that's a gross oversimplification, of course, but I mean, you want a tldr blurb as to why it's worth listening to this video, right?

This has been a thing for a very long time, it's part of why I was moved to private in the 90s

yeah. it also very much tracks with some threads in rp I recall from the last... uh... overall, here and there, over all the decades I've been rping, where I'll have spent literal hours, sometimes, going over a tag I was working on, making sure it meant to say what I wanted it to, because it was meaningful somehow....

....only for someone else in the thread to seemingly have glossed over like 90% of it and had entirely the wrong takeaway. and I'm like -- it was three short paragraphs??

I agonized over word choice for precision, for clarity, for "is this how this character would phrase the thing naturally, even accounting for those first two points?"

and the reply felt like they'd speed-read it, just... glossed right over, didn't pause to reread, and kept right on truckin', lololol~

We clearly need to actually rp so someone more appreciates your little things

one of those people.... oh, this was years ago, it's no one on Plurk... but I think part of what saved our ability to interact, once upon a time, was that we were doing it over... not DW, but a medium that forced far shorter character limits.... so I could only send my tags about a sentence at a time. sometimes two tiny sentences, sometimes half of a

Skimming has value in denser academic reading, but you have to know WHAT you're looking for and you have to actually understand what you're skimming. I'm guessing that's not the case here.

longer one.... but if they took it in small enough chunks they seemed to get the meaning better? except I'd be pausing midsentence so that I could continue in a second post... and before I could post the rest of what my character was doing/saying, they already responded and posted to the first half as if I was done.

agreed, I'm always up to rp. XD I just don't always have time lately, so patience with glacial slowness is appreciated, haha....

and yeah, that's absolutely not the case here.

like, completely made up example, mind... if I were to post that someone went "ohno!!" and scrambled to take stock of their kitchen contents to figure out what to make for the party, pulled out a few things, and started... and had decided on starting with bread dough first... and it was a "sticky situation" (time crunch, lack of planning and ingredients)

I could absolutely expect with some people that their takeaway would be that my character went "ohno!" scouted their kitchen quickly, then immediately started making dough, which made a sticky mess of the place very quickly.

but I'd be sitting there like - no? the flour is still in the bag. nothing's been poured yet, they're just stressing out. what are you even- what?

I remember being taught that as speed reading in a private school I went to for a while. And I used the heck out of it for text books and I will use it still for articles I'm trying to get the jist of but not study in depth. But it's not designed for like... novels

I wonder how that ties into another trend I've seen all throughout rp stuff, from waaaaaay back when, when someone will get the wrong takeaway and then just... run with it, being confidently wrong like that. have their character come in on mine "making a sticky dough mess in the kitchen" and start helping clean up, for example.

and then that puts me in the position of either having mine stick to the reality I'd established, and say HEY I JUST PULLED THAT OUT, WHAT ARE YOU DOING.... or roll with the new scenario they seem to be trying to establish, in which my character actually did make anything resembling a mess rather than a bowl and three other objects on the counter.

what even is the proper etiquette for something like that?

do we give an ooc aside in-tag saying hey, just checking, are your character's standards for "mess" so high that it includes the bowl itself being out so that it can be used in a moment? ....do we just carry on accepting that apparently my character actually did more than pull out a couple items? do we PM them and ask them to please re-read the tag?

and there's so much insecurity among the community, too, I completely understand how even approaching something like that could kill someone's want to continue. maybe they're already stressing out; I don't want to add to their bad day....

They teach SIGHT READING not phonics anymore and it’s stupid

....you know, I don't think I was ever taught speed-reading or sight-reading? I remember being a bitty and my dad sitting down with me to sound out words on the page....

really makes me wonder, what percentage of the DWRP community does this, vs what percentage of them is bothered by people they're playing with doing this? lol.

and... this'd tie into this, I'm sure....

combine this tendency to skim and assume with sometimes only reading the previous tag, and no wonder I've had a couple train wrecks of lack of understanding. XD

makes me wonder, of those people that skim, do they even realize that they're not actually understanding the tags they're replying to? are they even a little bothered by only having a superficial at best understanding of what they've just read?

pffft, and I'm not writing well even in my own plurk here, after rolling my eyes about written communication. I need caffeine. XD

Dunno, seems comprehensible to me. :3

ehhh, I'm finding places where I absolutely did not phrase things half as well as it seemed it was in my head.

....case in point. XD

the point remains, though

ugh, and now I'm back on considering that supershort-posts-and-reply-interruptions rp. how... did that person even assume I was done enough for it to be their turn to write back, when the sentence was literally cut off mid-thought at times? siiiiiigh.....

I remember back when I'd not be finished, but had to hit enter to reply on things, like in deviantart rp chatrooms, I would pointedly leave a pair of hyphens at the end to indicate that I wasn't done writing. Never really had a problem.

But that definitely seems like an eagerness/jumped the gun thing

although I wouldn't be surprised if it's also a lack of reading comprehension

see, I would do that too, but this particular medium would sometimes cut off what it let through... and not tell me. and from my side, it'd look like my whole sentence went through. on their side, it ended sometimes mid-word. it was a horrible guessing-game.

laskjdfaljf oh nooo

so I did try... but whether it cut off mid-word/mid-sentence or ended in a hyphen, I still thought it'd be fairly obvious that something was missing yet? ....but they'd answer my character's question BEFORE IT WAS FINISHED BEING ASKED and maybe just maybe the end of my character's sentence would've changed the entire response to it?

Yeah that's super irritating. D:

like...

me: I don't have anything ready for dinner yet, but would you want pizza tonight, or

them: Oh, yeah! that'd be cool! I even have a coupon for That Place we can use!

me: -Indian? or should we just use the portal to Scifiland and eat there?

....I mean, if Scifiland was the other character's FAVORITE PLACE...

example is total BS, but still.

fkasljf;askj

one of the tidbits I still laugh at was, when we were able to do longer tags (we switched platforms, haha) one time I had the Plot Door open for this character to a specific setting: here's what it looks like, at a glance, in about a sentence or two, short and sweet. immediately followed by, the loud bang and rumbling noise that came from below... and then

the shaking of what could be seen beyond the Plot Door, and another loud bang and rumble...

as in, stop, that place is gonna be destroyed in the next few seconds. you get to witness it, though!

you know what they did?

"Oh, hey, I know this place! " /HEADS RIGHT ON IN~

did... did they not read the entire second half of the tag??

...yeah it explains a lot about people's general lack of ability to parse complicated ideas and rationale, and not seeing the problems with things like AI which do basically the same thing.

i.e. pick out some key terms and build a correlation function around them

mmm, true.

it makes a lot more sense that people don't get how AI is doing something actually really dumb, if they've been taught that's what analysis is

....huh. maybe that's actually behind a good chunk of why so many people use AI the way they do? I mean, why they outsource the thinking in the first place - because they're already not used to doing it themselves?

idk, maybe... to my thinking, at least, the lack of understanding of the difference between logical and heuristic reasoning is probably the biggest thing, and the basis for all claims and beliefs that AI (as marketed and popularly used) is actually... providing anything

yeah... there's uses for it! but not even usually the ones it's been being pushed for.

like that "I know my grammar is correct; my spell checker tolled me sew" poem from waaaaay back when.... XD

yeah no it's very much being pitched mainly for things it's bad for, mostly with ads that low-key imply that the target user lacks some very, very basic skills and is proud of it

or shouldn't have to be ~bothered~ to apply said skills if they even have them

even that would be fine if it were marketed as a disability aid, but it's not

yeah it's less "things it would be unreasonable to ask of you" and more "things you don't want to bother doing for yourself"

Meanwhile I'm actually really bad at skim-reading and basically had to just completely give up on actually doing the most of the assigned reading in school, because I took about 4 times longer reading something than I was "supposed" to

...yeah I guess it also explains why I'm such a slow reader.

haaaaah, yeah, I... found myself actually getting drawn in due to interest in a lot of my school reading....

(wait, dna does what, now?? ....an hour later....)

I mean if it's something I don't care about, I'll still not really internalize, but

It felt like I was being actively punished for needing to actually understand what the teachers were putting in front of me. It sucked. Ironically the only reason I made it through my senior year English class was because the teacher told us multiple times not to use Spark Notes, thus making me aware of the existence of Spark Notes

lol

(And I STILL managed to internalize and understand the stories better than half the class)

I'd believe that. XD

I still wince remembering that in 9th grade, we did some reading comprehension tests... and even with mine and one other kid's factored in, the class average was a 6th grade level. ....there were kids who had a third grade reading level, in high school. I.... what....

ah lovely ._.

the score the other kid and I got was basically "college" because as I understand it, we actually got all the questions right. and it wasn't even a hard test, is what baffles me more...

yeah... i'm not shocked, just dismayed

...Oh now that's just depressing. No wonder all the teachers seemed so flummoxed by my reading level test

but... I can see why it could've been a difficult test, if someone was trained to skim and assume, rather than just read and comprehend like I guess we were....

I kinda wish I could remember what the test was called? I remember it being one of the many Scantron tests....

it'd be interesting to dig up something about that particular test, and see what others make of it - maybe it's out there, as to what, exactly, it was testing for?

what was the rubric for judging grade level? questions like that.

and I'm still listening to her videos in the background while I do some sewing to fix a thing here... RainRaven you might be amused, she's partway through AoT while writing this, so uses it as one of her examples. XD

Modern Heroes are Weak and Boring
I am really loving her breakdowns here.

one of the tldrs is, modern fiction tends to conflate judgments of morality with contemplations of how it makes someone FEEL. as in, is this thing/act bad because of rational considerations of the benefit vs harm? or is it being labeled bad or good because it upset people?

reminds me of this other vid, actually:The Only Time Murder is Okay
...which.... pretty sure the tldr is "righteous-seeming revenge is often celebrated because it makes us FEEL good"

p. much

...not sure how righteous it even needs to be for most people, but that definitely helps.

and that's not the same as saying it's morally justified, just an observation that people can cheer for it because dopamine, basically.

but it's interesting that so many stories (especially lately) don't seem to understand that. neither do a lot of people.

Watched just the AoT part and I really like her analysis there, definitely saving to listen to the whole video later. Now I'm really curious what her reaction will be as she continues the series and the writing quality dives off a cliff...

HAH, same XD

actual moral justification and the judgment thereof requires that critical thinking we were discussing people not doing, vibes-based heuristics of "does this make me feel good by association with my own fears and prejudices?" is a lot easier

very much so, yeah

and frustrating, when someone can't disambiguate the two

hmm, studies look to show that the brain's reward centers are indeed dopamine-affected in cases of revenge. that explains a good few things.....

Getting back to the earlier topic, one forum I used to frequent seemed to have this problem too in the 2010s. A lot of people seemed to read maybe the first couple of sentences or so and assume the rest, skipping paragraphs of stuff.

(And yeah, DWRP being so anxiety-heavy that you can't so much as point out a typo without people curling into a ball and shaking was one of the things I didn't like about it, too.)

And I also have to agree that this sounds plausibly relevant to at least some people's failure to see LLMs for what they are.

yeah.... fortunately, sometimes it's just minor details, and I tend to just... roll with it. whatever, it's not a deal-breaker, you know? but... mmm. and then sometimes re-reading things in hindsight, I'm facepalming and going oh, wow, I totally misinterpreted that bit there....

(I figure there's a lot of wishful thinking in the mix, too, whether it's people just wanting to live in a gee-whiz sci-fi world or executives salivating at even the possibility of getting rid of those uppity high-maintenance workers.)

I will note that the more obsessive "AI"-boosters skimming even social media posts would certainly help explain why, in my experience, they're such colossal failures at knowing when they're being told off or chewed out.

yeah, it would, wouldn't it.

actually.... ChickletLARP I don't suppose you'd know offhand if there's a philosophy/philosopher that leans that way? that basically, feeling good = morally correct? XD

more to the original topic... this also feels like a bit of a continuation off this observation of mine from a while ago: how much context does someone bring up again, to reply to something in the moment? like, raise your hand if you always re-read the previous pair of comments that go before the one you're directly replying

to, so you know you have everything freshly in mind and re-analyzed, so there's fewer misunderstandings and stuff, right?

(and here I'm once again laughing and kinda facepalming at that rp partner who'd reply back to me mid-line where the medium had cut me off....)

(so much of that particular PSL makes so much more sense with this sort of context in mind, wow...)

I reread a lot more than a couple tags back when it's been a while

(I typically reread probably more than one might expect, lmfao)

If it’s been a while since my last tag I might reread the thread from the last collapse point/beginning if it’s that short before replying! But yeah I’ve had things like that happen too, like my character will poke their head into a doorway where there’s potential danger and someone responds like they stepped all the way into the room...

I've had people come away with some truly wild interpretations of things either in RP tags or in "would this thread idea interest you" tags

or to conversations in general tbh

usually all I can do is resort to the fallback of "people are super weird" which is not very satisfying

CherryFlight: similar happens to me too, hah... and then I've had it too, where when I had my character respond as though the other player hadn't misunderstood, they act as though their take was what happened first, and my carrying on as if it hadn't happened also. like mine didn't just pull their head back out, they just ducked their head only....

Misreads happen to the best of us of course but it’s not the best feeling when it’s a pattern. Feels like the other player is phoning in replies and isn’t having fun with the RP and won’t tell you what you can do to help

Lol thanks for not loading the replies plurk

.......yeah "feels like they're not enjoying it" is a thing that hits hard. orz

I see that I was pinged but am not in shape to watch/read all this now. Will look later. Sorry

ChickletLARP it was for a specific question, actually.... do you know offhand if there's a philosopher/philosophy that emphasizes "this feels satisfying/good = this is good/moral" rather than "rational logic dictates that this is good/moral" like most do?

or... does anyone, for that matter?

the closest I can think of is probably Thelema, but that's in terms of "don't let people limit your self-actualization, and don't do it to them either" which isn't really the same thing

mm, yeah, it's not... but that's one I haven't heard of yet. gonna note that down, haha. thanks!

I think the usual summary is something like "to thine own will be true"

but it's been a minute so I could be mixing up mottos

trying to google... this is one of those times when the old methods of "send forth the keywords and bring me back relevance on the morrow!!" fails utterly, lmfao

I mean loosely speaking, it's hedonism, but afaik that hasn't been the endpoint of a philosophical position for a long, long time

yeah. I think.... I'm trying to figure out how "it feels right" can even legitimately be a solid philosophy, in a sense? like, look, just because you like something, doesn't make it morally excusable, unless you're just deep in the [name here] rabbit hole... XD

it was kind of a thing like... 3000 years ago-ish?

but yanno

I'd be curious as to what sorts of arguments people would even try to make for that kind of thing, haha

most of the more developed versions like Epicureanism iirc are really closer to the modern notion of prioritizing self-care, that you'll be more at peace and more able to pursue Higher Good if you let yourself have nice things sometimes

I don't know the older ones as well so I can't really speak to them off the top of my head

totally fair!

I know a lot of this musing on it, on my part, has to do with how I've been diving in headfirst on the worldbuilding for some of my chars in the last... while. and I explicitly don't like being one of those writers who make crud up on the fly, and then do it again, and again, and... after a while, when compiling my notes, it's plain that there's not a

lot of internal consistency about it. but at the same time, I'm definitely not Tolkien and have zero desire to come up with a new conlang with a 50k+ word dictionary ready to go, rofle

(oh hello there typo....)

but I already knew a lot of the cultural/philosophical stuff I was juggling for my chars, and so defining some of it, if just behind the scenes for myself, really felt like it helped to nail it down better

like, would my character be phrasing something as "I have x" vs "I am x"? how do they think about these things? does their language draw distinctions between pink and red, the way English does, but Korean doesn't? or blue and green, the way older Japanese doesn't? why, or why not? how about, what of their words are related in the first place, as a way

of figuring out the relationships between these two things conceptually? etymology can matter; language tends to shape thought, and vice-versa; it's difficult to easily discuss a thing, when there isn't a word for it, after all. (or a phrase, etc)

so I'm finding myself spending quite a long time on some tags, referencing those notes....

........conlang can be really fun actually but it's hard to really do well

yeah. I have an IC excuse to fall back on PIE roots, though, so I at least do have a readymade lexicon to start drawing from in various ways, haha

but figuring out all the rules for it is... interesting!

XD

so this is all just compounding the whole... taking a million years to reply thing. XD

relatedly I still want to RP one of these days, I just suck at getting myself to actually do things

lol, fair

man, this is also exactly the kind of thing that I never learned in school. I'd have remembered, if my English class had spent even one lesson pointing out that though this is how things work in English, it's not how they work in other languages, necessarily... word order, objective and subjective nouns, pronouns, all that...

so a lot of it... honestly, I don't think I really paid much attention in language arts classes? I always joked, back in high school, that actually going to school was one of the biggest impediments to my education. but looking back at it... I think it was more the structure? that the lessons had to be designed to try to teach everyone some basic info

or other, and because of the way most kids forgot everything over summer break, it felt like the first half the school year was simply spent getting everyone caught back up again, just to take another half-step forward. and then there were all the kids that tuned out and didn't care, and they were trying to teach them too, and I get it, but...

lead a horse to water, etc etc.

meanwhile, I spent most of my free time either reading all sorts of stuff (novels, textbooks, whatever piqued my interest.... and a lot of fanfics, lbr here) or RPing and writing, or drawing....

I still vividly remember getting my hands on a chemistry textbook on one of the trips to the thrift store, then staying up until like 2am on a school night (when I'd get up at 6) looking up the oxidized vs non-oxidized state colors of various metals, and the viability of using them in place of iron in the hemoglobin molecules.

read: figuring out alien blood colors for a fanfic I was working on. XD

and I speculate that maybe my lack of that sort of dedication to my schoolwork, and jumping headfirst like that on things that interested me outside of school... was more true to that joke of mine than I realized? I probably legitimately did learn more from stuff I did on my own. picking up the rules of writing and spelling by reading for fun, or

learning about various crafts and trades, or even naming conventions throughout history, and when that really started to change... everything from human anatomy (bones, muscle... art studies) to botany and genetics (it was interesting!) to how laser printers worked (my dad's was having an issue, and I wanted to solve it)

and I recognize now that this was all probably some sort of adhd consequence, lmfao. but I really wonder how many other people actually end up doing similar? ....like, by ignoring their English classes somewhat, being able to retain some love of reading, and thus ending up learning how to comprehend what they're reading, instead of skimming?

Another thing that kind of bugs me that's related to literacy and language and such... There's definitely a yearning, especially among younger people, for something that's like a story but has no conflict in it, where nothing goes wrong... and yet, the concept of poetry seems marginal at best these days.

I would like to see these kids who want "stories" with no tension or discomfort and full of nothing but beautiful and comforting things drive a resurgence of poetry... though this plurk does make it seem possible that some of the problem, aside from just straight-up ignorance of poetry as a thing, is just sucking at language.

yeah, i mean... there's also room for that in prose, but as you said, that sort of thing is very marginalized

like the only narratives that matter are dramatic narratives, which fundamentally do depend on tension/conflict, and nearly always ends up being either tragedies or hero's journeys

what gets me is the weird black-and-white reading that there just ~haaaaas~ to be an evil villain and a good hero. like... why take it to that good/bad dichotomy in the classic sense? real conflict can be as mundane as "do I buy A or B, when I can't just get both right now?" someone could be the villain/antagonist of the story from one point of view,

but legitimately be the hero/protagonist from another point of view.

it's just so bizarre that people keep going off on these notions that shades of gray don't exist, or that it even is always a matter of that wrong and right.

sometimes it's just conflicting priorities.

sometimes it's just selfishness or ignorance, rather than maliciousness.

...which really isn't helping, when people are taught to look at all this dramatic, polarized GOOD VERSUS EVIL!! stuff... but then get confronted by things not being so simple in the real world. so they try to apply the only kind of interpretation they've been taught to things where it absolutely does not apply, and you get stupid messes like... well....

binary thinking is a menace to society.

surface-level skimming for keywords, kneejerk reactions to those, unquestioned assumptions rather than clarifying in light of ambiguity or uncertainty, binary thinking with a tendency to oversimplify, especially for good vs evil notions.... honestly, this reminds me of a few people, and that bothers me.

Still reading to catch up. (wow that video was kind of terrifying) finally got to where I was pinged the first time. There probably is a philosopher known for that, but I cannot think of whom off the top of my head. Though I had at least one professor who would say that Socrates fell into that neatly., but only if you were a philosopher king, because for you

and you alone would then have some chance of being intrinsically good, because according to him, humans were not and it is society which makes us good, and yeaaaaah I have issues with Socrates, though not as much as some of my professors did, lol.

sounds batty, lol

Going to go back to try and finish the catch up, but I will say this as a kid from the "hooked on phonics worked for me" era who is also both profoundly dyslexic and according to others a "speed reader"....

I sometimes miss whole sentences, not because I am skimming... but because sometimes my brain just... does not track that they are there. I will reread a paragraph a half dozen times because I can sometimes tell I am missing something important but cannot tell what, or even where.

Between that and my horrible memory... I love rereading because I can read a book a hundred times and still feel like I am finding something "new" on the 101st read. Not counting what is just new connections in context of what I have read/experienced since, of course.

oh, huh. that's an odd upside I hadn't even considered, lol

So there are a lot of times on RP tags where I just have to say "My dyslexia is making it hard for me to parse... any chance you can reword the post?"

aah. well, if ever you have that issue with mine, please feel free, and I'll break it down for you, take it bite by bite in Discord if you want, etc.

So if I ever seem to be someone you have an issue where you think I missed like half the post... I probably did and 100% would appreciate it being pointed out.

Also you know that my brain and yours fundamentally are at odds in comprehension sometimes, lol

Okay going back up to read more now. This is a lot and it is very late compared to when I need to get up.

yeah, I know I tend to get caught on "wait, but that logic isn't consistent, how I'm looking at it?" and you tend to... do... something else, lmfao.

but that's also why I have so much issue with some worldbuilding stuff - and why I'm doubling down on figuring out that language for my chars, even if it isn't coming up in tags all that much, lol

I have now caught up.

yay!

And someday, maybe after we move, I should pull out all the world building notes my best friend and I have for one of the novel systems we are writing. Printed out and bound it stacks from the floor to somewhere around my ribcage.

I do a lot of world building too, but I tend to keep it for things I am too paranoid to RP with until they are published, lol.

so knowing that I am going over what I've figured out about the language so far, if you ever do have questions about stuff, especially when it comes to how things may or may not be translating for Chell in particular, know that I've probably either already figured it out or have a pretty good idea, lmfao

LOL, I did gather that such questions are welcome, yes.

I did finally tag some of mine into the flashcard post, btw. Sorry it took forever

that's... actually part of why tags with him can sometime take a while when discussing certain things - I'm actually figuring out how it'd translate, to be written in his language (no, not figuring out the actual words, but the "does this even translate" question, and "if so, how, roughly?") and then figuring out, with how he'd answer back, how it'd come

across. like I said, I've been writing him not so much as Ye Olde Language sorts of stuff, but as like... if he were speaking modern English, what would suit how he speaks? is he using whatever their version of slang is? (spoilers: no. XD) is he being particularly formal/old-fashioned about how he's phrasing something? is he just being as-

straightforward and precise about it as his language would allow? etc etc...

which... this is part of why I'd totally be down for going over behind-the-scenes notes on that convo he had with YS, fyi. I need to remember where I put those, and fill it in better now that I've nailed more down, but... that was probably more interesting in parts than you'd expect, because English just is not going to convey some of it. XD

LOL, perhaps some time in the future. As much as I love linguistics I am really bad at parsing sometimes, and I have been low on the sort of spoons needed for some things (that, new music, among others) for a few years now. And I am not sure why or how to fix it.

eh, I could always pick at some of the bits I think might be more interesting? you point out where you had a question? no one says it has to be a giant thing. XD

but there's a lot to be said for definitions. like how some languages have words for one particular color or another (like, differentiating peach from salmon from baby pink) but in this case, the language would actually have a great deal more to say about feelings, for example, than English does....

also omg, how did I miss those tag-ins.... (no, no, I know. been stupidly busy.)

I figured Mallia was just quiet for you atm

somewhat that, I do admit, but more accurately, there're other factors I'm juggling with her that make it a little more complicated. like... she's kinda currently pondering a few things, prompted by the whole issue of that convo with YS and then the cards demonstration, and considering what she knows of the humans and all....

You absolutely can have tension and conflict without a good hero and evil villain. I mean that I've definitely gotten the impression that some of the younger set can't even so much as cope with so much as a story of weather knocking the power out, or your standard-issue love triangle. Hence my pointing at poetry...

ah, yeah, that's kind of.... ....yeeeaaahhh.... poetry's pretty underserved too.

I feel like that implies though that poetry can't be unsettling and full of conflict and my love of Poe wants to argue, lol. (I do get your point though)

Having actually watched the video in the OP now... wow, that is distressing.

yeeeaaaaahhhh.....

I've also been told by someone who lives there that in parts of the South, there's an attitude that reading is superfluous and unnecessary. If they need to know something, people should just tell them!

eww.

Also noteworthy for its absence from the video: any discussion of parents reading stories to their kids at a young age.

yeah. that's... I'm pretty sure that's not all that common these days.

When I grew up in New England, at least, it was pretty heavily emphasized as The Right Thing To Do if you want to make sure your kids are at all literate.

my dad read to us as kids... Ray Bradbury was normal for bedtime story fodder for us. I remember hearing The Sound of Thunder back in something like 2nd grade that way, so I already knew what the Butterfly Effect was way before the other kids... XD

Heck, I'm not even thinking about stuff on the level of The Hobbit (which was a thing read to me later), I'm thinking more having a toddler on one's lap and reading Dr. Seuss.

I can get parents just not having the time to go through chapter books. But there are books specifically suited to reading to a kid in bed in 15 minutes or so!

Really, though, it's been distressing since a rather young age for me how bad my own peers were at reading. Teachers even singled me out for being too good at it, to the point that for a while I thought I must be bad at reading things aloud somehow.

(I actually understood what I was reading enough to include emotion at, like, 4 or 5. The other kids were all just emotionlessly reciting the text in front of them.)

I remember in 10th grade, we were taking turns reading pages of some book or other... they had to remind me what page they were on, when it was my turn, and the look on everyone's faces when I had to go so far back in the book, to rejoin them so I could take a turn was... amusing, at the time.

pretty sure I was the only student there that wasn't tripping up on words more than five or six letters long, though....

For my own part, I can't read and listen to speech at the same time, so reading ahead like that wouldn't have been possible for me.

I was tuning them out, hence not keeping track of where they were, haha

But yeah, things are so distressing as far as literacy goes that I actually drafted out a theoretical YouTube video talking about the alphabet in a broad, high-level sense a few months ago, based on the idea that later videos would be talking about specific letters and letter combinations.

Part 1: Alphabet (Plurk Paste)
Dunno how useful or practical this would really be, it's just the presentation that pops to mind for me.

Obviously with adults as a target audience.

I still need to read like, all of this plurk when it's not 10.40 at night, but. Oneday I will RP with you again, Nightsail. I remember you being really fun to bounce off.

My cousin was told when he was a kid because he was dyslexic he didn't have to try to read, so he barely reads. Mom and I were near full time carers for his daughter right after she was born. We always read to her and with her. I also used video games and TV subtitles to work on reading with her.

He thanked us, and said he wanted her to enjoy reading, and how he feels envious that me and my folks, and his wife, his step daughter, and now his daughter all got so much joy in reading. He says he tries to find it and just... can't.

Another thing all this might help explain: why normal parts of skilled writing keep getting spread around as alleged signs of LLM use.

Like the em dash being dubbed "the ChatGPT hyphen" or my recently hearing that now rule of three is supposedly a ChatGPT thing.

Vibe readers never learned any of this stuff, so can't call bullshit on it.

(Another one I've heard called out that isn't actively encourages academically that I know of, but still strikes me as questionable, it claiming that "not only/just A, but B" being allegedly a ChatGPT thing.)

encouraged, even.

...really, it's a shame you need a Plurk coin to use one of your custom emotes as reaction to a plurk, or I'd put on the OP.

yeah here's the thing, ChatGPT learned those things because we were doing them often enough it saw the pattern. So it does do them a lot...but so do we

exactly that. its makers didn't invent that formula for it to follow....

I'm embarrassed to say I wanted to write with em-dashes like all my books were doing for the 20+ years I've been writing in Word, but thought it was too fiddly for one character. I only figured out it'd autocorrect a double-hyphen two years ago. Just in time for that mess. Well, forget it! I'm not giving up my em-dashes now!

lmfao, right? It's taken me so long to not just do double hyphens here in Plurk, because that's strikethrough here....

(I just leave autocorrect fails where they are to signal I'm human. I guess it's kind of like how some artists have left bits of process in instead of cleaning it up perfectly. sketch lines and stuff)

(ah, I've all but given up with autoincorrect. ....amusingly enough, it now volunteers "autoincorrect" when I'm gesture typing, instead of autocorrect. XD)

me just using dashes incorrectly...oops

(i always put them at the top sentence instead of the bottom.... )

(It's cool. You're not necessarily doing it wrong -- you're just using it according to your own unique style!)

(sorry, I had to. gotta use the thing referenced, right?)

yeah, before I knew how to do them I did it with a single hyphen in spaces - like this! It's also correct, plenty of published books and games do that too! I just liked em dashes so when I learned how easy they were to use actually I switched

I like single dash surrounded by spaces personally. But as I have been told I over abuse a dot dot dot I may not be the best source...

On that note: some people seem to think that it's only specifically em dashes surrounded by spaces that are ChatGPT, when that's how I was taught to use them and is in line with Associated Press style (as opposed to, say, Chicago style).

...Anyway, it does also occur to me that a certain thread of transphobia makes more sense in the context of widespread terrible English instruction too. Do these people know what "pronoun" actually means? Or noun, verb, adjective, adverb...

(I've had this idea that trolling some right-wing chud by literally talking without pronouns when they go transphobic might get under their skin...)

for Thelema, it's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'" if I'm remembering right

(Hi, lurking here, and remembering my own trials in school where I was taught on phonics but everyone else was taught sight reading. And also being taught in an after school program to "Read the first paragraph and last paragraph, and then the topic sentence for each paragraph in the middle and that's enough" and I was like...but...that's not enough? )

"Em dashes surrounded by spaces" is also the correct usage in French, so if anyone is ESL they might be using it like that too...

shinotenshi22: that makes sense, I remember Will being a major concept in Thelema

I think I was mixing up the law of Thelema with a line from Hamlet XD

...Decided to look at this person's video on writing heroes and villains, and think she's only half right about those... with the other half really screaming "I'm a conservative at best!" from between the lines.

(The half that's right being that you can't really make coherent villains/write coherent evil without a clear idea of what's right and wrong that you're writing from. ...The problem being how she insinuates that there is only one measure of right and wrong and it's totally objective you guys!)

(And equates incoherent morality with morality that's not hers.)

yeah, it's... definitely food for thought, at any rate. personally, I'm a fan of "no one is (intentionally and ideally) the villain of their own story" - that maybe you're doing what's right in your view, according to what info you have, your morals, your situation, etc... but that may put you at odds with others.

i think "no one is the villain of their own story" is at least a good starting place, but there are some key exceptions--or i guess specifications for what does and doesn't count as "the villain"

oh, of course. but I mean, everyone tends to try doing right by themselves or someone they care about. maybe it's revenge or spite. maybe their goals just run afoul of someone else's. who knows.

but the point is, people tend to be rational, just operating on different values and data.

like, justifications can also include just repressing/avoiding thoughts of why the things they do are bad, or the belief that everyone is either bad or stupid/delusional so better a villain than an idiot (e.g. Azula is basically a permutation of this), or otherwise embracing amorality, etc

well... people tend to be internally consistent, anyway, but that can allow for some pretty wildly irrational conclusions

yeah.... XD

and a lot of people can handle pretty massive cognitive dissonance by just... refusing to question their assumptions or confront their contractions

*contradictions

very true XD

.....Frollo.....

so... it's a good rule of thumb and a reminder there should be some kind of internal justification, but a lot of them are straight up irrational or deny/invert the notion of villainy

(although the latter case are fairly exceptional)

all right, finally listening to more of her stuff, and she's... definitely oversimplifying things. to a comical degree, lol.

definitely still agree with pointing out that sometimes "is it right/wrong" gets conflated with "does it make us feel good/bad" too much sometimes.

.... we'll pretend I edited that sentence correctly, right?

I'm even more eager to see her reaction to AoT now...

yeah i mean there's a kind of obvious impetus to confuse them

yeah, and I find that interesting. it's... immature, but I get it.

logically, if feels-good = morally-good, then just about anything can be justified. but sometimes, feels-bad = morally-good. so uh.....

there's a saying to the effect of "there's no one easier to fool than yourself"

it's a big part of what therapists are for, telling you when it sounds like you're making nonsense excuses to justify the thing you want to do as "right"

well put, yeah