headless-horseboy

[headless-horseboy]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[headless-horseboy]

Hey so part of the argument around gay rights in the late 90s through the teens was.

"Hey, this is totally different from the civil rights movement. The idea that blacks and whites shouldn't sit at the same restaurant together was a recent invention in history, contingent on really specific American culture, so that was easy to change.

"But gay marriage deals with some of the most foundational feelings in human psychology and some of the most universal and ancient cultural practices! It's absurd to think that some glib answer about "consent" could overturn thousands of years of culture and psychology! Unless gay people come up with a knockout argument, there's never going to be a change, and frankly there probably is no argument strong enough to make homosexuality truly acceptable, when you weigh it against the whole history of human psychology."

And then, oops, turned out "Yeah just let consenting adults do whatever" totally worked! We didn't need to answer any of those thorny questions of human psychology and it has been years since I have seen anybody bother to even ask them.

I leave any analogy to modern day trans politics as an exercise for the reader.

[headless-horseboy]

I keep seeing folks cite the fact that 4chan got hacked by uploading a doctored PDF as evidence of how much PDF files in particular suck, and, like, no, that's just what happens when you don't keep your security patches up to date. That applies to everything – there used to be a way to get web browsers to do arbitrary code execution by displaying a sufficiently fucked up JPEG.

[headless-horseboy]

I hate how often some (typically abled) people will go “well, if you can’t [get a specific support], then what?” when it comes to disabilities. As if it’s a “gotcha” moment. And then act like you’re exaggerating when you answer that question honestly.

Disabled people often die from a lack of support. A lot of disability aids are not a luxury, but a basic need in order to live.

“Well what happens if—” people die. People hurt themselves. People hurt others. Disabled people don’t magically become abled if our needs aren’t met.

If a bedbound quadriplegic is caught in a housefire, and there’s nobody there to save them, they’ll probably die. They won’t magically become able-bodied out of sheer will.

If a nonspeaking/nonverbal autistic is denied access to alternative methods of communication, they’ll suffer in silence. They won’t spontaneously become capable of speech.

Disabled people are disabled all the time. Our disabilities don’t go away just because they’re inconvenient, or if we’re in danger.

[headless-horseboy]

I think part of the reason social media ends up as worse off than television is because television had a singular algorithm driving a channel. They had to appeal to the largest amount of people with each channels content, which meant generally not catering to crazy people with harmful beliefs.

But since social media is a personalised algorithm for each person, it just shows you what it deems you personally want to see. Creating a feedback loop of bad harmful ideas where preconceived notions are never challenged

transgenderer said: very confused by your characterization of TV as beneficial and social media as harmful. either position seems plausible, but not both at once. id consider TV as more harmful than social media, as someone who spent a lot of time watching tv in my childhood and a lot of time on social media in my teens

for TV you have to compare it with the cultural environment pre-1950 and the effect it may have had on why society got so much nicer post-1950.

now of course there were many dramatic changes going on at the same time: child mortality plummeted so we weren't surrounded by tiny skeletons all the time, birthrates slowed and family sizes dropped, we got much richer and ate more food and suffered less disease, lifespans lengthened, everyone learned to read and children started spending more time in school and less time in factories and on farms, etc.

but it's noteworthy that everyone also started spending a couple of hours a day watching television, a giant experiment in mass media (one of many giant experiments we ran on society post-1950).

now, many people assert that it had a negative effect (television shows feature sex, violence, and commercials!) but few people say it had no effect (humans gonna human) and hardly anyone seems to claim it had a positive effect, and I find that a little strange when you think about what television typically shows: highly moralistic narratives that both reflect social norms but also shape them by modeling what we consider to be good behaviour, good relationships, and idealised families, in a context that almost everyone shares, inflected by new elite ideas about psychiatry and psychoanalysis that were obviously very clumsy but a huge leap on what came before.

compare what a child in the '60s or '70s or '80s will learn about what it means to be a child and how adults should act and parents should engage with children and with each other and how the world works compared with a child in the '20s or '30s or '40s; I think the kid raised by television may well have a better baseline in many ways!

this is all anecdotal -- maybe some enterprising academic could do a study where they try to correlate the spread of television with some metrics of social health and disentangle it from the spread of leaded petrol lol -- but there are innumerable examples of the way television is loaded with positive messages, from The Brady Bunch to The Simpsons, even television that was often viewed as antisocial or subversive or potentially harmful at the time.

I mean I was just watching the first few episodes of SVU the other day and amongst all the hard-boiled detective shenanigans and the sensationalism it basically consists of authority figures saying "people do bad things to each other, and even worse sometimes society is unkind to the victim; also rape is a serious issue and women can be cops btw" -- even as copaganda it's a progressive show for the time.

an argument that television is harmful on net needs to account for where the harm is coming from and how it influences people; there are clearly things that would be much better than television as practiced in the 20th century but it seems like a significant improvement on the culture and media environment that preceded it, whether that was vaudeville or public executions.

social media on the other hand is more complicated to analyse because there are so many disparate unrelated things happening on there, it's individualised more like the telephone network or email than broadcast television, even if some general trends are evident.

and social media obviously contains many positive elements -- I love it myself -- but the negative elements are equally obvious; whether it ends up negative on net depends on how you account for them, but it's looking like a much more complicated story than television.

some factors to consider:

the way social media selects for viral spread leads to content that is far more inflammatory than television

"doomscrolling" makes the nightly news broadcast look tame

social media creates an explicit status/attention hierarchy for the world and puts almost everyone at the bottom of it; if the message of television was "you're special" then the message of social media is "you're nothing"

social media permits mob harassment in a way that makes old shows like Jerry Springer look good by comparison

social media appears to be having effects on politics which are not necessarily positive, I would say

social media appears to be damaging gender relations for young people in ways we're still figuring out

youth suicide rates appear to correlate with social media usage

anyway, I think as a society we will develop better cultural antibodies to the worst aspects of social media over time, but so far I think AI in the form of chat bots appears to be more like television (good) and less like social media (bad).

[headless-horseboy]

The US is deeply segregated not only along racial lines, but along class lines as well: from housing to schools to healthcare, many of our major institutions are designed to allow rich people to keep poor people as far away from them as possible.

Where do rich and poor people interact with one another? If I'm reading this study right, it's restaurants. Which restaurants? They find that some of the most cross-class locations in the country are cheap full-service restaurants: "Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Chili’s and IHOP."

The more I think about this finding the more it makes sense. Places like Olive Garden are some of the only locations in US society which are simultaneously "nice" enough to draw in high-income diners and cheap enough to attract low-income diners. Rich people go to, say, Outback Steakhouse because they see it as a cheap and easy meal that's better than fast food, poor people go because it's one of the closest things to a nice steakhouse you can eat at without dropping $100+ per person.

Other cross-class locations: churches, libraries, credit unions, alcohol stores, the DMV. Locations which worsen class segregation: golf courses and country clubs, bars, museums.

[headless-horseboy]

glad to see those spreading the truth

[headless-horseboy]

I used to hate the word faggot but now I realize that it's probably one of the only things that the gay community has left that isn't being sanitized, shined, and sold back to us at a premium by deceitful ass companies who claim to like us but then vote for policies that kill us. you're not gonna see a bank in a pride parade with banners that say "we love faggots" but you sure as hell will see a gay person saying "I love being a faggot" it feels so more real.

and I want it to stay controversial too because if a bank ever feels like they have the right to say "haha faggot right guys? 😏🏳️‍🌈" we should be able to publicly execute their ceo

[headless-horseboy]

"you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel" girl i am living that balsamic life, that's the mommy down there at the bottom.

[headless-horseboy]

lord the peasants are so loud today

[headless-horseboy]

One thing I appreciate about the Final Fantasy speedrunning community is that their strat names are goofy as hell even by speedrunning standards. I just watched a Final Fantasy VII Rebirth run that introduced me to the Yuffie Hamster Wheel. Fantastic.

[headless-horseboy]

Thanks, Anon!

-submit your poll!-

[headless-horseboy]

You know what really fucking Annoys Me about internet censorship is stuff like swear words being heavily censored because that's entirely an American cultural hangup being forced on the rest of us. I don't know a single country where swearing is as taboo as it is in America. In fact most languages have swear words that would have the same effect on an American as giving a Victorian chimney sweep a pepsi max cherry.

[headless-horseboy]

I've invented a new superhero who kills all of his enemies because he thinks that's more ethical from a utilitarian perspective than sending them to prison

[headless-horseboy]

Huge thanks to Richard of the Order of the Blade for throwing me around!

(If you’re in the UK, consider checking them out! The order are a combat school with a really fun and welcoming ethos)

And as always, more bows, swords, and nonesense on Patreon

[headless-horseboy]

*faux leather no animals were harmed! :)