oscillatingmadness

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This makes me think of the white colonial experience of the "abundance of god's promised land" and resultant manifest destiny philosophy, which in reality was the abuse of wildlands agriculture practiced by indigenous peoples. Utterly destroying the food prosperity built by them in favor of English agriculture, the kind that turned their entire island into a fields and lawns, obliterating everything natural, larger than a fox.

I mean, we knew, but it's nice to hear so succinctly

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Two ladybirds having a shag that i edited cbat over

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trying to buy a bookshelf/room divider feels so fucking pointless. it's a quest in futility. there's nothing worth getting, not at any price, and you know why? it's because 60-some odd years ago, god damned George Nakashima made this thing:

Look at this fucking infohazard of a piece of furniture.

Look at how fucking perfectly proportioned each and every void space is to create a subtle sense of motion and elevation, almost a landscape with just a few careful lines.

Look at how the reduction in the support pillars from left to right mirrors that ascension and proportion. How the different woods highlight each other and the near-seamless points at which they meet. How the shadowed interior boards bring out the bright highlights in the grain of the shelves and top piece.

Look at how it fits into a room, how it casts a shadow, and most importantly, how it perfectly frames and hilights every single thing placed on it.

Like. It's not some wild statement to claim that the man who defined an entire genre of woodworking and furniture making, crystalized in his book "the soul of a tree", is like. A human god of the art form. I get that i'm saying nothing revolutionary here. But this thing just. breaks me. nothing compares. i've spent years trying to find a bookshelf that can even hold the faintest candle to it. I've spent long nights up in cad modeling out my own versions based on his design, desperately wanting to take them down to the woodshop and try my hand, but like. one real, good look at this, and it's so clearly the result of decades of craftsmanship. a lifetime of the art. i love it. it ruined this type of furniture for me, and i love it so, so much.

I'll just have to stick to desks, the one thing I know Mr. Nakashima will never ruin for m-

...

fuck.

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i downloaded this god damn episode just so everyone could watch this fukkin clip

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This is interesting to me, because I am a strong reader. My mom is a reading educational psychology professor. I tested at 11th grade reading level in like, 3rd grade, because of her starting me early. I specifically remember articulating the more advanced reading comprehension being shamed out of me in (public) school. "It's full of fog," I learned to regurgitate bullshit basic answers like this _because I scored poorly_ on reading metrics with one bad teacher. I was too verbose and my forth grade teacher thought I was bullshitting her. Thinking back, it's entirely likely I had better reading comprehension than her. Other students and parents did it too. Nobody wanted to engage with nuance and depth, or no one was willing to do so with a child not even a teenager yet.

I learned very young that I just shouldn't ever engage with my full breadth of thoughts on a subject. No one cares. No one wants to know. I've found friends since then who do care to know things in depth from me. And I've learned a series of scripts that are essentially, "How deep do you want me to engage in this subject, and what level of expertise are you coming from?" (thinking of useful life skills, that's a huge one that should be mentioned in schools) This ties in to other teaching and "problematic" kids. I consistently finished grade school material, extremely fast compared to peers. I got sent to the library often because I just needed less time than other kids, and the teachers didn't want to worry about me getting bored and disruptive. And since I was an "easy" and "mature' child (with all the associated baggage now that I'm an adult) they trusted me to go when prompted and not disappear. In 5th grade I remember a kid cheering because he finished a math test before me. He failed the test, I did well. This stands out to me bc it was a regular occurrence where I'd go hand my test in, then wait as long as I took to write the test for the most of the rest of the class to turn it in (we had to carry them up to the teacher's desk).

So I decided to read the actual study (link) - it's totally free. TL;DR: the study is testing how well people in the 21st century can understand the specific nuances of 19th century London. This is not "reading comprehension", they are testing whether you know things like what a "Michaelmas Term" (Wikipedia) is. This is... to put it politely, not a normal part of reading comprehension in any sort of day to day task. This study is exclusively about your ability to read and be familiar with the nuances of 19th century English Literature as a specific body.

The study structure was 20 minutes to read aloud seven paragraphs. So, while one was allowed a quick Google or a peek at the dictionary, there isn't really time to do any sort of deep dive - this is a test of whether you are already familiar with this sort of work.

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Oh, but it wasn't just 20 minutes to read it out loud: every few sentences, the facilitator would poke the subject to explain the last few sentences. Not summarize, no: they wanted a full dissection. "Dickens is setting the atmosphere by describing the fog" was considered a failure of comprehension. The only explanation they provide that counts as a "pass" is almost twice as long as the actual passage itself!

It's not even really clear if they made it clear to the subjects that they were looking for this sort of verbose summary - the facilitator just replies "O.K." regardless of how detailed their response is.

I cannot imagine I would do terribly better, given 20 minutes to read aloud 7 paragraphs, and being constantly prodded to regurgitate the material at random intervals!

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I really do NOT consider it worth reading, but here's a link to the original post for posterity's sake: https://www.tumblr.com/prettyboysdontlookatexplosions/783379386552516608?source=share

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I saw this and wanted to do some data mining practice on it. The most interesting thing I found is that english-unlike letters have a make a nice clean normal distribution wrt tier. The 52 english letters rate very high, and then the english-like letters, eg those with accents or pheonetic alphabet letters broadly score quite low, with a tail off towards the higher scores. The english characters in A- are: X, e, W. The english-like characters in A- are: ø, Ö, Ø, ɀ, ü. The english-unlike characters in A are: ʘ, ɤ, ᴥ, Þ, ɸ, ß, Ʃ, ʃ, ꝝ, ʔ.

poll idea that's too big for tumblr. what are your favorite letters?

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His superpower is reading comprehension. The internet can not relate

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How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

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y'all ever reach the end of google

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political theory does not override life experience. if your theory doesn’t take into account the life experience of the people you’re discussing, it’s not political theory it’s a badly written opinion piece.

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"New York Style" cat scratching towers. Never forget playtime

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I'm 6'2". I walk pretty frequently. I've had one of these monstrosities pull up beside me wanting to make a right turn. I could not see the driver. She stood up in her chair and I barely could meet eyes with her. I'm six foot fucking two, and as a pedestrian I couldn't see the driver who wanted to turn right across me in the intersection of a middle school front gate (with a grade school 2 blocks away).

Im not autistic about cars or makes or models but I AM autistic about crumple points and field of vision and blindspots and conflict points. do you understand. urban design, anti car dependency/anti car centric infrastructure, and so cars themselves are part of that interest. because car design is urban design. cybertrucks SUCK as cars and also dont function well in infrastructure thats designed to care about people. there are good cars and vehicles that are designed good and fit well with good urban design

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American naturalization test