Tooth Lesbian

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He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

I recently saw a headline in a british newspaper about 'this one manor house has so many hacks for climat econtrol without hvac!' and it was just... "orient the building and windows to catch or deflect the sun", which is something I learned just living in southern california and having a bedroom on the west side of the house.

Most houses that are older than the McMansion boom are oriented to catch the most HEAT. That's why bedrooms are on the west and south sides of the house usually. Because people used to worry about the cold more than the heat, in most places!

I read a lot of midcentury plan books and most of them are still oriented in this way, despite saying the plans can be mirrored.

Colonialism has fuelled this idea of people ignoring the true seasons of their biome in favour of just using "winter/spring/summer/fall" for everything, everywhere. But that's not how all of the world works, and so that's not the environment we should build for in the desert, the everglades, the pacific northwest, etc.

Houses should not be commodities or investment portfolios. Houses should be for the people that live there, and should be anchored to THAT reality, that biome, and those plants and weather patterns, as well as the materials available in that environment. And we should make use of hills and build into the sides of them--that will regulate the temperature of our house much better than sticking it on top of the hill!

With a warming planet, it behooves us to build for coolth, not warmth; we should look to indigenous architectural styles from hot places for cues on what will help keep the building cool without needing expensive HVAC systems. Sinking the house down even a few inches into the ground will help cool it off, so will going back to using lathe and plaster and other "mud" building materials, building into hills, and being mindful of wind currents and using breezeways and window alignment to create breezes--my childhood home was like this and stayed surprisingly cool even in 100F California summers, because the breezeway was oriented to catch the south-to-north winds, and opening all the windows and doors meant it sucked the air through the whole house. The deep eaves of California-style houses act as awnings and shield the windows from the sun, keeping the house shaded and cool even without trees surrounding the house (which is dangerous in fire-prone environments like most of california!). Mud walls are extremely effective in desert environs, as well as being very cheap--and plaster is a kind of mud btw, so is stucco and adobe. All very good cheap building materials used in deserts all over.

At the Irvine Arboretum there's a museum house that was built and oriented so that a small breeze always circulates through the house from down to upstairs. It's amazing to witness!!! All because the builders used to care about that sort of thing.

I just read a Fortune article the other day about the fact that some college students can't read a single sentence. One. They cannot parse the meaning of a single sentence. That's terrifying. (Here it is on Yahoo without the paywall, btw.)

The thing is that you do not have to be wholly illiterate to struggle with reading. About half of Americans have low literacy, meaning they read around a sixth grade level or less.

This puts publishers in a terrible position. They need to sell books to an audience that cannot read books made for adults but that doesn't want the simplicity of grade-school books. The books need real adult problems without the nuance, hence the therapy speak and the black-and-white thinking.

Another thing is that cognitive flexibility influences literacy, meaning the reverse is also true; cognitive inflexibility determines lower literacy. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your schemas or combine multiple pieces of information without being expressly told to do so. It also impacts whether you can identify the mismatch between what someone says and what they do, which is the gold standard way to avoid therapy speak.

Poor cognitive flexibility means you can't have messy situations, because then the reader doesn't know what to think. Everyone has to be sorted into Good Person and Bad Person, and if the Good Person does something that may seem Bad, then they become a Bad Person unless the text assures us that they are still Good.

You will see many positive Goodreads reviews for these books. I'm not saying every single person with a positive review for a book like that has low literacy, but it's more likely than not. The same thing that drives you insane is what compels other readers who can't handle more complex texts.

Basically what I am saying is that if you want something with nuance, as a reader or a writer, you probably need to seek out selfpub stuff. I know that a lot of selfpub is garbage specifically because of the lower barrier to entry, and a lot of good selfpub stuff is not highly rated because getting reviews takes time and energy.

(I'd like to say my own stuff is good but doesn't have a lot of reviews because that requires active solicitation and I'm busy. I'm competing with millions of authors, both selfpub and tradpub, who have larger budgets. Anyway.)