AQATSA Update, No April Fools' Joke!

[inverarity]

I feel like staying off the Internet tomorrow. I know this makes me sound like a humorless grumpy-pants, but I hate April Fools' Day. Yes, it's just so cute when every web site covers their home page with monkeys, tells us they've been bought out by the Russian mafia, changes their color scheme to pink and chartreuse, announces that they've sold your personal information to a finance start-up company in Nigeria, or whatever other clever idea they come up with. Hah hah. So I have to spend all day going "WTF?" and then remembering "Oh yeah, it's April 1."

So anyway, I guarantee this post is 100% April Fools Free.


Current word count: 186,392.

Below is preliminary line art for the cover of Alexandra Quick and the Stars Above. I made a few change requests (like holding her wand in her right hand, and pointing out that Alexandra should be a little bit skinnier), but I like it and am looking forward to the full color painted version.

Comments

Re: On scholarship and research

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, I did not read History of Britain. I only skimmed a bit of it. I'm sorry -- that's not my area of interest, so I'm not going to read multiple self-published volumes on a subject I'm only vaguely interested in.

But you ARE going to reach polemical views of it and propagate them without visible self-doubt. What was it you said last time about pseudo-scholarship?

Re: On scholarship and research

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

In most fields, saying "it has been suggested" without saying who suggested it will get serious side-eyes from reviewers. Have you ever asked someone in this field to look at your work? Do you think academic peer reviewers would be gentler on you than I have been?

I haven't said anything polemical about your work. I've said it's not peer-reviewed and of questionable academic merit since you haven't been through the process that teaches you to write scholarship that will stand up to challenge, as is evidenced by the angry and uncomprehending way you respond to challenges.

Sigh. You're doing that multiple-posts thing again. I can only assume you're not taking a breath and collecting your thoughts, but dashing off angry notes as quickly as you think of them.

Re: On scholarship and research

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm not the one digging myself into a hole, nor the one with a stack of apologies owed.

But you clearly don't even understand what "peer review" means. Literally. You don't.

Also, your HTML is borked.

Re: On scholarship and research

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what peer review means, and I pointed you at two publications, including one book, from very respectable learned societies. Dig, dig, dig, dig diggety dig...

Re: On scholarship and research

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You have taken a passage that was actually intended as a side-glance, of little importance and no evidential value, and not even paid attention to the meaning of the "Anyway" that starts the second part. In English, "Anyway" at the start of a phrase or sentence implies that, whatever side issue or unprovable fancy we had been pursuing up to there, we are now going back to more solid ground; "Anyway, Nixon was President and ought to have known"; "Anyway, they scored and won the game, whether or not the ref was on their side." As for your fanciful claim that I did not subject my work to peer review, I will not even ask you to take it back - submission to sixty or so publishers ought to be enough, and publishing on the internet hardly means hiding it away - but I will tell you that your view of me would greatly have surprised the Belgian Society for Celtic Studies, who published my first book (http://www.sbec.be/index.php/publications/memoires.html), or Dublin's Institute for Advanced Studies (http://www.dias.ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=596%3Ationol-2003&catid=23&Itemid=153&lang=en), not to mention any amount of more informal groupings in Oxford and elsewhere. And where is it written that to publish something on the Internet is to remove it from peer review? I can point you to at least one peer-reviewed magazine (Aarhus University's Classica et Medievalia) who didn't think so. I don't expect an apology from you when I've never had one however often you may have been wrong about me; but I remind you of the good old proverb that when you are in a hole, the best thing you could do is to stop digging.