#clause and effect

[velvettte]

series masterlist

nanami kento never called himself a bored man.

sure, he’d admit, his normal routine had gotten quite monotonous. every morning he’d rise at six a.m and go for a morning jog to collect his thoughts. he’d get back by seven to shower and wear his attire for the day — always some suit that he’d preplanned for the week, matched with his signature tie.

he’d make the commute to the office by eight, where he’s accompanied by his assistants and secretaries all greeting him a good morning and giving him his agenda for the day. he’d get into his private office and seclude himself, working for the entire day before returning home again.

nanami thinks he’s had the most boring day yet so far, that is, until you stumble into his office just as he’s about to leave.

you’re shivering, soaked from the rain, and your clothes stick to your skin. he can see every part of your silhouette in this dim light, and for a moment, he’s speechless.

“hello,” you say almost shyly, looking up at him with innocent eyes. “i’m so sorry for the intrusion but it’s pouring outside. do you know anywhere i could find a ride? or wait this out.”

almost cinematically, a thunderbolt ripples through the air, rain splattering against the glass paned windows.

you shiver a bit, and nanami has a sudden urge to cover you somehow.

you’re the most angelic person he’s ever seen, he decides, when the light hits your face just right. he sees your features, defined and perfect, accompanied with lips so plush, he’s unsure how anyone could ever resist.

“i could offer you one,” he says, taking off his blazer and draping it over your shoulders. “my car is just outside. it would be an honor to accompany you home.”

“thank you,” you beam, and his heart palpitates at how your smile brightens the whole place.

the two of you walk together, with him opening the door of his car to allow you inside.

he takes the turn out of the office building and turns to face you, bathed in city lights and looking ethereal. he feels lucky— his day wasn’t boring anymore.

“just another two rights,” you say, soaking in the warm air from his car. “my apartment should be around here.”

he follows your instructions, only to be led to a luxurious establishment. outside the plants were beautifully manicured, holding up despite the harsh weather.

“eden apartments,” he says, slightly in awe when you grin at him. “isn’t this where atlantis solution’s ceo lives?”

you smile even more, and he catches the slightest flush on your cheeks. “ah…that would be me.”

his heart nearly stops.

“well. thank you for the ride mr. nanami,” you say, and he wonders if this ride was a strategy or genuine interest. “i’m indebted to you. i look forward to seeing you all dry tomorrow.”

with that you wink and grin, walking into your apartments and leaving him there, a surprised man.

read part two

feedback is so appreciated!! send an ask or comment to be a part of the taglist <3

[thoughtless-dreamer-ao3]

Clause and Effect - Chapter Thirty Eight

[friskafriskito]

Some silliness in the fanserver I'm in; someone mentioned Minecraft is a lonely game :')

(Disclaimer I have not played minecraft before so)

---

The Magnus Archives (CC) The Rusty Quill Podcast Network Minecraft (c) Microsoft (originally Mojang)

[lmelodie]

"Your powers are mine!"

[cantheykillmacbeth]

Could Commander Shepard kill Macbeth?

Female Shepard qualifies for the gender clause. But would both qualify for Unconventional Death Clause since Shepard died and was unethically brought back/rebuilt by the Cerberus Group. If that qualifies them then they might further qualify by the Birth Parent clause, depending whether you consider the "parent" in this case the Illusive Man runs the Cerberus Group or it would disqualify them if you consider it Miranda since she was in charge of the project.

I don't believe that Commander Shepard would apply for the UBC or BPC, no. Their revival doesn't seem to have left them as a separate person or without their previous memories from what I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong, of course), so they will still be counted the same as they would be before. So, female Shepard can under Gender Clause, but male Shepard cannot.

Thank you for your submission!

[crittertalez]

its not extremely common but it is interesting (not in a good way) that several times ive seen peoples solutions to "apprentice x older man who isnt very good to them" is "apprentice x older woman who is questionably better maybe" and its like yeah idk. i dont know that i like "teenager shipped with someone who is a grown adult when they meet and get close" even when its gay

[hkamenar]

Welcome, dear reader!

🖋️ So you found me. Maybe you followed the prophecy… or maybe you just recognize a certain fortune-teller’s vibe.

I’m H. Kamenar, and I write cozy romantic fantasy where magic meets bureaucracy, and love has to read the fine print.

My debut novel is coming soon, featuring: 🔮 a bureaucratic oracle 🧛 a runaway dhampir 💍 a problematic engagement ring 🐈 a very opinionated ginger cat

Stick around for snippets, moodboards, WIP ramblings, and general magical mischief.

💌 Join the Newsletter! Contact me on Bluesky (although all my vibes are here 😁)

[whispering-brushes]

checking up on you again, how are you doing? Matches annoying?

-🎆

Edgar gives a long, drawn out sigh, as if belaboring the point. "When are they not. I did have to face Jack the other day... it's not that I find him the most difficult to deal with in a match, more so that I can not trust that man, inside or out of these 'games'. He speaks with such honeyed words, but when that eventually falls away, what is underneath? Nor can I forget how he seems to think of me as if I could be like him. He makes me sick."

[cavettrobert]

These charming kids remind us of the true joys of Christmas—family, fun, and believing in magic!

[velvettte]

part one || series masterlist

nanami kento was dressed to the nines today.

his suit was a slate gray, fit and tailored to his frame so perfectly that he’d caught his secretary staring at him for more than her usual twenty seconds after he walked past her desk.

he set his briefcase down at his desk and checked his watch, only to be disappointed by the time it showed.

8:15 a.m. a full forty five minutes until he’d get to see you again.

not that he should want to see you — despite not knowing whether your first encounter was genuine or not, he knew enough to declare one thing.

he was absolutely, most definitely, caught in your storm.

he’s about to settle down at his desk, taking out his laptop and about to do some research before his mahogany doors open to reveal you, draped in sunlight.

you wore a suit of your own, a set so finely crafted and tailored that he’s left catching his breath as you walk through the doors. you gently adjust the blazer, grinning at him as soon as the door closes behind you.

“hello mr. nanami,” you say, and your tone is all business despite the informal grin on your face. “i thought it would be a good idea to drop in early in order to provide you papers of the transactions that are to occur between these two companies.”

nanami feels a bit comforted by the professionalism, moving his eyes to look at the documents you’d just handed him.

he scans the words, pausing when he spots a particular clause he never remembered in the negotiations.

“i’m sorry…i believe one of these documents contains a non disclosed clause. if these documents are to be used in the barter of services between our companies, i will have to involve my legal staff, as these are undiscussed terms.”

he pointed to line eighty, where it said “if jujutsu technologies does not reach a profit margin of at least 20%, the company will be acquired and merged into atlantis technologies.”

he looks to you and is surprised to see calculatedness on your face, a far cry from the giggling, sweet version of you he met last night.

“my apologies mr. nanami,” you say, and he is unnerved by the confidence your voice holds, “this clause was not an addition by me to this contract. it was actually a clause given to me by your superior, the former ceo of jujutsu technologies before he chose to step down. i merely added it into the contract so it would come to your attention in case you weren’t already aware. it seems that you weren’t.”

he meets your eyes to se something mirroring genuine remorse as you produce what was certainly the email chain between you and a man he called more friend than superior.

a man who’d currently put this entire company in hot water.

against his will, he looks at your lips, trying not to be distracted by the softness of them as they curved into a satisfied smile when he signed the papers that would place his company under intense negotiations.

he also tried not to wonder how your figure would look beneath your blazer as you walked out of his doors again.

“emily!” he hollered to his secretary, who ran in the moment he called.

“yes sir,” she said.

“get gojo satoru on the line.” he pauses, wondering how you could shake up his routine so much. “we need to talk.”

read part three

taglist: @iniyalovesall @debussy42 @chosostonguepiercing @salsakiyoomi (send an ask to be added!)

[thoughtless-dreamer-ao3]

Clause and Effect - Chapter Thirty Eight

[pansexualkiba]

i'm tempted to do like. "tumblr plays Fire Ash", except i'm just making polls to make people give ash extra pokemon per new encounter area. tumblrized batshit ash ketchum who managed to get a Spearow/Rattata/Poliwag/Sandshrew route 1 somehow.

[the-arch-elf]

Mrs. Claus would like me to tell everyone about the performance being put on by a couple of the younger elves.

I think we should all go to support them! They're very proud of what they've put together, and they've worked very hard on it. If you're interested, it'll be held next Friday at 6:30 in Santa's Workshop

[cantheykillmacbeth]

Gin Noto from TCE2 could probably theoretically kill Macbeth! He’s not a man, he’s canonically transmasc non-binary and has been confirmed to not like being either a man or a woman, he just uses He/Him pronouns!

Yes, Gin Noto from The Caligula Effect 2 could kill Macbeth!

He applies for the Gender Clause, due to the reasons described above. Thank you for your submission!

[msshadows97]

Season 2 episode 5/6 spoilers (before the episodes even comes out

I didn't know the episode names but we get to see Betty this episode!! Her short stint in New York wasn't enough I want my girl to save the day

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

couple other notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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