Chaos Cat (loves this thing in particular)

Dr Glass was only three cars back from the entry point. After pondering the problem in this unexpected pocket of leisure, he got out of the car.

The other drivers looked at him, astonished, censorious. Was this muppet just up and leaving his car? Abandoning a vehicle in congestion? Were they about to witness someone making their day WORSE?

Dr Glass walked to a pedestrian crossing, a few feet upstream, and pressed the button. He turned around and got back in his car.

Enlightenment, and a cautious hope, dawned on the faces of the other drivers in the queue.

The pedestrian sequence unrolled. The red light cut off the oncoming stream of traffic. The queue was freed. The roundabout was freed.

AI also more often avoids subplots and fails to play with time jumps and flashbacks. The systems overwrite passages about the body and senses. “Where a human author might write that a character ‘felt afraid,’ AI renders fear as a tightening chest, cold sweat, and dimming lamplight,” the study said. Humans also spin more complicated narratives involving more characters and locations than AI can handle. Humans also reference other works of fiction, specific people and places in a way that AI struggles with.

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TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

We barely know anything about Madagascar pre-500CE. We don’t even know whether the island had a permanent population before then, despite finding a bunch of much older signs of temporary human presence.

Malagasy mythology makes mention of the vazimba, a “precursor” ethnic group that might or might not be distinct from Madagascar’s current population.

The point is, we do not know.

So you were in Madagascar when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, i.e. during one of the most obscure, most undocumented parts of Madagascar’s human history?

Where!

The scientific versions of this make me feel very glad that I’m no longer a lab rat, as the life-defining version of this for me was when I was a young lab rat tasked with tracking down an extremely defrosted armadillo from Texas.

When the consignment of armadillo parts - decorously placed upon dry ice, in accordance with the finest scientific principles - was shipped to a young British scientist and summarily lost in transit, it was one of those academic problems. You know what I mean by that. That means: Problems that only happen to academics.

The late armadillo was too late. Despite earnest emails promising that it had arrived a few days before, this was meant in a sort of spiritual sense, and what you might refer to as the “material” aspect of the dead armadillo manifested many days later. This was the subject of some fraught discussions between the ivory tower and the US Navy, who said rather stiffly that they had shipped a dead armadillo in perfectly sensible dead condition to us, and had no idea why the American postal service had interpreted their instructions as “send the dead armadillo on a quirky little road trip and lie about it.”

Intense discussions about the dead armadillo revealed the US Navy had no sense of humour about Schrödinger’s Armadillo (“we sent you a dead armadillo, and have washed our hands of any downstream issues”) as well as their rather uptight announcement that they would not be sending us any more free dead armadillos unless we could prove that WE were not in the habit of carelessly losing them. The implication being that this important military armadillo corpse had been lost entirely because the postal service had received it in a spirit of unbecoming whimsy, and this was the fault of Elodie, lab rat and designated representative of the United States Postal Service. As the military arm of the imperial core are naturally the primary suppliers of high-quality scientifically reliable dead armadillos, this censorious and frankly ungenerous cooling-off was a topic of some consternation.

Elodie, a very young person at the time, who rather fancied the British postdoc who looked so enthralling in riding breeches, was thus tasked with tremulously arguing with the Navy about how grateful we were for everything, but how fresh armadillos were far more academically interesting, while we were on the topic, if they didn’t mind, and if they could spare another one, if we promised not to allow the mail to become whimsical.!

The academically interesting part of the metaphysical armadillo was eventually run to ground significantly after the point at which the dry ice had become academic. The state of the armadillo inside the box at that point was an extremely academic problem. The late armadillo had become so late that it had surpassed biological interest, yet had not quite entered the realm of palaeontological significance. It was, however, a stage of lateness that was officially Too Late. It smelled of an unusual kind of death, simultaneously pork and mouse.

As the most junior of junior lab rats, it fell on me at the time to sneak the box into the medical waste in someone else’s laboratory (as is only honourable.)

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

Melanistic fallow deer filmed by Jakub Wencek in the forests of Barycz Valley.

turns out

it was definitely my favorite boba place at my favorite mall. I sent op an ask with this photo when I was leaving the mall earlier (I don't think they've seen it yet but I was astounded)

you guys would all have loved my (not on tumblr) spouses reaction when he went "oh no the kiosk is gone" and I immediately said LOST JOB FROM TUMBLR?!?