#but also seems to have really resonated

[pynkhues]

I just saw an Aus election tiktok that mentioned democracy sausages and gold coin donations. I need you to know that I (american unfortunately) only understood it because of your election posting.

Congrats to the country as a whole for the good results as well lol

Haha, I'm glad that I could help, and thank you! It's been a relief honestly, because it was looking like a conservative sweep four weeks ago and there have been some pretty ugly things said and done by loud voices here recently, and to have that be so resolutely rejected by the majority of the country in the election is just - - yes. A relief to put it mildly.

[vaguely-concerned]

purple hawke who, at malcolm's death, lost not only a father, a mentor, the single most stable and safe point in their world up until this moment. but also the only person in their life who would consistently, gleefully 'yes, and — ' them. the loss, in one fell swoop, of both a beloved parent and your sole willing — no, not only willing, enthusiastic — improv partner. truly, the most unkindest cut of all that the maker could have seen fit to deal. (there's always so much less laughter in the house, after malcolm's gone.)

and then after all the horrors of the blight and trying to make a new life in the shithole turned shithome of kirkwall....... they meet varric. and something that's been slumbering deep within their soul dries a tear of relief and joy and whispers 'oh we are so back'. and they are so right

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

forever obsessed with dynamics between vampires, specifically that of a maker and fledgling, as a way to explore abuse. the creation of a vampire itself can so easily be a literalization of the lasting impacts of trauma and also much more simply the ways a perpetrator might shape their victim’s very identity. the extremes of isolation in the way that the new vampire, in most narratives, must cut all ties to their mortal life, or else go through an elaborate charade to maintain the facade of humanity, while forever still being removed from it. and the sheer dependence and vulnerability of being in an entirely new state of being, wholly uncertain of what it entails, and relying on another person to define… everything.

[o-uncle-newt]

I've been doing some very very interesting Sayers reading/research lately (about which more another time) but it's making me realize a) what a fascinating and often extremely problematic worldview she had, b) how extremely integrated her worldview was such that some of the more progressive-type ideas she had that many readers love are often inseparable from her more regressive ones, and c) how one of the reasons why I love the Wimsey books is that you can see her philosophies clearly play out in them BUT her character development in particular is so good that you can also read in complexities, including ones which she may not have intended.

[alicenpai]

2021 re2 and re4 doodles i unearthed, 2020-2021 were the years of art block for me - i drew a lot, but not too many of my drawings felt quite right. anyways... sherry finally got that puppy (big puppy...) and parrot she always wanted! im a big fan of taking a single obscure piece of dialogue/game mechanic/inventory item etc and then drawing it

[capricores]

pisces/virgo placements... it's about time you took care of yourself, too, ok?

you burn yourselves out allowing yourself to be pulled by so many people in all different directions. you exhaust all your resources and empty your cup - no, your entire well - to help those around you, even people you don't know. it's such a beautiful thing, and i know you genuinely love helping others, supporting people, seeing them thrive. it's such a beautiful trait! but you constantly end up neglecting yourself, right? you don't realize that you have permission to set aside time to care for you, to cater to your needs for once. you often feel like no one puts a drop in your cup, the favor is never returned - it's exhausting; you might think if you just keep giving your all it will come back; i understand. you will find the people that give the same energy back to you one day, but regardless of whether you've found those people yet, you need to learn to step aside and fill your own cup!

setting boundaries and saying no is the most important thing you will learn to do in this lifetime. it will not be easy for you, sometimes it will feel painful. but you cannot help the world if you're constantly drained and tired! you deserve to take care of yourself in the same way you do for others. be gentle to your kind soul, nourish yourself; do the things you love to do. learn to worry about others less, as hard as it is, and focus on yourself more.

[cooking-with-hailstones]

.

[finalgirlminamurray]

my tag for my gender-swapped tcm au on here is (will be) "the sawyer sisters", because it's simple and easy to put on everything related to it, and my name for the collection of fics related to it on ao3 is "don't question the virtue names" because i felt the need to address my odd choice of naming theme for them in a way that probably draws more attention to it than anything

but if i really wanted to be clever and slightly esoteric while expressing my vision for this 'verse, my tag for it would be something like "cannibal Little Women"

[happy-go-lucky-fairy]

I wanna make another wuwa SI...I love Nüwa as is, but I wish her clothes were more cutesy!!

I could change it but arugh...I love her design 😭 Torn...what to do....hmm.

[lactosefreevanillayoghurt]

hello should i read radio silence

YES ‼️

[bloodlessharmony]

why am just now getting how the juxtaposition of satanist and we're in love on the track list makes so much sense. i didn't get that sequencing at first because they're so different sonically and also in tone that i missed how they complement each other. but listening to the record all the way through today it hit me that satanist half-jokingly poses a question and then we're in love earnestly provides an answer

[nebulouscoffee]

✄ what’s your editing process?

★ what was the scene you most wanted to write in "Who We Are" ? what was the hardest scene to write?

and

▵ pick a fic and I’ll tell you my favorite line -> for "Home"

Thank you so much!😊

✄ what’s your editing process? - answered here :)

★ what was the scene you most wanted to write in "Who We Are" ? what was the hardest scene to write? - I remember being so excited to write Ezri's joining, which ended up being a ton of fun- as well as this (not yet posted) fallout between Jadzia and Julian. Plus the climactic zhian'tara ritual! A scene that's been quite hard to write is one where Jadzia sort of snaps and is... actually very mean to Ezri (hard because it's tough to find the balance between painful and still in-character; in canon it was Garak, who can easily be cruel- but while I think Jadzia can be uncaring sometimes she isn't usually mean like that, so what would it take to push her? how can I make it convincing?) - and ofc that climactic zhian'tara ritual lol, because HOWWW can I capture the sheer madness of Jadzia Sans Dax But Not Quite Idaris hosting the spirit of Technically Now Dead Past Host Jadzia Dax. Nothing is good enough!! Nothing!!!

▵ pick a fic and I’ll tell you my favorite line -> for "Home" - omg Home :') can't believe it's been two whole years since I sat down and thought "well maybe I should try writing a fan fic" & then accidentally gave birth to a 100k word monster lmao. I haven't actually read this one since last December, so I'm not sure these are in fact my fav lines- but people seem to comment about this exchange between Kira and Garak a lot, and I do like it!

“Nilvi isn’t even a Cardassian fruit,” he said randomly.  Kira knew. It was Amlethi; plucked from their soils and grown on Cardassian worlds. Jiruoub berries were Amlethi too; yet they’d fed her three years in the Resistance. Korman weeds brought by Cardassian invaders now blanketed moba orchards, inexplicably helping the indigenous trees grow. Two of the seven spices in Seven-Spice Hasperat were Cardassian.  Years ago, Kira would’ve defiantly relished a five-spice version, shamed her peers who didn��t. Now, she just thinks they’ve all been through too much to punish themselves with bland hasperat. Maybe time couldn’t heal all wounds. But it could turn her hasperat from a political statement into lunch. “My father enjoyed it,” she remembered. “So did my mother.” Garak paused. “You’ve met her, you know.”

This digs into a lot of things I find fascinating about their dynamic, and what they might have in common despite being from opposite sides of an Occupation- but it's also an important character moment for both of them; a recognition of how much their lives have changed, their worlds have changed, they have changed. The nilvi fruit does have symbolic weight in this fic lol- it's the thing that starts off the whole series of unfortunate events, yes, but also when it's first mentioned in chapter one, it's via Garak reminiscing about it as a symbol of cultural pride, unity, and Cardassian wealth, and with casual nostalgia. Him saying this now is a display of how much the events of the fic have forced him to confront that nostalgia- now, the fruit has become a symbol of Cardassian greed, entitlement and violence (both on a larger, planetary scale, and a personal one). I also really wanted to write this moment of peaceful self-awareness for Kira- there are things she will never truly heal from, things she'll never forgive (a lot of which are quite literally personified in the man she's currently sipping springwine with) - but that doesn't mean they can't come to take on new significances. I remember I was thinking about how maize is a dietary staple in most African countries, and red and green chillies are so famously associated with various Asian cuisines- yet, neither of those things is native to those lands. Every country from Sudan to Sri Lanka is filled with tea stalls that are now a crucial part of the culture - but shai/chai never used to be made with tea leaves until those countries were colonised. This is not a "silver lining on the cloud" type thing, of course- quite the opposite; neither Bajor nor any real-world nations should ever have been colonised (& this is why I included that "inexplicably helping the indigenous trees grow" line- the exact sort of thing that would get paraded around as a defence of colonialism! Just like railways, languages, European architecture, fusion art, etc. Whether Cardassian activity was poisoning the soil or inadvertently helping something grow, it doesn't matter- it had no business being carried out in Bajoran territory.) But this is an aspect of occupations I hadn't seen explored all that much in ds9 fanworks; that inevitable intertwining of cultures- so I wanted to write more about it, and given I drew a lot of inspiration from stuff I see around me I'm always so pleasantly surprised by how many people responded to it, I'm very glad it resonated

[1960z]

hi I like to go through the notes on this sometimes because I’m the OP of the original tweets and looking at the discussion there’s something I’d like to clarify real quick:

yes absolutely this is a textual metaphor for being mixed-race first and foremost. I am aware of that and I wasn’t trying to downplay it when agreeing with the tweet about it being similar to how women feel working in corporate environments.

I think the thing that has made spock such an enduring character for so long is that his story and struggles are relatable to a lot of people who are marginalised in different and intersecting ways whether it be gendered, racial, queer, neurodivergent etc.

but ultimately yes the mixed-race reading has a textual importance that should not be overlooked and while I like and am very interested by the gendered reading I don’t want people to think that’s the only one I think is important

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

i appreciated this study: "They Can't Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills Of English Majors At Two Midwestern Universities"

[ETA: if you are somehow finding your way here pls note some - not exhaustive!!!! - follow up notes in this reblog. sorry again i mixed up megalodons and megalosaurs]

essentially, a pair of professors set out to test their intuitive sense that students at the college level were struggling with complex text. they recruited 85 students, a mix of english majors and english education majors - so, theoretically, people focusing on literature, and people preparing to teach adolescents how to read literature - and had them read-while-summarizing the first seven paragraphs of dickens's bleak house (or as much as they made it through in the 20 minute session). they provided dictionaries and also said students could use their phones to look up whatever they wanted, including any unfamiliar words or references. they found that the majority of the students - 58%, or 49 out of the 85 students - functionally could not understand dickens at all, and only 5% - a mere 4 out of the 85 students - proved themselves proficient readers (leaving the remaining 38%, or 32 students, as what the study authors deemed "competent" students, most of whom could understand about half the literal meaning - pretty low bar for competence - although a few of whom, they note, did much better than the rest in this group if not quite well enough to be considered proficient).

what i really appreciated about this study was its qualitative descriptions of the challenges and reading behaviors of what the authors call "problematic readers" (that bottom 58%), which resonated strongly with my own experiences of students who struggle with reading. here's their blunt big picture overview of these 49 students:

The majority of these subjects could understand very little of Bleak House and did not have effective reading tactics. All had so much trouble comprehending concrete detail in consecutive clauses and phrases that they could not link the meaning of one sentence to the next. Although it was clear that these subjects did try to use various tactics while they read the passage, they were not able to use those tactics successfully. For example, 43 percent of the problematic readers tried to look up words they did not understand, but only five percent were able to look up the meaning of a word and place it back correctly into a sentence. The subjects frequently looked up a word they did not know, realized that they did not understand the sentence the word had come from, and skipped translating the sentence altogether.

the idea that they had so much trouble with every small piece of a text that they could not connect ideas on a sentence by sentence basis is very familiar to me from teaching and tutoring, as was the habit of thought seen in the example of the student who gloms on to the word "whiskers" in a sea of confusion and guesses incorrectly that a cat is present - struggling readers, in my experience, seem to use familiar nouns as stepping stones in a flood of overwhelm, hopping as best they can from one seemingly familiar image to the next. so was this observation, building off the example of a student who misses the fact that dickens is being figurative when he imagines a megalodon stalking the streets of london:

She first guesses that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech. Some could correctly identify a figure of speech, and even explain its use in a sentence, but correct responses were inconsistent and haphazard. None of the problematic readers showed any evidence that they could read recursively or fix previous errors in comprehension. They would stick to their reading tactics even if they were unhappy with the results.

i have seen this repeatedly, too - actually i was particularly taken with how similar this is to the behavior of struggling readers at much younger ages - and would summarize the hypothesis i have forged over time as: struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense. my hypothesis for why this is the case is that their reading deficits were not attended to or remediated adequately early enough, and so, in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.

like, i've said this before, but the year i taught third grade i had multiple students who told me they loved reading and then when i asked them about a book they were reading revealed that they had absolutely no idea what was going on - on a really basic literal level like "didn't know who said which lines of dialogue" and "couldn't identify which things or characters given pronouns referred to" - and were as best as i could tell sort of constructing their own story along the way using these little bits of things they thought they understood. that's what "reading" was, in their heads. and they were, in the curriculum/model that we used at the private school where i taught, receiving basically no support to clarify that that was not what reading was, nor any instruction that would actually help them with what they needed to do to improve (understand sentences) - and i realized over the course of that year that the master's program that had certified me in teaching elementary school had provided me with very little understanding of how to help these kids (with perhaps the sole exception of the class i took on communications disorders, not because these kids had communications disorders but because that was the only class where we ever talked, even briefly, about things like sentence structures that students may need instruction in and practice with to comprehend independently). when it comes to the literal, basic understanding of a text, the model of reading pedagogy i was taught has about 6 million little "tools" that all boil down to telling kids who functionally can't read to try harder to read. this is not productive, in my experience and opinion, for kids whose maximum effort persistently yields confusion. but things are so dysfunctional all the way up and down the ladder that you can be a senior in college majoring in english without anyone but a pair of professors with a strong work ethic noticing that you can't actually read.

couple other notes:

obviously it's a small study but i'm not sure i see a reason to believe these are particularly outlierish results (ACT scores - an imperfect metric but not a meritless one IMO for reading specifically, where the task mostly really is to read a set of texts written for the educated layperson and answer factual questions about them - were a little bit above the national average)

the study was published last year, but the research was conducted january to april 2015. so there's no pandemic influence, no AI issue - these are millennials who now would span roughly ages 28-32 (i guess it's possible one of the four first-year students was one of the very first members of gen z lol). if you're in your late 20s or early 30s, we are talking about people your age, and whatever the culprit is here, it was happening when you were in school.

i think some people might want to blame this on NCLB but i find this unconvincing for a variety of reasons. first of all, NCLB did not pass because everyone in 2001 agreed that education was super hunky-dory; in fact, the sold a story podcast outlines how an explicit goal of NCLB was to train teachers in systematic phonics instruction, because that was not the norm when NCLB was passed, and an unfortunate outcome was that phonics became politicized in ed world. second, anyone who understands anything about reading should need about ten minutes max to spend some time on standardized test prep and recognize that if your goal is truly to maximize scores... then the vast majority of your instructional time should be spent on improving actual reading skills because you actually can't meaningfully game these tests by "practicing main idea questions" (timothy shanahan addresses this briefly near the top of this post). so i find it very difficult to believe that any school that pivoted to multiple choice drill time in an attempt to boost reading scores was teaching reading effectively pre-NCLB, because no set of competent literacy professionals would think that would work even for the goal of raising test scores. third, NCLB mandated yearly testing in grades 3-8 but only one test year in high school; kansas set its reading and math test year in high school as tenth grade. so theoretically these kids all had two years of sweet sweet freedom from NCLB in which their teachers could have done whatever the fuck they wanted to teach these kids to actually read. the fact that they didn't suggests perhaps there were other problems afoot. fourth, and maybe most saliently for this particular study, the sample text was the first seven paragraphs of a novel - in other words, the exact kind of short incomplete text that NCLB allegedly demanded excessive time spent on. i'm not really sure what universe it makes sense in that students who can't read the first seven paragraphs of a novel would have become much better reader if everything else had been the same but they had been making completely wack associations based on nonsense guesses for all 300 pages instead. (if you read the study it's really clear that for problematic readers, things go off the rails immediately, in a way that a good program targeted at teaching mastery of text of 500 words or less would have done something about.)

all but 3 of the students reported A's and B's in their english classes and, again, 69% of them are juniors and seniors, so like... i mean idk kudos to these professors for being like "hold up can these kids actually read?" but clearly something is wack at the college level too [in 2015] if you can make your way through nearly an entire english major without being able to read the first seven paragraphs of a dickens novel. (once again i really do encourage you to look at the qualitative samples in the study, lest you think i am being uncharitable by summarizing understandable misunderstandings or areas of confusion that may resolve themselves with further exposure to the text as "can't read.") not to mention the fact that most students could not what they had learned in previous or current english classes and when asked to name british and american authors and/or works of the nineteenth century, roughly half the sample at each college could name at most one.

the authors of the study are struck by the fact that students who cannot parse the first 3 sentences of bleak house feel very confident about their ability to read the entire novel, and discover that this seeming disconnect is resolved by the fact that these students seem to conceptualize "reading" as "skimming and then reading sparknotes." i think it's really tempting to Kids These Days this phenomenon (although again these are people who in some cases have now been in the workforce for a decade) and categorize it as laziness or a lack of effort, but i think that there is, as i described above, a real and sincere confusion over what "reading" is in which this makes a certain logical sense because it's not like they have some store of actual reading experiences to compare it to. i also think it's pretty obvious looking at just how wildly severed from actual textual comprehension their readings are that these are not - or at least not entirely - students who could just work harder and master the entirety of bleak house all on their own. like i don't think you get from "charles dickens is describing a bunch of dinosaur bones actually walking the streets of london" to comfortably reading nineteenth century literature by just trying harder. i really just don't (and i say that acknowledging i personally have had students who like... were good readers if i was forcing them to work at it constantly... but i have also had students, including ones getting ready to enter college, who were clearly giving me everything they had and what they had was at the present moment insufficient). i think that speaks to a missing skillset that they don't know are missing, because they don't have any other experience of "reading" to compare it to.

just wanna highlight again that although they don't give the breakdown some of these students are not just english majors but english education majors a.k.a. the high school english teachers of tomorrow. some of them may be teaching high school english right now, in case anyone wishes to consider whether "maybe some high school english teachers can't read the first seven paragraphs of bleak house?" should be kept in mind when we discuss present-day educational ills.

[libraryspectre]

I feel like it's important to know he's a crime investigator and zombie hunter BECAUSE he's a priest. He's a priest for the god of death, so these jobs are all deeply intertwined. It's a really well-done fantasy take on the detective priest trope AND its spooky

please read the witness for the dead because the protagonist is a priest and a crime investigator AND a zombie hunter. he's dirt poor. he carries his guilt like a little package. he feeds his neighborhood cats. he's so tired. he daily drinks his body weight in tea. he's put on trial by ordeal. he's even gay

[cathymee]

why does showtime have random episodes where they just make as much mj references as they can