#my reasoning was academically rigorous

[phormlessblob]

never felt worse than when i had to ask my tutor how to cite ao3 as a source :/

[carriesthewind]

WOW.

Okay, after a night's sleep, I have decided that yeah, there is value in responding to this absolutely steaming pile of ignorant, self-centered, self-important, anti-intellectual, b.s.

It looks like a number of people in the notes were swayed, at least to some degree, by this garbage, so I think it is worth trying to show why it is nonsense.

(Also it's possible I'm still spoiling for a fight after being denied an evidentiary hearing on Friday.)

I'm not reblogging the post because folks don't need a self-aggrandizing tantrum on their dash, but I do think it is worth taking a look for yourself, in order to practice your analytical skills. Some questions to consider as you read:

(1) What is OP saying in her original post? What claims is she making?

(2) How, if at all, does the poster respond to claims OP made? What claims is the poster saying that OP made? Do these match what OP actually said? If not, (a) what techniques does the poster use to transform what OP said into the claims the poster is claiming OP made? (b) What rhetorical purpose does it serve for the poster to warp OP's claims?

(3) What affirmative claims is the poster making? What evidence or arguments do they provide to support their claims? Do they explore any of the specifics or real world implications of their claims? If not, what real world implications of their claims can you think of?

(3) What other rhetorical techniques does the poster use to bolster their argument? Do these techniques actually enhance and support the substance of their argument?

(4) Relatedly, how does the poster play into the biases of their assumed audience (tumblr users with generally progressive policies). What claims do they make to play into those biases? What evidence or argument, if any, do they make to support those claims? Are these claims by the poster reasonably related to the claims made by OP?

Now, let's explore their response in detail!

(Also obviously don't harass the poster, and I would recommend not directly engaging with them at all. Harassment is vile and makes you far worse than them. And earnest engagement is unlikely to be productive - the OP tried to engage with them politely (and even offered to help) in the notes of poster's original post. In response, the poster (1) implied that OP is an obsessive rude busybody. (2) Told OP to "Shhhhh. Chill." (in response to (paraphrased), 'hey, the advice someone else gave you is probably a waste of time and effort'). (3) And finally, after condescendingly telling OP, "Breathe. Practice radical acceptance. Know that I am here on the other side of the internet, flagrantly wasting my effort and thinking of you every second of that time," proceeded to prove that they were, in fact, "thinking of [OP] every second of that time" by searching OP's blog to find this post by OP and dumping this Arrested-Development-level demand to be taken seriously in the reblogs.)

(All of which is to say: hi, poster who was "being vagueposted about." I assume you are reading this, because you demonstrably don't have the good sense to block and move on. I'm not going to block you in advance, because I think you have the right to make your own terrible decisions, and I suspect any response you make is going to be *very* funny. See you in the notes!)

So, let's go through the poster's response, paragraph by paragraph.

They begin by doubling down on the stance that, "any sufficiently deep enthusiasm is indistinguishable from academic rigor." This, they say, is their defense of that stance. Let's see how it goes - but first, I think it's worth remembering, OP's original post is literally a single sentence long.

OP's claim, paraphrased, that the claim that "any sufficiently deep enthusiasm is indistinguishable from academic rigor" is incorrect and anti-intellectual. If we read the OP's tags, she clarifies that enthusiasm is valuable, but different from expertise.

The poster starts their defense with a long...explanation that the structure of their claim was a reference to the Arthur C Clarke's third "law" (read: sci-fi fiction adage).

*deep breath*

Ok. I'm a big a fan of wordplay as the next person. And I know from personal experience that it can be really frustrating to do some fun wordplay to make a point, and then get misinterpreted here on tumblr.com.

But. The wordplay has to make a point for it to be relevant to your defense. OP's claim wasn't "this poster did a bad job with the linguistic structure of this sentence and is not familiar with classic sci-fi." How does the "rhetorical structure" of the poster's claim support the substance of their claim???

It doesn't, is the answer. The poster explicitly asks this question later down, but then they never actually answer it. Instead, the rhetorical effect of this whole digression is just to throw out surface level references to things (Arthur C Clarke! "AI"!) that might make the poster sound more thoughtful and knowledgeable. It also creates distance from OP's actual point - as the post continues, the poster has to remind us what they're talking about. This gives the poster more control over the narrative, over what claims are under discussion.

Which leads to the poster's next paragraph: the unanswered question of why the poster structured their claim to resemble a sci-fi author's famous quote, and a baseless attack on OP.

And I think it is worth really lingering on this attack on OP. The poster claims, OP perhaps is "misreading or misinterpreting" the poster's point. But what on earth is the poster talking about? OP literally just quoted the poster's exact words and then said that they think this is anti-intellectual. What "misreading or misinterpreting" is being done?

No. Instead, this attack rhetorically sets up the poster's next couple paragraphs: not actually defending their claim as OP originally quoted, but reinterpreting their own words, providing their own special unique meaning that they will then proceed to use for the rest of the post. They are redrawing the rhetorical bounds of the conversation. Rather than defending their stance, they are redefining their stance so that it matches the defense they now want to make.

(Which is still bad. It's a bad defense and it makes me very angry.)

The poster proceeds to define "academic rigor" in a way that just means, "enthusiasm." Notice how no part of their definition includes things like critical thinking skills, building up a knowledge base, testing ideas, receiving criticism (wow I wonder why), or any expertise or action to build up and test that expertise. It's just what a person "cares very much about," how much "curiosity" they have; some inherent quality someone who "NEEDS to know." (Also hit the bell for another surface level reference - this time to Herodotus - to make the poster sound more knowledgeable.) If you actually read the poster's definition, it is entirely "idk vibes i guess."

Now, having defined "academic rigor" as enthusiasm, they successfully declare that enthusiasm is a necessary precondition of enthusiasm.

And then, we get the best paragraph of this entire tantrum of a post: "Any sufficiently deep enthusiasm is indistinguishable from academic rigor. It's like a fractal -- the closer you look, the more complicated it gets." No only is this another attempted surface level reference, this time to fractals, but just. What is this supposed to mean. At a glance, it seems like it kind of follows from the last paragraph - maybe, the more an enthusiast looks at something, the more there is to know? But the closer you look at this sentence, the more nonsensical it gets. What does things getting more complicated the more you look at them have to do with academic rigor (either a real definition or the poster's enthusiasm-based definition)? More importantly, what does it have to do with proving the point - that enthusiasm is indistinguishable from academic rigor? (You might as well say, "the further you fall down the rabbit hole, the deeper you realize it goes," except then more people would realize you are expressing straight conspiracist reasoning oops.)

Now, several paragraphs in and having firmly taken control of the rhetorical boundaries of the argument, the poster finally decides to provide some context to the original statement (and needlessly insult OP for trying to be helpful again).

The poster correctly quotes relevant parts of the discussion (although mischaracterizes their own responses as "polite" instead of "incredibly condescending and rude"). However, the poster then immediately characterizes OP's response as "muddied." Because words have objective meanings, however, we do not need to accept this characterization. OP expressed her argument very clearly. Rather, it is the the poster who claimed that OP was making an argument that she was not, which we can paraphrase as, 'passion and capacity for learning are limited to formal education at academic institutions.' It would be convenient for the poster if OP was making this argument, because it could be easy to argue against. But since OP clearly stated that she does not believe this clearly incorrect thing that the poster made up in her head, the poster claims that her response was "muddied."

The poster emphasizes this false claim in the next few paragraphs. They say, "to me she seems to be arguing that one MUST (?) receive formal training at an academic institution ("academic training" "trained expertise") in order to achieve that level of rigor." But OP simply doesn't say that. You can look at the reply the poster quoted, it doesn't say what the poster says it does.

Now, this is speculation on my part, but I think the poster really believes that OP is saying 'passion and capacity for learning are limited to formal education at academic institutions.' I think they believe this because its how they feel when they hear the (correct) statement that enthusiasm does not equal expertise. The poster repeatedly says that they think that enthusiasm for learning is the same as expertise. They throw a tantrum after receiving the slightest, politest, disagreement. They think someone giving them advice that hey, maybe its a good idea to get a basic foundation of knowledge before cold-emailing experts is a busybody who is obsessed with lecturing them. The poster simply, demonstrably, doesn't believe expertise is real, and refuses to admit that someone else might know more or better than them. If they "care very much about getting it right," how dare you say they aren't as good as anyone with "academic training," fuck you very much you elitist jerk.

This sense is emphasized by their next paragraph. First, they shift the rhetoric framework of the conversation again. The actual claim the poster says they are defending is that "any sufficiently Deep Enthusiasm is indistinguishable from Academic Rigor" (emphasis added). Now, they are claiming that OP means that no one outside of an academic context "has the capacity to learn what rigor means in their field." These are very different claims, but the poster shits between them seamlessly.

Second, they just completely misunderstand what academic rigor is. I'm sorry, you can read every book and article and (*sigh* dear god) TED talk in the world, that doesn't make you an expert, and that's not academic rigor. A large part of academic rigor is in how you critically engage with what you read. Otherwise you just end up, at best, with a bunch of shallow facts that you can "whip out at dinner parties to impress [your] acquaintances" or sprinkle as references in arguments on tumblr to make you sound smarter.

But no, the poster confirms in the next paragraph, you don't need critical thinking or training or people who will tell you that you are wrong. All you need is the information. And if you disagree, you are arguing in favor of "the ivory tower." (Take a drink.)

In the next two paragraphs, the poster pays lip service to the idea that sure, it's easier to learn in academia. But even then, they imply that somehow that's the easy route, that good learning environments create weak men, that people who are self-taught are the ones who are actually building up the critical thinking skills because someone doesn't just "tell them the answer."

Then, before the readers have a chance to absorb, wait, did you really just say that academia is really just having someone either tell you the answer or where to look for the answer and therefore unsuitable for "sincerely love to learn," (because you are, in fact, anti-intellectual), the poster then throws in a bunch of shallow buzz phrases about how higher education isn't available to a lot of people.

And I say these are just shallow buzz phrases for two reasons. First, the poster never actually engages with this lack of access. It's just sprinkled in, like the references to Arthur C Clarke and Herodotus. (For example, no, actually, "any sufficiently MOTIVATED person" can't actually access all this information that is online. You need a stable internet connection, devices to allow you to make use of that connection, to speak or read the language those materials are published in, enough time and sleep and food and goddam shelter.)

Second, this doesn't actually have anything to do with the actual claim that the poster is supposedly defending. Remember that? Remember the position the poster is arguing for? "Any sufficiently deep enthusiasm is indistinguishable from academic rigor." How does, "some people can't go to college" support that claim, specifically?

It doesn't, which is why the poster's next paragraph instead claims that OP is arguing that "those people do not have the ability to hold themselves to a rigorous standard of learning."

Which just.

Fuck you?

Because yeah, that would be a shitty opinion to hold! And you are the only person raising it! You are explicitly making the claim - fuck, perpetrating the anti-intellectual worldview - that anyone who suggests "caring about something does not inherently equal subject matter expertise" is an elitist who thinks that everyone else, ordinary people, real Americans, are stupid.

I'm gong to be honest, this is the part of the poster's claims that made me mad enough to respond.The notes include people agreeing that academics and "experts" are actually pretty elitist, aren't they, and they deserve to be "taken down a few pegs," that suggesting that you need a baseline level of knowledge or vocabulary before you can engage deeply with a subject is "gatekeeping."

The U.S.'s institutions are crumbling as they are dismantled by people that are making these exact same arguments. There is no meaningful difference in the reasoning of the poster's argument here, and the argument that "alternative medicine" hacks who never completed their medical training have sufficient credentials to run goverment agencies, and that if you bring up their lack of credentials, well, that just proves what an elitist you are.

The "worldview" the poster does not accept - is telling you not to accept - is the idea that expertise exists at all.

And because that is an incorrect and harmful worldview, the poster has to use a bunch of rhetorical tricks to hide what they are doing. And then to sell it, they throw in a bunch of words to stir up the audience's preconceptions and biases. OP's claim (again, that enthusiasm and academic rigor are not equivalent) is "racist and imperialist." Why? Don't worry about it. Something something college is expensive and inaccessible to a lot of people. All you need to remember is that these ivory-tower academics are The Bad Thing.

*deep breath*

Anyway, knowing we need a laugh to bring the mood back up, the poster then says someone on reddit criticizing your argument is an "informal version[] of the peer-review process." Besides betraying a deep ignorance of the nature of peer-review (I guess even knowing how academic processes work is also elitist?), I think this means that the poster has to be cool with my post here, right? Because I'm just doing peer review? (Because also, just to be clear: "the academic structure of the peer review is a formalized process of the very human impulse to gleefully tell other humans when they’ve stuck their foot in their mouth." No. This is just. No.)

Next, more misstating OP's original claim. The poster says, "An institution of formal learning is not a prerequisite to pursue and absorb information," which OP already agreed with in the comments of the poster's original post.

In support of this claim that no one is arguing with, the poster than makes up a "guy at the model airplane shop who seems to know absolutely everything that has ever been known about WWII planes," and asks, "why don’t we acknowledge him as a legitimate expert?" The poster implies that this is because this guy is autistic and OP is a bigot.

But the real answer is simpler:

Unless you are referring to something you chose not to link for some reason, he's made up. He's a made up guy in your brain. And OP never said anything about him, so it's really weird for you to criticize OP for not sufficiently praising him as an expert. Fanfic isn't reality.

To the extent we are talking about real phenomenons - who do you mean by "we" and what do you mean by "acknowledge him as a legitimate expert"? There are lots of people with legitimate expertise, and in my experience, they often are recognized as such. And I don't know where you live, but outside of revenge-fantasies of conservative pundits and the people who are mislead by them, most academic experts aren't exactly exhausted and prestige and praise.

'Knowing a lot about a subject' is not the same as academic rigor. This isn't a criticism or insult to people who know a lot of things, despite your weird, self-centered hang-ups. Let me be clear here, actually: I am not an academic. I am a lawyer. I know a lot about the law in the areas I practice in. I do not practice the law "with academic rigor" because that's not really meaningful. I also like to constantly learn more about the law, including in many areas I don't practice in. I am not an expert in those areas. Just as an academic who studies the law and legal practice would not necessarily be good at actually practicing the law, my enthusiasm does not mean I have academic expertise (and my academic training is rather rusty, this many years out). This is normal? My ego is not threatened by acknowledging different kinds of expertise and knowledge exist?

And perhaps most to the point - "seems to know absolutely everything that has ever been known about WWII planes." "Seems to." An important part of academia - part of what makes it rigorous, if you will - is that you actually have to prove your expertise to other experts. They are then "recognized" as experts because there is a process the public can usually trust that they don't just "seem to" know what they are talking about. If you are talking to an amateur enthusiast - how do you know you they actually have the expertise they claim to have? Because I know of some guys who are really enthusiastic about the, claim to be experts, and have a lot of strong opinions about how they have reclaimed their Sovereign Identity by not capitalizing the letters in their name.

I agree with the poster's final paragraph. I love learning. But I can't see this as anything other than a manipulative postscript, a rhetorical trick of ending on a point of agreement and mutual enthusiasm. By a person - and I can't emphasize this enough - who refused assistance in learning and threw an enormous tantrum because someone suggested hey, maybe its a good idea to get a basic foundation of knowledge before cold-emailing experts.

[leonardcohenofficial]

i had to read and reread so much of marx's writing for my dissertation and i did not find it particularly fun nor at all easy. economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 is about as dense as it gets and i complained about it at length while i was reading it and found it often times extraordinarily hard to wrap my brain around and the things that i did to further my understanding of the material that i was not initially understanding involved 1) reading the text multiple times 2) talking to people about it and 3) reading rigorous academic critiques and responses to it. what i did not do was go onto genius dot com and pretend that reading random internet annotations would be a reasonable substitute for parsing the text itself or engaging with other academic analyses. hope this helps!

[stylish-suidae]

I've known about how an increase in problem solving ability comes downstream of math education for a while now, but it only occurred to me reading this that *that's* why CS degrees are often math intensive despite my programming work not once involving my nemesis calculus.

Are you willing to make a long personal post about how Math should be presented in an educational environment or in general conversation trying to convince the other participants about its daily usage. How it can advance a person’s problem-solving skills and approach in life.

I’m really good in Mathematics. I’ve given help for my classmates and friends about Math when they are having trouble or ask for it. But I have never been convinced of its importance outside of the classroom, outside of the test papers that gives me the variables to substitute in the given equation of that test of the day.

How can Math and it’s many properties relate back to everyday life in a casual manner?

Hm. Well, as someone who hasn't had to solve an antiderivative in years, my perspective on this is that the most important and widely-applicable skill math can teach you is the stuff behind the math - mostly the muscle-memory you get from proofs.

Math is, at its core, puzzles and logic and pattern-recognition. You learn a set of tools, you practice those tools on a set of simple problems until you get a feel for them, you are presented with a bigger problem, you recall which tools best applied to problems that are shaped like this, you break the problem down using your tools and eventually reduce it to something you know how to solve.

The fact of the matter is, the tools that are specific to branches of math don't really have much widespread use outside pure mathematics, and unless you go out of your way to keep using them you're likely to lose track of them. Studying math is not going to turn you into a super-calculator-wizard who can bounce stuff off the walls at perfect angles and do six-figure arithmetic in seconds, and I think some people feel overwhelmed at the assumption that that's what's expected of them if they learn math, and some other people feel cheated when they learn that that's absolutely not going to happen, because most writers don't know math and when they tell stories with math in them their best guess is it makes you a wizard.

I think the most advanced math I've used lately was trigonometry, and that was just because I was curious about how fast my plane was traveling relative to the sun's apparent movement at my latitude. We were flying back to the US from Iceland and we'd taken off at sunset, and we had been in that sunset for at least an hour by the time I got curious how the math worked out and started estimating our latitude, the circumference of the slice of the earth at that latitude, and correspondingly how fast we were flying vs how fast it was spinning to complete a full rotation in 24 hours. But even if the math involved didn't tap into any of the higher-level stuff I'd learned post-trig, those years doing proofs and figuring out which tools applied to which geometry meant that I could use the tools and my training applying those tools to calculate what I wanted to know, and confirm that our plane was actually outflying the sun when we were at iceland latitude, but as we curved south the sun's apparent relative movement (aka the rotational speed of that latitude of the earth) slowly accelerated until we were falling behind, landing right as the sun finally set. The math involved was high school level, but if I'd been given that problem in high school it would've taken more work and more stress to figure out how the tools I had needed to be applied to the problem I was facing. The years of practice I had tackling much more complicated proofs made the diagnostic process much faster.

I saw someone once analogize studying math to lifting weights. Where am I going to use this in real life? How often will I really be faced with two dumbbells that need to be lifted in three sets of twenty? Where am I going to apply the skill of holding a heavy thing straight out to one side of my body?

You don't lift weights because lifting weights is such a valuable and widely-applicable skillset, you do it because lifting weights makes you better at lifting everything.

You don't study math because math is going to fill your daily life with concepts that you need to prove true for 1 and for n+1 given true for n, or complex solids that you need to sum an approximate volume for, or a surplus of sunset plane flights that demand you calculate a bunch of cosines. You study math because it is the skillset of making things make sense. It trains you to break a huge, incomprehensible problem down into a series of small problems you already know how to solve. It lets you reach true and correct conclusions by starting from facts and transforming them through operations that preserve truth, and correspondingly that if you reach a false conclusion from these methods, then either the methods are flawed or the initial assumption is not as true as you believed. It teaches you to put two and two together and be confident, once you've double-checked your work, that you can say four.

This is stuff I use all the time in both my video research and my freeform writing. Building out a slow picture of how a story was told or changed over time involves finding the context it was created in, and reverse-engineering what parts of that context could have produced what standout portions of the story - what authorial or cultural bias results in this standout story element. Worldbuilding where I take two wildly disparate parts of the world, put them together and see what web of implications springs out of combining them, following the threads to new and interesting concepts that follow from what I've already established. Building a character arc by breaking down exactly what events are happening to them and what transformation each component will apply to the underlying character. If I want the story to go in a certain direction, what transformations do I need to apply to make that happen while still preserving truth? If I'm faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, what methods can I use to break it down into bite-sized pieces?

This isn't something I think about most of the time. It's just how my brain works at this point, and I can't promise it'd work for anyone else. But thanks to all my years of hard work and training, my brain has been buff enough to solve every problem I've tangled with since graduation, and that feels pretty good.

[tanadrin]

Can you explain in what what you think eugenics doesn't work? Does this basically boil down to skepticism about the accuracy of GWAS studies? My understanding is that academic consensus is "G probably exists, disentangling direct genetic inheritance vs genetic cultural inheritance is complicated but possible, we can identify a number of alleles which we're reasonably confident are directly causally involved in having a higher G factor"

when it comes to intelligence, its heritability, and its variation at the population level, my understanding of the science is:

highly adaptive traits don't, in fact, vary much at the genetic level between populations of a species because they are strongly selected for. in an environment where a trait is being strongly selected for, a population that failed to express that trait strongly will be rapidly outcompeted.

intelligence is probably the quintessential such trait for humans. we have sacrificed a great deal of other kinds of specialization in favor of our big brains. we spend an enormous amount of calories supporting those brains. tool use, the ability to plan for the future, the ability to navigate complex social situations and hierarchies in order to secure status, the ability to model the minds of others for the purposes of cooperation and deception means that we should expect intelligence to be strongly selected for for as long as our lineage has been social and tool-using, which is at least the last three million years or so.

so, at least as a matter of a priori assumptions, we should expect human populations not to vary greatly in their genetic predisposition to intelligence. it may nonetheless, but we'd need pretty strong evidence. i think i read this argument on PZ Myers' blog a million years ago, so credit where that's due.

complicating the picture is that we just don't have good evidence for how IQ does vary across populations, even before we get into the question of "how much of this variation is genetic and how much of it is not." the cross-national data on which a lot of IQ arguments have been based is really bad. and that would be assuming IQ tests are in fact good at capturing a notion of IQ that is independent of cultural context, which historically they're pretty bad at

this screed by nassim nicholas taleb (not a diss; AFAICT the guy only writes in screeds) makes a number of arguments, but one argument I find persuasive is that IQ is really only predictive of achievement in the sense that it does usefully discriminate between people with obvious intellectual disabilities and those without--but you do not actually need an IQ test for that sort of thing, any more than you need to use a height chart to figure out who is missing both their legs. in that sense, sure, IQ is predictive of a lot of things. but once you remove this group, the much-vaunted correlations between IQ and stuff like wealth just straight-up vanishes

heritability studies are a useful tool, but a tool which must be wielded carefully; they were developed for studying traits which were relatively easy to isolate in very specific populations, like a crop under study at an agricultural research site, and are more precarious when applied to, e.g., human populations

my understanding based on jonathan kaplan articles like this one is that twin studies are not actually that good at distinguishing heritable factors from environmental ones--they have serious limitations compared to heritability studies where you actually can rigorously control for environmental effects, like you can with plants or livestock.

as this post also points out, heritability studies also only examine heritability within groups, and are not really suited to examining large-scale population differences, *especially* in the realm of intelligence where there is a huge raft of confounding factors, and a lack of a really robust measurement tool.

(if we are worried about intelligence at the population level, it seems to me there are interventions we know are going to be effective and do not rely on deeply dubious scientific speculation, e.g., around nutrition and healthcare and serious wealth inequality and ofc education; and if what people actually want is to raise the average intelligence of the population rather than justify discrimination against minorities, then they might focus on those much more empirically grounded interventions. even if population differences in IQ are real and significant and point to big differences in intelligence, we know those things are worth a fair few IQ points. but most people who are or historically have been the biggest advocates for eugenics are, in my estimation, mostly interested in justifying discrimination.)

i think the claims/application of eugenics extend well beyond just intelligence, ftr. eugenics as an ideology is complex and historically pretty interesting, and many eugenicists have made much broader claims than just "population-level differences in intelligence exist due to genetic factors, and we should try to influence them with policy," but that is a useful point for them to fall back onto when pressed on those other claims. but i don't think even that claim is at all well-supported.

[idiopathicsmile]

I've been thinking about American diner lingo lately.

Like, relaying an order for poached eggs on toast as “Adam and Eve on a raft.” Or “shingles with a shimmy and shake” for buttered toast with jam.

(I personally learned about this phenomenon as a very young child because we had a picture book where a bear and an elephant are roommates and temp workers and they get a job at a diner for a while. Couldn't tell you why this streamed back into my brain like a week ago, but here we are.)

I'm not sure I can articulate this but there is something so beautiful to me about it. We as a culture know so little about its origins—maybe the 1870s, maybe the 1880s��or even really why it exists.

Wikipedia (yes I wikipedia'd this, yes I feel actual embarrassment about the lack of academic rigor in this aimless tumblr post but also there is also just not a ton of information on the topic) suggests that some diner lingo might've been mnemonic devices for short order cooks to remember specific dishes but honestly scroll through any list and you'll find it mostly isn't that. What it reads like is bored food service workers, mostly in the 1920s through 1970s, looking for a way to amuse or at least entertain themselves.

Milk is “moo juice.” Jell-o becomes “nervous pudding.” Black coffee is “a mug of murk.”

Western history loves its individual heroes, but my guess is the practice arose organically at multiple luncheon spots across the US. We don't know the names of the servers and cooks who came up with the terms but a few of the terms have survived, in a fashion—as wider used slang (“Joe” for coffee), as a vintage-y affectation in quirky restaurants of the present, and in compendiums of self-consciously useless factoids (oysters wrapped in bacon are transmuted into “angels on horseback”). It's something about the ordinary people of the world of the past, the tiny fossils we leave behind without even knowing it. One unknown day in history, someone then working as a diner employee thought to call a tall stack of pancakes “Jayne Mansfield” because for some reason it made their day a little better, and this somehow caught on to the point where I can, without doing much work, still find multiple written sources insisting it happened. It wasn't a marketer or a CEO somewhere, it was just a bunch service workers passing the time and leaving the slightest little linguistic footprints behind.

I don't know. Imagine if one of your inside jokes from work was still being spread by offbeat trivia lovers a hundred years from now.

[ekebolou]

I get that people have complicated relationships with higher education, and that's 100% reasonable, but there's something I want to point out.

when you hear a popular podcast or youtuber or history show or see a popular history book or article say it's 'revealing' or 'uncovering' or 'bringing to light' or 'reevaluating' some story of the past, it's usually doing so off of academic history work done by people in academia.

Journalists and your average YouTuber are generally the worst about not crediting this work,* but it's there in the background, nonetheless.

That work - academic research, particularly of this kind, and the articles, books, and other information it produces - doesn't get done without institutional support. That is, like with everything, sure some enthusiasts will keep at their particular interests hell or high water, and rich folks can peruse to their hearts' content - that's what fueled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' ever-increasing investigative output.

And that should be concerning, not comforting.

Not because all of that output was wrong or terrible or misguided - a lot was, but much of it is still essential, foundational, exceedingly rigorous and useful - but because much of modern history work, twentieth century on, has been a century-long battle to correct some of deeply culturally embedded beliefs an almost wholly dilettante pursuit of the past generated. It's kind of a joke in English-language scholarship that the Victorians ruined everything, but like, for real, y'all, the Victorians left us some BURDENS, from fake relics created for ~the aesthetic~ to defaced and destroyed historical documents.

Academic research in itself is not some kind of panacea. we're not shitting on dilettantes (I am very much a dilettante, in my way) and so-called 'amateurs', who are vital and excellent contributors to knowledge. We're also not saying institutions are always perfect and good and don't need to change. I'm saying that robust, diverse, in-depth, careful, broadly reaching, and most of all interesting and new scholarship requires something on the scale of institutional support.

This is not just because that's where your historians live, but because in a very practical sense, that's where your archives live. You do actually need a big building stuffed with Things Of The Past well-maintained and with a core of well-trained and extremely cool (like librarians, all archivists are extremely cool in my books, even if they're kind of assholes, as long as they are good archivists).

Archivists are currently doing a lot with very little support - like a lot of academics and librarians, really - because that's what people do. When they care about doing something, they get along, they scrape by, they suck it up. But they need buildings, they need climate control, they need continuing training and new people coming into the field - if the idea is that we have so many documents from the past extant today because archives DON'T need institutional-level support, then you are severely misinformed about how much of the past has survived to the present day. And if the idea is that we'll preserve the IMPORTANT bits of the past regardless then you're also sadly misinformed about how good we are at determining what's important, and how frequently (and with growing frequency) disasters of various kinds wipe places out (Lisbon 1755, for example), and how robust any of our documentation (often ESPECIALLY the 'important' stuff) is in terms of long-term survival.

There's a theory going around that THIS period - like the 2000s through today and into the future - will produce a 'dark age' for future historians because the digital infrastructure which not only underpins almost all of our day-to-day lives but is how we've decided to 'save space' - by preserving things digitally rather than in hard copy - is so unspeakably vulnerable and weak. Everyday folks have already, for the most part, lost access to things like CDs, which have a lifespan of something like 100 years at the most. Proprietary softwares, black box devices with irreplaceable parts, flimsy modern materials with difficult to preserve features mean a whole of information that drives our lives today will simply become inaccessible in, actually, a very short time.

Archives - vast storehouses under careful supervision full of well-organized stuff that might potentially be important one day - need institutional support, but also, on their own, are kind of... well, let's just say, Historians will also say shit like they 'uncovered' a 'hidden history' in a previously 'lost, unknown' document that some archivist put in a special box on a special shelf and carefully catalogued for prime findability. It's a symbiotic relationship that doesn't always get its due. An archive on its own can be very useful to a local community, an individual business, a specific family, all kinds of things - but to get History out of it, you need some Historians or suitably rabid individuals of other castes. You need both, or you end up with the pseudo-histories of nineteenth-century rich folk that then get to determine what we believe is possible for the future by what we are told of the past. It's a bad scene.

Again, there are further steps to take - not over here defending institutions as they stand. We were, at one point, on our way to accessible higher education, meaning everyone had a chance to go to pursue their interests, before we started seeing Universities not as a social good and social resource but as job training and profit centers and cut social funding as demanded by business ghouls. Higher education and academia as it functions now has done a lot of damage to people's lives.

But institutions are much harder to build than to change, and change is hard enough. Once an archive is defunded, its collections distributed or destroyed, you typically don't get it back. Like certain species of sea creatures with long gestational periods, once you destroy the mid-range of the population - the bit that raises up the next generation - your population collapses and its very hard to get things back on track (historians and other academics who require lots of investment and training and time and experience are like the sea creatures, you see).

You can, of course, start new. We've done that a lot, as a species. It's always possible. But it's a bit like running out of a fire empty-handed instead of grabbing your wallet as you go. Sometimes you just gotta go, and that's always safest - sometimes you just can't think or there's no time to think and you couldn't get to anything useful if you wanted to - but if it's matter of looking at the wallet in your pants pocket and dipping down to grab it (and maybe pants!) while you bolt then yeah, ought to try. Maybe the pants catch fire and you've got to abandon them anyway to save your life. That's reasonable. (This is just an analogy - fire safety generally says to get ye gone with your life and health intact ASAP, just for the record - don't stop for shit and don't go back in).

The point of this is that next time you're enjoying some popular history content (please save me from this word) or learn some cool fact about the past, think about the fact that none of that get down to you without a big chain of people all joined together doing different things. And that big chain needs nice big social supports to exist. The social supports are hard to change, but the chain is easy to lose without them. It's a group effort all the way, even that little fucker who didn't credit the work they used to make fun videos is important.

That content doesn't happen without the structure to support it - or even worse, that content lies to you. Makes stuff up. The stuff it makes up isn't going to be fantasies of freedom and equality, at least going by what's been made up before.

Hate the academy, want it to change, act to reform it - all very good, go for it, no desire to stop you (except maybe the hating part, try to hate more specifically, like individual actions or aspects of the academy, if you're going to hate on stuff, but, like, hate can be unhealthy, get some peace in your life if you can). Things are bad enough without also feeling like you have to take on a crusade to save archives or other institutions - though honestly just participating in your local history scene, giving them time and attention, is really valuable help - so that's not really the call to action here. The call is just asking you to notice the big structures that enable these small joys.

Don't let yourself be convinced that they somehow happen in a vacuum, that they'll just persist somehow like getting Deliveroo at your off-grid mountain cabin. A lot people helped make that stupid podcast about Marie Antoinette's toenail fungus happen - and there's way more than that waiting! If we can just keep letting people make archives, study stuff, fuck off on fruitless searches for things that were never there and instead find stuff we never KNEW was there. There's so much of that to be done! The more the merrier on who should be doing it! But if we want that, we got to figure out how to support it, to keep what we've got, build more of it, or it'll be the same shit about Marie Antoinette over and over and over and over and over because that'll all we'll have to build from.

Anyway, if you've never done it, take a ghost tour. Visit a museum nearby. Pop into an archive and just ask them some stuff. Get on these web pages that do things like recreate Angkor Wat as a virtual tour, go watch a Youtuber do a frothing-at-the-mouth defense of Charles Lightoller, or even better, read this reddit thread about whether Dua Lipa would have survived the Titanic sinking based on her music video. And just think - holy shit, isn't it cool that we have a society, a whole social structure, that could produce such a thing? And it's right here, at my fingertips, ready to disappear.

*there are reasons for this, some related to format and legibility/accessibility that still shouldn't eliminate the need to credit others' work and others cowardly excuses for parasitism

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jesse Singal

Published: Jun 27, 2024

In April Hilary Cass, a British paediatrician, published her review of gender-identity services for children and young people, commissioned by NHS England. It cast doubt on the evidence base for youth gender medicine. This prompted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organisation for the doctors and practitioners who provide services to trans people, to release a blistering rejoinder. WPATH said that its own guidelines were sturdier, in part because they were “based on far more systematic reviews”.

Systematic reviews should evaluate the evidence for a given medical question in a careful, rigorous manner. Such efforts are particularly important at the moment, given the feverish state of the American debate on youth gender medicine, which is soon to culminate in a Supreme Court case challenging a ban in Tennessee. The case turns, in part, on questions of evidence and expert authority.

Court documents recently released as part of the discovery process in a case involving youth gender medicine in Alabama reveal that WPATH's claim was built on shaky foundations. The documents show that the organisation’s leaders interfered with the production of systematic reviews that it had commissioned from the Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Centre (EPC) in 2018.

From early on in the contract negotiations, WPATH expressed a desire to control the results of the Hopkins team’s work. In December 2017, for example, Donna Kelly, an executive director at PATH, told Karen Robinson, the EPC's director, that the WPATH board felt the EPC researchers “cannot publish their findings independently”. A couple of weeks later, Ms Kelly emphasised that, “the [WPATH] board wants it to be clear that the data cannot be used without WPATH approval”.

Ms Robinson saw this as an attempt to exert undue influence over what was supposed to be an independent process. John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who co-authored guidelines for systematic reviews, says that if sponsors interfere or are allowed to veto results, this can lead to either biased summaries or suppression of unfavourable evidence. Ms Robinson sought to avoid such an outcome. “In general, my understanding is that the university will not sign off on a contract that allows a sponsor to stop an academic publication,” she wrote to Ms Kelly.

Months later, with the issue still apparently unresolved, Ms Robinson adopted a sterner tone. She noted in an email in March 2018 that, “Hopkins as an academic institution, and I as a faculty member therein, will not sign something that limits academic freedom in this manner,” nor “language that goes against current standards in systematic reviews and in guideline development”.

Not to reason XY

Eventually WPATH relented, and in May 2018 Ms Robinson signed a contract granting WPATH power to review and offer feedback on her team’s work, but not to meddle in any substantive way. After WPATH leaders saw two manuscripts submitted for review in July 2020, however, the parties’ disagreements flared up again. In August the WPATH executive committee wrote to Ms Robinson that WPATH had “many concerns” about these papers, and that it was implementing a new policy in which WPATH would have authority to influence the EPC team’s output—including the power to nip papers in the bud on the basis of their conclusions.

Ms Robinson protested that the new policy did not reflect the contract she had signed and violated basic principles of unfettered scientific inquiry she had emphasised repeatedly in her dealings with WPATH. The Hopkins team published only one paper after WPATH implemented its new policy: a 2021 meta-analysis on the effects of hormone therapy on transgender people. Among the recently released court documents is a WPATH checklist confirming that an individual from WPATH was involved “in the design, drafting of the article and final approval of [that] article”. (The article itself explicitly claims the opposite.) Now, more than six years after signing the agreement, the EPC team does not appear to have published anything else, despite having provided WPATH with the material for six systematic reviews, according to the documents.

No one at WPATH or Johns Hopkins has responded to multiple inquiries, so there are still gaps in this timeline. But an email in October 2020 from WPATH figures, including its incoming president at the time, Walter Bouman, to the working group on guidelines, made clear what sort of science WPATH did (and did not) want published. Research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense,” it stated. Mr Bouman and one other coauthor of that email have been named to a World Health Organisation advisory board tasked with developing best practices for transgender medicine.

Another document recently unsealed shows that Rachel Levine, a transwoman who is assistant secretary for health, succeeded in pressing WPATH to remove minimum ages for the treatment of children from its 2022 standards of care. Dr Levine’s office has not commented. Questions remain unanswered, but none of this helps WPATH’s claim to be an organisation that bases its recommendations on science. 

[ Via: https://archive.today/wJCI7 ]

--

==

So, there are 6 completed reviews sitting somewhere, that WPATH knows shows undesirable (to them) results. And they know it. And despite - or perhaps, because of - that, they wrote the insane SOC8 anyway. And then, at the behest of Rachel Levine, went back and took out the age limits, making it even more insane.

This isn't how science works, it's how a cult works.

When John Templeton Foundation commissioned a study on the efficacy of intercessory prayer, a study which unsurprisingly found that it's completely ineffective, it was forced to publish the negative results.

So, even the religious are more ethical than gender ideologues when it comes to science. This is outright scientific corruption.

[slowd1ving]

OUT ON A LIMB ･ﾟ DAN HENG NSFW

"Tender was the kiss when you held me captive In your sweet embrace, Lips begin to burn and my heart beats faster, Than the normal pace." The prestigious Astral Institute is no place for those who are too afraid of competition. Though the thralls of the Music Society may tear you asunder with their particularly fierce intra-club rivalries, those fears are brushed aside as the company of a certain bassist overshadows them. PREQUEL to roommate au rough designs for blade & dan heng here male guitarist reader warnings: amab m! reader, nsfw, porn with plot, blowjobs, alcohol consumption, overstimulation, friends with benefits but one's already got feelings lmao wc: 11.4k

HONKAI STAR RAIL MASTERLIST

MASTERLIST ・゜・NAVIGATION

Few universities on the globe offer the same prestige that the Astral Institute does. Talk to anyone on the streets with more awareness than a rock, and you’ll find that the common opinion is this: amidst its hallowed stone walls, a treasure trove of knowledge it hosts. Take a stroll beneath its grand marble friezes, and if the architecture isn’t enough to enthral you, perhaps the floating snippets of discourses and lectures echoing from the halls are. 

Naturally, aspiring scholars from across the planet find their way here—either on their own two legs, or from their vaunted perch on their parents’ coattails. Yet, contrary to popular belief, the sprawling grounds offer less competition to get in than one expects. 

Maybe that’s the reason the fierce streak of rivalry manifests in other ways. 

It’s not unusual—the sports teams for the Astral Institute dominate the field, and for the past n decades, the goal of every other college in the area is to get second place. Silver is most coveted, for the hapless scholars know they’ll never touch the gilded gold of the Institute. But even their aspirations for second cannot hope to reach the silver tongues of the more academic societies: such as the Debate Society, completely trouncing their opponents round after round with mercurial elegance.

Vying for heights grander than one can even imagine is encouraged—nay, it is the shackle placed about a scholar’s wrist. 

It is even worse, you’ve observed, when clubs that aren’t necessarily clubs germinate and flourish beneath the nourishment of the Institute. The most prevalent example would undoubtedly be the Music Society, but the Dance Society is another place where intra-club, cutthroat rivalry occurs. 

It’s an official society: has its own choral branch, orchestral branch, and even its own dedicated division of audio engineers and managers who aren’t necessarily involved with the music but the image cultivated for the club. 

Officially. On the spidery ink detailing the aged vellum, which resides outside the building the Society claims. 

Unofficially, it is also a stamp of authentication for the numerous bands that have sprung like weeds with the revival of pop culture. On school grounds and the buildings surrounding the university—which the Institute owns, whether it be the sensuous jazz bar downtown or the towering library next to the river��only groups with permits can perform at these locations. 

Though, with the spike in tensions between bands in recent years, it’s become a de facto requirement to blend in: anonymous, identified by only the mask that conceals your appearance during performances. Of course, with the roughly dozen or so factions, there's new speculation about a particular member’s identity every few days: only fueled by people practising in the music halls in the open, or those prone to gossip. 

For scholars with a meagre social life and even less free time, joining a club in the school roster is practically a given. It’s a distinguished mark to put on your school record—and if you want the full Institute experience, competition needs to be an accustomed flavour on your tongue. To those who successfully balance both studies and the rigorous requirements of the Institutional Societies, it is a distinction in of itself for any academic. 

Venture forth in spite of inexperience; only ignorance shall meet those who keep still. 

That’s the pretentious quote of today, faintly watermarked onto your post-it note as you carefully unpeeled it from the stack in the on-campus café just a few moments prior.

“How stupid.” You tap your pen on the list inked harshly on the paper: Engineering Society, Archery Club, Chess Society, Classics Society. Though they had initially piqued your interest as being mildly intriguing, it now seems more of a bother than anything: time-wasters dressed up in erudite clothing. 

“What is?” Kafka sits opposite you on the plush couch: steam wafting from her Earl Grey and against her maraschino lips as she observes you amusedly. 

You don’t even know how you became friends with her—the Literature buildings and the Physics laboratories are on opposite sides of the expansive campus, after all. Maybe it was your frequent trips to the bars last year, or maybe it was your exasperated comments plastered on the school gossip board—which she ran, believe it or not—but whatever it was, you’re now stuck with a fuschia shadow at your side. Though she’s as mysterious as they come, you don’t think she’s a bad person. Key word being think, not know; there’s just something shady about her, after all.  

“Ah,” she figures as you grimace. “The club deadline’s coming up, right?”

There’s an unspoken rule when it comes to joining clubs in a university as large and diverse as the Institute. Halfway through the second year is the cutoff point—it becomes exceedingly difficult to join any society past this point. You’ve still got four months, give-or-take, but the notion of not getting anywhere is unpleasant. Perhaps it’s the intrinsic striving this college has slowly ingrained in you over the past year—but part of you really can’t be bothered. 

“Unfortunately,” you sigh. Mindlessly, you swill bitter coffee down—savouring not the aromatic taste but the piercing heat entering your mouth. 

“And you can’t figure out which to join?” she prompts. You stare down at the list—neither the Chess nor the Classics society sound particularly inviting, the Engineering Society sounds dead, and the Archery Society seems too dangerous for the you who does calculations and paragraphs by hand almost daily. 

“Uh,” you reply intelligently. “No.”

“How about the Music Club?” 

You pause. And you swallow, temporarily debating the pros and cons of navigating a minefield such as the aforementioned club. 

And as the wise men of years yonder have sagely expressed to problems which require impulsive solutions: fuck it. 

“Sure.”

It’s too late for regrets. 

✦ . 　⁺ 

Though, against your nervous expectations, you’re not immediately dragged into the thick of the competition and bloodlust. It’s surprisingly underwhelming—a brief ‘that’s it?’ before you’re assigned a small pass granting you access to the numerous practice rooms and a basic certification to perform in the less-prestigious venues. 

Hmm. You stare at your electric guitar gathering dust in the corner of your friend’s garage, and just like the void, it stares back. 

No doubt the literature student expected you to pick up some managerial duties, but maybe it’s fate that led you back to collect your stuff—and not the nagging after your friend bought a new motorbike and needs more space for his baby. 

“No hard feelings, man,” he says, and perhaps it’s the forgotten discovery that allows you to break into a smile that is neither terse nor annoyed. 

No hard feelings, indeed. 

It’s a week after you’ve received the metal placard, and an hour after attending a lecture for vector fields. Maybe it’s the curiosity peeking through, but something prompts you to ditch the stack of thick sheets of homework on your desk and pick up your guitar. 

Your guide through the long-winded halls pauses, blood-red hair swaying to a cascading halt as she points to her right. “This is your practice room for today. Make sure to read the rules before you begin, alright?” 

She’s friendly, introducing herself as Himeko with a dazzling smile. She’s one of the managers in the music club—veering into engineering territory. Compared to her, you’re just some guy with his guitar; you look away from her cheerful expression, gazing at the rules emblazoned in a red less vibrant than her locks. 

No intercourse. No hot food. No unauthorised persons. Scrawled beneath in messy purple pen is a blinding neon post-it: get the fuck out if you’re not using the room properly, you bums. 

“Wow,” you cough out in surprise, breaking your laconic pattern of responses. “I assume those have some crazy stories behind them.”

That elicits a small laugh from her, and finally it feels like you’ve done something right. 

“You have no idea,” she bemoans exasperatedly, ushering you into the room. It’s nothing too large—small enough to feel cosy rather than make you self-conscious, but big enough so sound carries well. “Right, if you need help setting up, just let the admin at the end of the corridor know.”

She leaves in a whirl of crimson and gilt gold, and you’re left standing bemusedly in the doorway. 

It’s not like you do need the help: hands deftly unravelling and plugging in cords and tuning the pegs with the ease only muscle memory evokes. How long has it been? With your mountainous studies, it’s little wonder that your hobbies were pushed to the bottom of the priority list. 

Your breathing turns rhythmic as you warm-up: chord after chord gently brought into existence with the fretboard and a copper penny as an impromptu pick. Though it’s been a few years, your hands fly across the strings.

A little bit of Bauhaus. Improvisation for The Cure. A brief snippet of Fields of Nephilim.

“I was cold as I mouthed the words, and crawled across the mirror,” you sing along with the backing track, embellishing the sombre baseline—chords ringing out clean in the daylight. It’s been so long that your mouth tastes sweet: letting the tones sweep you away in its ebb. The melody and harmonies blur together—as do your eyes. They flutter shut, focused only on replicating the feeling. “I wait, await the next breath.”

The notes fall apart and distort in the empty room: jarring and incomplete, yet harrowingly beautiful. 

“Your name like ice, into my heart.”

Your voice is hoarse: fingers raw and voice scraped tender from just these meagre hours of practice. 

“Everything is as cold as life—can no one save you?”

It’s not enough, but as the sound of song dies out and is replaced by the buzz of alternating current and low whir of air conditioning, you realise there’s someone in the doorway. 

Fingers drum on the lacquered body of the guitar as you look at him, and he looks back at you. He’s roughly your age: wavy black hair cut messy round his head; silvery chains decorating his neck and pale wrists; red liner accentuating sharp, lucid eyes that bear directly into you. 

“Can I help you?” you frown, scanning his face and realising you’ve never seen him around before: be it at a lecture, the library or any of the small stores dotted around campus. At least, you hope you’ve never seen him around—it’s awkward enough knowing he heard you, let alone that you might’ve come across him and forgotten his name. 

“Ah, I’m sorry,” he murmurs. His voice is pleasant: slightly melodious and clear even with his lowered volume. “The other rooms are all full—I was wondering if we could share?”

Wow, you blink. He’s so damn polite.

“I don’t mind,” you shrug it off, ignoring the smile that he gives you. While it may do you good to get along better and make friends with your fellow club mates, you don’t particularly care about that. 

“Wait,” you call out to him as he walks past you towards the back, scratching your neck hesitantly. “I don’t have headphones to plug into my guitar.”

Sure, you may be cold, but you aren’t that much of a prick to disrupt his own practice like that. 

But contrary to whatever you expected him to do, it’s certainly not him rummaging around in his bag and extending his hand with a pair of headphones. “I’ve got spares.”

“Uh, thanks,” you reply, fairly dumbfounded as you walk forward. After all, the most prepared student in the physics class you’re in only carries around a half-eaten pencil and a crumpled sheet of A4 paper on a good day. Yet as you reach out for them, he holds on to the pair. Inevitably, his fingertips brush yours, and you swear his hand trembles minutely. 

“Dan Heng,” he introduces himself. “Data analysis major.”

“Bit too late for introductions, is it not?” you comment, and it’s the second time someone’s laughed today with you. No, it’s not really a laugh—more like an exhale of air that suggests a laugh. It suits him: restrained as he is. 

“It’s never too late.” He doesn’t budge: fingers firmly clasped around the headphones, tips still brushing past your skin. 

“I’ll give you a clue instead,” you compromise, wondering what exactly keeps driving the conversation. “Analyse that qualitative data instead.”

“So original,” he remarks dryly, but he does free you from his warm hands. His eyes linger upon you as you gift him a strand of red to investigate: one of the sciences. It’s vague enough to be frustrating, but he could easily view the roster for the Music Club. Or not, actually—since the club is so volatile, it can’t be easy to peruse just who’s in it. 

“Yeah, yeah,” you wave dismissively, plugging the plain black headphones into the instrument with practised grace. “Think of it as repayment for letting you stay here.”

“Hah,” he grins freely this time—as bright and messy as a finger painting—and you stare at him for a few seconds. “You’re really stingy, you know that?”

The mask of politeness has slipped minutely; you see it in the crescent shape of his eyes and the casual cant of his head. Even the long white coat he’s wearing is falling from his shoulders—he simply shrugs it off and tosses it on the couch behind him, as though he’s shedding an outer layer of his very being. It’s strangely personal; for a brief second, you’re privy to a stranger’s deeper feelings beyond meaningless platitudes. 

“Better than outright kicking you out,” you mutter, averting your eyes from his now-calm face. “How many doors did you knock on before you stumbled on my generous being?”

“Generous—” he coughs abruptly, and your head whips back up from your guitar. “—apologies, that was purely reflexive.”

You sit on the sofa by the window, letting the sunlight dapple over you as you watch him clear his throat. There’s no use sitting awkwardly when the tension has pretty much dissipated; you lean back until you’re comfortable, elbows resting neatly on top of the body. 

“So? Who slammed the door on you?” You adjust the jack in the insert until the static fades completely, gazing at him all the while. 

“I was hoping you’d imagine yours was the first door I knocked on,” he sighs. “How embarrassing.”

“I’m not an idiot.” You tap your penny against the lacquered wood of the guitar. Tap, tap. “This room’s on the very end of the corridor.”

A heartbeat passes. 

Tap, tap. 

“So how many people rejected you?” you snicker. Third time’s the charm. 

“Don’t phrase it like that,” he mutters. His eyes flick up to yours, and you stare at him with raised brows, evidently nonplussed. “...Twelve. Three rooms are out of commission currently.”

“Pff— wow,” you stifle the sound against the back of your palm, but you can’t hide the grin in your words. “Your charm sucks, man.”

He sighs in exasperation. “Then what does it say about you if you’re so easily swayed?”

Did he just call me easy?—you gape, then quickly deduce he’s pretty funny when he wants to be: all dry humour and quick wit. 

“Sorry, sorry,” you wave your hand in a gesture of conciliation. “I’m not surprised that they all rejected you, though.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, now?” 

“I don’t mean it like that.” You rub the penny—the familiar metallic scent coats your hands now, and you can almost taste it on your tongue. “I mean the students here are mostly competitive pricks.”

“Unlike you?” he deadpans, and you feel somewhat offended at the sarcastic undertones he’s emitting. So rude. 

“Uh, duh,” you grin, flipping the coin with a calloused thumb. “I let a stray cat like you in, didn’t I?”

“And here I was, about to compliment your playing,” he sighs out instead of acknowledging your words. “Guess you won’t want to hear it from a stray cat like me, huh?”

Woah, you blink, almost impressed at how quickly he’s mastered passive-aggressiveness. 

“No, I would,” you retort shamelessly. “I love cats, strays included.”

“Think about it,” you continue, missing how startled he looks—the tiny twitch of his brows as he looks on incredulously, the minute waver in his hands as he raises his finger hesitantly. “If a cat came up to you, started talking, that would be cool as shit, right?”

“I’d think I was on psychedelics,” he proclaims flatly. “And possibly insane.”

“Way to ruin a scenario.” You lean back your head until it hits the back of the couch: warm sunlight gently washes over your face and closed eyes, all red through your blood vessels in the delicate lids. “We’ve established I would absolutely not mind talk from a stray cat, so give me my compliment.”

“You always want the last word, don’t you?”

“Yes.” You’re a bit too quick with your reply. 

He sighs. Deeply this time. 

“Fine. I don’t think your rougher style of playing will ever get boring,” he considers thoughtfully, and you can feel his eyes rake over you and your guitar. Assessing—just some guy with his instrument, lazily basking in the sun. 

“And… your style is very emotive,” he adds, and there’s something about that emphasis that’s ever-so-slightly different. 

“Aeons—you’re only saying that because you heard me singing, right?” You peek one eye open in a glare. 

“I liked it.”

“Be serious,” you groan.

“I am,” he shrugs. “I’ve never heard someone sing ‘Cold’ so enthusiastically. There’s real hope for The Cure fans.”

“Damn, you’re definitely making fun of me,” you quiver in mild irritation. 

“You figure that out for yourself then.” And you’re left just like that—staring at him dumbly while he unlocks the tall cupboard in the back. This bastard… 

From its mahogany depths, he pulls out a hard black guitar case—and silently you wonder at the coincidence. It zips open with a strangled buzz: careful teeth sawing against careful teeth under his nimble fingers. You watch, entranced, as he pulls the guitar out by the neck.

It’s not six-stringed like you expected. Rather, the black fretboard and polished azure body boasts only four strings. He’s a bassist, you realise with a start; the notion enthrals you, just a little. 

“That’s yours, right?” You point, double-checking not just the way he took it from the cupboard, but to make sure you aren’t hallucinating it. 

“And to whom else could it belong?” he humours you. 

“Oh wow.” You sit up, setting the headphones around your neck while he sets up. “It must’ve been fate leading you here.”

“I would’ve come here to collect my guitar regardless of fate,” he answers.

“So fate assigned me this room in particular,” you shoot back, undeterred. 

“Coincidence.”

“Explain why no one else wanted you in their practice rooms then.” It’s a pointless back-and-forth, which is precisely what entertains you. 

“As you said—” and here he looks up, eyes catching yours in such a placid stare with lips poised in a nigh-triumphant grin that you can’t look away. “—they’re all competitive pricks.”

Seamless. You can’t even argue back; he’s agreed with you and gone against your words in the same breath. 

“Shame,” you sigh, twirling with the length of headphone cable streaming out from your guitar. “Here I was, about to use it as an excuse to get you to play with me.”

“You needed an excuse?” he comments. You look on as he fiddles with the amp: too preoccupied with the technical aspects of setting up to notice your stare honed onto the back of his curls. Or maybe he does notice—he’s observant, after all. 

“Who knows? Maybe you’d demand my name in return.” You pluck the D string lazily—it faintly echoes against your neck through the headphones. Jokes aside, there’s something itching against your flesh that urges you to take this opportunity for practice. 

“Great idea,” he replies laconically. Just like that, he’s standing with his own headphones still in his grasp—as clear as scales with just another push to tip the balance in your favour. “You’re quite stingy, after all.”

“Act broke to stay rich.” You pluck another string, then another. With the presence of your hand covering the fretboard, there’s only a jarring quality to each note. 

“So—” you look up this time, only to find he’s already staring your way. Got him. “—wanna play with me?”

“Depends. Can you keep up?”

“I mean, based on your spying, what do you think?” 

One stingy, the other arrogant. It’s a perfect joke—a meticulous comedy Kafka would no doubt write in a moment of drunkenness. 

Your hand wavers on the headphone jack, as though awaiting his answer. A stingy, hesitant fool.

Thump. That’s what you hear when he tosses his own headphones onto where his long coat rests on the couch. You received your answer after all. 

It’s safe to say that your first encounter with Dan Heng is neither bad nor good, just a mixture of both that titrates itself into mundane neutrality. 

His notes are mellowed against yours—smooth, buttery—and it’s like you read his mind and he yours. But it’s futile to ponder on the concept more; after all, it’s not like you’ll encounter him any more often.

✦ . 　⁺ 

You’re right, as you oft are. 

Truly, your studies of physics have left you with a talent for predicting trajectories—including human ones. You don’t see the bassist in the following days; the practice room you’re beginning to get rather fond of is blissfully devoid of chatter and teasing remarks strewn back and forth. 

It’s… quiet. 

Rather, the only conversations you have are rushed ones with Kafka throughout the week when you spot her on campus—she updates you on whatever gossip she’s heard recently, and the scandals she’s personally witnessed. 

Or, more accurately, Kafka isn’t the only one you talk to. Small tidbits of chatter between you and Himeko have also become tentative routine. It started off as polite exchanges, but ever-so-slowly, the two of you occasionally peruse different topics. 

(“Have you thought of joining one of the bands in the Music Society?”)

The question she left you with just yesterday plagues your mind as you wait in line in one of the tiny, cosy cafés dotted around campus. There’s the strong aroma of roasted beans, but you can’t focus on them—nor the quaint atmosphere, nor the menu items. 

No, you haven’t. Of all things, you’re not planning on entangling yourself with creating a persona to present to the rest of the student body—a mask slipping onto your features while you showcase your music to the world. 

But as you turn around with a steaming coffee in your takeaway cup, there Himeko is: sanguine dripping off her shoulders in glossy waves, a crimson smile playing on her lips, a jaunty flair to her movements as she waves you over to her tiny table in the corner. She’s better suited for the window seats—shining like the sun itself. It almost makes you squint as you look over. 

“Have you given it any more thought?” 

“Aha,” you stare at the scalding cup in your hands nervously. There’s something about seeing someone with their life perfectly put together that makes you instinctively on edge. “Honestly, I’m not too keen on the idea.”

“Hmm,” Himeko rests her chin on a manicured hand, drumming on the varnished oaken table with her other one. Tap–tap. “Is it the competition? Per my understanding, you’re a rather reserved scholar, aren’t you?”

She’s sharp, you acknowledge. 

“I just find it rather pointless,” you shake your head in half-agreement. “I may be reserved, but I can handle the pressure.”

“Otherwise I wouldn’t have picked physics for my studies,” you comment as an afterthought. “Call me pessimistic, but I can’t find much merit in anonymous rivalries that only benefit the ego.”

“You were assigned the Nihility path at orientation, weren’t you?” Himeko remarks—a reference to the quiz each first-year takes to determine a ‘house’. You thought it was more arbitrary than anything; with a school as intra-competitive as the Institute, it’s only natural that it has its own factions to compete with each other even further. But clearly, there are some who value the path system as measures of personalities. 

You hadn’t given that much thought either. 

“I think so.” You play with the empty sugar packet, twisting it in your fingers. “Dostoyevsky isn’t my favourite author, before you ask.”

She exhales wryly, and just like that, the small tension in your shoulders dissipates somewhat. 

“Well, it’s not entirely ego-boosting. Of course, due to rumours and information of that ilk, the rivalries are what’s the main focus for those who aren’t in the Society.” Red stains her own cup as she takes a sip of her espresso. “It’s a good opportunity for scholarships, prizes, and extra credit. The rivalry’s a natural consequence, of course, but there’s only one or two groups with bad blood like that between them.”

“You’d need to be a bit more careful to keep your identity as a band member a secret,” she adds. “But since a portion of the club are part of bands themselves, they mind their own business out of a mutual ‘stay out of each other's' way’ policy.”

You think back to Dan Heng’s rejections from the practice halls, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense. 

“But you’ll know who’s in your band, right?” 

“That’s a given,” she nods, and you’re sweating slightly from the enthusiasm that shines bright in her eyes. “Group managers will be eager to snatch up a talented newbie like you, so I’ll extend my hand first.”

Your tongue is leaden in your mouth as you swallow. 

And just like that, you begrudgingly join the Trailblazers. 

✦ . 　⁺

“What the fuck?” you point at the man before you incredulously, though retrospectively, you should’ve expected this. 

Himeko had driven you to the more private practice rooms in the city: a space subsidised by the Institute for each band. Your expectations had been low, but the glossy building led you to rethink your entire philosophy (each practice room was twice the size of your dorm) and wholeheartedly accept your new reality. 

It was going too smoothly, perhaps. March 7th was the first proper band member you’d met—an enthusiastic Environmental Studies student in charge of the synthesiser. Her affable personality wholly reminded you of bubblegum. 

Next through the door were Caelus and Stelle—twins which you had met before. Kafka had taken them under her wing a while back, and they’d tottered after her (or at least, that’s how you remembered it) before they grew accustomed to the Institute on their own. Theatre and psychology majors respectively, if you recall correctly. Caelus on the drums, Stelle on vocals; two roles that fit them surprisingly well. 

“Ah, Welt won’t be joining us today,” Himeko informs you as you’re idly tuning the pegs for your guitar. You recognise the name of your blunt upperclassman; an animation major who looks like he’s on the verge of dying every time you see him. Condolences, you sympathise for the man who’s finally kicked his personal bucket. “But he’s good with the harp and cello.”

“So you guys are missing a guitarist?” you interject. As far as you knew, there was a bassist left on the roster. There’s also the ‘mascot’, Pom-Pom: Himeko’s small rabbit that you’ve unfortunately not had the pleasure of meeting but you have seen from March 7th’s phone as she gushes over the tiny, fluffy thing. 

“Yeah, pretty much,” Stelle sighs. “Our old one quit a while back.” 

No—she assures you, the reason was perfectly normal and not any unsavoury reasons that would’ve definitely given you cold feet. 

“He’s so late,” March 7th grumbles, but you don’t have time to ask just who exactly the mysterious bassist is—because speak of the devil, the wooden door swings open and suddenly you’re staring at a man whom you thought you wouldn’t see much of. 

Which brings you to your current predicament: spilling an expletive from your lips while pointing at a man just as dumbfounded as you. 

“Huh?” he stares back. “Himeko, what did you do?”

“You mentioned him, so I checked out his talent for myself,” she shrugs nonchalantly. “Even if you hadn’t said he was good, I would’ve seen it for myself anyway.”

He gapes for a moment longer, but your own astonished expression is a lot more difficult to stave off. 

“Oh, oh—he was talking about you, you know,” March 7th bounds up to you with her hands clasped behind her back in a picture of innocence. 

“What’d he say?” All too eager to play along, you lean so she can whisper it without the aforementioned man overhearing. She responds in kind, already cupping a hand around her mouth, but—

“March.” You’re pulled away by a glaring Dan Heng: hand firmly grasped around your wrist. Just as quickly, he lets go with a sheepish smile. 

“Sorry, she’ll probably embellish what I actually said,” he fumbles. 

He’s warm, you notice. And flustered, you note, this time with far greater amusement. 

“He said the two of you had great chemistry,” Stelle calls, and her tone of voice is so steady that you half-believe her. 

“Stelle, I did not—”

“—totally did—”

“—part of ‘we played well together’ could you have possibly misheard like that? I said four words—”

They’re bickering, March 7th and Caelus jumping in on their argument—and suddenly there’s a messy, bright burst of feeling tangling in your chest. 

They’re always like that, pay them no mind—Himeko tells you, but you don’t mind. Despite your initial reluctance, there’s something that draws you to this mismatched group. 

And perhaps your second encounter with Dan Heng isn’t the greatest either, but it certainly isn’t terrible. 

✦ . 　⁺

Though it doesn’t seem like it at first, Stelle’s offhand comment—chemistry—seems to be more prophetic than teasing. From a purely objective standpoint, his buttery-smooth playing wraps into your rougher style seamlessly: a steady, unwavering foundation. 

It’s never boring; you’re watching as his hands practically fly against the fretboard as he plays a post-punk piece, spellbound even as you churn out gritty chord after chord. There’s a small smile on your lips as you gaze at his concentrated face—which breaks just as the last rattles of the song die out. 

The two of you are back in the practice room like all those weeks ago. It was quickly made clear to you that other than the weekly meetups, individual practice is more efficient since there’s no other way to meet sooner without taking study time away. It’s either good luck—or fate, as you’d like to put it otherwise—that Dan Heng’s schedule is pretty similar to yours, since now you’ve essentially got a free partner to practise with in the afternoons. 

“What?” His head snaps up as a response to the scorching sensation of your eyes drilling holes in his face. 

“I think you’re my favourite bassist I know,” you answer seriously. In all honesty, he’s the only bassist you know—but you’re not about to say his chord progressions give you goosebumps. It’s become a running bit—one that you feel a strong obligation to commit to—which consists of offhand remarks that seem a bit too much like compliments. 

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only bassist you know,” he deadpans. “So that compliment doesn’t count.”

How’d he know that?—you blink in surprise. Drat. “I think you’re a mind reader.”

“That’s just fact.”

He leans back on the wall at the back; maybe it’s the gentle sunlight washing over his features, or maybe it’s the low hanging light fixtures in the practice room, but his eyes sparkle cerulean at this very moment. A lazy smile paints his face, and your brows raise in mild surprise. 

“Um,” you wrack your brains. “Your eyes are pretty.”

He coughs loudly—taken off-guard at how casually you admit it. Even now, you’re still tapping that damned penny against your keyboard as you keep looking at him: nonplussed, as though you’re simply saying the grass is green and two plus two equals four. No other intonation other than neutrality. Just like any other compliment you’ve given him nonchalantly.

His stomach tightens. Just a little. 

✦ . 　⁺

It becomes habitual: practising every other day turns into hanging out. From walking to that shiny room together (both of your dorms are surprisingly close together, after all), to greeting him whenever you see him pass by to his lecture hall, it feels like you’ve gotten closer to the not-so-stoic man. 

Twenty-one days it takes to form a habit. 

You’ve gotten far too used to his company: neither March nor the twins live nearby, Welt looks like he’s fighting off death each time you see his haggard face, and Himeko’s a lot busier than you initially thought. Past those three weeks, and it seems like you’re slowly extending and accepting tendrils of friendship from the bassist. 

Maybe that’s why you’re currently in this predicament.

Even with your new-found (and old-found) hobby, there’s an obvious need to keep studying—that physics degree won’t award itself, after all. In comes the expansive library on-campus: a marvel of classic academia and modern architecture that scholars never get used to. 

“Is anyone sitting here?” It’s just you and Dan Heng in this corner. You—sitting down at a four-by-four walnut hued table, stacks upon stacks of atomic structure reading piled neatly on your right. Him—standing before you with a meagre, slim laptop in his hands that cannot possibly contest with the fat stacks of paper by you. 

“Absolutely,” you lie through your teeth. “The whole table is reserved for my company.” 

That’s a prime example of falsehood. 

Dan Heng, the smartie-pants he is, sees through the fib quite easily. 

“You and what friends?” His brow piques. 

You make an obvious show of looking around him. If the space beholden to him was any emptier, there’d be a tumbleweed merrily sweeping past him. 

“And where’s your company?” 

He scowls. 

“Know the enemy and know yourself.” You place a palm on your chest sagely. “It appears you do not know yourself, nor your enemy.”

“There’s someone willing to spend time with you?” He sits down anyway, but it’s not like you were going to reject him in the first place. 

“Yes.” You turn back to your book mysteriously. Ignoring the very obvious contender who’s currently sat himself opposite you, willingly, there’s also a text on your phone refuting his words. 

< Living Poets Society <3 > 11:32 > I’ll be there in fifteen. Save me a place, won’t you?

There’s a smile playing on your lips while you tap out an ‘okay, see you soon’, one that doesn’t go unnoticed by Dan Heng as he glances up at your sudden movement. He’s still looking over as you place your phone down and crack open the textbook once more: eyes so blatantly heavy you can’t help but speak while you skim over the information. 

“Need something?”

“I still haven’t gotten your number—” and this time he pointedly adds your name to the end of his statement, courtesy of a slip-up from March 7th a few weeks back. 

“Oh, yeah,” you turn your page, unlocking the phone without looking and passing him the device. “Just add yourself.”

He notes the anonymous sender in the back of his mind, the heart directly after, and the message itself. His teeth grit together as he adds himself to the list of contacts: why March and the twins are there before him, he doesn’t know. He’s known you longer and better, damn it. 

His thumb swipes a quick message to himself so he can save your number too—a simple ‘hi’ that makes his mouth dry, even with how lacklustre it is. 

Though, his mouth is dry due to deliberation over whether to put a heart next to your name, which he now knows thanks to March 7th. Just as quickly, he strikes the thought from his mind—it doesn’t matter. 

Why the hell would it matter in the first place?

He glances back up at you—you’re engrossed as ever in the text, which is all well and good because his hands wobble a bit as he slides your phone back. You still barely notice: a low ‘thanks’ slipping from your lips as you turn the page. 

Dan Heng appears to be working away silently from where you’re sitting, but what you can’t see is how he’s rereading the same few lines of data with furrowed brows. 

What you can’t see when Kafka arrives and kisses your cheek in greeting is how his hands clench around his pencil—but she does, purposefully lingering just a second longer to leave maraschino smeared on your face. 

What you can’t see when you make no moves to wipe the gloss off is the stony look on the bassist’s face—as well as the questions he has for himself. Why the hell is he so annoyed anyway? It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t, but the way you’re unbothered by it increases his bothered levels as though it were inversely proportional. 

He doesn’t know her—though he thinks he’s seen her with Caelus and Stelle before—but he’s never been so irritated by a stranger before. 

She’s sitting next to you, a model scholar: typing away on her laptop with a concentrated look on her face. But she’s leaning into you, head canting in your direction at such a sluggish speed that had he not been glaring at her, he wouldn’t have noticed it. 

You’re none the wiser. Absent-mindedly, she’s tapping on your palm: kneading away at the flesh and you let her, too preoccupied with inking notes into the memo pad before you to really care what she’s doing. She’s always been slightly touchy with her friends—lingering hugs, grasping your hands and twining her fingers with yours, dotting her spiced perfume right against your wrists—so this isn’t particularly out of the blue.  

With a loud clatter, Dan Heng’s pen falls to the floor—you’re too busy looking his way to notice the coy smile brimming from her pout. 

Gosh—she coos internally, what an oblivious little student you are. This is what collecting organic material is all about; even if he doesn’t realise it himself, he’s practically brimming with jealousy. 

“Wanna get out of here?” she whispers after a half-hour of noting his reactions to various visual stimuli: outright holding your hand, resting her magenta head on your shoulder, letting you take a sip of her sweet coffee. It’s low enough to appear as though she’s making an effort to stay quiet, but she knows he can hear it; the now-familiar creak of the plastic biro graces her ears. 

“Sure,” you reply absently. Perfect. “I’ll see you tomorrow then, Dan Heng.”

And as she saunters out of the library with you in tow, she makes sure to wrap her long coat around your shoulders. 

It’s rather cold outside, after all. 

Well, certainly outside. For poor Dan Heng, he’s likely stewing over in his irritation. 

✦ . 　⁺

If it weren’t often before, it is now—seeing Dan Heng has become a daily routine. Whether it be at the library or at the music practice halls, the familiar ping on your phone alerts you diurnally that he’s located somewhere in the vicinity. 

To be more accurate, it’s nocturnally now. He’s at your dorm door tonight—

< Dan Heng > 23:48 > Snack run?

—a motorcycle helmet held out to you in his steady hands. This development only came to life a few days ago; you had opened his mini-fridge to find no actual food, and thus came his offer to go on a late-night snack run. 

With his jacket wrapped snugly around your shoulders, and your hands tightly gripping the valley of his waist, his abdomen trembles somewhat. But not enough for you to notice, and certainly not enough to stop him from poking fun at you:

“What, you planning to fall off? Hold on properly.”

He shivers as your arms sling round his middle: fingers splayed then grasping his shirt, right at his shaking diaphragm. He can feel your chest press up right against his back—muscle shifting against muscle as you get comfortable against his quaking torso. 

It must just be the frigid wind nipping at his body. 

He doesn’t quite know why he’s offered these rides to you when he’s never done this with anyone else, but the smile you give him as you pick out food for the two of you to share is somewhat endearing. Dan Heng sighs in annoyance as you forget to get him a drink—yet he supposes he’ll just steal some of yours in return. 

“You got a lecture tomorrow too?” Sitting outside on a bench—cherry juice on your breath—is pleasantly eye-opening. With the city just waking up, it’s a profound experience to witness. 

“Yeah,” he hisses as you poke his cheek with your gelid fingers when he spaces out. 

“And you’ll wake up for it?” you remark sceptically, retracting your hand. He’s warm, you note—a mild flush on his cheeks from the boreal night. 

“‘Course.” His tone is somewhat insincere, especially right after he takes a swig of your drink. There’s a red trickle of the sticky juice that lingers on his mouth, and your eyes can’t help but be drawn to the motion of the liquid. 

“Okay…” It’s clear you don’t believe him. 

“What, you wanna skip?” Dan Heng doesn’t quite know what possesses him to ask. Maybe it’s the specific look in your eyes that makes him want you to acknowledge him—something childish and petulant, sure, but isn’t it natural to feel like this with your friend?

You weigh your options: Intro to Mechanics, or the slightly pleading look in his eyes?

“Um—” you swill down another gulp of the tart juice—there’s a prickle of redness on his cheeks as he realises he also took his sips from that particular spot. Sanguine coats your lips, and now it’s his turn to stare as your throat bobs and juice trickles from your warm mouth. “—sure.”

And perhaps watching B-rated horror movies isn’t the best way to keep grades up, but there’s something addictive about keeping his leg pressed against yours on his cramped couch—something he can’t quite put his finger on. 

When you tell Kafka about those forty-eight hours, she lets out a cackle that sounds like it’s been marinated for that long too—and she won’t tell you why. 

✦ . 　⁺

With the rigorous academia of college comes a universal, practically hallowed tradition that resides on the other side of its gleaming coin. Parties. Gatherings, events, soirées—whatever elegant name one wants to disguise it with, all meld into a party with enough booze and enough people. 

One lonesome Friday, there’s a ping that graces your phone—followed swiftly by another, then a final one that finally catches your attention. 

< Music Society: ANNOUNCEMENTS (do not reply) > 10:00 > For those in the Society, an opportunity to socialise and mingle with fellow club-goers is here for next SATURDAY. Hosted in the illustrious Avis Hall by the POP MUSIC division…. [108 members reacted to this message]

< Kafkalicious <3 > 10:05 > I’m picking you up.  10:06 > There’s no way you actually have good clothes to wear for this. 

Sheepishly, you type out an affirmative. The club can brand this however they want, but the specific division they’re referring to is often labelled the unhinged party of the year—sneaking in dozens of students who aren’t necessarily in the Music Club, serving enough liquor to comfortably drown in—yet still managing to keep it under wraps. Unfortunately, this also means the clothing you have in your dresser—casual ensembles and a few ones suitable for performing as a member of a band in the darkwave genre—won’t cut it. 

Which is precisely why you’re feeling the biting cold particularly clearly as soon as the next Saturday rolls around—Kafka’s lended jacket does little to warm you up when the mesh, spider webbing top she selected lets through all the frigid air. It ghosts white against your skin, while the pallored cargoes she picked out are likewise spectral and blend in against the snow dotted around campus. Even the jewellery she painstakingly selected is almost intransient: shifting like silvery mercury against skin with their delicate links and chains. To put it simply, the only skin that isn’t somewhat on display is the skin of your legs—the trousers are thankfully opaque. 

As you enter the building, the strong odour of spirits and alcohol hits you: just like any other college, its parties aren’t any more illustrious than the next. 

There’s the press of bodies against bodies in the small hall; dim lights make it hard to spot anyone clearly, let alone your friends. If it weren’t for the stumbling wake of drunken dancers in your path, it might’ve been easier to navigate—but this building is crowded, and you probably would’ve been swallowed in the horde already were it not for the sight of the stairs in the corner. 

With a solo cup unceremoniously taken, you inch past the thumping decibels of music that cannot be classified as pop—ironically, almost every genre save the division’s namesake plays before it—and the amorphous mess of people milling about on the ground floor. 

A text from March 7th saves you the trouble of meticulously searching the rooms to find your friends. 

< National Cereal Day <3 > 21:16 > first floor, room at the end of the corridor!! We’re playing seven minutes hurry up!!

It’s why you find yourself squished between Kafka and Himeko in the dim room; if you squint, you can make out Dan Heng, Caelus, March 7th and some other oddballs like Ruan Mei and a few you can’t place the name of. 

There’s no actual closet in the room, which brings in question the integrity of this game. A confused glance at Kafka later, and you get your answer—the janitor closet next door will suffice, won’t it? 

“You look simply divine,” she compliments directly into your ear, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who the glare she feels on her belongs to. 

“I bet my stylist would love hearing that,” you shoot back, and she twirls her hair coquettishly in response. She’s right—the outfit she picked out for you feels like you’re about to step into an angelic rave, minus the wings. 

Is it luck that spins your name first?

You swill down the bitter, slightly lukewarm alcohol down—setting the red plastic down as you select a piece of paper out of the hat. Kafka whistles as you take your time unfolding it; she’s got a knack for noticing things that people hide in the shadows, and currently she’s noticing how your little friend’s hands clench tight around his trousers in the dark. It almost makes her feel bad—almost. 

“Uh—” your brows raise in mild surprise. Dan Heng’s breath hitches, and now even March notices—the look she sends him is one half-disbelieving, half it just dawned on her. There’s approximately a nine-percent chance of being drawn—

“Dan Heng,” you read carefully. What a joke—to have someone you’re close to rather than not to accompany you to the space sequestered away in the hallway. When you look up at him, there’s a strange expression settled on his face: slightly agape, as though he’s uncomfortable with the thought of being in a closet with you. 

He stands abruptly, and you flounder after him: too busy ignoring the wolf whistles to notice the faint rosy hue that radiates from his ears. 

Maybe you would’ve asked him if he was okay with this, but the way he opens the janitor closet door and steps in leaves you at a loss for words instead. As it stands, you simply follow him in—the heavy thud that resounds from outside confirms that there’s no backing out. 

It’s smaller than you expected; only a foot or so separates the two of you, and the air is thick with the lingering odour of lemon-scented cleaning chemicals. You’re thankful for the faint tendrils of light that pierce through the small holes in the door—since at least now you can observe the look on his face as he glances at the floor, then the shelves. Anywhere but your face. 

“You… alright there?” you murmur. There’s a certain incandescence to his features as he looks back up, evidently startled by your question. If you focus on the heavy bass that you can somehow faintly hear from downstairs, the effect is almost dizzying. 

“Um,” he begins hesitantly—that in of itself strikes you as unusual. “I’ve never kissed anyone, so don’t expect too much—”

“Dan Heng,” you interrupt, and suppress a laugh as his head snaps up awkwardly. “This game doesn’t actually force people to kiss.”

“Oh,” he starts, and this time you don’t miss the hazy red painting his cheeks. “I… knew that.”

You snicker—he can’t bring himself to meet your eyes. “Yeah. We can pretty much just stand here until seven minutes are up. Talk. Gossip. Hang out in this tiny space.”

It’s easier said than done, though. You can smell his cologne, the scent of the liquor he drank earlier tainting his breath; you can feel the warmth radiating from his body as he shifts in place. This isn’t comfortable, but you don’t mind staying like this for those few minutes. 

“But,” and your eyebrows pique at that word. “I’d like the full game experience.”

Wow. That’s new, but then again, he’s always saying things you don’t expect. You mull over a reply quickly—he’s practically trembling after all, breathing shallow and face radiating the same rosy shade as his cheeks now. 

“Oh? Would you have asked this of whoever you ended up with?” It’s out of curiosity that you ask, but you’re hoping his answer will be a no. 

“No,” he breathes. “I’d rather have my friend be my first kiss.”

“So we’re doing this as friends?” you mutter. Your hand slips under his chin, and you can feel his breathing waver. You’re no stranger to friends with benefits-type situations, which is precisely why you miss the adoring look his eyes briefly hold—flushed, hazed, yours. 

“Exac—exactly,” he practically whines as you grip his face tighter. He’s scorching to the touch, much more than usual. “Don’t get the wrong idea—”

His hands loop around your neck as you lean down to match his height. Your eyes follow his throat bobbing when he swallows nervously. 

“Dan Heng.” He clams up immediately as you tilt his head upwards. “Shut up.”

“Mmph—” Whatever he’s about to reply with is cut off by your lips pressing against his suddenly—his movements come to a halt as his arms coil tighter around your neck. Almost reflexively, like some sort of snake. 

He tastes like venom too—the impression of liquor and a hint of whiskey clings avariciously to his lips. If you weren’t so pressed for time, you would’ve spent longer tasting his flesh. But judging by the desperate curl of his hands tangling in the chains around your neck, it appears he feels hounded by the sand grains in the hourglass as well. 

Your thumb and forefinger press into the sides of his face. Pliantly, obediently, his lips open with a gasp; you waste none of those precious sand grains in how you languorously probe into the warmth of his mouth. Just as you taste the profound tang of alcohol and salt on his tongue, so does he taste the familiar palette of sweets on your own. Sweets that you’ve shared with him on all those snack runs. 

The very thought of it makes him press urgently into you. He’s shivering as he melds the seams between your lips and his more: chest rising and falling heavily as he laces you tight against him. But that’s a mistake—your much-too-thin shirt lays bare all the divots and dips of your flesh against his, and his mind blanks out shamelessly as he whines low into your mouth. 

He flinches as he feels himself sink down onto your thigh—flinches as he hears himself. 

“You good?” you murmur as you pull back. Your thumb traces small circles in his side, and perhaps that’s his last straw; he’s tugging you back onto his mouth with a small groan. 

So, so good, his thoughts jumble out in a haze, and it’s not until you pause that he realises that he did, in fact, say that aloud. 

But it’s not like he cares: not when your scalding mouth targets his jaw. Rough fingers grasp at his hair and crane his neck backwards, and it takes everything within him to muffle the sounds he’s making. 

Fuck, fuck. 

Almost unconsciously, he’s grinding on your leg—blood rushing straight to his head with how numb his mind feels. Aeons above. As you trail your mouth beneath his collar, he can feel his abdomen tighten impossibly. 

“Ah—” he lets out as you nip at his collarbone, and those eyes go wide as saucers as he stutters to a halt against you. He’s practically dripping into his boxers: hips flush against your leg, so utterly done for as you shoot him a grin. 

“I hope that was satisfactory,” you deliberately speak with a polite cadence, as if he wasn’t just writhing against you. As if— as if you weren’t just drawing him to the brink of pleasure. “Did you enjoy the game?”

Perhaps he should be grateful when the scraping sound appears once more and light—though not much brighter—floods into the small space. Perhaps he should be thankful, but instead he buries his red face in his hands and desperately composes himself—bile entering his mouth at the interruption. 

He leaves early that night. 

✦ . 　⁺

A friend, as he buries his face in his pillow and ignores the painful tent in his pants. The air conditioning turned on full blast with the winter breeze streaming through the open window does nothing to cool him down—skin burning, teeth worrying away at his lips. 

A friend, as he recalls the skilled movements of your hands against both the fretboard and his skin—drawing out small noises that he can’t help but blush at. 

A friend,  as his own hands attempt to recreate the feeling of your body on his—practically towering over him in that small space. If he closes his eyes, he can picture it vividly: tasting even the liquor that lingered in your mouth just an hour or so prior, feeling the firm press of your arms as you caged him against those shelves. 

Did you… want to go further?

As a friend, surely it would be rude to not acquiesce, right?

“Dan Heng?” That’s your voice, right? He’s not… imagining things now, is he?

With a start, he realises he’s staring at his phone—black reflection coming to life with his sudden movement, revealing that he did in fact call you. 

“Yes,” he practically whines as he soaks in the rougher lilt of your voice; if he zones out, he can almost feel your breath ghosting across his neck and stirring the dark curls by his ear. 

“Did you need something?” Stoic image gone, he’s entranced by the cooler tone of voice—fuck, fuck. There’s a dark crimson flush on his face, and a sheen on his forehead as he smiles against the receiver. 

“Wanna come over?” Aeons he’s desperate—vocal cords twisting into something breathier, heavy with implication. 

“Oh—” and he can practically hear the purring grin stretching out your face—taunting him that he can’t see it at the minute. “—I get it now.”

“You— you do?” He feels himself twitch against his mattress, ever so slightly shifting until he’s rocking gently while you speak. 

“You want more from me, don’t you?” There’s a mocking tone laced under your words; common to when you make fun of him, but currently, it only serves to make him harder. 

“Yes,” he groans, half-muffled through his pillow. 

He’s so, so shameless. 

“You alone?”

Luck smiles upon him tonight. He’s never been particularly fortunate—serendipity for him is painfully average. The most he expects from his middling chance is for his boot to occasionally knock against a discarded penny: burnished copper never picked up by his clean hands regardless. 

But tonight? He’s lucky. 

“Yeah,” he slurs into the soft fabric. “Roommate’s gone home for the weekend—I’m all alone for you.”

No feelings involved, he thinks—too oblivious to notice the dopey grin on his face as he hears your next words: 

“Give me ten minutes.”

And when you disconnect with a sharp click, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the hazed look dilating his pupils is akin to a rather adoring one. 

✦ . 　⁺

Fuck—he should’ve never suggested this, he should’ve never come to that stupid party in the first place. 

It’s only one predicament after another; squirming on the edge of the bed was not what he had in mind when he practically begged you to come over. But now he’s in this mess because of only himself: rolling his fucking eyes back while you spread his pliant thighs even further with your shoulders. 

His teary gaze meets yours from where you’re kneeling before him, staring right at his face as you trail your mouth across his weeping cock. It’s torturous—and worst of all, he can’t feel himself softening anytime soon. Not even with the pearled globs of white that spilled just from grinding into your leg, and definitely not with his sore chest as you soothed it with your balmy mouth: bruising teeth marks upon bruising teeth marks left to bloom mauve come tomorrow. 

“Hurry—ah,” he whines as you suckle on the angry, flushed head; cold saliva and precum drip down the length, and he shivers at the sticky shick-shick that resounds in his small dorm as a result of your pistoning hand. 

But contrary to his plea, your pace slows until it’s deliciously agonising. He wants to buck his needy hips into your face—yet your hand firmly maroons him on the spot by his trembling waist. 

Aeons, his flesh feels scalding beneath his taut skin—the bloodiest of reds sprawls across his damp cheeks, to his shoulders, to even his very chest. 

Even like this—with just your warm, slick mouth barely grazing him—he can feel the now-familiar tightness in his abdomen building up within. But you don’t let him adjust to the new pace you’ve set; almost immediately after his mind stops reeling, you dip your head and take him down your throat. 

He’s arching into your touch reflexively as white spurts onto your tongue—messy, thick. It dribbles from the corners of your mouth as you swallow with him still in your mouth; tears streak from his placid eyes at the weird sensation in his stomach that leaves his hips writhing with how sensitive he feels. 

“Fuck, fuck,” he mewls as you finally draw back with a wet pop sound—lips slick with his release as you lick them clean. The view certainly doesn’t help him; you’re looking at him so ravenously that his flush won’t ever let up. 

“Happy?” You’re licking your fingers clean now, and he’s aching once more. 

“No—” he sobs as he twitches in your tight grasp. His head’s spinning, but he’s so fucking empty he wants to cry. 

“You want more?” Can you believe this guy?—your expression seems to state: a slight concern present in the pique of your brow. 

“Yes, yes,” he slurs, cupping your face in his scorching fingers. “Need you in me.”

Despite his words, he’s gasping as you slide a single finger in: roughly probing to only the second knuckle, but he’s already gripping onto your shoulders for dear life. 

“Mmph—feels weird,” he breathes before you kiss him sweetly. Your mouth swallows up his cries as he adjusts to the sensation that makes his stomach churn devastatingly. It’s uncomfortable, but he wants you to be buried in him—wants you to lose yourself in his tight walls and never want to let him go. 

When you probe a second finger in, he’s struggling to prop himself up: arms shaking far too much as you scissor and stretch him open. It hurts, but there’s something budding in his gut that keeps pulling whine after whine out of his kiss-bitten lips. 

That all changes when you crook your fingers slightly. Something shifts inside his walls—a specific spot of nerves is pressed, and he freezes in your arms. 

“Wait—ah—feels strange,” he gasps out. You rock him closer, but you don’t relent with the steady pistoning of your fingers: making sure to brush and hammer right into that spot. His eyes dart everywhere and nowhere—dizzy as a twirling teacup, beyond measure. He’s stuffed so full; each time he hears that squelch, he can’t help but moan out. 

“It’s okay,” you murmur softly in his ear. He shivers at the small gesture—so tender he’s getting whiplash, quite frankly. “You’re doing great.”

“Ngh—” he whimpers—he fucking whimpers—at the praise. Maybe it’s the proximity of your skin against his naked body, or maybe it’s your words—but he’s clenching around your goddamn fingers as he spills more white over himself and now you. The aftershocks hit him like a train; blinding incandescence flashes bright in his eyelids while his body writhes against you. 

“That’s a surprise,” you mutter. What’s a surprise?—is what he wants to ask, but a gasp is forced out of him as soon as your fingers leave him. 

“See that?” you ask in fascination as you lift them—clear tendrils coat the digits, sopping all over his sheets and staining his own face a dark red. “Must’ve liked it, huh.”

“Shut up,” he hisses. Although, it’s pointless to even begin to defend himself—not when his dripping hole still flutters like it was made for you. 

“Oh— oh fuck,” he eats his words as soon as you smear his fluids against his peaked nipples; cock bobbing stiffly against his tummy with each languid ministration. 

“So weak-willed,” you coo; he’s so cute like this. Knuckles white with how fastened they are to the sheets, it’s really no surprise that he looks like he’s losing his mind. Those blue irises are almost completely gone—dilated completely as he gazes up at you with a quivering bottom lip. 

With a shaking hand, he pulls you closer by your white belt loops—you’ll have to apologise to Kafka later, since you’ll never wear these ruined clothes again. 

He’s the one who unzips your pants. He’s the one who palms your front—it’s so heavy and warm he can’t help but feel a little flustered by the foreign feeling. He’s the one who ultimately slips past the underwear and handles it with something close to reverence. 

“Fuck,” you hiss as his hands wrap carefully around your sore cock—neglected, but so utterly worth it as he gazes all doe-eyed at you. “Dan Heng, baby—”

His fingers quaver to a halt, and he stares with eyes large as saucers. Ignoring the obvious stain on his cheeks, it’s evident his breathing’s picked up to shallow, rapid rise-and-falls. 

“Aeons, please put it in,” he all but begs. His syllables stumble over each other in a race to exit his mouth first, but they trip into incoherency as he feels the fat head of your dick press against his slick hole. 

“Ah.” He cants his hips upwards in delight—stars in his eyes and shimmering across his mind’s theatre as the very shaft burns into him with a slow squelch. Hurts so good, he wants to say, but all that comes out of his mouth is a drawn-out moan as you latch onto his fat tits with your mouth—suckling—until he feels the sensitive buds harden once more. 

He’s so embarrassingly close from just the tip alone—especially since your tongue is unrelenting, just the way he likes—

“Ngh— fuck, I’m cumming,” he wails, choking each word out just as your teeth graze his chest. But you’re unrelenting, even as you’re groaning into his ear from how he tightens around you—you simply rock him in your arms so he can ride out his orgasm. 

The waves of pleasure ebb and flow in his mind so poignantly he sees the most blinding of whites. Right after it fades, he’s greeted with the sight of your face and chest plastered with slightly thinner, paler ropes of liquid. 

“Aeons.” He barely knows what he’s doing anymore. Weakly, his tongue kitten licks and suckles the salty liquid off the areas he can access—namely, your jaw and neck—before he bites hard on the flesh, slinking his arms tightly around your nape so he can arch into your touch. 

He’s softened now, but he’ll be damned if you don’t stuff him full for the rest of the night. 

“So pretty like this,” you whisper. The words, paired with the slightest roll of your hips as you adjust your position, jolts him with a delicious pain. “You wanna keep going?”

“Yes, ah—” he sobs, legs wrapping tightly around your waist. It hurts—his dick feels spent and all too sensitive to the lightest of brushes of your soaked abdomen. But despite it all, he can still feel the stupid thing harden once more as he imagines you filling him to the brim. 

“Fuck,” you curse, long and drawn-out as his hole flutters around you once more. “So damn tight.”

Inch by inch, he takes you deeper; swearing he’ll be split in half by the time you’re done with him. Uncontrollable moans spill from him, mixed with incoherent babbling as he claws at your skin; he feels so damn full that his spent cock still dribbles precum from the slit. 

“Are you in fully?” he slurs after a few more minutes of this agony. It’s not until he glances down and sees a bulge in his lower stomach that his heart skips a beat—only to find you admiring the sight too. You lift your hand, and—

“Wait,” he begs, but it’s already too late.

—you press down on the mound in his tummy, and he wails. 

He arches into your touch fully; tears leaking out his eyes as drool escapes his lips. Like a mantra, he’s chanting your name in between his broken sobs—too cock-drunk to think about formulating any other word. There’s only thin cum streaming from his softened dick now—and it hurts so good. 

His mind’s so numb, but there’s still something missing from this giant puzzle. 

He’s so far gone with pleasure that he can’t think of anything else. 

“Do you want to stop?” Your voice comes fuzzy and disembodied, like he’s hearing you through a pool. But he musters up enough energy to shake his head in a vehement no. 

“Keep— keep going,” he whimpers. That’s all the encouragement you need as you start moving faster, thick cock splitting him right in two as you tightly grip his hips. With each collision of your pelvis against his plush ass, a devastated whine rips out his hoarse throat. He’s so spent, but somewhere in his subconscious he wants you to think how good he squeezes you, how tight and warm he is around you. 

“Aeons, you’re so beautiful like this,” you mutter between kissing him desperately. With each rough thrust, you drill into his prostate over and over—blood wells up on your back with how hard he digs his crescent nails in. 

“Fuck—” you swear as you finally spill into him—hot seed stuffing his hole so full that he sees stars one final time. It’s a dry orgasm—he thinks he hears you say, but he’s far too delirious to think of anything but the sopping mess between his legs. 

His eyes flutter shut, and the last thing he can feel is the warm, gentle touch of a wet cloth wiping him down—and the sweet press of a kiss against his forehead as he slips into the land of slumber. 

It may have been a bad decision. He may have a crisis over his terrible impulsivity. It may have felt so good he was positively wracked with pain. 

None of that stops him from coming back for more. And more. And more, until it’s more common to see Dan Heng with a bite mark just poking out the top of his turtleneck than not. 

When you tell Kafka about this hypothetical friends-with-benefits situation, she supports you—of course she does. But what she doesn’t tell you is how this man looks at you.

She’s a poet, so she could talk about how enamoured his gaze is. How devoted the brush of his knuckles against yours is. How he looks at you as if the stars strewn across the fabric of space were your doing. 

But she’s a sadist, so the adoring haze in your so-called ‘friend’s’ expression is one she lets you be oblivious to. 

If every other band-mate of yours can see how obsessed he is with your very existence, surely you’ll be able to tell eventually?

[max1461]

I've said this before, but I was identified as gifted in elementary school but my school didn't have any kind of gifted program or anything like that so nothing was done about it. Later in life when I met people who did go through gifted programs, especially earlier in their education, I always thought "oof, glad I did go to one of those". Of course this is purely anecdotal I don't have any policy opinions based on this. But I have the sense that it would have made my thinking more academically myopic and robbed me of the chance to develop the genuine autodidactism that has served me very well.

Like, from middle school through high school I hated the math I was being taught. Not because it was too easy, but because (among other reasons) I wasn't any good at it. Turns out I was good at proof-based math, which I found out by Browsing The Web, and in college I was a math major and did very well and loved it. But I just scraped by in HS calculus and stats. If they were even harder and more rigorous and so on I probably would have concluded I wasn't cut out for math.

[utilitycaster]

Imo (as someone who didn't watch the finale, so I'm happy to be wrong), one of the bigger problems with the ending that isn't being discussed is that religions don't work like that. I'm not talking about cosmology or divinity, which people have already spoken on plenty, but the people who actually believe the beliefs.

There are people who believe their god was in some way mortal (Buddhists, some Christians), but they still practice the belief. I'm Jewish, and if it was definitively proven that God isn't real, I would still be a practicing Jew. The gods of Exandria becoming mortal would definitely cause schisms and theological debates, but the gods as concepts would continue to hold power regardless of their mortality or continued existence. Vasselheim would change, but it wouldn't be rocked to its knees.

Obviously, the cast has their own biases and thoughts on religion. That's understandable, but in a campaign and world that is increasingly about How Religion Amd Gods Shape Things, why is religion treated only as a plot point and not a dynamic of understanding the world, yaknow?

This is a hard question to answer since I think to truly give a good answer I'd need a thesis statement and several weeks of writing, but in short, as myself a practicing Jew and philosophically somewhere between weak and apathetic agnosticism I agree that Exandria as a setting did a good job of exploring individual faith/devotion to divinity, and a very bad job of exploring the concept of religion on an anthropological level.

I do think the fact that most of the people with whom I can have a conversation about this are either fellow non-Christians existing in a Christian dominated society; left-leaning Catholics from a rigorous intellectual tradition in the Protestant-dominated US; or people who left a more conservative Christian sect for a more progressive one and in doing so interrogated the nature of religion and faith is telling. I think if you were raised strictly Christian and either swore off religion entirely (the ex-Evangelicals who never unlearned lack of empathy/self-centeredness and simply applied it in a different direction) or were raised Christian but not particularly religious and live in a culturally Christian society in which that is the norm and thus you never had to see yourself as a person with an identity and a practice outside said norm, you are far more likely fail to adequately notice this as a problem with Exandrian worldbuilding.

Something that struck me as I thought about this (on my solo walks to and from synagogue today, no less) is that I am someone who for various reasons, academic, religious, and otherwise, has spent a lot of time thinking about the role of ritual in daily life. And the thing is, "ritual" has in many cases been coopted into a thing you do very much for yourself, often with a capitalist slant - self-care as consumption as ritual. (If you look up companies named Ritual, it's zero proof spirits and vitamins/supplements and takeout). It is individualist and is intended to soothe one's self.

Ritual is far more than that. Ritual is a sign of community. It is a means of remembrance. It is a reminder to look outside of yourself. We light candles on Friday night not for ourselves - indeed, we are prohibited from using them as a light source - but to welcome someone of something else. We blow the shofar to wake ourselves and our community up to what we can can change and do better.

Jester and Caduceus are in my opinion the strongest practitioners of ritual across campaigns, but both are from very small groups of practitioners. We meet many clerics and adherents, but their stories or their experiences with religion as part of daily life are largely untold.

And this is just about ritual, which is in many cases neutral or even positive, but as discussed there is no real hegemony - Vasselheim holds respect and serves as a vault for divine secrets, but outside of that has little political sway. Caduceus and Fjord do not answer to Hierophant Ophera. We also see very little of those theological questions or debates - one must imagine they occur, but it, like the world of ritual or religious service, feels oddly empty. There are temples, and there are keepers of those temples, but the temples always feel like they pop into existence for the PCs and vanish when they're not present. I remember during Campaign 2 there was a great discussion of how D&D offers a concept of religion without the need for faith in the unseen - the gods exist definitively - and it just feels like that's never been reflected meaningfully in the world of Exandria, and that wasn't really a problem with Campaigns 1 or 2 and it very much was with the concepts C3 attempted to tackle.

[odileeclipse]

HIII HELLO ODELIE!!! Hope You're having a nice day/night, especially after that card incident! I'm gonna get straight to the point, because quite frankly, I'm very bad at starting up messages (and this is probably my 2nd or 3rd ask on Tumblr, EVER)– I LOVE the way You portray the reader in Your Sage of Truth fanfic! I'm personally more of a Pure Vanilla gal myself–something about him scratches my brain in just the right way (another reason I love Your blog <3 ), but Your Sage of Truth characterization.... Amazing. Jaw dropping. Makes me giggle and kick my feet like a lovesick schoolgirl. Just the right amount of compassionate & understanding, and ABSOLUTELY intimidating (because of both his patience AND authority). BUT! Back to the reader; I really enjoy that we can actually see them STRUGGLE. We can see the gears turning in their head, the knowledge doesn't just come to them with a snap of the finger or materialize in their head out of thin air. They have to work for it, and oh boy, do they work HARD! When it comes to the teacher/student, or mentor/protégée trope–I notice that the readers (who are most often the students/protégées in question) are often quite glamorized, so to speak. In a lot of fanfics with said trope, we don't really see the struggle of a student desperately trying to keep up with their peers, feeling like they are somehow worse or dumber for not immediately understanding hard concepts and ideas. And don't get me wrong, not every fanfic has to show that! But I have to say, I found it quite comforting–to see a reader that a LOT of people, myself included, can relate to. Someone who IS more than willing to learn– but someone who also needs time, patience, and compassion too.

And on another note; I ADORE their little friend group, too. Reminds me so much of my own friends and how we jokingly bully each other. Hazelnut Biscotti is an absolute mood.

Hope this message was somewhat coherent and understandable! English isn't my first language, but I tried EXTRA hard to show just how much I love your work lmao!

– ⚜️anon

You know what's really funny I'm a pure vanilla person too but my audience seems to really really love shadow milk cookie, which I love both and found myself almost faltering and betraying Pure Vanilla but I am true to myself and at heart Pure Vanilla is my #1!

The sage of truth to me is someone who is kind and compassionate, the reason he isn't as theatrical right now currently in the story is because he isn't particularly close to the reader yet so he isn't going to disrupt the boundary of student and tutor because we haven't gotten there yet. But also, in the KR version (I've said before I go based off of the KR voice lines) he is more soft-spoken less theatrical and a lot more kind. His voice lines reflect that, but the tone is just so much kinder, and it has this sense he always wants to see people enlightened with knowledge and encouraging other cookies to disagree with him. Of course, he will ask for evidence and all that jazz. And this gives me a chance to address some questions I've gotten frequently, the (y/n) or mc or whatever anyone prefers, is NOT stupid. And to the people who asked no this is not me reprimanding you because I understand however, I wanted this to be realistic. Think about it being at an academy where "The Sage of Truth" is I imagine it's a very competitive place to be and the classes are extremely difficult the reader got there somehow which means no they are not dumb but the academic life at a rigorous level is difficult for anyone.

I also wanted to reflect on how hard it is that some professors do in fact call out students who don't know the material, but I know a majority of them do it because they want to see you succeed. I think I did include that the reader had been previously attending office hours with Professor Almond Custard Cookie if not this is now canon to the story. Which is why the professor knows them by name and calls on them in class. It has definitely happened to me before irl too except I don't know why my professor knows my name...I guess it's because I was in a discussion section with them...anyways I rambled but my point is I wanted to make an interesting story about what I think Shadow Milk could have been like while using my own experiences to shape the story, which is only really in the academic sense.

I also wanted to base the cookies on friends I have now and have had in the past, I didn't really want them to come across as yes men to the reader but as actual friends and what I think is the most fun dynamic between friends. I wanted the cookies in the story to seem like they were their own thing. Reading all of this I didn't mean for all of this to come out poetically or anything, but I really am passionate about writing.

Thank you for the kind words and for allowing me to reflect on this story, I really do appreciate and love when people send in long messages like this concerning anything really...Thank you for reading my story and enjoying it I hope today's update will keep you guys full for the next 2-3 days!!! I'm glad you put in the effort to ask anything it's a lot more meaningful than you think <3

-Odile

[transmutationisms]

hello! im just finishing up my read of structures of scientific revolutions, which has genuinely been very useful and shifted my understanding of science in a way being around people doing scientific research all day really didn't! i don't have a liberal arts education so i would love to get a sense of (a) what else of the philosophy / history of science canon is worth reading in the original (b) standard review papers or introductory textbooks and (c) critiques of the canon. i understand this is a big ask ofc, so feel free to point me to good depts / syllabi from good courses. thanks :)

yessss such a fun question >:) so, the thing that was so great about 'the structure of scientific revolutions', which i'm sure you've picked up on, is that kuhn pushed historians and philosophers of science to challenge the positivist model of science as a linearly progressive search to 'accumulate knowledge'. the idea of a 'paradigm shift' was itself a paradigm shift at the time; it was an early example of a language for talking about radical change in science without giving into the assumption that change necessarily = 'progress' (defined by national interests, mathematisation, and so forth). this is still an approach that's foundational to history and philosophy of science; it's now taken as so axiomatic that few academics even bother to gloss or defend it in monographs (which raises its own issue with public communication, lol).

where kuhn falls apart more (and this was typical for a philosopher of his era, training, and academic milieu) is in the fact that he never developed any kind of rigorous sociological analysis of science (despite alluding to such a thing being necessary) and you probably also noticed that he makes a few major leaps that indicate he's not fully committed to thinking through the relationship between science and politics. so for example, we might ask, can a paradigm shift ever occur for a reason other than a discovered 'anomaly' that the previous paradigm can't account for? for instance, how do political investments in science and scientific theories affect what's accepted as 'normal science' in a kuhnian sense? are there historical or present cases where a paradigm didn't change even though it persistently failed to explain certain empirical observations or data? what about the opposite, where a paradigm did change, but it wasn't necessarily or exclusively because the new paradigm was a 'better' explanation scientifically? how do we determine what makes an explanation 'better', anyway, especially given that kuhn himself was very much invested in moving beyond the naïve realist position? and on the more sociological side, we can raise issues like: say you're a scientist and you legitimately have discovered an 'anomaly'. how do you communicate that to other scientists? what mechanisms of knowledge production and publication enable you to circulate that information and to be taken seriously? what modes of communication must you use and what credentials or interpersonal connections must you have? what factors cause theories and discoveries to be taken more or less seriously, or adopted more or less quickly, besides just their 'scientific utility' (again, assuming we can even define such a thing)?

again, this is not to shit on kuhn, but to point out that both history and philosophy of science have had a lot of avenues to explore since his work. note that there are a few major disciplinary distinctions here, each with many sub-schools of thought. a 'science and technology studies' or STS program tends to be a mix of sociological and philosophical analysis of science, often with an emphasis on 'technoscience' and much less on historical analysis. a philosophy of science department will be anchored more firmly in the philosophical approach, so you'll find a lot of methodological critique, and a lot of scholarship that seeks to tackle current aporias in science using various philosophical frameworks. a history of science program is fundamentally just a sub-discipline of history, and scholarship in this area asks about the development of science over time, how various forms of thinking came into and out of favour, and so forth. often a department will do both history and philosophy of science (HPS). historians of medicine, technology, and mathematics will sometimes (for arcane scholastic reasons varying by field, training, and country) be anchored in departments of medicine / technology / mathematics, rather than with other faculty of histsci / HPS. but, increasingly in the anglosphere you'll see departments that cover history of science, technology, and mathematics (HSTM) together. obviously, all of these distinctions say more about professional qualifications and university bureaucracy than they do about the actual subject matter; in actuality, a good history of science should virtually always include attention to some philosophical and sociological dimensions, and vice versa.

anyway—reading recs:

there are two general reference texts i would recommend here if you just want to get some compilations of major / 'canonical' works in this field. both are edited volumes, so you can skip around in them as much as you want. both are also very limited in focus to, again, a very particular 'western canon' defined largely by trends in anglo academia over the past half-century or so.

philosophy of science: the central issues (1998 [2013], ed. martin curd & j. a. cover). this is an anthology of older readings in philsci. it's a good introduction to many of the methodological questions and problems that the field has grown around; most of these readings have little to no historical grounding and aren't pretending otherwise.

the cambridge history of science (8 vols., 2008–2020, gen. eds. david c. lindberg & ron numbers). no one reads this entire set because it's long as shit. however, each volume has its own temporal / topical focus, and the essays function as a crash-course in historical methodology in addition to whatever value you derive from the case studies in their own right. i like these vols much more than the curd & cover, but if you really want to dig into the philosophical issues and not the histories, curd & cover might be more fun.

besides those, here are some readings in histsci / philsci that i'd recommend if you're interested. for consistency i ordered these by publication date, but bolded a few i would recommend as actual starting points lol. again some of these focus on specific historical cases, but are also useful imo methodologically, regardless of how much you care about the specific topic being discussed.

Robert M. Young. 1969. "Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory." Past & Present 43: 109–145.

David Bloor. 1976 [1991]. Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (here is a really useful extract that covers the main points of this text).

Ian Hacking. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steven Shapin. 1988. “Understanding the Merton Thesis.” Isis 79 (4): 594–605.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. 1989. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mario Biagioli. 1993. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bruno Latour. 1993. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Margaret W. Rossiter. 1993. “The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science.” Social Studies of Science 23 (2): 325–41.

Andrew Pickering. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Porter, Theodore M. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Peter Galison. 1997. “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief.” In The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli, 137–60. New York: Routledge.

Crosbie Smith. 1998. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chambers, David Wade, and Richard Gillespie. “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge.” Osiris 15 (2000): 221–40.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. Zone Books, 2002.

Timothy Mitchell. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

James A. Secord. 2003. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Sheila Jasanoff. 2006. “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science.” Osiris 21 (1): 273–92.

Murphy, Michelle. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Duke University Press, 2006.

Kapil Raj. 2007. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schiebinger, Londa L. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Galison, Peter. “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science.” Isis 99, no. 1 (2008): 111–24.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Zone Books, 2010.

Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2011. “The Muddle of Modernity.” American Historical Review 116 (3): 663–75.

Forman, Paul. “On the Historical Forms of Knowledge Production and Curation: Modernity Entailed Disciplinarity, Postmodernity Entails Antidisciplinarity.” Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012): 56–97.

Ashworth, William J. 2014. "The British Industrial Revolution and the the Ideological Revolution: Science, Neoliberalism, and History." History of Science 52 (2): 178–199.

Mavhunga, Clapperton. 2014. Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lynn Nyhart. 2016. “Historiography of the History of Science.” In A Companion to the History of Science, edited by Bernard Lightman, 7–22. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell.

Rana Hogarth. 2017. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Suman Seth. 2018. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Aro Velmet. 2020. Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, its Colonies, and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

i would also say, as a general rule, these books are generally all so well-known that there are very good book reviews and review essays on them, which you can find through jstor / your library's database. these can be invaluable both because your reading list would otherwise just mushroom out forever, and because a good review can help you decide whether you even need / want to sit down with the book itself in the first place. literally zero shame in reading an academic text secondhand via reviews.

[comicaurora]

Hey, firstly I just wanted to say I’ve been consuming your content for years and thank you and Blue for being the only thing that kept my academic brain from turning to mush during online COVID middle school!

But I’m entering a new academic era, notably Junior year of my very rigorous collage prep program at my high school. I’ve always thought I would go to collage after high school but I’ve recently stumbled into some very interesting ways of making a living only perusing my creative passions (some very scary publishing opportunities). So I’ve been wondering if I actually want to go to collage or not, since going to collage just to be a published writer is an objective waste of money and I don’t want to spend the rest of high school breaking my neck earning collage credits I’m not going to use.

So I was wondering, if you had known you could make a living only perusing your creative passions, would you have spent the time, money and academic energy going to collage for something you didn’t end up doing professionally?

(I would ask my advisor but he’s too obviously pro collage and doesn’t have any experience making a living creatively).

(Sorry for the long ask)

No problem about the long ask! This is a very good question!

I'll start with the short answer, which is that nobody can make this decision but you, and if you decide not to go to college right now, that does not mean you are deciding to never go to college. Especially with Covid, plenty of people are taking gap years, and plenty of full-on adults go to college later in life, simply because the mood strikes them, or they now have income to burn, or they're interested in a career change, etc. This is not a coinflip that will decide the trajectory of the rest of your life.

For the longer answer, for me personally? Knowing I'd be able to earn a living doing art would have no bearing on my decision to go to college. Setting aside that a ton of the literary analysis my job is based on is skills I learned in college, I liked college because it gave me the opportunity to learn a wide swath of things, from anthropology courses to dinosaur science. I like learning new things! College was an opportunity to learn a ton of new things, and even if it was very challenging in places, I thrived in it. I didn't go to college with the goal of becoming qualified for a Real Job - because of who I am as a person I think I'd seriously struggle at most Real Jobs, and I knew that even back then. I was in college to learn, and to learn how to learn. I got my degree in mathematics, a thing I do not use in my Job, but the functionality of mathematics - to logically reason through problems, step by step, comparing it to known problems to map the way to solutions using operations that preserve truth - is an invaluable skill that I apply everywhere there are problems to solve, especially literary analysis. I learned a wide swath of tools with surprising applications, and I couldn't have known when I started how I might use them in the end.

However, there's a big caveat there. This was my personal experience of college as a playground where I could work towards a solid major and also branch out to take weird one-off electives and summer courses when anything struck my fancy. But I was in on a scholarship to cover a good chunk of my tuition, and one of my relatives very kindly paid for the rest. I got to do college without accruing any college debt, and that is an enormous factor. I can only share my personal take, but I'm not going to pretend that things would have been the same if I'd had to enter adulthood finding a way to quickly pay off a six-figure sum.

I've been extremely lucky to get to the point where I can navigate life in a way where money is very rarely something I need to worry about. It was certainly not always like that, and I do not miss those times, but it invariably shapes the way I see the world and the steps I took to get here. For me personally, I do not consider college in any way a waste of time; I think the opportunity to learn is one of the most exciting things out there. But my experience cannot be pretended to be universal.

This decision is yours, and it is also not final. Whatever choice you make, you can always choose again later. You have time.

[ninja-muse]

Life happened to me in a big way (but not a concerning one) this month, and it's tanked my reading scores and my energy for non-essentials. I hauled Saga, Vol. 12 but for reasons can't take a picture, and I broke my streak of reading off my physical TBR. Hopefully my monthly totals will start looking normal again soon?

That said, I'm almost drowning in immediate TBR—I'm halfway through a tome, I have two books waiting for me at the library, I won an e-ARC, there's a physical ARC at work that I need to get to for sharing purposes, Libby keeps notifying me about holds that are ready, and there's a book at work that's due to be returned to the publisher and which my library does not have (so I have to read it soon or never). I have put a pause on everything at the library for at least a week while I desperately try to catch up. Wish me luck.

No official review again this month either, for Life reasons again. Nothing was quite good enough and I didn't have the energy for a long write-up. But in short, Aunt Tigress is an urban fantasy with a complex world that did interesting things relating to intergenerational relationships, cultural appropriation, and self-acceptance; Once Was Willem was a thoroughly enjoyable medieval fantasy from a unique perspective; An African History of Africa was not as academically rigorous as I'd expected but a fairly decent intro/overview; The Twisted Ones was a T. Kingfisher horror, enough said; and Great Big Beautiful Life isn't my favourite Emily Henry but neither does it deserve the poorer reviews I've seen of it or the "just like Evelyn Hugo" comments. Also if you have 5 minutes to read Cranky, Crabby Crow (saves the world), you should do so.

My biggest book news of the month is I managed a major unhaul! I didn't count but I estimate I'm about 50 books down from when I started the month. I feel lighter. (Did I massively add to my general TBR by obsessively checking the library's on-order list? Also yes….)

My goals for June are to catch up on my immediate TBR a little and also to make Life stop happening quite so much. (I don't expect Life to stop attacking me entirely until sometime later in the summer. It is what it is.)

And now, without further ado, what I read this month in order of my enjoyment…

Aunt Tigress - Emily Yu-Xuan Qin

Tam Lin’s attempts at normality are upended when her Immortal aunt is murdered and she inherits her estate—and her problems.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (sapphic), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (sapphic), Chinese-Canadian protagonist, Chinese-Canadian secondary characters, Siksika secondary characters, Omani secondary character, Chinese-Canadian author, 🇨🇦

library book

Once Was Willem - M.R. Carey

Willem tells of the tale of his second life and the village he comes from—one which has hosted shapeshifters, magicians, robber barons, curses, and worse.

7/10

warning: deaths of children

library ebook

An African History of Africa - Zeinab Badawi

A history of Africa by an African author, using African sources.

6/10

warning: colonial atrocities, slavery, and war crimes

library book

The Twisted Ones - T. Kingfisher

A woman cleaning out her grandmother’s hoarder house stumbles upon something truly terrifying in the woods.

7/10

library ebook

Great Big Beautiful Life - Emily Henry

Alice Scott has the chance of a lifetime to write the biography of an aging, reclusive heiress. Only problem is, Hayden Anderson also has the same chance. Oh, and the heiress is being cagey.

7/10

library ebook

The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting - KJ Charles

Rob Loxleigh and his sister Marianne are charming their way through the Season with the goals of marrying wealthy. Sir John is keeping an eye on Rob, though—because the man’s interested in his niece, obviously. Not because the man’s handsome or anything.

6.5/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonists (Achillean)

library ebook

Picture books

Cranky, Crabby Crow (Saves the World) - Corey R. Tabor

Crow sits on his wire scaring everyone off, but maybe he has his reasons.

Everything’s Wrong - Jory John

What do you do when everything in your day just goes badly? Two friends find out.

Currently reading

At the Feet of the Sun - Victoria Goddard

Cliopher Mdang is keeping his promise to be Viceroy of Zunidh in his lord’s absence, but finding it harder to balance his courtly self with his traditional self, and his desires.

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (bisexual), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (Achillean), Polynesian-coded protagonist, highly diverse cast generally, 🇨🇦

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

Victorian detective stories

disabled POV character (limb injury), occasional Indian secondary characters

warning: racism, colonialism

Monthly total: 6 Yearly total: 44 Queer books: 2 Authors of colour: 2 Books by women: 5 Authors outside the binary: 0 Canadian authors: 1 Classics: 0 Off the TBR shelves: 0 Books hauled: 1 ARCs acquired: 2 ARCs unhauled: 0 DNFs: 0

January February March April

[qqueenofhades]

https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/751102464296665088

*Puts on old man costume*

"Back in my day, we used to cheat and procrastinate like real people! With copious amounts of bullshitting and pulling things out of our asses at the last minute! Secretly sneaking in little things written on our hands or in our phones fer tests and shit! Heck, maybe we didn't even NEED to cheat because it turns out we actually knew stuff, we just didn't know we knew stuff until our last minute papers got a good grade anyways because our shit actually had some analytical relevance borne from deep in our psyche, but we just didn't realize it because we had massive cases of imposter syndrome where we thought everyone else was smarter than us, while overlooking our own abilities!

Now these newfangled ChatGPTs are just taking the easy way out of the easy way out! What's up with that!? These new procrastinators and cheaters make us look even worse than we already do, cuz they ain't even doing the work of not doing the work! And y'all can't even say that you can learn from it in the art of bullshittin', cuz that's not even YOUR bullshitting, it's someone else's bullshitting mangled up with hundreds of other peoples' bullshittin'!

Feh, kids these days!"

*Takes off old man costume*

Addendum: old man anon griping about cheating with ChatGPT does not endorse cheating or procrastinating. I'm just being silly.

I mean... at least with regular old-fashioned cheating, also an academic tradition since time immemorial, at least you're engaging with the material somehow. You are putting your own two god-given eyeballs on that and using your own ickle brainikins to do SOMETHING with it, even if that something is morally questionable. We've all seen the elaborate cheat devices where someone managed to engrave all the exam answers onto a pen or a pair of socks or whatever -- at least that person went in and used their initiative to remember information SOMEHOW, and to do it under their own power. Now, yes, it will get you into trouble, and yes, there are plenty of conversations to be had about accessibility and the fact that not everyone learns by sitting in a room and being lectured at and then having to regurgitate it all from memory with no notes in a final exam, which is why there is a whole thriving field of educational pedagogy and best practices and how to accommodate students with different learning styles and etc. etc. I sometimes see AI framed as "uwu accessibility issue :(" and like... cmon. There are educational professionals who spend their whole lives and careers working out how to shake up the traditional learning format and present material in an engaging way and teach students how to think and write and otherwise be academic and rigorous. And like, if you're voluntarily in this space, then we presume you WANT that instruction! Not to just sit around and whine about how we aren't catering enough to you personally and this means you should get to use the Bullshit Plagiarism Nonsense Machine to never ever think at all!

Now, I will say that the naivete around AI is not only limited to students. I was in a department meeting yesterday where the literal associate dean of the college seemed startled to discover that AI might not be a) totally reliable b) able to totally replace lesson planning and evaluation/grading by an actual human professor (after several faculty members pushed back, shall we say, briskly on the idea that it could). Plenty of people still think it can just magically solve Academia (or /insert field here), and those are not just limited to clueless undergraduates. And yes, undergraduates are clueless in different ways and for different reasons in every era of the world; it is likewise an academic rite of passage. But I still cannot for the life of me understand why you, in ye olde benighted 21st century, would pay tens of thousands of dollars and/or accrue it in debt to go to college, to learn nothing, to whine and blame your professors for "not designing assignments well" (when again, every remotely decent educational professional agonizes for eons about how to do a good job of this for all kinds of students), to insist it is your entitled right to use the Bullshit Plagiarism Nonsense Machine, and then presumably be /shocked pikachu face/ when you don't learn anything and spend your time posting idiot takes on the internet. I mean. The state of critical thinking is /waves hand/ Already So Bad, and the AI craze plays directly into that by fulfilling the insidious fantasy that the hard things in life aren't actually hard and don't have to be learned by patient and careful practice. And that is just. Yeah. C'mon.

(I realize this was a funny/lighthearted ask, but yeah, we can consider this one old man turning to another old man on the park bench and making a joke, and the other old man bellowing YOUTH THESE DAYS!!! and scaring all the pigeons and/or passersby. Ahem.)