@actuallynotautomated - Tumblr Blog

The key to understanding history and geopolitics is to remember: just because one side is bad, doesn't mean the other side is good

thepartyponies

Just because an official narrative is suspect doesn’t mean the most popular counter narrative is automatically true

aqwult

argumate

I don't see what the-- oh gosh

certified-door-posts

certified door post

restacks

my absolute favorite few days of the school year happened this week… the sixth graders started shakespeare. bear with me I have a lot of thoughts about this!!!

everyone in middle and high school here spends the last nine weeks of the school year reading one shakespeare play in english class. we read the entire play out loud, in class, pausing often to talk about it and puzzle out the lines and words and what the characters are doing and thinking. kids volunteer for parts at the beginning of each class period. they do weird accents. they put real emotion into it. I read nothing except the stage directions. it is, amazingly, nearly everyone’s favorite unit. at the end of it, they do projects and write papers and put on a filmed adaptation.

the seventh through twelfth graders start out excited, because they (for the most part) did this the year before and they know that shakespeare is fun. they love it. they ask for weeks beforehand when we’re going to start shakespeare.

the sixth graders, however, are new to the middle school and new to shakespeare. they are scared!!! they think shakespeare’s language is not their own. they think it’s too complex and/or boring and/or will go over their heads and/or very serious.

in the first two-ish days, something magical happens: the sixth graders lose their fear and fall in love with shakespeare. watching it in real time is a gift.

this year we’re doing macbeth. I ask the sixth graders on thursday, day 1, when and where shakespeare lived, what kind of writing he’s known for, etc., to get a sense of what they know (very little). I give them like a five-minute rundown of macbeth and shakespeare but nothing in-depth: I want them entering the play at the level of language.

for the first couple days I put the play on the smartboard as the kids get used to how to read the lines, then we switch to physical copies for everyone. this means there’s no glosses at first, nothing to check for meaning or context — only the lines themselves.

1.1 of macbeth is super short; we read it straight through, with three giggling girls reading as the witches and stumbling over their words, and then go back to parse out the lines. I ask something like, “what do you think hurly-burly means?” the sixth graders give a variety of replies: craziness, trouble, chaos, hullabaloo, and I get to show them a gloss that says basically exactly that. they laugh at weird-sounding lines, they get used to how it should be read. their confidence ticks up because they see now that the language of shakespeare is not some crazy inaccessible building to be scaled. it’s a playground!!! they can go right in and have fun. the learning curve isn’t even that steep. and mind you, we’re still in 1.1! we’ve only barely started.

on day 2, they’re cautiously excited. maybe the beginning was just like that? we were eased into this and it’ll get harder?? then they fully relax and get into it over the course of the class period. they argue over who’s going to read for what part. a kid who has not been doing great in class, rarely volunteers in discussions and even more rarely reads anything aloud, throws his hand in the air when I ask who wants to read for today. he asks to be the “bleeding captain” and proceeds to give an amazing and totally sincere performance of an injured man delivering news to a king. it’s the most he’s spoken in a given class period.

it does require rigorous work and attention to be in sixth grade and read and understand shakespeare. we pause A LOT to talk about the lines and what they’re saying. we look at A LOT of glosses. what bowls me over is how quickly they acclimate, how excited the sixth graders get for that work. not because it’s important to learn or whatever but because it’s fun and interesting!!! they love it. and it took 100 minutes of class between thursday and friday.

moghedien

I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with

But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy

moghedien

Here he is, the Aldi Cowboy

combeferres-mothematics

LAMARQUE EST MORT *Disco music intensifies*

sadclowncentral

i had a dream that time travel was invented and too many people choose to travel back in time to save the titanic from sinking (the question of whether unsinking of the titanic deserved so much attention in the face of human history was the subject of both heavy academic and online discourse), which caused a rift in the space-time-continuum that led to the titanic showing up indiscriminately all over the world’s oceans and sea in various states of sinking.

this caused a lot of issues both in terms of fixing said space-time-continuum and in terms of nautical navigation, and after a long and heavy battle in the international maritime organization it was decided that the bureaucratic burden of dealing with this was to be upon Ireland, much to their dismay. the Irish Government then released an app for all sailors and seafarers so they could report titanic sightings during their journeys, even though they heavily dissuaded you from reporting them given the paperwork it caused.

anyway i woke up with a clear image of the app in my head and needed to recreate it for all of you:

sadclowncentral

no you don't understand. i do international regulation of emerging technologies for a living. this WAS me stress dreaming about work

chilewithcarnage

yesornopolls

Have you gone to your native country’s capital city? (At least one of them if your country has multiple)

Yes

Remaining time: 2 days 14 hours

cypresstrees

crazy how if you do your chores and obligations first thing on a day off you can enjoy your free time more than if you feel like you’re procrastinating your chores and obligations the whole time. i will not be learning from this experience

uncultureddoubloon

Miles' forensic drain experience as a running silly but also hilariously useful little bit throughout the series is delightful

#vorkosigan saga #vorkosigan

geopsych

On this date in 2019 it was one of those radiant misty mornings in the woods and I took so many pictures and videos with the stream flowing and a wood thrush singing.

clementine-kesh

like literally if i didn’t want to see some weird nonsense i wouldn’t be consuming scifi

clementine-kesh

“ohh this episode is about meeting a bunch of dinosaurs who developed space travel and left earth to go live on the other side of the galaxy isn’t that crazy?! isn’t that silly?!” sure yeah maybe a little but by focusing on that but you’re missing the narrative reason for it which is to provide a starting point to explore religious authoritarianism and the production of scientific knowledge

mylittleredgirl

just a spoonful of [nonsense] helps the [critical thinking about uncomfortable social and structural problems that are such a fundamental part of the background radiation of our lives that we can't see them] go down

clementine-kesh

this is the meanest thing anyone’s ever said to me. apologize to star trek: voyager season 3 episode 23 distant origin right now

strangehorse

Is anyone else starting to feel kind of wary about the increasingly common narrative that "women's bodies are so different to men's that modern scientific recommendations do not apply to them"?

Like. There is a significant gap between 'a lot of studies do not take into account variations caused by things like female hormone cycles, which can limit how generalisable they are' and 'medical science does not apply to women', and the latter just seems to create a situation rife for bad faith actors and snake oil salesmen to reassure you that actually, THEY have the answers, because THEY listen to women, and if you simply pay them for their online subscription service-

strangehorse

like. female and male bodies are not different species. the traits you consider inherent and unique to Female or Male can often be changed by hormone therapy and other interventions, and many traits fall on a bimodal distribution, not a binary one. you can apply the findings of 'Invisible Women' without implying that female bodies are like, Startouched Special Moon-Tied Nature Creatures that are immune to all known scientific phenomena

zinderant

For some reason I'm seeing negativity about the new reblog graph, and I know some people hate change for any reason, but come on, look at how great this is!

Look, I get that on an aesthetic and artistic level the original reblog graph was better. It was like a living thing, but it was way too much form over function. If you wanted to use the reblog graph to answer any questions that aren't "who are the most popular blogs to reblog this post" then you had to go through a horribly tedious process of following individual links in the graph if you could find them. I mean questions like "how much engagement did the fact check for this post get" and "are there any in-depth discussions that this post kicked off", which the old reblog graph makes answerable, but it's not a whole lot better than clicking on individual reblogs in the tags and trace the path back to the original via "view previous reblog".

This one is not only highly functional, but it has its charms too. It brings to mind planetary orbits, and in the picture above, it's very clear that the post took a long trip to eventually end up in a different galaxy where it blew up all over again. It tells the whole story of the post at a glance.

If I was curious enough to go into the reblogs graphs in the past, I might have clicked on a few blogs that were central in a big blob of reblogs, but there was not much reason to engage with the graph beyond that. The new one lets you do much more guided exploration, for example by clicking different endpoints to see if those created particularly unique reblog chains. It just unquestionably adds a lot of value and I hope people recognize that.

zinderant

Well ding-dong-ditch me, it sure is! Welcome back old reblog graph!

I was surprised that swapping between tree and graph results in a slow smearing of the nodes and edges across the space, in contrast to the big bounces and jiggles you used to get when playing with the old reblog graph. The new one gives the impression of a christmas tree melting down into a puddle, with the branches turning to goo and the string lights on the tree slowly oozing downwards until they once again settle into recognizable shapes determined by the tension between different parts of the string lights in the goo. Very nice to watch.

I'll have to check back later for parts of the graph that are new to see how it looks a second time, but I like that feature in theory. Both the color-coding and the 'copy image' button are super nice to have too. Thanks @blowery!

chechula

I visited London last month and I was so overwhelmed by all the people absorbed into this building, that I boarded the wrong train. So I got time to draw this.