i swear that bog body was there when i got here

hi! i’m shaoni, pronounced shy-OH-nee. they/them. posts about writing, sff, biology, linguistics, history. you can read my short stories at shaonicwhite.com/creative-work

[cherryjuicegf]

when will my thesis defend me

[assiraphales]

I don’t think we’re rick rolling each other enough anymore. 1. it CANNOT die out 2. this under saturated market is perfect for unsuspecting victims who’ve been lulled into a false sense of security. be the person you hate. bring back the dastardly link

[json-derulo]

someone actually studied the falling Rick Roll rate for their Ph.D dissertation recently and published the paper

[junefrombug]

okay but this made me wonder if there was actually any academic literature on rickrolling and YES THERE IS this is a paper about rickrolling WITHIN academic literature. As in, studies that attempt to rickroll the people reading them. Best part is no one is going to believe me and click that link even though it’s 100% true.

[niltia]

My friend's book is mentioned in this paper!!

[teaboot]

There is no earthy way of convincing anyone that the rickroll study link is real. But for what it's worth. It is

[tehnakki]

I'm so sad that the link wasn't a rickroll 😭 guess I have to read an academic paper now instead of listening to a fucking bop.

[anglerfl3sh]

University really is about looking at the worst pdf known to man huh

[anglerfl3sh]

the professor uploaded this sideways. I'm sparing you at least that bit

[shieldfoss]

Image from the best pdf I ever saw, [Elliot 2025]:

[Elliot 2050] - The Utterly Unhinged Elamo-Minoan Hypothesis https://www.academia.edu/128559713

[hymneminium]

[onlycosmere]

[peachdoxie]

By the way this book is over 1000 pages long

[nudityandnerdery]

It is also the first of five books and two novellas published, so far.

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

Reading comprehension...

But also, this is why reading comprehension is a skill. Because what Sanderson is doing with his epic fantasy is expecting that the reader is coming in knowing that the book is going to be laying out an expansive and mysterious world, which will be gradually explored and explicated over the course of the story. 'Way of Kings' is especially egregious in this because (as noted by the original questions) it doesn't even start by introducing you to the humble (farmboy, traditionally) protagonist whose situation you might understand a bit before it unfolds; it starts by introducing a dozen different mysteries and proper nouns, and asking you to keep them in mind as you read to discover what they are.

This isn't a bad approach, but it is a specific one, and if a reader has asked 'what's a good fantasy series to start reading?' it's entirely possible they don't _know_ that this is a mode of reading/writing. If what they've read before has been books that start off introducing one character for them to relate to, and here's the interesting quirk of their situation, it's perfectly reasonable to wonder why, after three pages of reading, they don't know what's happening.

This is not to say that other ways are dumb or bad, either. 'Hunger Games', eg, starts off with 'here's a poor girl trying to keep her family fed in a bad situation' before it gets into more of the complexities and layers of the story. On the flip side, I've meet Sanderson fans who struggle with other fantasy novels because they get so wrapped up searching for the 'system' of magic that they don't appreciate anything else that, eg, Le Guin is doing.

Luckily, the way to get reading comprehension is to read - a lot, and a lot of different things - and to talk with other people about what you read, and that's all things the internet facilitates greatly. I hope the original asker pressed on and eventually enjoyed the rest of the book!

[ariaste]

Genres are usually defined by their tropes—mysteries have murders and clues, romances have two people finding each other, etc. Science ficti

If you want to read more about the particular ways that scifi/fantasy expects readers to be reading, this essay by Jo Walton is really good.

Because SF can’t take the world for granted, it’s had to develop techniques for doing it. There’s the simple infodump, which Neal Stephenson has raised to an artform in its own right. There are lots of forms of what I call incluing, scattering pieces of information seamlessly through the text to add up to a big picture. The reader has to remember them and connect them together. This is one of the things some people complain about as “too much hard work” and which I think is a high form of fun. SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting.

[icarus-suraki]

[brehaaorgana]

I love whoever decided to teach this website about simulacra via this meme

[jstor]

"To the Poem" is one of twelve poems by Frank O'Hara highlighted in JSTOR Daily's recent article, just in time for National Poetry Month. We love the effect produced by enjambment here!

What are some poems you can't keep away from? We'd love to read them :)

[themightyhumanbroom]

My average writing experience:

"Alright I think I'm almost done actually-"

*Google doc grows second health bar and a choir starts singing in latin*

[viralfrog]

[lookcaitlin]

[70sscifiart]

A lizard in a Sep 1987 ad for GOULD electronics in Computer magazine. The ad’s about how they can adapt “with the skill of a chameleon,” which a different reptile entirely.

[another-chaotic-bisexual-vampire]

Jonathan Harker In College vibes

[penultimate-step]

I have a mild interest in video game history stuff, so I was reading through the "50 Years of Text Games" page recently. I got to the article on The Hobbit (1982), which I had only heard about in passing before this, but this seems to have been an oversight given its apparent importance. Looking through this and some other articles, the game was well known for having npc behavior years ahead of its time, and was inspirational to early games programmers; this page even going so far as to say it "is often credited for helping to jump-start the British home computing market." But beyond the game's technical achievements, one paragraph at the article's end about the game's creator, Veronika Megler, stuck with me:

Megler for years was little aware of the game’s success. After graduating, Melbourne House offered her a full-time position, but she was sick of assembler debugging and turned it down: “I have a very low tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again.” She accepted an entry-level job at IBM, who “made it very clear that having written a game was not regarded as any kind of relevant work experience,” and would go on to a long and successful career as a computer professional—but never again worked in games. It wasn’t until the 2000s that she learned the extent of The Hobbit’s popularity, and its impact on a generation of players around the world: players who had first learned English to solve it, or had their imaginations fired for their own computer careers by the magic inherent in the game’s simulated possibilities.

(50 Years of Text Games)

And that got me thinking about legacy and how we perceive ourselves for a bit. Because to Megler none of this stuff is that important, apparently. For her this was just a college programming job, what others saw as groundbreaking NPC design she saw as ordinary, a stepping stone in her career; not part of her real life, which involved IT work. And today she is a leading data scientist at Amazon. But if you look her up online, check her wikipedia page, all of that stuff is a footnote. The last 40 years of her life, the stuff she valued, it's all placed under several paragraphs talking about her involvement in games, stuff she did for less than a year. 100 years from now, assuming people are still playing video games, people will probably be talking about The Hobbit, long after all the other stuff fades into history.

Really makes you realize that we have very little control over how we will be remembered, what about our lives others consider important and worth remembering.

[theonion]

Explaining how the timeless clash between the two sides remains among the most elemental forms of storytelling worldwide, a study published Tuesday by researchers at Oxford University has concluded that virtually all modern narratives are re-expressions of the classic Alien Vs. Predator conflict. “The Epic Of Gilgamesh, Paradise Lost, The Old Man And The Sea—each is simply a different culture’s exploration of the ageless, universally relatable struggle between Alien and Predator,” said study co-author Dr. Gavin Horsley, who noted he has yet to encounter a civilization whose most prized written works and oral traditions did not derive from the prototypical confrontation between the savage Xenomorphs and their technologically advanced, extraterrestrial humanoid adversaries.

Full Story

[thepenguinpress]

Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

[lonesomedovepdf]

“[March 21 1951]

Student explaining to me (after getting 55) that when reading a novel (’Ulysses’ in this case) he likes to skip ‘passages and pages’ so as ‘to get his own idea, you know, about the book and not be influenced by the author’.”

[specialagentartemis]

“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.

[bismuth-209]

i had a class last semester about How To Do History. first year of a history degree. ofc, one of the lectures went into what the requirements of a research question are. of course the regular things were said, open question, clearly delineated, but also. You should be interested in it.

whatever your question, you, personally, should want to know the answer

he also said, by the time you get to your thesis, you should have a problem. not a personal problem like a caffeine habit or relationship troubles, there should be something in history that bothers you. something you feel doesn't quite make sense or something. and that's what your thesis should be about ideally

i know this post was probably about fiction writing but it's at least as true, if not more, about non fiction writing

[specialagentartemis]

You know, that’s a really good point. I’m currently writing a dissertation about archaeology, and it’s a similar thing. How did these communities organize, and why?

I’ve often joked “to get a PhD you have to love your topic more than you love yourself” and it’s not wholly wrong, lol. You have to be interested and it has to be an interest, a curiosity, that can carry you even when you’re completely sick of the whole thing.

[elbiotipo]

The thing about many city-builder games is that they still can't break away from the SimCity model, and the SimCity model, as groundbreaking it was for its time, was never exactly the best way to simulate a city.

I of course deeply respect SimCity for what it did but it came out in 1989. I think it's time to think away from it. Do you really need a Residential Commercial Industrial index in every game?

[elbiotipo]

Things that SimCity, and other modern city-builders like Cities Skylines assume:

Cities are built in uninhabited "greenfields" with nobody living ON or owning the land where the player builds

"Zoning" as the main and sometimes only way to organize cities, when it's not even a factor in many places (Latin America anyone?)

This zoning being the main factor in growth in cities; people do not buy land and build themselves, or invest in building projects, they just establish themselves in wherever the zones are

A lack of history to your cities, so you don't have, for example, the "old towns" of European, Middle Eastern cities, etc. Historical buildings and city-planning are non-existent

An avoidance of politics. Sure, resolutions and laws are technically there, but you as the player enact them or not at will. The citizens of your city have little to no say on what the Almighty Mayor does.

Lack of interaction with the higher levels of government (governors, national governments)

Treating cities as an "enterprise" with profit (taxes) and expenses, instead of. You know. A government.

Lack of interaction with entities inside the city. Who owns the big factories in your industrial city, the skyscrapers in the commercial district?

And of course, I believe I don't even need to talk about this, but a completely car-centric design that makes all city-planning circle around traffic

At the end, all these games become about one and one thing only: SOLVING TRAFFIC (or logistics and resource management, which is traffic but fancier)

Not ALL of these assumptions are in ALL city builders (not even all Sim Cities!) but they're so prevalent all over the genre that they're not even questioned most of the time. But these aren't technical limitations, people could (and some did) make different city-builders! These are deliberate game design choices that have been replicated over and over and over since 1989.

[kuttithevangu]

What if we all got really into arguing about the meaning of some other short story for awhile. If I were in the room with the yellow wallpaper I would simply leave

[retroactivebakeries]

if I were a scrivener I would just prefer to

[tsunflowers]

book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

[tsunflowers]

yes. he invented and hand carved 4000 characters. it is a CRAZY project that resulted in an intentionally unreadable book. I love it

[curioscurio]

Xu Bing you're legendary to me !!!!

[potabo]

I feel like we're underselling it a little here