[artbyblastweave]

Jack Slash works as well as he does basically entirely on the basis of how visibly the author Does Not Like Him. There's a version of Jack Slash written by some other guy who actually unironically thinks his character archetype is hot shit, and that version sucks and the version of the story that he's in also probably sucks. This version also sucks but you can feel everyone else in the story rolling their eyes in unison at the fact that they've gotta put up with his bullshit, everyone going, "alright, can we please stop with the Dark Knight pastiche and go back to playing realpolitik with well-realized individuals who aren't homicidal cartoon characters that we're forced to take seriously purely by virtue of their inexplicable six-digit grimdark looneytunes bodycount"

[saeta-obscura]

Gustave Moreau – Study of Salome for "Salome Dancing before Herod"

[centrally-unplanned]

I was gonna write a longer piece about this but it didn't really come together, so to at least get the thought out:

In "social media vs education" discourse, there is a tension between the macro data not really showing any large declines in student learning & minimal benefits from things like cell phone bans, and the more anecdotal/smaller survey data of people telling you the kids in the classroom have really changed. I don't actually think you should toss out the personal experiences, that is being naive, while I think "oh the test scores are all corrupted by declining standards" narrative is equally naive - so what is the story?

The squaring of this circle is that when people talk about their student learning changing, it is almost always about books. They aren't unable to understand instructions, they can do math fine (again mild declines sure), people are taking calculus and chemistry and playing piano just like they always did. What has shifted is that people's attention span for reading books is vanishing, to the point where school districts are giving up on even assigning summer reading and shifting assessments to short form reading assignments. This cycle is just extremely hard to break because books are the one thing you can't "internalize" into the classroom - you can't ask them to sit in the room and read a book during an exam - and cheating the assignment is universal and free. Kids always wanted to skim their summer reading, but skimming, Cliff Notes, "asking a friend", those were all work and sometimes just an approximation of doing the reading anyway.

Now you just google/claude the answer to any of your homework questions about a book, you don't need even crack the (pdf's) spine. And of course the entire backdrop culture has shifted to either short form text or fully audiovisual content, so you don't care much about the object-level skill anyway. The bottom has dropped out on the incentives & value for many students.

But the rub is that this hasn't impacted learning all that much. The Kids Can't Read Bleak House, yes, but they were never great at that and it wasn't that related to other skills. "The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone" concept was just too limited; there are a lot of different whetstones out there. The test scores are doing fine, people's skills in the workforce are holding up, none of the "breakpoints" of someone's personal trajectory are flashing red. And of course many people do still read books! We have no shortage of historians because they were always a particular type of person anyway. Books aren't going away; their market share of global attention is just shrinking.

Are there consequences for this beyond the personal, though? Yes, individuals can still learn to be nurse practitioners and marketing analysts just fine, but is the ~body politic of the nation~ or whatever suffering from an endemic shallowness in its comprehension of itself? Maybe! I don't think that idea is crazy, actually, though it is a much more complicated story with many moving parts. But it is one that sits primarily outside the education system; school was never a particularly effect vaccine against "disenlightenment", and if the internet has done anything it has neutered the power of formal institutions to be that force.

This doesn't mean that the education system isn't facing challenges of course (AI & cheating is a big one), or that there aren't nuances to this whole story. I only wrote the quick-and-dirty version here after all. I just do think this tension is endemic to so much discourse from teachers, parents, students, etc - they are observing a mismatch between what they want students to be, and what students need to be to pass though the system.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Like. Look. Listen. I have taught introductory quantum physics at a university level, and I need you all to incorporate this into your trans advocacy: There are situations where you need to make a decision to prioritize being comprehensible to your target audience above being The Most Unassailably Correct.

[peppermintquartz]

You can try to teach a toddler about germ theory or you can get them to wash their hands because "yucky"

[tpwrtrmnky]

Teaching a toddler to wash hands because yucky when the Ethics Understander crashes through the roof. "STOP RIGHT THERE," the Ethics Understander shouts at me. "The disgust response is not a legitimate substitute for a considered value judgment, and in fact, weaponizing disgust instead of grounding those judgments in a more rigorous framework is fundamental to reactionary rhetoric!"

The toddler looks at me. "You are a fascist, auntie. I have seen the light and will now go eat chewing gum from the pavement, unless you can educate me on a rigorous framework on the microbiology of pavement chewing gum this very instant."

[feotakahari]

But I’m not a toddler, and I would never want someone to tell me the “for toddlers” version of their beliefs. If I found out they weren’t telling me their actual beliefs, I’d get mad and stop trusting them. So I don’t want to treat other adults like they’re toddlers.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

Putting aside the broader debate, most of my experience with raising children, even very young ones has been to give an explanation that falls in between "yucky" and "perfect explanation of germ theory." "Wash your hands now to help you not get sick," tends to do the trick. Kids will also ask follow-up questions if they're interested. I have a somewhat unconventional parenting belief that it's good to be fairly straightforward and literal about these things because kids do not share the same cultural referents as we do. For example, we all understand that credit card debt can be a bad thing, but a child (older than a toddler in this case lol) overhearing that their parents have credit card debt will not automatically figure out why it's bad and might substitute in "it's bad cuz my my mommy is going to go to jail," or whatever. Or as another example, saying "yucky" without ever providing a foundation of what makes something yucky can just become "it's bad to eat chewing gum off the sidewalk because it's yucky and it's bad to eat broccoli because it's yucky." To be fair, this may actually just be a recipe to raise nerds. I'm not necessarily proselytizing here.

Maybe the way to thread the needle here is to avoid simplifications that change the meaning, whenever possible, and also to give people the level of complexity they actually want, in the appropriate context.

[valtsv]

so last year during a period of intense suicidal depression i made this necklace that i always wear, right, and the thing is it's genuinely brought me a lot of comfort and relief and i've developed a strong sentimental attachment to it, to the point that i can inarguably state that it's had a net positive effect on my mental wellbeing. however i did now just have to stop to almost throw up laughing because i realised that i've succumbed to the amulet.

[xetrasherpa]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

(End)

[face-without-a-heart]

One really funny thing about Worf is his significance in Klingon politics. Like he has no official position in their government but he’s stopping civil wars, killing politicians for personal and political reasons, conspiring to rig elections, etc. His brother is on the high council and the only reason Worf himself isn’t on it is because the truth about his father would fuck up this already fragile society. He is making political decisions that affect the entire Klingon empire. He’s basically Klingon nobility. But he still spends most of his time on the Enterprise making suggestions that Picard doesn’t listen to.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

After four consequtive days of getting five or fewer hours of sleep, I let myself sleep in on my day off. Any amount of time in the world. No alarm. And apparently free from all responsibility my body wanted 7hr55min of sleep. And I do feel well rested. I think sometimes with the whole habit of working myself towards my limits I forget that I'm still very much in the youthful bounceback stage of my life.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

Maybe it gets better but having watched a few episodes from season 2 daredevil born again still feels like it's walking around in the corpse of an old friend.

[letterful]

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. 

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

[letterful]

What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.

[lumsel]

The whole "AI artists aren't REAL artists" thing always rubbed me the wrong way, and I think I finally seized upon why: it acts like there is no reason to make art besides wanting to identify with the label "artist". It does not seem to occur that someone may simply desire a certain work of art to exist and is not particularly concerned with whose hand composes it.

[mayhaps-a-blog]

Garak both loves and hates his tailor shop.

He loves it because he's good at it - he gets to talk with people, investigate their needs, and exercise his creativity. And he is very, very good at it! People leave happy, and he gets the glow of satisfaction in a job well done.

And every time he gets that moment of joy, he hates that shop a little more. Because it's not what he's meant to do - he was a member of the Obsidian Order, a spy, a genius! He loved his homeland, loved it so much, and to be banned from it, exiled to here, an alien shop on an alien station, never to see home again... every second is just a reminder of what he's lost. His status, critical in a military-controlled Cardassia; his father and mentor, gone from harsh respect to cold distaste; and his beloved homeland, lost forever to fools like Dukat.

How it must have galled, to find he can, in fact, forget - take pleasure in something as nothing as a dress design, when he once played the game of kings! To turn his keenly honed mind to guessing clothing styles! And, for even one second, enjoy it, and forget his well-earned misery!

It must have been fun once - a good cover, one he could sink himself into, knowing that he was fooling them all. How he must have reveled in his skills, the best of spies, the best of tailors!

And then he was asked to do something he couldn't countenance - finally crossing the line. And he made his choice, and got caught - not such a good spy after all - and reaped the consequences, falling back on his tailoring to make a living - a mean, poor living for a man once as powerful as he. And every second he sits in that shop, every dress he hems, every time he is assured that being a tailor isn't so bad, is more salt in the wound. Because it's not about being a good tailor - it's about betraying everything he once held dear, and losing it all, for a moral stance that ended up meaning less than nothing.

But imagine the kind of man he'd be if he hadn't made that choice.

[seymourworld]

and i do think that humans in general arent really made to be constrained to romance and monogamy in the way its enforced and understood now and i do think a lot of people only feel like they really need it because its whats expected and normal. But i say that and people get mad at me so

[seymourworld]

like im not gonna claim to be an expert on psychology or whatever the fuck but like. the idea of only having ONE extra special all important person who must meet all your needs perfectly and who cannot be substituted for anybody else and who everyone else in your life must be lesser than in your eyes is insane

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

Well, certainly some people see marriage/long term monogamy that way and that idea is extant in the culture, but it’s not like you stop having close friends or other family when you get married. Ideally it’s less that the other people in your life aren’t as important, but that you’ve made a specific commitment to work together with this one person. I have a very dear and close friend, we provide each other a level of emotional support and daily contact that is very marriage-like, but when it comes down to it if either of us need to make a big life decision like moving or switching careers, we’re not doing that together. I certainly don’t think everyone is monogamous or should get married but there’s an appeal beyond social obligation to a mutual agreement to have someone who will work with you as an equal, not a supporter, not you as a lone wolf, on the really big stuff - particularly kids.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

you jacked off at work?

history will absolve me

[andromedaexile]

They both reached for the gun phaser!

Inspired by @peachviz

[sharkodactyl]

moment of unspeakable beauty today when one of my coworkers called another coworker "judas" for not splitting a can of white monster with her, and i got to watch the guy who sits next to me open a new google tab, type in "jeudis," and say quietly to himself "french thursday...?"

[lumsel]

that whole thing men say where it's like "haha yeah you get one compliment and you gotta hold on to it for years" is just about the saddest thing that ever got said. we gotta start saying nice things to these guys