Don't overwhelm her by deliberately front-loading her Magic experiences with "combat math" decks. Decide if you're doing this for her, or for yourself to make yourself feel better. If youre doing it for her, let her determine how fast to go with the math.
For some, math is a tool to be used to accomplish other, more interesting things in life. To them, it's not an enriching experience in its own right. Emphasizing the math-y bits over the other aspects of the game, misrepresents the game as being a straight up math game.
Sure, it's designed by a math professor and it has many opportunities to use basic math skills and probability rules. But as a girl, and especially a girl who struggled with math until I got older, I can say if the game were presented to me as primarily combat math, I would have run away.
I wasn't interested in math although I believed (and still believe) mastering math is essential and not impossible for even the worst students. I liked Magic for its strategy and different ways you could win. Improving my math was a means to that ultimate end, not the other way around.
Let her discover the game on her own terms. Whether she's into the fantasy themes and artwork, or likes making wacky combos, or is a huge Timmy/Spike, if she finds her groove, the math will likely follow. And it's everywhere - every deck requires X lands and (60-X) spells. Even 61 cards have a lesson about probabilities somewhere in there.
These involve math you can do on paper, at your leisure, over a spread of potential deck candidates. I must say, doing math in your head during the combat step is probably one of the least fun and most nerve-wracking aspects of Magic, and if that were all there was to it, I'd probably go play something else.
And that may be just what she does. eventually she will either get into the game in her own right building her own decks, or she will simply lose interest in playing. (Maybe trading? That's mathy right there.)
On topic: She sounds very competitive and maybe a bit immature about it.
I know it's cool that she is willing to learn to play and all, but if you want to avoid trouble, you and she should agree to a truce or just both agree not to play Magic together.
Because fights over games and little things can precipitate bigger fights and more problems.
She may be mature enough to recognize she gets riled up by losing games, and that playing the games is not healthy for her.
We get a lot of whining in the RTS field as well. For instance, the original Age of Empires required a great deal more micromanagement and multitasking than its successors, which introduced automated farm queues, unit queues, automatic re-tasking of villagers, automated military formations and commands, and other measures of convenience.
Naturally, the elite RTS crowd complained that automating many game functions was "dumbing down" the game. Everyone else, including the Ensemble Studios staff, pointed out that actions per minute was only one aspect of skill, and that simplifying this area made it possible for gamers to focus on tactics and strategy.
It also made the game more accessible to people who did not enjoy games centred on a great deal of clicking and micromanaging. And this drew complaints from the elite gamers as well. "Maybe if they can't maintain X APM they should not play this game and go play SimCity instead." Ensemble felt differently, and their sales figures for AOE, AOK and AOC proved their point.
This didn't stop elite gamers from dominating any of these games. None of the top 20 players of any of the Age games got there because they could rely on the computer to remember to re-plant their farms or make villagers for them. APM still had a dominant place in determining success in competitive RTS. The difference was at the middling levels where some brilliant folks with slow fingers were now able to get on the ladders by sheer ingenuity and reading their opponent like a book.
The failure of many RTS games today is that they are rushed to market. Many game play features are poorly developed, or simply left out, with each new release. Options featured in previous releases are dropped if they do not support massive sales appeal for the current release.
A good example is customization. In the past many games were essentially 100% customizable, and you can download dozens of different total conversion mods for Age of Kings, Warcraft III, etc. Fast forward to today and you see that the core game files of RTS are "hardcoded" with only a few that are amenable to modding. The message is, these games are to be pushed to market quickly with little afterthought regarding the long-term viability of the game engine. Once gamers have had their fill of more recent RTS games, they must move on, because they can't change or customize it and get more use out of it.
As far as graphics are concerned, this is a double edged sword. More and more sophisticated tools are being used to create realistic worlds for games. It takes longer to get all the pieces working properly together, which limits how long the playtime of the game can be. Also, the tools used tend to be expensive: Havok physics, Granny2 3D modeling, proprietary 3rd-party rendering and graphics performance manager. This means end users will have a difficult time modding them, shortening their shelf life.
lastly, games are diverging. In one group you have games that are meant to be played on very high-end dedicated systems: quad core PC with dual graphics cards, Xbox 360, etc. On the other side you have games that are designed for mobile use: Farmville, etc. and are simplified and made accessible in virtually every way imaginable. Cute, 2-D graphics and simple economies/tactics replace vector drawn photorealistic battlefields and massive, context-dependent tech trees. They are all made to appeal to people's sense of making unproductive time more productive - farming, social gaming, trading, building up a mafia dynasty, that sort of thing. They have much more market promise than the beautiful and demanding RTS/FPS/RPG titles out there.
TL:DR version: We're moving inexorably away from 'deep' games and towards two extremes: The brief and brutal photorealistic game-movie and the Farmville mobile gaming superfamily you can take anywhere.
*Video games and computer games. We didn't have a computer in the house until I bought one for college.
*Most TV shows. We owned a 1970's black and white Philips portable TV and couldn't get most channels. I finally left it behind in my apartment when I moved away in 2001.
*Most movies. We never went anywhere, had no money to spend on theater. No VCR until nearly the time I left home.
There's also a huge economic imperative for people lower down on the ladder to do more scut work: teaching, proctoring exams, administrative duties/secretarial skills, public interaction, presenting material at conferences, etc.
This is because universities don't get paid for discovering higgs bosons every other week. They get paid for taking students' money and teaching them bonehead physics, and for presenting material at conferences and getting publications in large profile journals.
PhD candidates rarely idolize a life spent running errands and doing comparison shopping for the cheapest statistical software site licenses. They may come to resent this inordinate amount of scut work biting deeply into their research and study time. But the successful candidates 'get' that they are low on the ladder, need to show that they are flexible and can juggle multiple responsibilities. They will definitely need to deal with some of these issues as professors in their own right.
If for some reason you come across as unwilling or incapable of multitasking and being useful in the department, you could be Einstein and they would still find a way to let you go.
Only full fledged nobel prize winning physicists are allowed to be eccentric and aloof and have unorthodox problem solving methods. Then, their peers and admirers call it brilliance. Until you get there, it's called incompetence.
Don't just hyperfocus on the one complaint about your problem solving methods and approaches.
Get a list in writing of all of the issues of concern as far as your probation goes. Sit down with the committee and work out an action plan for each one, and goals. This is your potential career on the line, and all the money you've spent in tuition and fees to this point. "Probation" is fancy English for "last chance." YOu need to prove to them that not only are you capable of meeting the expectations of your supervisor, but also that you can get your act together and take responsibility for each and every one of your issues of concern with the prof.
Did I fail to mention? Get It In Writing!
Even if you have to get legal counsel to get them to reveal the content of private communications and emails discussing your more subtle shortcomings, get ALL the issues down on paper and get the action plans and recommended goals down on paper too.
Then do whatever it takes to meet those goals. If you have to take a course in logic, then do it. If you have to get some counseling for a personal problem that's affecting your work or your relationships, then get it. Tell your logic teacher or your counselor what your goals are and get them to document your progress in these areas. If you are putting other things in your life ahead of your duties in the lab, reassess these other activities. Magic/web comics/games may need to take a back seat to working on problem solving and doing your share of work in the lab.
This is so the committee can't use one of the OTHER issues of concern about your performance to cut you off, even though you've become a genius problem solver. This is also to help you focus on critically evaluating yourself and improving yourself. We often see our behaviours through rose-coloured glasses and miss potential problems that hold us back in many areas of our lives. Things that other people might not bring up with us because they are potentially embarrassing, or not easy to describe. Stuff like bad breath, interrupting others when they're talking, not staying late to oversee experiments or help undergrads, etc. But if it's bad enough the prof is secretly considering dumping you, you need to know about it and fix it pronto.
Finally you really need to sit down at this point and figure out if academic physics is a good fit for you. You may really dig physics, but your temperament and individual competencies/talents may not be a good match for academic physics. Perhaps a different scientific field or the arts or writing or finance might be a better fit. Better to figure this out late than never.
How many times has he given his little speech before? How many PhD candidates haven't had what it takes?
Appeal.
Depending on his study topic, he may still get stuck with the same lab chief.
And the bad blood between them for taking it outside the room will guarantee they find problems with the dissertation or the character application. If you stir ☺☺☺☺ up in academia, expect it to fly right in your face unless you're the one sitting in the prof's chair.
I don't get the impression this is a guy who's long tenure has produced no PhD candidates because he is a hardass. I get the impression he's a newb professor who needs to start producing PhD candidates to apply for tenure, but disapproves of Taylor's work so strongly, he's willing to cut off his nose to spite his face.
A tenure seeker who only has 1 PhD candidate would want to graduate that candidate ASAP with best honours. Unless your performance is so bad or your relations with him are so sour that he just can't conscion letting you stay on track.
Then again he might just be trying to scare the jesus out of you to get you to smarten up.
Many of these things have roots in a clash of personalities or temperaments. Do you get on his nerves? Your attitude poor from time to time? Is he an eccentric genius mental case?
Think about this and don't despair, you can always do something else, you're young.
I was hoping this was a publicity stunt of some sort and not an actual guide on how to molest children.
Right on the first, wrong on the second. Not that I've read it, but the link above seems to suggest it is what it says it is - a lot of material that spells out in detail how to molest children and lame excuses as to why it's okay.
No, just no. This guy can go back to being on mental health disability and living off cans of beans in a tiny room with a mattress on the floor. He's not getting any of my money, and shouldn't be getting any of yours. It's sad that a cute stunt like this could work in the first place.
Laibach (my mom threw out my concert T-shirt along with my Nirvana Fudge Packin...MFers T-shirt because they were "very negative")
Unheil
Rhys Fulber, almost all of his projects have an industrial bent
Godflesh
edit: Glad to see I'm sarnath'd on all 4 counts.
There's other ones but you've already mentioned them.
Keeping in touch with your mates from school helps a lot. Facebook, etc. just be aware their lives are changing just like yours, and don't be surprised to find they need some space.
Girls who get bullied actually get picked on more, both by boys and by other girls, because they do tend to be smaller. They also rely more on approval among their peers for their self esteem. A girl who is clumsy or homely or has Asperger's or mental health issues will be targeted by both boys and by other girls, and will actually get in fights with both.
A boy in a similar situation will usually escape getting flak from the girls in his classroom.
Girls can also inflict some permanent damage on a child's reputation because some of the things they do to bully other girls rely on the social network and relationships with authority figures. Lying, setting victims up for legal or administrative troubles, snooping about, disclosing personal information at school, and other humiliation tactics can actually cost families more grief and money than simply beating a child until they are sent to hospital.
It's all the worse if a girl fights back physically, because this behaviour is taken very seriously by school officials, and can be used to paint her as the one who started it, or as the bully. The usual defense of "boys will be boys" isn't accepted and the girl who tries to stick up for herself can wind up in a whirlwind of trouble based on what other girls say about her. They can get her expelled, or force her parents to transfer her to a school for kids with emotional problems, or at least subject her to a costly and embarrassing court mandate for counseling. Any of those can have a lasting effect on a bullied girl's prospects for going to college, getting recommendations for work, extracurricular activities, and general self esteem.
Its funny, the first person to tell me the same was a guy who (ironically) beat the crap out of me and several other kids, then got in a lot of trouble for it.
He seemed to turn over a new leaf and sorta took the younger kids under his wing. He was still getting in plenty of fights, but generally with guys his own size. he taught a few kids how to fight and how to end a fight.
Basically he put it into words a 12 year old could understand, not a lot of military tough talk, but "keep your eyes and ears open, avoid people who want to stomp you, don't go off alone, if you get cornered keep your cool but if they lay a hand on you, fight them like you're killing demons in Hell."
Making friends with bigger people sometimes helps, but if someone really wants to hurt you bad, they will turn this against you. So be prepared to fight your own fights, and stand up for yourself. Especially in the age of web bullying and kids going off the deep end and bringing weapons to school. You simply need to grow a pair and cover your own arse, pay attention to everything around you, and still manage to live your life.
For some, math is a tool to be used to accomplish other, more interesting things in life. To them, it's not an enriching experience in its own right. Emphasizing the math-y bits over the other aspects of the game, misrepresents the game as being a straight up math game.
Sure, it's designed by a math professor and it has many opportunities to use basic math skills and probability rules. But as a girl, and especially a girl who struggled with math until I got older, I can say if the game were presented to me as primarily combat math, I would have run away.
I wasn't interested in math although I believed (and still believe) mastering math is essential and not impossible for even the worst students. I liked Magic for its strategy and different ways you could win. Improving my math was a means to that ultimate end, not the other way around.
Let her discover the game on her own terms. Whether she's into the fantasy themes and artwork, or likes making wacky combos, or is a huge Timmy/Spike, if she finds her groove, the math will likely follow. And it's everywhere - every deck requires X lands and (60-X) spells. Even 61 cards have a lesson about probabilities somewhere in there.
These involve math you can do on paper, at your leisure, over a spread of potential deck candidates. I must say, doing math in your head during the combat step is probably one of the least fun and most nerve-wracking aspects of Magic, and if that were all there was to it, I'd probably go play something else.
And that may be just what she does. eventually she will either get into the game in her own right building her own decks, or she will simply lose interest in playing. (Maybe trading? That's mathy right there.)
I know it's cool that she is willing to learn to play and all, but if you want to avoid trouble, you and she should agree to a truce or just both agree not to play Magic together.
Because fights over games and little things can precipitate bigger fights and more problems.
She may be mature enough to recognize she gets riled up by losing games, and that playing the games is not healthy for her.
Naturally, the elite RTS crowd complained that automating many game functions was "dumbing down" the game. Everyone else, including the Ensemble Studios staff, pointed out that actions per minute was only one aspect of skill, and that simplifying this area made it possible for gamers to focus on tactics and strategy.
It also made the game more accessible to people who did not enjoy games centred on a great deal of clicking and micromanaging. And this drew complaints from the elite gamers as well. "Maybe if they can't maintain X APM they should not play this game and go play SimCity instead." Ensemble felt differently, and their sales figures for AOE, AOK and AOC proved their point.
This didn't stop elite gamers from dominating any of these games. None of the top 20 players of any of the Age games got there because they could rely on the computer to remember to re-plant their farms or make villagers for them. APM still had a dominant place in determining success in competitive RTS. The difference was at the middling levels where some brilliant folks with slow fingers were now able to get on the ladders by sheer ingenuity and reading their opponent like a book.
The failure of many RTS games today is that they are rushed to market. Many game play features are poorly developed, or simply left out, with each new release. Options featured in previous releases are dropped if they do not support massive sales appeal for the current release.
A good example is customization. In the past many games were essentially 100% customizable, and you can download dozens of different total conversion mods for Age of Kings, Warcraft III, etc. Fast forward to today and you see that the core game files of RTS are "hardcoded" with only a few that are amenable to modding. The message is, these games are to be pushed to market quickly with little afterthought regarding the long-term viability of the game engine. Once gamers have had their fill of more recent RTS games, they must move on, because they can't change or customize it and get more use out of it.
As far as graphics are concerned, this is a double edged sword. More and more sophisticated tools are being used to create realistic worlds for games. It takes longer to get all the pieces working properly together, which limits how long the playtime of the game can be. Also, the tools used tend to be expensive: Havok physics, Granny2 3D modeling, proprietary 3rd-party rendering and graphics performance manager. This means end users will have a difficult time modding them, shortening their shelf life.
lastly, games are diverging. In one group you have games that are meant to be played on very high-end dedicated systems: quad core PC with dual graphics cards, Xbox 360, etc. On the other side you have games that are designed for mobile use: Farmville, etc. and are simplified and made accessible in virtually every way imaginable. Cute, 2-D graphics and simple economies/tactics replace vector drawn photorealistic battlefields and massive, context-dependent tech trees. They are all made to appeal to people's sense of making unproductive time more productive - farming, social gaming, trading, building up a mafia dynasty, that sort of thing. They have much more market promise than the beautiful and demanding RTS/FPS/RPG titles out there.
TL:DR version: We're moving inexorably away from 'deep' games and towards two extremes: The brief and brutal photorealistic game-movie and the Farmville mobile gaming superfamily you can take anywhere.
Tog, UG threshold, Wake, Slide. Even Madness was a slowish aggro especially if you got to the point where Circular Logic was relevant.
*Most TV shows. We owned a 1970's black and white Philips portable TV and couldn't get most channels. I finally left it behind in my apartment when I moved away in 2001.
*Most movies. We never went anywhere, had no money to spend on theater. No VCR until nearly the time I left home.
Not much to miss, is there.
This is because universities don't get paid for discovering higgs bosons every other week. They get paid for taking students' money and teaching them bonehead physics, and for presenting material at conferences and getting publications in large profile journals.
PhD candidates rarely idolize a life spent running errands and doing comparison shopping for the cheapest statistical software site licenses. They may come to resent this inordinate amount of scut work biting deeply into their research and study time. But the successful candidates 'get' that they are low on the ladder, need to show that they are flexible and can juggle multiple responsibilities. They will definitely need to deal with some of these issues as professors in their own right.
If for some reason you come across as unwilling or incapable of multitasking and being useful in the department, you could be Einstein and they would still find a way to let you go.
Only full fledged nobel prize winning physicists are allowed to be eccentric and aloof and have unorthodox problem solving methods. Then, their peers and admirers call it brilliance. Until you get there, it's called incompetence.
Get a list in writing of all of the issues of concern as far as your probation goes. Sit down with the committee and work out an action plan for each one, and goals. This is your potential career on the line, and all the money you've spent in tuition and fees to this point. "Probation" is fancy English for "last chance." YOu need to prove to them that not only are you capable of meeting the expectations of your supervisor, but also that you can get your act together and take responsibility for each and every one of your issues of concern with the prof.
Did I fail to mention? Get It In Writing!
Even if you have to get legal counsel to get them to reveal the content of private communications and emails discussing your more subtle shortcomings, get ALL the issues down on paper and get the action plans and recommended goals down on paper too.
Then do whatever it takes to meet those goals. If you have to take a course in logic, then do it. If you have to get some counseling for a personal problem that's affecting your work or your relationships, then get it. Tell your logic teacher or your counselor what your goals are and get them to document your progress in these areas. If you are putting other things in your life ahead of your duties in the lab, reassess these other activities. Magic/web comics/games may need to take a back seat to working on problem solving and doing your share of work in the lab.
This is so the committee can't use one of the OTHER issues of concern about your performance to cut you off, even though you've become a genius problem solver. This is also to help you focus on critically evaluating yourself and improving yourself. We often see our behaviours through rose-coloured glasses and miss potential problems that hold us back in many areas of our lives. Things that other people might not bring up with us because they are potentially embarrassing, or not easy to describe. Stuff like bad breath, interrupting others when they're talking, not staying late to oversee experiments or help undergrads, etc. But if it's bad enough the prof is secretly considering dumping you, you need to know about it and fix it pronto.
Finally you really need to sit down at this point and figure out if academic physics is a good fit for you. You may really dig physics, but your temperament and individual competencies/talents may not be a good match for academic physics. Perhaps a different scientific field or the arts or writing or finance might be a better fit. Better to figure this out late than never.
Depending on his study topic, he may still get stuck with the same lab chief.
And the bad blood between them for taking it outside the room will guarantee they find problems with the dissertation or the character application. If you stir ☺☺☺☺ up in academia, expect it to fly right in your face unless you're the one sitting in the prof's chair.
I don't get the impression this is a guy who's long tenure has produced no PhD candidates because he is a hardass. I get the impression he's a newb professor who needs to start producing PhD candidates to apply for tenure, but disapproves of Taylor's work so strongly, he's willing to cut off his nose to spite his face.
A tenure seeker who only has 1 PhD candidate would want to graduate that candidate ASAP with best honours. Unless your performance is so bad or your relations with him are so sour that he just can't conscion letting you stay on track.
Then again he might just be trying to scare the jesus out of you to get you to smarten up.
Many of these things have roots in a clash of personalities or temperaments. Do you get on his nerves? Your attitude poor from time to time? Is he an eccentric genius mental case?
Think about this and don't despair, you can always do something else, you're young.
I used to like them before they were decent. Sure we made fun of them but we went to games in the Kingdome and had fun anyway.
RIP Dave Niehaus.
Right on the first, wrong on the second. Not that I've read it, but the link above seems to suggest it is what it says it is - a lot of material that spells out in detail how to molest children and lame excuses as to why it's okay.
No, just no. This guy can go back to being on mental health disability and living off cans of beans in a tiny room with a mattress on the floor. He's not getting any of my money, and shouldn't be getting any of yours. It's sad that a cute stunt like this could work in the first place.
Unheil
Rhys Fulber, almost all of his projects have an industrial bent
Godflesh
edit: Glad to see I'm sarnath'd on all 4 counts.
There's other ones but you've already mentioned them.
A boy in a similar situation will usually escape getting flak from the girls in his classroom.
Girls can also inflict some permanent damage on a child's reputation because some of the things they do to bully other girls rely on the social network and relationships with authority figures. Lying, setting victims up for legal or administrative troubles, snooping about, disclosing personal information at school, and other humiliation tactics can actually cost families more grief and money than simply beating a child until they are sent to hospital.
It's all the worse if a girl fights back physically, because this behaviour is taken very seriously by school officials, and can be used to paint her as the one who started it, or as the bully. The usual defense of "boys will be boys" isn't accepted and the girl who tries to stick up for herself can wind up in a whirlwind of trouble based on what other girls say about her. They can get her expelled, or force her parents to transfer her to a school for kids with emotional problems, or at least subject her to a costly and embarrassing court mandate for counseling. Any of those can have a lasting effect on a bullied girl's prospects for going to college, getting recommendations for work, extracurricular activities, and general self esteem.
He seemed to turn over a new leaf and sorta took the younger kids under his wing. He was still getting in plenty of fights, but generally with guys his own size. he taught a few kids how to fight and how to end a fight.
Basically he put it into words a 12 year old could understand, not a lot of military tough talk, but "keep your eyes and ears open, avoid people who want to stomp you, don't go off alone, if you get cornered keep your cool but if they lay a hand on you, fight them like you're killing demons in Hell."
Making friends with bigger people sometimes helps, but if someone really wants to hurt you bad, they will turn this against you. So be prepared to fight your own fights, and stand up for yourself. Especially in the age of web bullying and kids going off the deep end and bringing weapons to school. You simply need to grow a pair and cover your own arse, pay attention to everything around you, and still manage to live your life.