madefromclay

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I don’t like the idea that my life is scheduled and prescribed beyond my control

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I’m not ready to die yet

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let the contemporary record show mr beast was pretty ignorable for his whole career if you were just like, busy.

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i would listen to sabrina if she made music like this

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shadows ii set 1 by charles gaines 1980

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21st January 1990: A human chain for independence from Moscow's rule in Kalush, Ukraine.

Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in the 1990s

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Something about hands and bars

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bauhaus – bela lugosi's dead cassette

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keep making bids for connection . It’s literally how to stay alive. We are here to be with each other and everything else is beside the point.

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there is a category 9 vibe shift occurring and everybody’s blogging like they don’t feel it

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If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

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jenny shimizu in her apartment in NYC,1994

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Russia invading Ukraine is one of the most morally clear-cut conflicts, period. A former empire, much larger than its neighbour/prior colony, invades it due to longstanding revanchist fantasies of reclaiming its lost imperial glory. The smaller country has to fight back to ensure its survival, especially since its aggressor has repeatedly stated its intent to wipe it out even if it submits. Someone who supports Russian irredentism and imperialist warmongering is either someone profoundly ideologically poisoned, evil, or both.

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