the return of the magnificent sternin

lover of elementary, the assembled idiots, star wars, frasier, and doctor who. " Everything ends, and it’s always sad. But everything begins again too, and that’s always happy. Be happy."

[queerofthedagger]

the fun thing about having a mental health crashout in your thirties is that sure yeah you're crashing out, but at the same time there's a part of you standing across the room smoking ben affleck style, going yeah yeah you're crashing out. you crashed out before you will crash out again can we wrap this up yet. and the most annoying part about it is that they're right, and that that does Not stop you from crashing out even a little. love and light on planet earth.

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[leontocephagaina]

"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 “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 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 “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

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 assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” 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 Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — 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 Japan’s 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 “kept losing track” 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 “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — 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 “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” 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 “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s 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 student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” 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 K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” 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 “finding the main idea” 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 “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” 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 “deep work” 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 source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” 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.

I’m afraid I don’t 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? K–12 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 “students will adapt.” 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 students’ sentences before they’ve 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."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

Opinion | My Students Can’t Read

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

[persephatta-crescent]

Much Ado About Nothing - Text Posts (viii)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

[titanicnerd-blog]

10000000% all of this!

[plaguedocboi]

Here it is folks:

My definitive ranking of my least favorite bodies of water! These are ranked from least to most scary (1/10 is okay, 10/10 gives me nightmares). I’m sorry this post is long, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this.

The Great Blue Hole, Belize

I’ve been here! I have snorkeled over this thing! It is terrifying! The water around the hole is so shallow you can’t even swim over the coral without bumping it, and then there’s a little slope down, and then it just fucking drops off into the abyss! When you’re over the hole the water temperature drops like 10 degrees and it’s midnight blue even when you’re right by the surface. Anyway. The Great Blue Hole is a massive underwater cave, and its roughly 410 feet deep. Overall, it’s a relatively safe area to swim. It’s a popular tourist attraction and recreational divers can even go down and explore some of the caves. People do die at the Blue Hole, but it is generally from a lack of diving experience rather than anything sinister going on down in the depths. My rating for this one is 1/10 because I’ve been here and although it’s kinda freaky it’s really not that bad.

Lake Baikal, Russia

When I want to give myself a scare I look at the depth diagram of this lake. It’s so deep because it’s not a regular lake, it’s a Rift Valley, A massive crack in the earth’s crust where the continental plates are pulling apart. It’s over 5,000 feet deep and contains one-fifth of all freshwater on Earth. Luckily, its not any more deadly than a normal lake. It just happens to be very, very, freakishly deep. My rating for this lake is a 2/10 because I really hate looking at the depth charts but just looking at the lake itself isn’t that scary.

Jacob’s Well, Texas

This “well” is actually the opening to an underwater cave system. It’s roughly 120 feet deep, surrounded by very shallow water. This area is safe to swim in, but diving into the well can be deadly. The cave system below has false exits and narrow passages, resulting in multiple divers getting trapped and dying. My rating is a 3/10, because although I hate seeing that drop into the abyss it’s a pretty safe place to swim as long as you don’t go down into the cave (which I sure as shit won’t).

The Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota

This is an area in the Brule River where half the river just disappears. It literally falls into a hole and is never seen again. Scientists have dropped in dye, ping pong balls, and other things to try and figure out where it goes, and the things they drop in never resurface. Rating is 4/10 because Sometimes I worry I’m going to fall into it.

Flathead Lake, Montana

Everyone has probably seen this picture accompanied by a description about how this lake is actually hundreds of feet deep but just looks shallow because the water is so clear. If that were the case, this would definitely rank higher, but that claim is mostly bull. Look at the shadow of the raft. If it were hundreds of feet deep, the shadow would look like a tiny speck. Flathead lake does get very deep, but the spot the picture was taken in is fairly shallow. You can’t see the bottom in the deep parts. However, having freakishly clear water means you can see exactly where the sandy bottom drops off into blackness, so this still ranks a 5/10.

The Lower Congo River, multiple countries

Most of the Congo is a pretty normal, if large, River. In the lower section of it, however, lurks a disturbing surprise: massive underwater canyons that plunge down to 720 feet. The fish that live down there resemble cave fish, having no color, no eyes, and special sensory organs to find their way in the dark. These canyons are so sheer that they create massive rapids, wild currents and vortexes that can very easily kill you if you fall in. A solid 6/10, would not go there.

Little Crater Lake, Oregon

On first glance this lake doesn’t look too scary. It ranks this high because I really don’t like the sheer drop off and how clear it is (because it shows you exactly how deep it goes). This lake is about 100 feet across and 45 feet deep, and I strongly feel that this is too deep for such a small lake. Also, the water is freezing, and if you fall into the lake your muscles will seize up and you’ll sink and drown. I don’t like that either. 7/10.

Grand Turk 7,000 ft drop off

No. 8/10. I hate it.

Gulf of Corryvreckan, Scotland

Due to a quirk in the sea floor, there is a permanent whirlpool here. This isn’t one of those things that looks scary but actually won’t hurt you, either. It absolutely will suck you down if you get too close. Scientists threw a mannequin with a depth gauge into it and when it was recovered the gauge showed it went down to over 600 feet. If you fall into this whirlpool you will die. 9/10 because this seems like something that should only be in movies.

The Bolton Strid, England

This looks like an adorable little creek in the English countryside but it’s not. Its really not. Statistically speaking, this is the most deadly body of water in the world. It has a 100% mortality rate. There is no recorded case of anyone falling into this river and coming out alive. This is because, a little ways upstream, this isn’t a cute little creek. It’s the River Wharfe, a river approximately 30 feet wide. This river is forced through a tiny crack in the earth, essentially turning it on its side. Now, instead of being 30 feet wide and 6 feet deep, it’s 6 feet wide and 30 feet deep (estimated, because no one actually knows how deep the Strid is). The currents are deadly fast. The banks are extremely undercut and the river has created caves, tunnels and holes for things (like bodies) to get trapped in. The innocent appearance of the Strid makes this place a death trap, because people assume it’s only knee-deep and step in to never be seen again. I hate this river. I have nightmares about it. I will never go to England just because I don’t want to be in the same country as this people-swallowing stream. 10/10, I live in constant fear of this place.

Honorable mention: The Quarry, Pennsylvania

I don’t know if that’s it’s actual name. This lake gets an honorable mention not because it’s particularly deep or dangerous, but it’s where I almost drowned during a scuba diving accident.

Edit: I’ve looked up the name of the quarry, it’s called Crusty’s Quarry and is privately owned and only used for training purposes, not recreational diving.

[unamccormack]

The Gulf of Corryvreckan is indeed in a movie. It’s in I Know Where I’m Going! from the genius partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Also, yes, the Strid is possessed by devils.

[fangmich]

Avowed - Murals by Rita Yuwei Li

[androdragynous]

there is a screen reader / magnification program that is the only one the low vision clinic knows of with these features and it is $650 Canadian Dollars behind specific approved vendors that require you to be geographically close to them and get government approval of a degree that I am only just now reaching after being visually impaired for going on seven years. I feel normal about this

[androdragynous]

if you can code a program that does any or all of the following:

Magnifies a display beyond standard options with keyboard / mouse movement inputs or voice commands,

Can read text on the screen,

Has different color filter options for text / background distinction,

Can change and magnify the cursor beyond standard amounts,

Works on Windows or more than just Windows,

Has a keyboard echo (says the character you've pressed on the keyboard out loud)

... there is a genuine, GENUINE need for you to code this and put it at a more accessible price point than $650 Canadian Dollars which I also just learned is a SUBSCRIPTION FEE AND NOT EVEN PERPETUAL. if you are reading this and able to code I am begging you. would genuinely change lives

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[citizen-zero]

WIBTA for taking advantage of my boss’ possible manic episode?

I know this already sounds bad but hear me out.

So I (30M) am the sole employee of this guy (62M) who’s honestly just a miserable boss and an even more miserable person. It sucks so bad working for him—the pay is horrendous, he’s verbally abusive, and the working conditions are awful (in the winter I literally have to stay bundled up the whole work day because he refuses to put the heat on in the office). He wouldn’t even give me holidays off if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s basically nothing to do those days because everywhere else is closed. I’m almost positive he unironically thinks poor people should die if they can’t work. His nephew (aka his only living relative and just the nicest guy) came by yesterday to invite him to Christmas dinner and he told him he’d see him in hell.

I cannot stress this enough—it’s BAD. I’d quit, but it’s been hard finding a better job and I’ve got four kids at home, including one with special needs.

Anyway, so here’s where I’m wondering if I’d be the asshole. Today was Christmas Day and he showed up at my house out of nowhere (huge red flag, I know). At first I thought he’d forgotten I had the day off and he was here to chew me out, which was worrying enough, but then his whole demeanor changed and he was super happy and excited and talking about how he was going to raise my salary. He even mentioned possibly making me a partner in the firm.

Now if that was it, I’d feel a little weird about the suddenness of it but it’d be fine. I’m not going to complain about having more money to feed my family. But then he started talking about how he wanted to pay our mortgage off. He talked about wanting to pay for our son to get the very expensive medical care that’s probably going to save his life. He mentioned at one point that he was going to be donating a huge amount of money to charity too—I knew he was rich but it staggered me. All this from a guy who doesn’t (didn’t?) even want to turn on the heat or the lights because it costs too much money.

It was such a sudden and drastic change that happened very literally overnight and now I’m kind of concerned he’s having a manic episode or something. I really, really want to accept his sudden generosity (I probably will; my wife is all for it and thinks he owes it to us), and I would love to believe that he’s truly had a sudden change of heart (an actual Christmas miracle lol) but I’m just worried about the possible consequences of accepting huge financial gifts like this from someone who I believe might be experiencing some kind of break from reality. Even if there’s nothing legally wrong with it, I’m worried about the ethics of it.

TLDR, my asshole boss might be in the middle of a mental breakdown. WIBTA if I accepted his offer to pay off my mortgage and my son’s medical expenses?

[gallusrostromegalus]

You don't think matcha is tea????

Matcha isn't a Tea in my humble Opinion.

Matcha is an experience.

The year is 2009, the place is the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu, and I am recovering from a still-undiagnosed disease that left me with a 100+ degree for over three weeks, extreme weight loss and permanent Brain Damage.  I have signed up for an introductory Art History class because I need an additional Humanities credit.

It's called "The History and Philosophy of the Japanese Tea Ceremony", and for a class I can only sort of remember, it stands out.

So I'm in professor Roberts' Japanese Tea Ceremony  class, looking and feeling like death warmed over, but I'm genuinely interested in the subject matter and show up to every class because I have nothing better to do, and ask questions and turn in my homework, even if neither are particularly coherent at times, and rapidly become his favorite student.  The thing I learned in public school was how to show up to events even if I don't want to, analyze tests and other written materials for patterns and charm educators by holding up my end of a conversation, skills that have served me in the modern world far more than learning actual course content would have.

The Tea Ceremony, historically, takes a good month to prepare and the entire evening to carry out- the guest list is curated to create social bonds and intellectual stimulation alike, a poem is composed for the season, and a seasonal flower arrangement created to decorate the space. When the guests arrive, they must all crawl through a small door to enter the tea garden, regardless of profession or rank.  Hands are ritually washed in spring water, and there is a slow processional walk through the garden, to admire the artistry of the landscaping, and the composition of seasonal elements to create this particular night of beauty.  The entire ceremony is about appreciating both the joy of existing right now, in this time and place, and the unification of the self and the universe and the endless cycles of nature. 

The guests arrive at the tea house and meet the Tea Master, who will be making the Matcha that evening. The guests are seated in particular order, the Most Revered Guest- sometimes a high-ranking official, sometimes a visiting scholar or artist- is seated closest to the Tea Master.  The Poem is read aloud.  The Flowers are admired.  The tools for making the Matcha are taken out, examined as objects of art, and their history told.  The matcha powder itself is taken out- the case examined, the cultivation of the tea discussed, and only then does the Tea Master make the Tea. 

Matcha is not brewed- it's a fine powder made of crushed green tea leaves, and the powder is whisked together with not-quite-boiling water in a bowl to create a much more substantial and flavorful drink.  This drink is presented to the Most Revered Guest first, who is expected to take a sip and, in a moment of Zen spiritual clarity, comment on its flavor and how all the elements of the tea, art, garden and season all complement each other, and perhaps offer some sort of philosophical statement.

At least,

That's how it's supposed to go.

About a month before the spring semester is over, Professor Roberts announces that he has a surprise for his class- a good friend of his, a Professional Tea Master, will be visiting Hawai'i, and has agreed to perform a Tea Ceremony for our class!  I am very excited. The other 10 people in class are varying levels of amiably confused to distressed by having to go to An Event (TM) for a grade, but agree. One of my classmates, an astrology hoe named Jessica, pointed out that with the 11 students, Professor Roberts, and the Tea Master, there will be 13 people present, which is basically inviting disaster.

"Jessica." Sighed Professor Roberts. "It's a Tea Ceremony. What disaster could happen?"

Despite Jessica's misgivings, Preparations for the ceremony went on.  We learned about Ikebana while deciding on the Ceremonial Bouquet and tried our hands at it with what Professor Robert could get at the grocery store for $12. We learned about calligraphy and different types of poetic compositions while making the Seasonal Poem, and stain the hell out of the classroom carpet learning the brush strokes.  We learn about different types of Matcha Bowl sculpting and glazing and we are not allowed to touch the demonstration bowls or the kiln because Professor Roberts was beginning to suspect that some of his students (me)  were suffering from coordination issues. I apply myself with zeal, if not necessarily talent.  I was, at the time, an Art Major, but my professors in the art department had been grading me on a secret "this bitch almost died last semester and is re-learning how to hold a pencil" curve, and boy howdy did I stumble and break leaves and splatter ink like it.

Despite my ongoing unmonitored recovery, Professor Roberts viewed my enthusiastic class participation with rose-colored glasses, and about a week before the ceremony we had a class where he brought out the used Kimonos and Obi and other forms of japanese dress he'd borrowed from the theater department so that we would be traditionally dressed(ish) and experience the ceremony authentically(ish).  While people were trying on clothes to see what would fit, he took me aside and told me he wanted me to be in the position of Most Revered Guest, the person who makes the zen statement upon which the entire event hinges.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" I asked.

"You're the only person who doesn't fall asleep in class and you talked about how the flowers stagger their blooms to not compete for the bees- you're perfectly engaged and conscious of the seasons!" He said, blindly. "You will need different shoes though."  He indicated my flip-flops.  "I won't make you learn how to walk in Geta, but nothing with Heels. Ballet flats are fine."

"...These are the only shoes I own." I said.

Professor Roberts stared at me.

"-I used to have a pair of sneakers but I think a homeless guy stole them while I was at the beach last month."

"What?" Roberts blinked.

"He probably needed them more than I do. I'll see if I can borrow some flats."

"...I don't think I've ever met a woman with less than 10 pairs of shoes."  Said Roberts.

"I'm not a woman, I'm and undergrad." I said, still three years away from learning the term 'Nonbinary'.  "Those are Jordan's only pair of shorts, you know." I pointed at my classmate, who had been wearing the one (1) pair of basketball shorts for the entire semester.

"I WASH THEM." Jordan shouted defensively, wearing the longest Men's Kinmo the theater department had, which barely came down to the top of his calves.

"Oh God." Said Roberts, a horrifying new world opening up to him like a tub of Expired sour cream.

*

It was the day of the Ceremony.

The Seasonal Theme we'd worked on was "The Turn Of Summer", and the weather was complying maliciously. 

Normally, Tea Ceremonies are scheduled for the more temperate evening, but due to the school needing to host something in the adjoining cultural center later, we could only use the Tea Garden in the middle of the afternoon, and the summer sun was a sweltering 98 degrees and a similar level of Humidity.  The Camelias were melting.

Where Jordan had difficulty finding a Kimono that suited his ent-like proportions, I'd had the opposite problem and the only Kimono short enough to not trip my Hobbit-sized self was a Child’s size.  My roommate had helped me get into the Kimono and Obi before the ceremony, and leant me a pair of her Ballet Flats, but we discovered an issue- this Kimono was designed for a flat-chested prepubescent youth, and even though I barely scraped 5'0", I had the robust proportions of an Irish Peasant, and the only way to avoid displaying a frankly offensive amount of cleavage was to use the widest Obi we could find and sort of tuck my boobs into it. 

"Hm" I said. "Kind of hard to breathe."

"Yeah, but you're sitting for most of it, right?  It can't last more than an hour, so just like, shuffle and don't talk much?"  She suggested.

To her credit, the first forty-five minutes of the ceremony only involved shuffling through the gardens and not talking while the Tea Master lectured us on some of the finer points of the garden's design. 

But then we got to the Tea House- a small structure only barely able to accommodate the 13 of us, which was in the shade but hotter than the outside because of the roaring fire in the middle of the room, where the water for the Matcha was boiling.  The room was surrounded by a narrow sort of porch, part of which hung over the Koi pond, where several massively overfed carp blurbled expectantly for treats at the arrival of humans. I sat down, legs folded under me like Professor Roberts had insisted, and realized that this pushed the Obi UP, and now my rib cage was being compressed in all directions.

I tried to pay attention to the rest of the ceremony, but two and a half hours is an awfully long time to listen about lecturers you've already heard when your body is undergoing a sort of internal horserace to see if the heatstroke, sciatica pain and numbness, allergies or suffocation-by-compression will cause you to pass out first.  My legs had gone numb below the knee by the time we were done with the flower arrangement.  My entire legs were numb before we were done with the Poem.  By the time the Tea Utensils came out, I was seeing spots of colored light in my vision and could only breathe if I focused on it very, very hard.

But! The ceremony was genuinely interesting! and Professor Roberts was counting on me!  So I did my best not to sway or throw up from watching the Tea Master whisk the Matcha, and dutifully took the bowl with a pair of hands that felt like slabs of ham that I was attempting to puppet from another dimension, and took a sip.

They say that Smell and Taste are far more closely connected to the emotional centers of the brain than any other sense, and I believe it because the instant I inhaled both the grassy, powdery smell, and tasted the moderately viscous bubbly liquid, I experienced an intense flashbulb memory back to a previous late May-

The Year was '98, the place was my elementary school art room, and we'd been using the seasonal hot weather to paint on a massive scale as the art dried quickly- each third-grader had been given a roll of butcher paper, a cheap brush, squirts of non-toxic paint and a water cup, and allowed to go hog-wild on our murals, and the rush of creative energy and the imminent sense of freedom as the semester drew to a close truly embodied the summer of youth, carefree but with an almost psychotic fervor, where lack of care was both freeing and dangerous as you lost track of your surroundings in the act of creation-

Which isn't a bad seasonal-philosophical connection statement to make, but the actual words that came out of my mouth were:



"Wow. This tastes exactly like paint."



The first sound I heard after the moment of silence was the cartoonishly loud gasp of horror from Professor Roberts, which was almost immediately drowned out by the thunderclap of laughter from the Tea Master, slapping his thighs and wiping tears from his face, unable to stop. I desperately tried to explain the connection between the fact I might be dying of heat stroke right now, and how I ended up drinking my paint water back in Mrs. Krantz's art class because back then I was also dying of heat stroke, but mostly ended up wheezing half-formed sentences as the rest of the class took sips and offered opinions varying between "Wow, that's thick. Like a Hot smoothie." and "Oh yeah, it tastes like summer. Like how a freshly-mowed lawn smells like summer." Professor Roberts slowly melted into a pile of shame, and the Tea Master slapped him on the back, still howling with laughter.

"They're honest! Nobody else will be honest!  This is magnificent!"  he wheezed.

Eventually, everyone had their taste, and the ceremony was concluded.  The second the Tea Master had packed up his tools and stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, Professor Roberts was in my face.

"HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT?" he hissed, grabbing my arm and pulling me up. "GO APOLOGIZE RIGHT NOW!"  he shoved me out onto the porch where the Tea Master was looking at the Koi, who had started bubble-begging aggressively again.

Except that my legs felt like blocks of wood that my pelvis was renting from another planet where legs hadn’t been invented yet, my vision was entirely static between the dehydration and lack of oxygen, and my vestibuar system had fucked off an hour ago, leaving me to stay upright by purely by the virtue of the over-tightened Obi.  So instead of bowing and apologizing profusely like my professor expected, what I actually did was stumble out of the room, say something like "Hsdfkf" and topple head-first into the koi pond.

Fortunately, the impact of the bottom of the pond with the top of my skull activated a sort of last-resort emergency self preservation system and I inhaled with enough force to break the Obi-Jime and probably a couple ribs from the pain that hit both my sides like lightning.  Unfortunately, the thing I was inhaling was fish-shit riddled Pond Water, so my emergency self-preservation system ordered an even harder Exhale. 

The Tea Master, to his immense credit, had immediately jumped in after me, and pulled me upright just in time for me to forcibly exhale half a gallon of rancid pond water directly into his face, then start screaming.  Screaming is an extremely appropriate reaction to have when injured, because it alerts everyone that you require medical attention, but is very unpleasant to experience from four inches away, which is probably why he then immediately dropped me.

Fortunately the pond wasn't very deep and this time I sat there, scream-gasping as my lungs reinflated, Koi fish burbling and sucking at me with tremendous excitement, until the EMT from the campus clinic arrived, a vanguard before the actual ambulance.

"Okay uh. You're bleeding." he said, cautiously wading into the pond.

I opened my eyes to find that I had apparently acquired a large and profusely bleeding head wound, which had activated some long-suppressed Shark Instincts in the Koi, which were eagerly gumming at the streams of blood and trying to suck on my forehead. "Good thing they don’t have teeth." I said in the distant bliss that only zen masters and people with serious head injuries get to experience.

"Do you want a towel?" he asked, helping me up.

"No, this is rather refreshing, actually." I said, still absolutely smashed on endorphins, Koi still enthusiastically swarming at my kneecaps.

"I mean like for your-"  the EMT Gestured Vaguely at my torso.

I looked down and realized that not only had I broken the Obi-jime, the entire Obi had come undone and was floating several feet away, and I was only wearing the Kimono, fallen completely off my shoulders and was only being prevented from performing a full Lady Godiva by the valiant efforts of the safety pin my roommate had put in to keep it folded correctly while we figured out the Obi.

"Professor Roberts?" I stood up all the way, soaking wet, bleeding from my forehead with such force as to create actual streams of blood down my face, neck and chest, tits out, and addressed the poor man standing, white-faced on the deck above the pond.  "I don't think I'm going to be in class on Monday-" I paused to fish a small Koi that had gotten trapped in the remains of the now-ruined Kimono, and tossed it back into the pond. "-Can I schedule a make-up exam for the Final?"

"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GET IN THE AMBULANCE!" He screamed.

I was x-rayed for a skull fracture, but my lifelong membership to the Lactose Tolerance Club had protected me, and I happily texted my roommate to come pick me up as "They x-rayed my head and found nothing" while the doctor stitched part of my scalp back together.

The following morning, I discovered that Professor Roberts had graded my exam before I took it.  100%. Truly, the best way to get a good grade on your finals is to get a serious head injury.



So, Matcha is not a Tea, in my humble opinion.

Matcha is an Experience.

And sometimes that experience is drinking something almost exactly like paint, ruining an important cultural ceremony, traumatizing your professor,  and introducing a bunch of fish to the taste of human flesh.



***

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[shadow-von-vamp]

reblogging a post that says “do it scared” vs actually doing it scared

[tractorgoth]

[zstraps]

the musical motifs of project hail mary

been nerding out about the project hail mary score real hard, so here are some notes on the various motifs the appear throughout the score! this is just based on my own observations from listening to the score on repeat for the last two weeks, noticing patterns, then going back to the film to see the exact moments they correspond to. this score is so so gorgeous but also so so SMART, the more i listen to it, the more i hear.

(note: this post contains SO MANY SPOILERS)

main theme (connection)

there are two motifs that appear most often/prominently throughout the film, but I think of this one as the main theme. while it's not the first music we hear in the movie, it's added on to the beginning of the first track on the score album, almost like an intro to set the tone, and it's prominent in the last song we hear as well, bookending the score.

it shows up over and over again in the score, usually at moments of connection, collaboration, and trust. it's often heard as choral vocals, in the rhythm written above (often repeated a second time with the last note up a fifth) but there are many many variations on it as well.

its big debut is when grace takes off his helmet in the tunnel, trusting rocky and allowing connection between them (Connection)

however a variation of it appears earlier, when grace first puts the hail mary into centrifuge mode (Centrifuge). the melody starts with this sequence of notes, and a variation of it can also be heard as a small ornamentation right as he pulls down the lever. the score here is dreamy and optimistic—a celebration of humanity's innovation and success in coming together to design the hail mary.

after rocky tells grace he will give him enough astrophage to go home (Grace Go Home)

when grace is observing the taumoeba under the microscope and realizing that he and rocky succeeded (Tau Amoeba)

in Amaze Amaze Amaze, the upbeat song which plays as grace shows rocky the breeder tanks and as they celebrate their success, then again during the final scene of grace and rocky on erid. not only is the main form of the theme present as vocals (in Fist My Bump) and strings (in Life on Erid), but the repeated syncopated melody that forms the backbone of the song is actually a variation using the same pitch sequence

astrophage theme

this is the second of the two most prominent motifs. it's often repeated a second time down a half step (which puts the second instance in a minor key). another common variation is for the final note to go up instead of down (up to a G and then resolve to an A). like the main theme, it is very often choral vocals, but it appears in many variations.

(as a side note, one thing i love about the choral vocals in this score—in addition to the celestial/holy sound and the organic/human aspect—is that while they're wordless, there's a bit of vowel distinction and consonant articulation. not enough to be recognizable as words, but enough that your brain interprets it as language and strains to understand it, recreating rocky and grace's experience in a way)

anyway. i call this one the astrophage theme, but it's broader than that. it underscores moments of profound emotion. both have a celestial, almost holy/spiritual sound, but where the main theme is hopeful, the astrophage theme is haunting, present for moments of wonder, uncertainty, grief, awe. it's the feeling of looking up at the stars and feeling very, very small.

the very first time it's heard is (briefly, but very clearly) at the moment grace realizes he has bred astrophage (Box in a Box)

it's there as a small ornamentation in Secret Clearance on the score album, though interestingly I don't hear that part in that scene in the movie

during the burial scene, beginning right when grace nearly breaks down giving their eulogies, and then building as he sends their bodies off (You Were Loved)

when grace and rocky talk about their crewmates dying (Learning to Communicate). leads into "grace rocky save stars", followed by the dies irae theme (more on that below)

during grace and stratt's conversation on deck, right when he asks if she believes in god (God Willing)

during grace's moment in the petrova line!!!! here it's slow and grandiose, with a huge swelling orchestral sound (A Moment)

in the background as rocky and grace realize that astrophage has a natural predator on adrian (Life Is Reason)

after grace sets up the taumoeba breeder tanks and there's nothing left to do but wait for rocky to wake up (Tau Amoeba)

as rocky and grace say goodbye (Goodbye My Friend)

the moment grace makes his choice to save rocky instead of returning to earth (Xenonite Contamination)

ascending 6ths

ascending 6th intervals, often repeating in a descending sequence. i can't even catalogue everywhere this motif is used because it's so omnipresent in the score. it's often played on cristal baschet, which gives the score that unearthly, shimmery vibrato. but it shows up in some other really cool variations as well!

dies irae

ok this one is really, really cool. this is a variation on the dies irae, a theme from a 13th-century gregorian chant about the judgment day that was used in funeral masses, which in the last century or so has been widely quoted in music from symphonies to film scores. here's a video from a composer talking about how the dies irae theme has become synonymous with death and apocalypse in popular consciousness, and project hail mary's more hopeful-sounding variation on it.

within the score, the dies irae still represents high-stakes moments and moments of existential fear—where failure would mean death for the characters and their entire species and planets. but it's transposed from the original into a major key (i think from dorian to lydian? don't quote me tho), and at times the second part of the phrase is changed to move upward instead of downward, giving it a swelling, hopeful feeling.

it's first heard when grace looks at astrophage under the microscope for the first time, in the lab on earth. (interestingly, this doesn't appear at this point on the score album, and i think it might actually be Life Is Reason, which comes way later?? the music at the moment he puts the petri dish under the scope is the exact same as when he's putting the petri dish with the sample from tau ceti's petrova line under the scope!)

it appears again when stratt and co are explaining the hail mary mission to grace—and it comes in specifically when they say they need grace to breed the astrophage, aka the moment that the stakes become personal for him (Secret Clearance)

as noted above, it comes in after rocky and grace talk about losing their crews and rocky's determined "grace rocky save stars". the score has been more curious and upbeat in the few minutes prior as they begin to communicate; now the dies irae theme interweaves with that optimism as they are reminded of the stakes (Learning to Communicate)

it's heard as grace and rocky study their petrova line sample and they begin to prepare to collect samples from adrian's atmosphere (Life Is Reason). this is where you can really hear the more hopeful upward-climbing variation, particularly as grace looks at the sample under the microscope and the music builds towards rocky's realization of the significance of life on adrian.

and of course it's a huge part of the masterful building of tension as they're retrieving the samples from adrian's atmosphere (Time Go Fishing)

what i didn't realize until i was halfway through writing this post, though, is that the main theme is ALSO a variation on this one! the four notes of the main theme are the first four notes of the dies irae. there are some moments, like the choral vocals when grace is first looking closely at rocky (Connection), where i truly wasn't sure whether which motif to put it under. so not only does the score inject a more hopeful sound into the dies irae, it also remakes it entirely, into something nearly unrecognizable—transforming death and fear into connection and trust.

curiosity theme

this one shows up for moments of curiosity and investigation!

it first appears in the score in Water Based. i can't actually find this one in the film, so if anyone knows where it is, let me know! but my best guess is that this was planned as the score for when grace is first in the lab studying astrophage, but it was replaced with a version of Life Is Reason. it's very wet-sounding, which is fun. the lower staff pitches are approximated with percussion, sort of like a proto-version of the motif that then develops further.

it shows up as grace is deciphering the contents of rocky's canister (The Message)

and when grace starts building his translator and they start to be able to talk (Learning to Communicate)

the synocpated motif in the lower staff is heard as grace demonstrates the astrophage's power for the astronauts

and when rocky wakes up while grace is sleeping, it's what plays as the lights come on and rocky comes into frame in his ball (Wake Up Buddy)

the four note sequence from the top staff is heard when rocky and grace are in the tunnel, after their mirrored motions, when they come closer and look at each other through the xenonite (Connection)

and! the same sequence appears diegetically in the same scene—rocky vocalizes it as he taps on the xenonite!

box in a box (aka doin' science together)

this one just makes me laugh a lot. this motif appears in Box in a Box, when grace and carl are putting a sealed box (containing the three astrophage) inside the sealed lab. and a variation of it appears later in Rocky Moves In.... aka a sealed container (rocky's ball) inside a bigger sealed container (the hail mary)

they're also both moments of working together, where grace is letting someone else in to his work!

hail mary theme

this motif scores the first moments of the film and the climax. it has a few similar variations, so i just picked one to transcribe, but they all use the same main pitches, just rearranged a bit and with different grace notes. i'm not sure of the exact instrument it's usually played on, but whatever it is has a very bright, resonant tone. i think of this one as the theme for life triumphing over the odds.

it's the first music we hear in the film, as grace is waking up on the hail mary (Ryland Grace Cognition Assessment)

we hear a similar version of it after yao tells grace "you just have to find someone to be brave for"

it's heard as rocky is waking up after saving grace. the score swells into the last few notes just as grace hugs rocky's ball (Wake Up Buddy)

after grace goes back for rocky, the score shifts from a darker sound to this motif right as rocky appears in the tunnel, and that same triumphant swell happens right as they touch hands through the xenonite (Believe in the Hail Mary). the same song continues through the shots of the probes reaching earth and stratt watching grace's video

whew!

this post got so much longer than i meant it to! i hope someone else finds this all as interesting as i did. it's such a brilliant score, and it really rewards a close listen—there are so many moments where these motifs are woven together in very clever ways. please feel free to add on with any moments i missed, other observations, or just your favorite moments from the score!

[woodsdyke]

im swimming at the lake and accidentally kicked a fish. this has never happened in my many years of swimming. sorry man

[sootandspine]

there used to be an old mine near where i'm staying. it's flooded now, so all that's left is this round opening in the rock filled with water. the rock walls surrounding it are steep, and people like to climb up and jump into it. the water is dark that even though it's crystal clear, you can't see the bottom. it's just this endless black void beneath you.

well, one night a friend and i decided to jump in without bothering to check the water first. it was late, nobody else was around, and we figured it'd be fine.

it was not fine.

we hit the water and immediately realized we'd landed in what i can only describe as tadpole soup. i am not exaggerating when i say it felt like swimming through boba tea that was 70% pearls. every stroke meant hundreds of tiny, squishy little bodies slipping between my fingers.

1/10 experience. one point awarded solely for the fact that it was, technically, an experience.

[letseyx]

Revolutionary Rom

[bean-pronounced-bawn]

I can't find the post but there's this one post that's like "aging is less than 1% as terrifying as whatever the fuck is going on with people desperately trying not to age"

That but with weight.

Getting or being fat is less than 1% as terrifying as whatever the fuck is going on with people desperately trying to not be fat.

[proudtoehaver]

“I was on a strict diet during Episode VIII, and she was like, ‘Kid, get into that fridge and take some chocolate bars. I have many there.’ And I did,” he recalls. “I failed my diet because Carrie Fisher told me to. And it [felt] great.”

-John Boyega on Carrie Fisher

[fuocogo]

This is the Carrie Fisher post of body positivity reblog for a chocolate bar from her fridge

[orbiten]

Ryan Gosling's man/guy films