Naharie

Was driving with my grandmother and in broken English she says “no eyes… no nose… no face. Don’t trust.” To which I looked around wildly in search of this omen of ill portend.

Please stop being nonbinary too. God only created one gender. You must conform to that.

I remember when I was younger, anytime I watched a movie where the characters have to kill a scary monster/alien, I always thought the act of killing it was intended to be part of the horror. Like there’s this amazing creature that we’ve never seen before, and maybe under different circumstances we could’ve coexisted with it, but it’s trying to attack you and you have to defend yourself, but by destroying it you also destroy the ability to ever understand it and that’s sad and is supposed to make you feel conflicted.

applying for new job:

Ten or so people you'd like to know better

Last Song - Karma Police by Radiohead

Last Song - My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion

glimpsed some passing discourse on bluesky yesterday. apparently there is a conflict stirring between "speed readers" and "normal readers", the latter accusing the former of "skimming" and "not comprehensive reading". this was very confusing to me because i was formally instructed in Evelyn Wood's speed reading methods from the 1950s by the Korean war paratrooper who taught the rhetoric class in the weird alt school for morons and dropouts i partially attended as a teenager. and the way Speed Reading was taught to me at the time was specifically as a form of skimming, which is also how it is defined and even judged in speed reading competitions where you only have to hit 50% comprehension of a text to pass. so it is, definitionally, skimming, with pretty bad comprehension, its just that you dont need to read every single thing the same way you would read a novel with prose you wanted to enjoy or whatever. theyre different skills. speed reading was a big fad in the 50s and 60s, JFK was obsessed with it. it has largely been abandoned specifically because it doesnt enable a lot of comprehension of complex texts

Some people are legitimately super fast readers without losing any comprehension. I knew someone who could read 500wpm without any training or practice beyond reading by herself. Terrifyingly she not only had above average comprehension at her age, but could also remember all of it word for word, being able to back up her interpretation with direct quotes and pages numbers and area of the page. Insanity.

500 wpm is actually well within normal parameters! if you knew this person as a kid then yeah that's impressive for a grade schooler for sure. but just to check myself on this, i just took a reading speed test where i had to stop halfway through to turn off the stupid music i was listening to AND pause a youtube video and i still got 553wpm. so its not crazy fast. like i said, if you can finish The Vampire Lestat in 4.5 hours or less (and im guessing i personally know multiple mutuals of this blog who have done exactly this) you are reading at 500wpm or more. the vampire lestat is this big: