#this is not what literacy skills are for

[literallyaflame]

“the end goal of fiction is (of course) to collectively identify and consume only the good things. good stories make you a good person and bad stories make you a bad person” you guys literally sound like the 2nd grade teacher who told my mom not to let me read the golden compass

[necroixe]

@ younger creepypasta fans, don't be worried about sharing what you make for the fear of people finding issue with it for existing. We like your art for what it is, and encourage you to keep making it, because that's what the core of being an artist is. The ability to write, draw, create, whatever it is that drives you, and literally nobody ever can take that away from you. Those kids with the shitty stories and self inserts built a fandom from the ground up, wrote and drew their characters just because they wanted to. If you don't care for it, make your own art, or move elsewhere.

The quote in anton's original post is incomplete, so here’s a better one— "find what you love, and let it kill you."

[elumish]

I genuinely think a lot of outrage over whether/how things are being covered by the news would be solved by Tumblr users actually regularly engaging with major news sources.

I recently saw a post with someone expressing outrage about how the Washington Post "broke" the news about Biden signing the aid package to Israel and that they had to search so much to find the information, as though there hasn't been literally months of coverage from every major news site that covers politics about the machinations to get Israel and Ukraine funding through Congress.

I see people saying that nobody covers what Israel is doing in Gaza--as though that hasn't been a major topic in the news for months. I see people talking about how nobody covers what's happening in Yemen, Sudan, Haiti, etc. as though, again, that requires more than literally googling things like "Yemen New York Times" to find a wide breadth of coverage that spans years.

Critiques of news coverage are absolutely fair and valid--but when you start them by saying that "nobody is talking about this" all it shows is that you aren't bothering to look.

[wizardsix]

i guess i have to say it a million times since people insist on being dense: gale is just as much of a victim as the other companions. this isn't the trauma olympics. everyone has been through shit and deserves healing and redemption.

gale is not the self entitled, manipulative abuser people are painting him as. he's a lot of things, but nothing so heinous. he was groomed by a goddess who has a history of preying on wizards that threaten her power, and as a result, gale's ambition and faith was what drove him to discover the netherese orb. what he did was for mystra - in his mind, it was to prove his love by restoring her missing power - and by extension for the betterment of mortals. his actions were never malicious or selfish, in fact he puts himself so low on the priority list it's pretty much non existent. he was never going to use that power to usurp her, but mystra definitely saw it like that, which is why she didn't hesitate to present suicide as his only solution. he never crossed her personal boundaries in the way people are twisting it, he only wanted to cross the boundaries she put on wizards and their power.

people who insist he's all of these things and more clearly only spoke to him once or lack the reading comprehension to see past how much of an unreliable narrator he is. i can understand first impressions might put some people off, but you can say the same about the other companion introductions. i don't like comparing but since people insist on doing it; gale is one of the easiest companions to get along with just by being a good person, yet his honesty and selflessness makes people think he's secretly evil? while the companions with the capacity to be evil don't even try to hide it? how are people being so backwards about this? it's genuinely baffling and tiring to see people continuously spit out incorrect takes all too confidently.

no one is forcing anyone to like him, but it's unfair to completely mischaracterize him because you refuse to learn critical thinking. i promise using your brain is not as scary as it seems, or you can just. not talk about things you don't understand.

[s-aprua]

stray cats - erzi

[twinsarekeepers]

People actually think the “Where’s the glory in that?” line was serious … have you forgotten sarcasm king Percy Jackson??

[kingandqueencambridge]

I do not understand the speculation and panic around us not seeing Catherine for a while. KP literally told us straight out, she won't be working for at least 3 months, till at least after Easter.

They literally told you what to expect, so this didn't happen.

[moongothic]

I do kinda wonder, considdering how much Luffy hates being alone... On those first levels of Impel Down, did Luffy stick to Buggy as if they had been glued together, not because he trusted the clown (let alone liked him), but because Luffy hates being alone and being with Buggy meant he wouldn't be alone?

Like think about it, Luffy didn't give a damn when he ran into Buggy, it wasn't a Happy Reunion like it was with Bon-chan

"Oh, it's Buggy" vs "You're alive!!"

And while we know Luffy is at least A Little Stupid, Luffy does have pretty good instincts when it comes to making judgements about people, and he has emotional intelligence when needed So between Luffy not really liking Buggy when they reunited in Impel Down, and Luffy even currently thinking Buggy is a loser, it seems unlikely to me Luffy like, wanted to team up with Buggy when they ran into each other. But Luffy did understand he'd have a hard time getting to the bottom of Impel Down by himself, and he knew Buggy would be mostly harmless in this situation. If anything, the clown could maybe help him along the way, even if only a little. And yeah, at least he wouldn't have to be alone if Buggy came along.

I think that might be why Luffy decided to give the treasure map to Buggy

Like yes, Luffy may have been naïve to think Buggy wouldn't ditch him as soon as he got the map instead of keeping his end of the deal, but also. Maybe for Luffy the risk of getting ditched was a better option than not trying and being alone anyways.

Maybe Luffy chose to give the map to Buggy because of that, so he wouldn't be stuck alone.

[ohlookitsthearkhamknight]

Me after looking thru 911’s insta comments: GET BEHIND ME OLIVER ILL PROTECT YOU FROM THE HOMOPHOBIC MEDIA ILLITERATE DUMBASSES

[twilleansparks]

You'll never believe this but. I actually used to be anti Catradora (but then I grew up lmao)

[xinyuehui]

We can have a guess which ones Yiyong came up with and which ones Guangyan came up with lol

TN: A lot of these are idioms, Chinese poems and Buddhist concepts

[sluttylittlewaste]

Since the Hbomberguy video has dragged everyone back into talking about academia, I have a rant:

The take, "Academic papers and academia in general tend toward a writing style that is intentionally inaccessible to maintain standards of ableism and academic elitism" (woke) is not the same statement as, "Because I do not understand this thing about this topic I have never researched at this level before, the work is inaccessible and therefore in Bad Faith™️" (not only broke but fucking wild).

Working as an academic advisor in my senior year, my specialty was helping people with writing. That included reviewing essays and helping with research mostly, as both of my degrees are research and writing intensive. Even with the MANDATORY Introduction to College Writing class freshman were forced into - unless, of course, you either tested well in AP English Language or passed the writing assessment that allowed you to skip the course (which most people didn't) - I often found myself explaining that academic papers are written with the understanding that the reader already possesses some meaningful amount of context. Students would come to me with full confidence just to show a paper reliant on paraphrasing and regurgitating the source text, ended with whatever hand-wavey, unresearched thoughts they had while reading and call it /Analysis/. Thus would begin the long, arduous process of teaching them how to actually research and structure an academic essay from scratch, down to identifying reputable sources and deciding how many is too many quotes.

As such, while it saddens me to see people put off of academic writing (and research as a whole) for the reason of inaccessibility, I get it. Disregarding the prevalence of paywalls blocking credible published works from the public, I'd argue that most papers assigned to studentsr weren't actually written for students. The 25 page article in the well established medical journal is going to be laden with esoterica and intracultural references; it was written for peer review by other professionals in their field with a baseline of pre-requisite knowledge. Similarly, if you're doing independent research and just roll into a random a decades old article you found on Google Scholar, it's likely to be confusing if you have no backgound in the topic. The expectation that anyone can just dive into a research paper written by an expert and immediately grasp the information provided completely misses the fact that learning is an active practice requiring critical thinking and access to reliable resources.

Why does that matter? Because the core facet of research is taking that confusing, inaccessible academic journal or data and /making it make sense/. Taking the time to learn terms you don't recognize, to read ALL OF the provided context, to reword and recontextualize the information to be digestible to an audience without expertise on the topic, that's THE POINT. When an assigment asks for ten sources, it's not for the sake of making you work harder. The entire exercise is to have you compare and contrast things like word choice, historical context, and author bias so you can synthesize your own understanding of the topic. Entire categories of the research and essay writing community exist simply for this goal: to make complex academic literature accessible to general audiences. It's what Internet Historian and Illuminaughti (fuck if I spelled that right) were pretending to do!

There are a lot of valid points to be made in the discussion of academia being inherently inaccessible. Unfortunately the Internet, specifically social media, has a way of boiling actual conversations down to the bare bones of "Is hard and I don't like it, therefore is bad."

(Note: This does not apply to professors/educators assigning a bunch of text without doing any actual teaching. Expecting everyone to be able to read something and just get it isn't a "challenge in critical thinking", it's bad teaching and makes things harder for people who may already find a learning challenging or inaccessible. Do better. )

Is academia filled with conventions that make it widely inaccessible to people from all education levels? Yes.

Do some people write with as many big words or as much autofellating fluff as possible purely for the purpose of sounding smart? YES.

But, as an academic writer and reader myself, and as a person with a bevvy of peers I respect deeply in the field of research, a significant amount of these articles are written in good faith by people who are using the vocabulary they have. The use of "big" words, esoteric references, and hyper-specific language isn't based in the desire for exclusion, but rather clarity for a peer group who are comfortable with the language being used is it's intended context.

Sorry about all this. I just actually enjoy academia when it's about the love of learning rather than being a pissing contest/bitchfest. Ignore me 😭

[thetaoofbetty]

pretty sure the only person who wins at this point is alex winning the never had a theory that wasn't wrong award for this show tbh

[julictcapulet]

sometimes i think about how so many people have decided to base their entire personalities around their teenage years and it’s honestly so tiring at this point. “i don’t read the classics because high school english class traumatized me by forcing me to read books that i couldn’t understand” there are so many issues with the education system, but saying that it was traumatizing for you so you decided to swear off anything even remotely difficult to engage with and only settle for things that provide easy to digest entertainment in the name of “healing” when you’re in your 20s........you’ve got bigger problems that you need to address.

[redysetdare]

Y'all listen just because you learned something in school doesn't mean everyone else did. idk how y'all got this idea in ur heads that we all learned the same shit when literal book bans are happening in schools across the united states and certain subjects are being banned from ever being talked about. (do not even get me started on the fact different countries have different curriculum too) Like you cannot say "You guys obviously just didn't pay attention in school and are stupid because we all learned this" like you are ignoring like 50 other options as to why people may not have learned this ranging from poorly funded school to disabled kid getting shoved into special ed classes which are often notorious for mistreating their disabled students. I'm begging you all to understand the nuance of why certain skills and abilities aren't as widely spread as you assume they should be.

[fincherly]

antis in your inbox I’m so sorry lol

I’m not one of you either get outta here