standard pencil shape. I always had round pencils at school (a set of leftovers from my father), and people always liked the way they felt when I loaned them out (which is why I lost so many). The shape is quite comfortable, and just that little bit better than a hexagonal pencil. The set of pencils that I received have a satiny finish that make them fairly grippy even with sweaty hands (from what I understand, they used to be more shiny and slippery). The rest of the body is a plain black with “Mirado Black Warrior” in gold on it in a poorly chosen font, as well as HB 2 and the Papermate logo, the hearts of which take away from the “warrior”-ness.
The back of the pencil has a standard pink eraser, which does its job and hasn’t dried out in the time I’ve had it. I’d guess it isn’t the best quality and if you always want to erase what you wrote I’d recommend getting a dedicated eraser, but these work fine for most of us. The lead is HB, but feels much softer than most HBs I’ve used. Perhaps that is just me, but I’d say it is at least a little softer and it covers smoothly and well. A good pencil for filling in scantrons or shadows. Because it is so soft it is not too great at holding a point, though.
Is it a good pencil? Definitely, and for the money it’s really just a matter of preference.
There are loads of good pencils in this price range, so if one that is round (make sure your desk isn’t slanted) and has a slightly softer lead sounds good to you; or maybe you just like the “stealth” idea of an all-black pencil, this one is at least worth looking at. And like I said, for the price almost anyone could afford to pick up a box to compare to any other pencil they happen to be using.
QUESTIONS
1. What makes a good teacher?
2. Why would you rather be a girl or a boy?
ANSWERS By: Austin Smith
1. I have no idea, it depends on what their teaching. You need to just have a knack for it.
2. I have no real preference or any reason to prefer being any gender other than I am already male and it would be difficult to change.
Renaming videos and articles after their release seems a very recent phenomenon. I go to a website, or see a new video on youtube that’s news-related, read the headline, read the article or watch the video, then leave and do something else. And when I return to the website to check something else, I discover the title to the thing I’ve already seen has changed.
I’m never quite sure why the change has occurred, but I do know that it is quite inconvenient for me when I think I might be looking at something new when I definitely am not.
I guess I know why they’re doing it. In theory it would be because of a mistake, or improper wording. If they had a title that didn’t reflect what the article or video was about, I would understand the need to change it. And, of course, typos need to be corrected.
But in some cases, more recently, I’ve been seeing perfectly accurate titles being replaced with equally accurate ones, less accurate ones, and sometimes even irrelevant ones. Perfectly good titles are exchanged for ones that will get more views, or play in with some recent phenomenon (that will get more views). And this is something that really disappoints me. I want the places where I go for entertainment to at least keep their original titles (save for fixing typos) the vast majority of the time. When a much-more-appropriate title appears, I am absolutely fine with the previous one being replaced, but if one is replaced on a weekly basis I start to have problems.
Sometimes I don’t name things until I’m done working on them, but often times I have a finished title halfway through production, and not having one, or at least a good idea of one, by the end of the process seems like a large oversight. If you don’t like the title enough that you’d consider changing it later, think for a longer time about it now.
And when news sources do this I feel especially wronged (not in a severe sense, because this is just online, but you get my point, I hope). Many times it’s obviously changed to get more views. Now I’m fine with things being named to get views, but if I have to deal with two click-baity titles on the same piece of material in the same day, I start to not want to view that content. Sometimes there are even more title changes, which may speak to a strange attention disorder and want of more recognition that may be inside the mind of the poster.
In short, I don’t like it! It is passable sometimes, but I feel that it is wrong to an audience to rename multiple times what you have put up for viewing. In my opinion, it attempts to get more views dishonestly and corrects mistakes very rarely. Although I’m not a fan, it still isn’t nearly as bad as the Discovery Channel airing that mermaid “documentary”, though.