Peer reviewers defeat themselves, again!

Peer reviewers once again self-defeated their own objectives.

'Cause they were like, "this article is too speculative. You have all this speculative language, like "possibly happened" and "seems like." And you draw all these speculative conclusions. We do not like it! Too much speculation."

So I am going through and deleting all of the speculative language, but keeping the speculative conclusions. Now, instead of saying, "It seems like [totally speculative thing] may have happened," it says, "And then, reader, [totally speculative thing] totally happened! For real!"

Mwwaahhaaha!!!

And once again, peer reviewers are going down thanks to their own sucky-ness!  YEAH!

Pier review

I want also to say this:

Have you noticed how like two different peer reviewers will have totally different reactions to things?  Ok, Ok, often they both don't like the same thing.

But dudes. Often Reviewer A hates something and Reviewer B doesn't care about it, but hates something else. That happens a lot too.

I am just saying. Pier review is not all that helpful, I think we can all get behind that sentiment. But what about peer review?

peer review is censorship

Have you ever noticed in somebody's book where in the intro they totally disavow some term/concept, like, 'there is a literature on term/concept X, and some of it is relevant to this project, but X is also totally not applicable to the cases I'm looking at, and so I would never use term/concept X, I am not going to write X never, ever.'

And then in the chapters of the book they basically prove that concept X does indeed apply to their cases. But they never use the actual term X. You know?

That's because of peer review. The peer reviewers told them to take out X. So they did--sort of.

That is totally going to be me. 

Could be worse

Just to update this situation: the book manuscript suffered disaster in the wacky, wacky land beyond the Misty Mountains that is the academic publishing industry. But not nearly the worst kind of disaster.

I have heard much worse. I should not complain, really.

Things are bad for book manuscripts in the land of academic publishing.

 Yeah, that bad.

(For anyone who does not recognize that volcano, it's in Mordor. Recent conversation with CC while watching a certain HBO series:

Me: Do you know what is going on even though you did not watch the books? Do you want me to say who that guy is?

CC: No, I know.

[long pause]

CC: Is this the one where they are going to meet elves to get some kind of jewels?

Me: Uh, do you mean rings?

CC: Yes!

Me: No. This is the other one.)

Running with cows

Some stereotypes about cows are wrong. (Based on my experience running with cows.*)

Cows--the cows I run with**, that is--do not really like humans. They really, really do not want to be petted.

Some are aggressive. By "some" I mean, about half of them. And not only the "male cows"--are they actually bulls? I think someone did cut off their nuts. I hope they are not bulls, whatever that means, because I am running with them and I do not want to run with bulls at this point--also the female cows.

*Like swimming with dolphins!
**One of said cows pictured above. Actual photo taken while running.

No words necessary

Ack

Found out that they hadn't even sent it out to readers yet. Reports due back in the new year, ACK!

What will I do until then?