upon reviewing the notes I'm changing my position. games must be <50GB. no more mandatory 8k uncompressed textures!!! I don't believe in 8k I think it's fake
to be clear games really ought to be around 20 gigs or less. but I think in the spirit of generosity and mercy we won't criminally prosecute the developers until the file sizes breaks 50
just looked it up. holy fuck. they did it by de-duplicating assets. I'm just. my jaw is on the floor. supposedly duplicating assets helps load times on HDDs but. holy fuck at what cost
it's worse than that: The Helldivers devs were told that duplicating assets would help HDD load times, but then they actually tested it and it had basically zero effect on load times!
So they had more than sextupled the size of their game by following industry standard practice that actually did basically nothing!
having worked with a silicon valley programmer I can 100% believe this sort of thing. All faith and no critical thought. Its not that she was incapable of thinking critically but some things she accepted as received wisdom and vehemently fought against even when I showed her the performance improvements.
Her reasoning about why things should be this or that when it came to these things was extremely shallow and rooted in simple to state "facts" that were often lies-to-children.
For example I had something iterating over a list a few times each time doing a different job. We were gathering things into maps and so I was just using the stream interface for that. Stream, map, filter collect. she went nuclear about it saying how wasteful it is to iterate multiple times. But I measured the performance, far faster than one big loop. And to me the reason was obvious: cache. not needing to pull more things into memory meant that each task fit more comfortably into cache.
And she didn't learn from it either. It was hardly the only thing but it is the one that sticks in my mind. She kept spouting these half truths, these rules without insight. Belief in magic, in short.
I don't abide by magical thinking. Not ever but especially not when programming.
What is magical thinking?
Magical thinking is when one learns how to achieve an effect by rote, do this then that and this and it Works. No understanding, just reciting the words delivered from on high. Chaining together effect after effect until a program is born. But the units of reasoning aren't well understood. They do SOMETHING. Maybe a brief surface level explanation but not the why. Not knowing is this a hash map or a tree map, what is the cost of this function, how much performance is reasonable to expect, etc etc across a million topics all ignored. Programming is a cult of IGNORANCE.
Sure we have lots of wonderfully skilled people out there who look behind things, who are genuinely curious and don't take good ideas as givens but interrogate them. That isn't the default, that isn't even often desired. We have created a community built on recitation NOT innovation. It hasn't been noticed because large corporations assemble the few innovations we have at scale and have fooled us into thinking that scale is itself innovation.
This isn't even about the hot button topic of the 2020s, this was before all... the goings on. Its why what is happening IS happening. Even if someone doesn't support the slopification of the craft it is only different in the scale of the shit produced not in the essential nature of it.
So if you don't want to become like the developers that sextupled their game's drive space requirements then start to question everything, kindly. Investigate claims, do small experiments, listen to the rules and then learn why they are what they are. Even if the rules are sound its worth knowing why they work, the limits of their application, and when to break the rules. It is always reasonable to wonder WHY. That isn't just self improvement either, its how we make the world better. Not recitation, not "right thinking" as prescribed by some authority, not being on a team, but stopping to humbly wonder "huh, why is that?"
upon reviewing the notes I'm changing my position. games must be <50GB. no more mandatory 8k uncompressed textures!!! I don't believe in 8k I think it's fake
to be clear games really ought to be around 20 gigs or less. but I think in the spirit of generosity and mercy we won't criminally prosecute the developers until the file sizes breaks 50
just looked it up. holy fuck. they did it by de-duplicating assets. I'm just. my jaw is on the floor. supposedly duplicating assets helps load times on HDDs but. holy fuck at what cost
it's worse than that: The Helldivers devs were told that duplicating assets would help HDD load times, but then they actually tested it and it had basically zero effect on load times!
So they had more than sextupled the size of their game by following industry standard practice that actually did basically nothing!
Hot take, but even if you ARE punching up (instead of punching sideways at a group that is in the same boat as you), there's a limit to what you can say without sounding like a violent facist but woke this time.
Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.
When the only thing stopping you from completely dehumanising someone is your own judgement regarding their privilege level relative to yours, you are not a safe person to be around.
"convince your followers that their Oppressor Class (whether real or imagined) is less deserving of human rights" is the oldest and most reliable trick in the book to incite mass violence, and you're not immune to it because you're a Good Person with Correct Opinions. you will continue to be a potential breeding ground for fascist thought until you stop dehumanizing people in any context, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, or how serious you are. there can be no acceptable targets.
Pretty sure most genocides in history, including the Holocaust, were justified with "we're punching up." š¤£ "We're killing our oppressors" has always been a convenient excuse to justify atrocities.
It's pretty much the standard thing, it couples in with the 'X group is simultaneously stronger than us and weaker than us' view that is used to justify all forms of hate.
Holocaust is a tricky one since the claim was ātheyāre weak and they screwed us over by trickery and made us weak by poisoning our bloodlines,ā more than ātheyāre oppressing us.ā Itās worth mentioning that in that case both claims were bullshit. Not really fair to put it next to the Rwandan genocide, which is a much more apt comparison for this mindset gone wrong.
The Rwandan genocide is a much stronger case. That was an instance which is frighteningly apt for the issues with current leftist movements, actually.
To whit: the British ruling class had divided the local peoples into two groups: Hutu (majority, oppressed) and Tutsi (favored collaborators with the British. Still oppressed by the British, but much, much less than the Hutu, and collaborated with the Britās). The exact mechanism of this division is irrelevant and rooted in discredited race science.
After decolonization occurred more with a whimper than a bang (the Britās tapped out and gave up Rwanda without a fight because they werenāt in any shape to fight for it) Rwanda was doing pretty okay for a while.
But there were a lot of Hutu who didnāt. Particularly. Give a shit that the Tutsi had been oppressed by the British. Or that colonization was over. They wanted payback. They organized militias around the idea of fully eradicating the Tutsi, and over about a 2 year war fought through streets and roadways with everything from machetes to AKs, they actually got about halfway there while the UN just watched becauseā¦well, because it was Africa and no one gave a shit about Africa.
The Hutu leaders had legitimate grievances about collaboration. They had legitimate rage at the Brits. But they couldnāt reach the Brits, whoād mostly gone back to Britain. So they hit their neighbors, who they could hit, because it was a target they could reach to take their trauma out on.
To be clear, weāre not at decolonization. We havenāt reorganized our government. Itās not 1-1 by any stretch.
One of the biggest reasons Iām less worried about angry leftists saying āanything is fine towards oppressorsā is yhat the majority of people who talk like that have no intention of ever actually winning or holding power, just endlessly critiquing it.
But. And here is the but. They are training themselves into certain patterns of thought that are common among fascists. If they ever win, if they ever do get power, that will abruptly be a problem.
Another way of saying it: this mindset is a problem because either you never expect to win and expect to only ever remain a problem to other oppressed people, crab bucket style, (see: this websites average discourse) or you do expect to win at some point and are under the (mistaken) impression that you can turn that mindset off like a switch when you get actual powerā¦and you cannot.
The latter creates a situation in which you will constantly be looking for new āoppressorsā to brutalize or fight, even after your revolution ends, even if you win, rather than trying to build a world without oppression. (See: Israel.)
i feel like a lot of problems would level out if nobody was allowed to have more than $5Mil Net Worth or yearly income. all excess gets donated for public services, like infrastructure, education, community centers like parks and libraries. there may even be enough money that welfare wouldn't struggle as a system, bc no the leeches aren't the real problem. or to make that hybrid community center+mall idea i heard about into reality. but we'd need to have failsafes in place to make sure all that money goes where it needs to(not the military or anybody's wallets) and that nobody gets away with an "inflated" bank. we'd have to find ways to prevent circumvention, too
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Hereās a link to the 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan's Showa University that compared reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper. (As quoted in above article. Really interesting read!)
Electronic devices have become an indispensable part of our daily lives, while their negative aspects have been reported. One disadvantage i
poor on the piss website. yes third world countries are suffering the effects of climate change far sooner and far worse that first world countries, and with far less capacity to mitigate it and responsibility for causing it. but france is not the point here. you get that right? this isnāt about france. this is just a very illustrative example of a global problem. which again will most impact the third world. yes the reason there was a convenient projection in france to make this image possible is because france has the resources, stolen from the third world, to do so. but again, itās a global problem. itās everywhere all at once. so if climate change is accelerating beyond predictions in france it is also accelerating beyond predictions in other places as well. but beside that you donāt have to choose between caring about people in the first world and the third world. donāt listen to the campists. you can care about all people all at once. thereās queer and bipoc people in france if that helps.
poor on the piss website. yes third world countries are suffering the effects of climate change far sooner and far worse that first world countries, and with far less capacity to mitigate it and responsibility for causing it. but france is not the point here. you get that right? this isnāt about france. this is just a very illustrative example of a global problem. which again will most impact the third world. yes the reason there was a convenient projection in france to make this image possible is because france has the resources, stolen from the third world, to do so. but again, itās a global problem. itās everywhere all at once. so if climate change is accelerating beyond predictions in france it is also accelerating beyond predictions in other places as well. but beside that you donāt have to choose between caring about people in the first world and the third world. donāt listen to the campists. you can care about all people all at once. thereās queer and bipoc people in france if that helps.
This is just to let everybody know that for Pride Month of 2026, the Ebooks Direct Pride Package has been really ridiculously discounted.
...From the product page:
This package contains all our Middle Kingdoms materialāsome of the first LGBTQ-representing epic fantasy in the 20th-century fantasy field, now continuing into the 21st. It also contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the Young Wizards universeāAdvisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, on their first canonically-"out" venture as a couple.
The main part of the collection spans more than forty years, from the publication of Diane Duane's two-time Astounding Award finalist The Door Into Fire, first published in 1979, through its main-sequence sequels (both also Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winners) The Door Into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset, to 2018's and 2019's interstitial Tales of the Five novels, The Levin-Gad and The Landlady.
The collection also includes such otherwise hard to find short works as the romantasy-adjacent novelette Lior and the Sea and the two current volumes of the "Sirronde's World" group, The Span and Parting Gifts.* And finally, it also includes the Middle Kingdoms noveletteĀ Overdue (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2), and the short Young Wizards work Owl Be Home For Christmas.
All that for $19.99? Seriously, I need my head felt! So please go validate my possibly dubious mental state by buying the package.
And happy Pride!
(Meanwhile, the project for the course of the month is to put all the major queer, bi, and/or ace characters in my various series into that shot. Just added: Mevraen, Wyn and Eftgan. Now to get Lissa and Matt and Matt's boyfriend in there...) š
(And the usual sorrowful reminder: With regret, we must remind any UK viewers of this product that, due to Brexit, we can no longer sell ebooks directly into the UK. Our apologies.)Ā
*Before you ask: The Span is "Sirronde's World #1": Parting Gifts is "Sirronde's World #3." Due to timeline continuity and spoiler issues, part 2 has not yet been written. Thanks for your understanding.
[Video description: A small bottle is prepared for a cat to drink while the cat meows demandingly from the floor. The meowing stops when the person filming hands the cat the bottle and is replaced by sucking noises. The person lifts the bottle, lifting the cat where it's attached to the bottle, and moves the cat to its bed. /end description]
If you're going to tell people the sound is important, provide a damn description.
You know there's probably a bunch of people who get into their jobs because of a fetish and are perfectly competent and you would never know and I think that's beautiful, If anything I bet those people are more competent. If for example a butcher gets a little hot and bothered when he slices meat just right I bet he'll slice my meat really well and be a great butcher
its 2026 i cannot handle any more fucking "author A obviously ripped off author B" discourse by people Who Have Only Seen the work of author B and admit themselves that they have no further knowledge of the literary landscape they are moving in. like.
Seeing "open source" in reference to writing fiction has to feel like being told you're a clone made as an organ bank feels like. Say that about five or six more times, please?
i feel like the fair folk would be very offended to find out that ppl honestly believe they're made up by a human. we just may have a return to the dark days when ppl actually had to keep track of how to stay safe when They may be near
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Sad to say but as someone in the notes has pointed out unfortunately this study is being grossly misrepresented by OOP. The study itself offered plenty of alternative explanations and said that it likely wasn't walking so much as semi-autonomous repetitive activities that trigger this headspace, not just walking. So it's possible fidgeting, doing the dishes, taking a shower, activities like that are just as likely to create this kind of headspace as walking is.
I also don't fault anyone for falling for it, this was written extremely well to seem airtight, but I do think this shows an ableist blind-spot a lot of us have(myself included, I took a lot of time to read and think if I was just misunderstanding and having a bean soup moment before finding the corrections in the notes), namely that very few have picked up on how the way this study is presented to us here directly implies that people who can't walk are somehow inherently incapable of being as creative as those who can. That's one hell of a red flag for either a bullshit study or that the person explaining it to you has no idea what they're talking about. Easy to miss, but a red flag nonetheless.
I implore everyone to read the study itself and the corrections in the notes, we don't need to go around pretending creativity is tied to an action many people cannot physically perform especially when that's not even close to the conclusion the people running the study came to AND the notes of this post are now full of disabled people with limited mobility deeply upset bcs they think that their very capacity for creative thought has been stolen by their inability to walk.
Yeah I keep my blowtorch in the kitchen, right next to the bisque-fired ceramics. Itās so I remember to take food breaks while I paint. The rock tumbler is in the bathroom cause the shower covers the sound of the motor. The antique sewing machines in the guest room? The cordless drill in the pantry? Donāt worry about it. No I have not done laundry
Sensible rock tumbler space, pit of the main way, carry on.
Correct space for antique sewing machines where else would they go the hallway?
Cordless drills should either go in the pantry or garage or linen closet. Keep your other small tools in the bag with them for easy where is my drill games.
Bolt action for rifle missing from cutlery drawer we canāt have everything.
everyone's talking about the ibs/autism haha funny comparison thing while I'm still stuck on the concept that hamsters exist in the wild. like naturally
tf do you mean they're a wild creature. you find those ankle-biters at the pet store
Not a biologist, but the evolution of mammals is way more granular than you might expect. Humans are the sole surviving species of the genus Homo, which was a real party before the other ones went extinct. You're in for a fun time.
Domestic cats are believed to be domesticated not from tigers, but from the African wildcat:
Which evolved to be small just because it's sometimes more useful to be small.
And no, hamsters are not off-brand rats. They're part of the rodent order, which includes beavers, moles, capybaras, guinea pigs (yes, also wild) and lots of other fun things:
I wanna add that wild Syrian Hamsters look mostly like Golden and Teddy Bear Hamsters (so your typical yellow/brown/blond hamster) but European Wild Hamsters are super pretty
As for where they are on the food chain, the same place as most rodents roughly their size.
Also both species are utter menaces that fear nothing and no one (dwarf hamster personality, iykyk) that burrow and make tunnels and can and will gnaw through concrete.
This is probably the least useful sketch Iāve ever done but Iām looking to crowdsource assistance on tracking down my motherās old lipstick that she got from my grandmother, I used to use it in highschool and I canāt track it down
It was shaped like this in a translucent matte green plastic tube with a chrome gold and matte gold middle docoration thing
She said my Oma got it from some mail-order service called Yves (not YSL, I asked) probably around the early or mid 90ās
a tiny heist went down to rescue Rise and now he's being taken everywhere by Reid Wiseman because he's extremely important (he was supposed to be left on the craft, he has instead been adopted)
#i imagine that someone on the heron mentions it during book four and five#and gilan freaks the hell out
Y'know what would be funny actually the other way around
Gilan makes a joke about how his mentor is always bitching about his ex she came from the fens and she was called like katrina or karina or something Hal whips around so fast he cracks his neck
wait wait wait. I just remebereed, during the battle of Skandia, Karina ran arrows to all of the archers. I'm guessing that during that time, she had at least some what of an interaction with Halt.
I can imagine that while Hal is internally freaking out, trying to convince himslef that it wasn't his mum, when thorn makes some offhand comment about how awkward it was during then.
Y'know what I remember somewhere, someone mentioning that Karina took a fair amount of initiative during that time, but either way, Karina is a doer and it wouldn't be surprising if she already knew how to fletch arrows so was better at it than the rest of the women. (did Halt teach her to fletch????) So Halt's like hey Mr Oberjarl Man I need some arrows but I'm very busy is there like anyone I can get them from here? They have to be good ones btw. And Erak is like, I know a chick. So Halt rocks up to get his arrows and it's his ex, several thousand kilometres and a decade and a half away from her original context.
Karina's running arrows to all the archers and she and Halt just keep slinging little barbs at each other while the battle is happening
Gilan takes delight in tormenting Hal on the return trip with this information. "We could've been like brothers, Hal. I could've been your big brother."
Gilan, to Hal: I guess this really makes us a brotherband, huh?
Hal: I'm going to commit fratricide
Also:
Gilan, furiously writing to Will: You know that one ex of Halt's that we always thought he made up? Well, you're never going to believe this, but we have a spiritual younger brother who's Skandian and he's really touchy about this fact.
Thorn makes a great show of judging all the Herons, all the time, about the whole thing, but when he meets Halt the very first thing he says is "ah, my estranged husband".
This is because @void-occupation was being genuine and thoughtful about potential Thorn/Halt interactions. Her comments got me thinking and while this post has made me incapable of genuine analysis, I can offer up Thorn/Halt horse thievesā>fake estranged husbands so...
After stealing the Temujai horses, Halt needs a quick ship back to finally cross into Araluen. (How he's going to explain these horses to Bob and train them is another question, but one that will prevent Halt from having to encounter his semi-recent ex, Karina)
The Temujai are after him and have sent out the signal for a short Araluen man so both Temujai and merchants are vaguely on the lookout for a single short man with a bunch of horses. They can't say exactly why they are looking for him (it would be too embarassing to admit they lost all the horses and the Temujai don't want other people knowing Temujai horses are up for grabs)
Thorn is in charge of the ship and is the first person Halt meets that doesn't ask too many questions. He's perfect for Halt's purposes and is willing to stretch the truth (why yes, Thorn is a horse dealer. He's only been a horse dealer for three hours, but he's one now.)
To get past the customs and Temujai agents, Thorn and Halt fake a marriage. Obviously Araluens and Skandians wouldn't marry each other at this point and the short guy's from Clonmel. They couldn't be the horse thieves everyone is looking for.
Halt forges some marriage documents, they pretend to be husbands and the boat is allowed to go. Halt is mostly sick on the boat so Thorn has to take care of the horses and a sea-sick Halt. It's not a pretty sight. This is where Thorn develops his intense hatred of horses (although he was predisposed to it before, the exposure to a whole herd of non-trained ranger horses was too big a barrier to overcome)
Despite all this, Thorn and Halt do bond and enjoy each other's company. Maybe there's a night on deck where they both get a little tipsy and sparks fly. (Maybe some tender and sncere words are spoken. Maybe Halt ogled young Thorn's biceps as he was coiling up rope. We'll never know.) The next morning, Thorn wakes up to a horse licking his face and decides he wants a forged divorce. He had been maybe willing to see where things go or try to make things work, but the horses are a deal breaker.
Halt is dropped off in Araluen without actually having forged those divorce documents and fully expecting never to see Thorn again, who had honestly become a little frosty after one of the horses chewed on his nice, new sheepskin vest.
Every time Thorn comes to that certain port, he has to fend off questions about where his "husband" is. Mikkel thinks it's hilarious, but Thorn hates it, prompting the eventual reply of marital estrangement. He's not expecting to work his with fake ex husband's former apprentice and to find out from the apprentice that Halt dated Karina. Hal's subsequent meltdown and all the resulting drama meant Thorn has the chance to be the funniest, most dramatic man in Hallasholm upon seeing Halt again and really turn the Herons' world upside down. He's got one chance and he's not going to blow it by revealing the info too early.
What if Thorn needs to provide proof of his divorce before he can legally marry Karina so he's like "ugh, I guess I can try contacting my ex husband so he can forge divorce papers" and Karina's like "My shady ex-boyfriend who I'm pretty sure was living under an assumed identity was a forger. I'll ask him to forge some papers as backup if you can contact your ex-husband."
Halt takes both hirings and tells each of them he'll meet them in Skandia.
hang on did Halt and Thorn get Actual Married (TM) to steal horses or did Thorn just forget that dodgy forged marriage documents aren't legally binding?
