I remain proudly part of the never even opened ChatGPT club but as a son of clowns and snake oil salesmen I feel compelled to give credit where credit is due: this Mechanical Turk they’ve constructed manages to simultaneously be a False Oracle, a Siren, and a Confidence Schemer, which is quite the triple threat for something that doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. Very impressive Charlatanship. Slow clap.
The 'hyperspecific situations' polls are really once again highlighting that native English speakers tend to forget that 'foreign' doesn't mean 'non-English' or 'non-American'
"Did you watch a foreign language movie in the past three days?" Yeah I watched the foreign movie "The Martian" with foreign actor Matt Damon
If Project Hail Mary taught us anything it's that forced romance subplots have ruined movies. Too many stories about guys sacrificing themselves to save girls and not enough movies about guys sacrificing themselves to save their cool rock alien friend.
ur clothes size doesnt say anything. like it doesnt say anything abt u as a person but it also especially doesnt say anything about what size your clothes are
saying this in a soft tone but i dislike this presentation of artemis 2 in the least political way possible as a wholesome and uncomplicated win for humanity as a whole like it's not american propagandism of the highest and most vulgar degree
It’s so heartbreaking as a space nerd cus the science being done by the artemis missions is incredible and will provide stepping stone into manned space flight to mars and beyond. Artemis 2 had the first Black man and white woman to fly by the moon and the crew made a point to thank civil rights leaders and the international community for the invaluable support and assistance that made these missions possible.
But at the same time it’s only happening cus our president is a fascistic maniac who wants to stroke his own ego and is in bed with psychotic billionaire maniacs who’s only interest in space is money and finding a place to go after they’ve took the earth for all it’s worth.
I know that there’s a world where space exploration is done purely because of scientific reasons. I know there can be a future where space exploration is for everyone. But as long as it’s being facilitated by the extremely fascistic and capitalist us government any space exploration done by nasa will always have overtones of us propaganda and exceptionalism.
Not to burst bubbles but there was never a world where space exploration (or art, or... or...) was done for any type of pure reasons. Individuals who participate in those endeavors may have pure(er) reasons but the rest is always political, about power, how it's wielded, how it's displayed. It's good to look past that and to look at the motives and skills and grace of the team doing the work. We can shine lights on them. For the reasons there has NOT been anyone up there in so long is also political, yet these individuals were ready when called to do it; meaning the work never stopped, never stops, even if the most vile, or lazy, or self-aggrandizing, or... or... politicians are in power. I think Artemis II is one of the best example of the fact that, collaboration is one of the most important skills. Also, from up there, we are one, this is our only home. Realistically, there are no other place for us to live so maybe we need to talk to our neighbors.
It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday today and I just want to yell about how much modern writing (in the English language) owes to this woman.
Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.
I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!
I’ve read some early English novels, and… from a modern point of view, they are messy. Plot events are often random. Characters are generally stock archetypes. Realism wasn’t much of a concern; characters get abducted, imprisoned, etc, on a regular basis.
Slowly, from about 1770 onwards, you started to get the ‘novel of manners’ – more realistic stories set in the social world of the time. Jane Austen was absolutely not the first to write books centred on young women coming of age and finding ‘Mr Right’. (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are probably the best remembered of Austen's predecessors.)
And I’ve read some of these novels, and they’re… fine? I’m generalising hugely, but the characters are still very flat. The women are usually perfect, well-behaved, virtuous, etc; the only character flaw they might have is being naïve. Here’s a passage from one of Burney’s novels, describing the heroine:
Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal, her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding...
It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And of course it is! Novels were only just starting to solidify as a genre. The idea of making the characters flawed, realistic human beings had barely occurred to anyone. But Austen decided she didn’t want to write flawless protagonists. ‘Pictures of perfection you know make me sick and wicked,’ she once wrote in a letter to her niece.
It would be ludicrous to say that flawed characters or character-driven plots didn’t exist; of course they did. What are Shakespeare’s tragedies except stories driven by their protagonists fatal flaws? What makes Austen so remarkable is that she was pretty much the first person to take those themes from plays and put them into a novel instead. And so we have Emma Woodhouse, who gets the plot rolling by being self-deluding, meddlesome and conceited (I love her so much). We get Lizzy Bennet, who makes snap judgements that confirm her own biases and has to relearn how she sees everyone around her.
And then there’s Austen’s fucking groundbreaking way of filtering the narrative through a character’s perspective.
Austen was the first writer to consistently narrate in third person, while still filtering the narrative through one person’s point of view. If the protagonist makes a mistake, the narration sometimes just… doesn’t correct it. Take this bit of Emma. All the context you need is this: Emma thinks her friend Harriet is in love with someone, and they’ve just received news that the guy’s controlling aunt is dead, which would make it a lot easier for Harriet to marry him. Harriet is, in fact, not in love with said guy, so the news means nothing to her. But the narration says:
Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing.
Harriet isn’t behaving with great self-command! She isn’t affected by this news at all! But what Emma thinks is reported as if it were fact. We don’t get to know what Emma doesn’t; her opinion controls the narration. I cannot stress how much this had never been done before.
Or take this part of Persuasion, where the protagonist, Anne, encounters the man she was briefly engaged to eight years ago:
Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary; said all that was right […] the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it.
Look at how closely we are in Anne’s perspective here. She can hardly process what’s going on, so we barely see it. We don’t hear Wentworth’s speech. Time speeds up, the narration becomes a blur, just like the moment is a blur for Anne. No one had done this before!
We all love the Locked Tomb books here, right? You know how closely the narration sticks in each protagonist’s head; how the narration sounds and feels like their voice, how we don’t get to know anything they don’t know? Jane Austen pioneered that technique. What I’m saying is: we don’t get Gideon the Ninth without Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was a phenomenal writer, who came up with entirely new writing techniques that authors still use, hundreds of years later. So many of the techniques we now hold up as ‘good writing’ were things she did for the first time.
Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen. Thanks for giving us books as we know them.
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(The examples here come from What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan, which is an incredible book I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to know more about the social context around her novels.)
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