aphantomr

[aphantomr]

i was visited by a being of pure light and it told me to do some stuff but i forgot what exactly

process gif plus other stuff

[aphantomr]

The Second Commonweal has been added to the list of Infinite Tour Group SI/OC crossover settings I am daydreaming about and will never write. Lowkey cosmic horror adventurer party tries not to die; I the author try to figure out how to handwave the language barrier and set them up so they don't kill anyone, which would complicate cultural exchange. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that ITG is ongoing and we still don't know what the 惊悚全球旅社 (global horror hotel) wants or what the limits of its capabilities are, which makes smashing out-of-context problems at each other a little tricky. Power, energy, and thought are kind of the same thing except when they really aren't in both settings, and so in becoming powerful you change and become yourself rather dramatically, but the environmental pressures in ITG are really different from the Commonweal and the Bad Old Days, being set in a modern Earth that is not (yet) experiencing an apocalypse.

[aphantomr]

“The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.”

— Ken Liu, Translator’s Postscript to The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin

[aphantomr]

putting on my discourse hat:

There is a time and a place for stories where the main character goes through the character arc of "not wanting romance" (distinct from obliviousness, I have separate opinions on that) to "I accept and return your feelings", plus or minus working through some trauma, but sweet jiminy cricket aromanticism exists and is not a character flaw that has to be developed away to have a happy ending. Flip side, let characters be normal about unrequited love for once, I'm begging you.

This post has been brought to you by certain webnovels that shall remain unnamed.

[aphantomr]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

couple other notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[aphantomr]

Commonweal posts that are simmering in my head as I re-re-re-read:

in their kingdoms of wrath: girl genius and the commonweal setting is mostly vibes-based. My brain is gesturing at a common genre that may exist? Post-apocalypse but people are somewhat successfully reweaving the fabric of society?

by my might and power: fantasy subversion and the exaltation of Power is about how setting up passing the Shape of Peace as the climax of a duology clashes with how magic is out-of-universe really cool, and speculation on how much of that is on purpose.

by no less mighty means: the evolution of the (Second) Commonweal is poking at the changing social treatment of sorcerers. We don't really get how weird it is until books 4 and 5 provide more contrast; part of me wonders how much of that wasn't worldbuilt earlier, but to be fair almost none of the earlier narrators are normal people. Also, industrialization.

untitled: the tragedy of Grue and the [coercion] of the Shape of Peace. inspired by @/strikeslip's the tragedy of order. this one might get taken apart into other posts, there's no structure to it yet.

[aphantomr]

I just realized that Independent is meant in the sense of

"Use of the Power is perceptible. ... In the Bad Old Days, someone'd come looking, to kill or control. Anyone who kept their independence, they were lucky, and fast, and ruthless." -- Blossom, book 2

as in distinct from a pre-eminent and their unwilling subordinates, which is just about the only possible relationship between sorcerers that looks possible in the Bad Old Days.

A few thoughts: "publication does improve us" is an uplifting sentiment; I wonder how the title was chosen; I don't think Mulch or Rust entirely agree with the sentiment.

[aphantomr]

"... the worst of those children is Dove's hard heart." -- Halt, book 3

I really haven't internalized how incredibly lucky that was -- not their talents or their Power but that they are all good kids who truly believe in the Peace. We don't get much perspective about normal life/society in the Commonweal, but people are still people (derogatory) (affectionate). Someone hypothesized on the somethingawful let's read that Angren didn't pass the Peace because what happened to the lower Third Valley is an experience that's hard to come to terms with, because it is so so easy to wish to be mighty, and I wish we'd gotten more about that. There is concern in the text, but it's so indirect -- and we get the kids' POV so we aren't concerned -- that it's easy to undervalue how unusual their moral characters are.

[aphantomr]

the narrators are mostly characters stuck in or near the 'do or die' parts of the commonweal with the competence and character that continued survival filters for, but *glances at current events* I find myself curious about the people with the luxury to be incredibly stupid. what are some bad but Lawful opinions?

closest example I can find: the guy who assaulted Chloris in book 3. the assault is illegal but, like, the beliefs that led to that assault are allowed to exist.

example in a different direction: Chloris' mom

trying to think of a context for bad opinions: art discourse? changes in school curriculum?

[aphantomr]

One thing I really like about how Murderbot relates to gender is how like–no wait, two things, in order.

So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it’s not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.

But that’s a human thing, those are human categories, and it has that deep determination not to naturalize into humanity just because that would be simpler, would smooth the ugly edges between the categories of person and non-person and make an easier, more convenient story for other people.

But then also there’s the part where the two construct genders are, effectively, ‘cop’ and ‘prostitute,’ as distinguished at construction per Murderbot’s own account by genital configuration, in this case ‘having’ or ‘not having’ ‘sex parts.’

Leaving aside how easily that analogizes to human gender categories for the average reader, which I’m sure was an intentional writing move–Murderbot’s assigned gender is, in a meaningful sense, ‘SecUnit.’

And what’s neat, and what I was going for to begin with only I had to set out my thoughts first for context, is how Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically!

But in a deeply queer way, that only gains a sense of meaning as it’s able to detach the performance from service to the oppressive power structures that created it, and redefine the identity on its own terms.

[aphantomr]

Cradlepost

So Ive been thinking thoughts about Fate and Ego lately. Well I've been thinking thoughts about Fate ever since Makiel had his first full scene.

It honestly seems that the ability to read Fate, nearly without fail, accompanies an overinflated ego. Suriel and the Oracle Sage are really the only people with any degree of talent at reading fate that couldn't be considered massive assholes.

I think about the nature of the Mantle of Makiel and what an individual must do to embody the literaly universal concept of being in everyone's business and deciding what happens.

Like, we know that Icons and nearly certainly Mantles have an effect on the mindset of the person who holds them. I don't think its literally possible for a person to be Makiel without facing their own form of corruption.

The first executor program failed because by cutting the executors loose from the Eldari Pact, and, by extension Fate, freaked the hell out of the Judges, particularly Makiel, because they were so reliant on their ability to read fate that they couldn't handle having a blind spot.

But they also couldn't deal with it in a healthy way, they just cast the executors free and then proceeded to put them under ever tightening scrutiny and control rather than support.

We know Makiel turned down Ozriel's suggestion of a Reaper Division time and time again not because it was a bad idea, but because he couldn't prove it would work by viewing fate and Makiel could not except anything else. The only one allowed to make decisions outside of Fate is Makiel, and he didn't like Oz and that was enough.

We also know that despite Fate Reading being inexact and flawed, most people don't treat it that way. Its something Lindon is warned of when he learns how to do it and he is still caught off guard every time it happens, the same way every Monarch is.

My biggest point is that the flaw is known. Oz failed to predict or account for the possibility of Makiel creating an imitation Scythe because he felt it was a low probability in Fate and he had contempt for Makiel. Despite centuries of Makiel wanting to get rid of Oz and just have the Scythe for himself. Despite the obvious idea that if Makiel was to do such a thing, he would attempt to hide it in fate such that it looked impossibly unlikely.

Makiel himself couldn't read the possible outcome of the fight between Suriel, Oz, and The Mad King, because he was too biased against Oz, he was running off of incomplete information regarding how Eithan had changed because he just didn't think he could. Because of a personal grudge.

Anyway. I don't really have a conclusion other than fuck Makiel and reading Fate is a trap, especially the better you are at it.

[aphantomr]

the impersonal is political

“It is commonly known that Ozriel, the Black Judge, who governs the universal aspect of death and destruction, carries a scroll which he uses to record the names of every living being killed in the severing of a world from the Way- both those who die in the events of the violent downward spirals that lower the local population enough for the world to become vulnerable to corruption, and those who live to be reaped by his own hand, at the end.

Each name is written in the native language of the deceased, presented in the fashion which would be most appropriate according to their culture and personal views.

This is surely not for his own benefit, as by his nature the Reaper has an exhaustively precise memory of anyone he has ever killed, and indeed of all deaths that have occurred in what may very generously be defined as the vicinity of his person.

During a legislative session of the Court of Seven, when the Judges had once more convened to discuss the matter of granting the secrets of healing known within the Way to mankind, Ozriel took the floor to argue in favor of changing the law, as he had every time the motion had been raised previously.

Instead of speaking, he held up the scroll and let it fall open, allowing it to continue unrolling in silence for the entirety of his allotted time.

By the time custom required him to yield the floor to his opponent, the scroll had unfurled to such a length that it filled all available space within the room, and had continued to unroll the list of names out the doorway and down the entire length of the hall, with no signs of stopping.

Makiel, the Judge who governs the universal aspect of fate, banished the scroll from the physical space around him with a passing whisper of thought and proceeded to make his own argument: that the Eledari Pact stood as written and would remain so, for though too-certain Death could witness all mortal suffering, even he could not see as Fate did the horror averted by the careful restraint of the Abidan.

Where their eternal laws might prevent them from doing some good, it also prevented them from committing any evil- and when considered on the scale of the Judges, a single evil act on their part would cause far more terrible suffering than the natural course of human life, short and often painful though it may be.

To strip away mankind’s certain protection in exchange for their uncertain benefit would, he insisted, be an act of monstrous arrogance.

Under popular opinion, Makiel’s position is currently held to be the more correct of the two, and indeed the motion was denied once more at a vote of five against three.

But Ozriel continues to tally the dead.”

-from “Laws and Records of the Abidan”, a series of case studies collected in the largest library on Sanctum

“Calder Marten, was it- remind me, exactly how do you spell that, again?”

“Why do you ask?”

“…Mm, never mind. If we’re lucky, I won’t need to know.”

[aphantomr]

two posts that are engaged in a beautiful marital affair to me

[aphantomr]

let's reread is officially put on pause as I rotate book 3 at speed for an ethics essay

[aphantomr]

yeah, the character work is great. Taylor & Eithan's growing relationship baited me into Cradle just to figure out what Eithan's deal was. Taylor planning to fight the heavens and the laws of reality is extremely in character and also funny on a meta level: "I will defy the heavens" is a xianxia attitude that's mostly missing from Cradle, and she's better at it than most people who grew up there.

Path of the Immeasurable Swarm by derivative_of_life has tackled me into the Cradle series by Will Wight and now I want to squeeze Eithan Arelius like a rubber chicken. He's so funny (to me, the reader) when he's distressed.

Also I want to throw triage!Iomedae at him. Get some experienced advice in setting up your radical experimental organization for doing good better, you burnt out self-proclaimed clown. How to do self-care when the world is filled with horrors that you, personally, could be fixing right now: a guide.

[aphantomr]

Path of the Immeasurable Swarm by derivative_of_life has tackled me into the Cradle series by Will Wight and now I want to squeeze Eithan Arelius like a rubber chicken. He's so funny (to me, the reader) when he's distressed.

Also I want to throw triage!Iomedae at him. Get some experienced advice in setting up your radical experimental organization for doing good better, you burnt out self-proclaimed clown. How to do self-care when the world is filled with horrors that you, personally, could be fixing right now: a guide.

[aphantomr]

““I go into the mill. What is a water mill? Describe.” “Describe the forest.” “Two emaciated horses, describe the horses.” “Describe the air, the soldiers.” “Describe the bazaar, baskets of cherries, the inside of the tavern.” “Describe this unendurable rain.” “Describe ‘rapid fire.’” “Describe the wounded.” “The intolerable desire to sleep - describe.””

— Some entries in Isaac Babel’s diaries, as listed in Elif Batuman’s memoir of reading Russian books, The Possessed.