Sounds like London is a comparatively nice place to live in WoD land. Huh. Pity it takes a surveillance state to get it.

To be fair, I’m old enough to have been taught cursive, I can read cursive, but it’s a pain in the ass to do so and even correct cursive can sometimes take serious effort to decipher— then you get into potentially messy cursive which is an order of magnitude worse. Cursive was made to be fast to write, not easy to read, and this just isn’t something that’s really needed much anymore. Writing things that aren’t meant to be read just seems entirely counter to how we do things these days.

Not that I hate cursive per se, or think that no one should learn it. It does teach good fine motor skills, it also teaches good letter flow and stroke order which can make deciphering even print handwriting easier, not to mention it can look cool and develop your signature better.

But I do hate trying to read cursive in those rare instances that someone writes something long in it, like a letter. I feel like it’s obnoxious, bordering on disrespectful.

Man… that’s a cultural shift from even just a half century ago…

Poe’s Law.

That was actually the original inspiration for the character. To take the nazi ideal being, and say, “what if he existed, but was nothing like you.”

All those “subversions” of Superman out there, including Snyder’s interpretation? Those aren’t subversions of Superman as much as simply going back to the original concept that Superman’s creators were deliberately trying to subvert. “What if the ultimate powerful person DIDN’T abuse his power, and was actually a good person?”

The panic at the existence of additional options you don’t use and will never use is, unfortunately, strong in some people. It is what it is.

I also have an iPhone and absolutely would love a 2nd store. I’m trying to figure out how to side load as it is, so I can get a version of YouTube that can keep playing audio while the screen isn’t on. I’d love that. My mother would be in fits of panic at the thought.

I absolutely and completely agree with you. I’m just saying, my aging mother does not. Having the option, to her, would make the iPhone a far inferior product. She is not alone in her opinion.

The scuttlebutt is that buffalo as a verb was only attested very briefly in upstate New York and the Midwest for a brief period of time in the early 1900s. It never spread nationally, and definitely not internationally.

However, checking Google ngrams shows that “he buffaloed” and “was buffaloed”, (to ensure it’s being used idiomatically as a verb and not just in the famous example sentence) emerged in 1900, peaked in the 1950s, but has sustained small but constant use in published print since then. I was actually expecting the ngram to rapidly drop off and never recover… shocked to see that some people still use it as a real phrase.

Not that I’ve heard of. Now, whether Homo sapiens idaltu is a real separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens is disputed, so there’s a question as to whether the second sapiens actually differentiates us from anything… but I haven’t seen any signs of any consensus against calling ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens to date.

I actually have seen the closed garden nature of Apple be listed amongst its attractive features between laypeople. There’s no fiddly bits, everything is simplified, almost no configuration required, and the closed garden means there’s some implied quality control going on. For people for whom computers and technology is scary, the closed garden is a feature, not a bug.

In D&D, the standard assumption is that elves mature just as fast as humans, but they are culturally treated as children until around hundred or just a bit higher. But I’ve started developing a campaign setting where elves really are the equivalent of kids until that age, and all the implications of that. One of which is that, if humans attended school alongside elven kids, they’re going to lose their reputation of mystique and wisdom— they’re going to be viewed as kinda slow and dimwitted, as the humans graduate through the grades and the elevens get held back a decade or so.

Beavers fuck up habitats and ecosystems about as much as humans used to before factories, which accelerated what we could fuck up. Beavers wreck shit up. Sometimes elephants do too, for that matter. And let’s be clear, the modifications these animals cause can have overall eventual benefits for an ecosystem, but they change the ecosystem extensively over a huge area, and any benefits you can ascribe to their actions could as easily be applied to human ecosystem modification too. “Oh yeah, the forest is completely gone, but now there’s new homes for different kinds of creatures that couldn’t live there before.” This sentence applies 100% to elephants, beavers, and yes, humans.

Some animals change their environment. We are one of them. Our tool use and brains allow us to do so on a pretty wide scale, but the destruction the elephants caused was pretty darn huge too. Humans also have the capacity to do with intention towards actively helping an ecosystem… elephants don’t have the ability for that kind of intentionality.

Of course, humans are also fully capable of acting without that intentionality too. It is pure coincidence that new ecosystems appear in the wake of elephant or beaver devastation— they weren’t actively trying to help other animals, they just wanted what they wanted. Our destruction can also have unintentional new ecosystems arise in our wake— the problem is that often we don’t LIKE the new ecosystems (bacteria and viruses, for example), and we often DO LIKE the stuff we destroyed.

But it’s not really different from what animals do. Because we aren’t separate from nature, we are nature. If we are bad, nature is bad. If nature is good, we are good. But this kind of binary thinking is too simplistic, life is more complicated than that, and we as humans have an ability to make value judgements and moral distinctions in a way that most animals cannot. We shouldn’t use that power in such a reductive way.

Not to me. Sounds more like someone who’s been in a lot of social media arguments, has a vague understanding of the counter arguments, and is trying to solidify their answer to it.

Can piefed be accessed through voyager? I heard people talking about it as a good way to avoid all the tankies, but I couldn’t find it on the instance search within voyager.

Maybe just a touch of cgi, like for the rippling wall when they cross dimensions, or morphing species when hit with the de-evolution ray. But that barely counts. The practical effects and set design were wonderful, and despite the weirdness of the mushroom king, definitely still hold up.

Super Mario Bros. No, not the new CGI one, the old live action one. I know I’m not alone in loving this movie, but man is it divisive— those that don’t like it, HATE it, and I think that’s the majority opinion.

I unironically love this movie. It’s not just nostalgia either, though I did watch it as a kid. I also watched the old Zelda cartoon as a kid when it first came out, and I loved it then but I can’t stand it now. No, I’ve watched this movie recently and it still rocks. It’s perfect for what it is, I think.

I remember roughly a decade ago I worked out that a gold was equivalent in purchasing power to somewhere on the order of $100, and $100 was a nice round number that’s easy to use to get a ballpark feel for what something is worth, so I pretty much always use that. I’m guessing inflation and/or doomsday preppers (or political culture) has significantly raised the price of gold since then. Inflation too.

Three-cue and whole word memorization are scams, yes. Possibly not maliciously intended scams, but they’re counterproductive anyway. Phonics is not.

I haven’t heard of swindled before. Forgive me, but I used an LLM to summarize it for me. Based on the summary, my professional analysis of the summary it gave me (again, I haven’t listened to it in total) would be that the podcast was critiquing the specific commercial product “Hooked on Phonics”, not phonics in general, and that the critiques involved this specific product being heavily marketed to parents (not educators) as being a panacea despite not utilizing best practices— even best phonics practices.

I’ve never used Hooked on Phonics specifically… again, it’s marketed toward parents, not educators. Some cursory, surface level research seems to show that early editions were especially bad, and in fact led to FTC citations for false advertising. Their marketing linked their product with phonics in general, which was generally untrue, and apparently the company didn’t even consult with experts (neither experts on phonics nor literacy in general!) when initially developing the program. So it sounds like they were probably a good source of material for a podcast on scams.

That doesn’t make phonics itself bad pedagogy. Phonics itself is fantastic, and produces the absolute best results.

If you were taught using “whole word” or “three-cueing” strategies (I’m guessing you were given the three cue method, as that’s been pushed in the past two decades pretty hard, to the detriment of everyone, but whole word isn’t great either) you’re more likely to have internalized inefficient, error-prone, and mentally tiring reading habits. Obviously you can still read, but you will find it more difficult and less enjoyable, adding an extra layer of stress when learning other things that is actually unnecessary.

It’s possible you learned/figured out phonics on your own from exposure. Some are able to do this— humans are the best pattern finding machines in the universe at the moment— in which case these problems won’t present themselves. However, being taught wrong can create issues such as guessing words based on context (or images/diagram presented with the text), skimming for clues instead of deciphering the word itself, memorizing entire words instead of pieces of them that contain sounds and meaning.

These strategies all “work”… they enable you to read, but they create extra problems when you encounter new, uncommon, or just unfamiliar words (necessary when learning new concepts), when the context is unclear (such as when picking up a new novel to read, or analyzing technical or scientific papers without illustrations), or when you need to read and comprehend things quickly and under timed pressure (such as when there are work deadlines, or… you know, standardized tests).

You can read, sure, but you probably can’t read well, unless you’ve managed to figure out patterns and strategies that weren’t expressly taught to you on your own.

Here’s an article that may lay things out for you clearly. It says much of what I’ve said here, but with more detail and probably better prose. It’s a persuasive piece, but it is backed by the current scientific research and understanding we have. At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

Teacher here. (EFL teacher, but phonics are necessary in EFL as well as L1 English classes)

The opposite. Phonics is the only thing that actually works, and any and all attempts to move away from phonics creates long term systemic issues in reading.

The issue is that phonics are hard to learn at first, but the payoff for the early effort is nigh-effortless reading in the future, enabling education to continue and making literally all future self-improvement better.

Alternatives to phonics focus on the “it’s really hard at first” thing. You know, if we skipped phonics and just memorized word shapes, we’d be able to get our 1st and 2nd grade test scores up… and that means more federal funding! And it works!!!

What do you mean our 3rd grade test scores are dropping… I guess we just need to pile on MORE HOMEWORK!!! And 4th grade scores are dropping too? And 5th? And middle schoolers are struggling? And high schoolers don’t read much either, and their writing is nigh-incomprehensible? Ehh… well, must be the kids fault, am I right guys?

Phonics teaches the rules that make English work. It gives you the ability to read and write as well as you can speak, which comes naturally. It gives you the method to learn new words in seconds or at worst minutes, instead of days or weeks. You can’t tell me that isn’t powerful.