blow by blow photography... I like it. Good job. I think everyone here can appreciate the sense of "stalking" a good shot. And, like you say, often its a long time, if ever, before you can get another chance to capture a scene.

I have to respectfully disagree with the analogy of a book group discussion and someone asking for advice IRL. Book clubs are meant to encourage lively debate. If a friend showed me a picture IRL and said "I love this look - how would you go about creating it?" I would not give my opinion on the idea - she told me she loved it - what purpose does it serve for me to tell her I think it makes it look like she isn't a reader or that it looks contrived? I think it is far easier for people to voice opinions and disregard feelings when a question is posed online. THe OP expressed her own love for a certain look and a few other posters felt compelled to tell her the reasons it was a bad idea - why? I think it is unkind and unnecessary and represents a lack of concern for other people's POV. I often do things that are outside the box so I am used to people at least raising their eyebrows a bit at my choices at times - but I could care less. It just seemed obvious in the response from the OP that she was influenced by other people's opinions about her taste and it made her question herself. That bothered me.

lemonhead, thanks for picking up on the research paper/project question. I find the responses very interesting and informative. I'd bet that you still remember more about Bonnie Prince Charlie than many of us ever learned. If I hadn't had a brother who loved Sir Walter Scott's Waverly and anything by Robert Louis Stevenson, I would have gone through elementary and secondary school without hearing a thing about the Jacobites. I took an anthropology class in gender language differences and found it both fascinating and dismaying. For instance, females often have a 'voice' they speak with around other females, but if a male enters an otherwise all-female group some of the gals' voices change immediately (often becoming breathier), no matter if the females are eight or eighty years old. I already knew this from observation and often found it annoying; but that it is largely an unconscious thing on the part of some females irritated me even more because I had thought it was a matter of choice, a mere affectation or a bad habit. elliottb: I'm intrigued how and why myths come to be, though the myths themselves don't interest me much. I will take a look at the 'Unhistory'. I know what you mean about anything "that holds interest" -- so in furtherance to your dilemma and mine, I will respond to woodnymph: woodnymph, I would enjoy a nonfiction thread and I would certainly contribute. Nonfiction seems to get short shrift here at RP. I know you mention the NF you read, Mary, but I'd say the "What are you reading?" thread runs something like 70/30 or 75/25 percent, favoring fiction over nonfiction. I can never keep up with all the bestselling fiction -- sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm only one person while there are dozens of people here at RP (and multitudes elsewhere) following the fiction trends. Yet nonfiction is even wider than fiction, so it's hard to comprehend that reading through post after post and there's hardly a mention of it. Maybe a thread devoted entirely to NF would bring more of it out -- I hope it would.

It's just spam, plain old spam. Probably not real people, but bots. The goal is t put the name of the company out there and possibly get users to click on it. every click can increase the company's (school in this case) posiition in a search. "Forum spam is the creation of advertising messages on Internet forums. It is generally done by automated spambots. Most forum spam consists of links to external sites, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track the spambot's identity; if a sale goes through, the spammer behind the spambot earns a commission." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming