derinthescarletpescatarian:

octagoncalibrator:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

kunou78:

googledocsdyke:

mostlybats-partiallyrats:

googledocsdyke:

remember when you were 10 and you would hang out with your friends in order to Look At The Computer together like you went to their house and experienced the information superhighway together. and then leave

How fucking old are you people?

normal amount

You see, there used to be a time (not all that long ago) when being offline was the default. And going online was the rare and wonderful thing that we (briefly) enjoyed.

It even came with happy modem noises.

They weren’t happy noises.

They were polite and reasonable noises! The sound of protocol being followed! Negotiation and compromise!

The box would scream

…huh. You know, honestly, the fact that getting onto the Internet involved a mandatory ceremony of back and forth screaming, as though human souls were being tortured by the wretched demons of the lightless abyss, a chorus of sounds that promised only suffering, is… perhaps a warning we should have better heeded.

Another day, another time getting mad about people referring to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah as a hymn/Christmas song.

WHY is he SO MANY MOUTHS

I’m building an empire right now and it’s a wild ride

I just wrapped up a 4.5-year-long campaign, which means I need to start planning a new one. And because I’ve had two parties (separated by a couple of centuries) wandering up and down the same coast of a continent for upwards of 6 years now, I need to make them a new place to play. Fortunately I had already sort-of designed another area, wayyyyyyy on the other side of the continent, a place that in the place previous parties have hung around is usually just referred to as the Eastern Empire.

And the funnest part, for me, of building fantasy governments, is finding ways to create governments that don’t have a monarchy… technically. But because all of my stories tend to involve tracking down lost ancient histories and the consequences thereof, sometimes Important Lineages are really useful.

So the Eastern Empire isn’t an empire… anymore.

On the other half of the continent, I had one full-on democracy and the rest of the coastal governments, save one, were something else. Combinations. Or they were situations where I’d tied myself in knots to explain why there was a hereditary line of rulers but they didn’t actually rule. In the biggest example of this, as in this new non-Empire of mine, there are mechanical reasons why I need that traceable line of continuity back to a specific Important Person, because of Magic Stuff.

So I’ve written this entire history of this first empress, and gone into a lot of detail about the reasons she conquered what she did, and how her empire was formed, and how the society that now exists came to be, and how the gods got involved despite she herself not being too big on gods, but how there is a very specific, mechanical reason why a descendant of hers needs to be in a position of at least some prominence, literally because I need this person to be findable when Certain Things come up.

And this first empress, most commonly by natives called The Founder, did not want to be an empress.

Didn’t want to rule anything. Ended up a nomadic chieftan mostly by accident, and then attacked other clans because there was no other way to sue for peace, and then fought back and ultimately conquered neighbouring coastal kingdoms when they decided they’d rather the barbarian clans of the desert not come together in a productive organized unit, thanks, and then, when it turned out the conquered peoples of the coast actually kind of preferred her to the tyrants she’d displaced, was forced to stand against the existing empire further north, who was looking south and going “uh-oh, can’t have all these smaller kingdoms and barbarian tribes coming together for a common cause, that’s absolutely no good for me,” and declared all-out war on everyone else.

Which went badly for them.

So forty years on, this empress who didn’t want to be in charge of anything was empress of many, many kingdoms and city-states, and was deeply uninterested in being an empress or imbuing her descendants (she had… a lot) with unimpeachable power, went and declared the empire a commonwealth, and abdicated her overriding vote, and died in her bed of old age surrounded by dozens of spouses and even more offspring.

And now we have an empire of hundreds of member states (some of which do, themselves, have monarchies, but) who are forced to send representatives to come together and scream at each other in public a few times a year if they want to get anything done, and none of the Founder’s descendants can make them do anything. But there is one descendant always present (appointed through a rigorous and gruelling education and selection process) to answer questions about what they think the Founder might have done in any given case - a kind of subject matter expert advisor. It’s probably a fucking terrible job.

And it works, mostly (though the party’s going to come across a few instances in which it Does Not Work). I’m modelling it after a couple of overlapping periods in the Roman Empire (kind of like if the Visigoths went on to conquer the rest of the empire and then formed a stable government). They speak French (or at least, with a French accent, most of the time, except not always because I have a fairly complicated set of linguistic rules that determine what accent Common-speaking NPCs get based on where they’re from or where they grew up or how they were educated, mostly because otherwise I would be picking accents at random), because I speak French, except in this world it’s a different language descended from Celestial (which is this world’s stand-in for Latin).

Did I mention the Founder was an orc? She was an orc. It’s an orc empire. But not an empire.

I can’t wait to trick my players into learning how an orcish Roman senate works. They were so mad about it when it was just an Elven democracy and then two of them went into politics. I’m sure this will be equally hilarious.

hollow-head:

headspace-hotel:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

idk-my-aesthetic:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

lesb0:

iirulancorrino:

lesb0:

lesb0:

lesb0:

This explains so much about why 20 somethings are just unable to read to any level of complexity beyond a tweet. The miserable failure of US pedagogy

They didn’t teach children phonics for TWENTY YEARS because they just hoped this “balanced literacy” bs would magically work out???

this still kills me. 20 years. that’s nearly every public school gen z kid in the US

There’s a really good five-part podcast series about this that recently came out from American Public Media called Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong. It does a great job of explaining this issue and goes into the political situation and profit motives that kept balanced literacy going for so long even when there was, this can’t be emphasized enough, *zero research* to back it up.

One of my personal big takeways from listening to this was the danger of turning facets of education policy into politicized issues along left/right lines–according to this podcast one of the reasons for why phonics didn’t catch on earlier is because it was being promoted by the second Bush administration, which led to teachers unions and other left-of-center people to be suspicious of it. I think that’s really unfortunate and sadly we saw that same dynamic play out during the pandemic, when in so many school districts how to handle public education became a culture war battle more than anything else.

Obviously everything is political in some way and it’s always worth analyzing who is promoting which ideas–but I think when aspects of public health/science/medicine/education become polarized we all lose out because the issue becomes so much harder to analyze on their merits. And it’s especially awful when the people most impacted are children who are still developing the basic skills needed to think critically for themselves.

oh that sounds worth a listen

I’m fucking gobsmacked. Firstly, here’s the link to the full article for anybody who wants to read the entire thing, or can’t view the image text:

The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy

Is a controversial curriculum, entrenched in New York City’s public schools for two decades, finally coming undone?

The New Yorker

Secondly, I’m just… is this not basically the gist of the scam in The Music Man? Y'know, where Harold Hill—who can’t play of note of music—passes himself off as a band leader, telling everyone he has a “revolutionary new method called The Think System where you don’t bother with notes,” and says ““If you want to play the Minuet in G, think the Minuet in G”? Like sure, context is helpful for reading, but having it be the basis is… WILD. I’m so sorry Gen Z 😭

Guys. Guys is this not how you learned to read. Bc this is how I learned to read.

NO THIS IS NOT HOW WE LEARNED TO READ WHAT THE FUCK

In the rest of the English-speaking world, children are taught to read phonically. There are multiple systems for this, from “winging it based on usage” to structured, tiered systems like Jolly Phonics. They’re taught the sounds that letters make, then the sounds that dipthongs and unusual combinations (like “magic E vowels”) make, and they are taught how to string the sounds together to sound out the words. Common words with unusual spellings/rules (or just really common words that the kid needs to know before they know the relevant rules, like “the” and “should”) are taught as “sight words” and expected to be memorised rote (although research suggests that children don’t memorise these words, but memorise whatever the tricky part is as an exception and read them normally, by phonically sounding them out in their head). This is so that children can get to reading common sentences and simple stories as quickly as possible, providing them with valuable practice and motivation.

As children get practice reading over many years, the most common words get memorised via repetition, and new words are sounded out and memorised if they come up enough. (This is why it’s common for people who read more than they watch tv/converse to mispronounce words for many years – I was over 20 before I knew the correct pronunciation of ‘misled’ or ‘rendezvous’.)

We certainly weren’t taught to check the first letter and then guess based on vibes. If you read like that then there’s no point in the rest of the word being written down. How would you learn new words and advance your skill that way?

Well, this explains a lot about how people in my notes process my posts.

Kids haven’t been learning phonics? No sounding out the word? Just guessing? How do you learn new words, then, if you aren’t even reading the word?

I guess that explains how someone can “read” something and come away with an entirely incorrect interpretation.

chandri:

chandri:

Okay I want to be clear that I love Steel, I do. She is so cool. Brennan playing a sad fond badass is always good time, especially when it’s a terrifying lady with a huge sword.

I just.

I do not trust her.

Not since she came to tell Suvi her parents were dead and grieved openly about it. Not since she very specifically gave Suvi gifts for Grandmother Wren, who she certainly knew was dying. Not since she knelt at Grandmother Wren’s feet. Not since she stood beside Soft and Stone as a city burned around them and swore to protect them.

I don’t know! Sure, some of it is that Steel has Brennan’s Beloved/Traitor voice. But the thing about the Beloved/Traitor voice is that it sounds the most like Brennan’s own voice and Brennan has naturally very high Charisma! These are people you like! Who you want to like! I like Steel! Nothing would make me happier than to be wrong.

But the instant she invited them to the Citadel, everything she said next became suspect. We still don’t know why Suvi’s parents fled the Citadel. Why Suvi needed to be hidden. How they died. We don’t know if Suvi knows. You know who’s the only person who definitely knows? Steel.

Steel, who’s trying to delay the breaking of Ame’s curse. Who seemed specifically preoccupied with who had cursed Grandmother Wren, but actually framed that investigation in terms of the acquisition of knowledge, not necessarily how it would benefit Ame. Who wanted to know exactly what Grandmother Wren revealed, or was able to reveal, in her dying moments (and let’s remember that Grandma Wren specifically warned Ame that some of what she’d been told would hurt Suvi), as though checking to see how compromised she was. Who went to some lengths to get Eursulon to agree to come and dwell under the Citadel’s power “for a while” before she extended the invitation to a predictably reluctant Ame, perhaps because she knew that Ame would agree if the others already had. Because Ame, as it turned out, was clocking the weird vibes even if she didn’t fully realize that was what was happening.

Steel, who treated even the suggestion that she might behave unjustly as completely impossible.

I know they’re going to go, and everybody’s doing what it seems like they’d do, and I think whatever happens there it’s going to be really, really cool. But the moment a trip to the Citadel was mentioned, my anxiety level jumped up to fifteen on a scale of ten, and I don’t know what’s going to happen there, but.

When they leave again, I have a feeling it will not be on such cordial terms as Suvi last left.

Yes, see, this is the other thing, because I just cannot imagine Brennan Lee Mulligan making the head cop of a fascist state a good guy. It’s meta and all and would it be narratively interesting to have her questioning things? Sure. It’s just that I don’t think Brennan is constitutionally capable of it.

Can’t wait for WBN to return tomorrow and the commencement of the slow creeping certainty that Steel will at any moment betray our heroes for the sake of the Empire!

I love D&D

This past Saturday, we concluded a 4.5 year long campaign (a very, very homebrewed adaptation of Tyranny of Dragons), wherein the last hour or so involved my PCs narrating how many children their characters had and with whom, their ages, names, classes, etc. Two of the party ended up in a triad with my favourite a beloved NPC, who is a shapeshifting genderfluid silver dragon. They decided that they were going to have four children between the three of them, but because one of them was from a huge famous elven family with dozens of cousins and plenty of representation, one had a very complicated relationship with their family (and anyway her family name was one made up by her d-bag abusive grandfather), and one was a full dragon, whose culture in my setting involved long, complicated composite names largely composed of pieces of the names of parents and other loved ones, they left it to said draconic partner to compose a new surname for the kids.

Which meant, of course, me.

Ask me how long this morning I spent throwing 40+ syllables from one composite Draconic name and three elven/drow surnames into word scramblers to come up with a list of composite names, contracted in the Elvish (Sindarin) style, that the two players could choose from. Actually, don’t ask me. I’m not ashamed. They immediately zeroed in on one of my top three favourites, and we ended up with a name that sounds kind of like Silmaril. Which is absolutely delightful, because this same dragon proposed (proposed back, I guess, as the two PCs sort of proposed to said dragon love interest just a little over halfway into the campaign in the most heart-shatteringly sentimental way possible) using rings engraved with the Elvish word for “beloved” because my homebrew setting doesn’t have a native Draconic word for romantic love because most dragons are at least culturally aromantic (lifespan angst) and the whole relationship was a big surprise to both the NPC and me, and there’s also a linguistic history in this setting of Elvish being the language of history and names and declarations being in Elvish has all this layered and weighty meaning about continuity and family and fealty and knowledge passed between generations and and and…

😭

Anyway. Run a D&D campaign. Do a little homebrew. When your players buy in to your worldbuilding to the extent that they decide they need to collaboratively build a name to represent their blended family using the traditions of a fantasy culture you made up… friends, there is no better drug in the world.

I love them all so much and I’m going to miss them. 🥹

foone:

highwarlockkareena:

@tvarchive Day 4: sci-fi

Season 03 - Episode 10 - Severed Dreams

Always reblog for Delenn’s “MY DICK CAN BE SEEN FROM ORBIT, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO MESS WITH ME?” speech

they’re coming

ALT