#bodhimcbodeface

:D i've got a few wips for you haha

Repressing a groan, Xie Lian allows Hua Cheng to pull his hands away from his face and reveal his cherry-red cheeks. He should be better at saying such things now, when he’s lived for over eight centuries, but he turns tongue-tied and stumbling when he tries. Hua Cheng watches him now with knowing patience, a good-natured hint of teasing in the quirk of his lips.

“Could it be that gege has something on his mind other than calligraphy practice?” he asks, far too innocent to be believed.

“I do?” Xie Lian retorts, flustered. “You—you’re the one!”

Canting his head to one side, Hua Cheng affects a sweetly innocent look. His hand still lingers on Xie Lian’s thigh, idly tracing something that could be either flowers or dragonscales over Xie Lian’s robe. Huffing out a breath, Xie Lian narrows his eyes.

“San Lang is teasing me,” he pouts.

okay so i know that one of them is named hua cheng. i don't know the other one's name and i don't know which one is hua cheng. one of them is a religious figure (god? demon? messiah? spirit? saint?) and the other one is a worshiper who is very horny for them. the god one is just as horny for them back. it's mxtx so there's actually a plot too

@bodhimcbodeface​ replied to your post: oh I really want to hear what you have to say about how the oxford comma doesn’t always reduce ambiguity? I can’t think of a situation where it’s unhelpful, please enlighten me! 

why can’t i just do reply to a reply anymore i had to paste this in manually 😭

ANYWAYS: you’ve activated my trap card!! here you go.

classic example of oxford comma reducing ambiguity:

I invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin. [w/o oxford comma - ambiguous: are JFK and Stalin the strippers, or are the strippers a separate group?]

I invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin. [w/ oxford comma - unambiguous: the strippers are indeed separate.]

however, you can tweak this example very easily into a sentence in which the oxford comma creates ambiguity instead:

I invited the stripper, JFK, and Stalin. [w/ oxford comma - ambiguous: is the stripper named JFK, or are JFK and the stripper different people?]

I invited the stripper, JFK and Stalin. [w/o oxford comma - unambiguous: we can see now that this is a list of separate people because stripper is singular, and thus cannot be conflated with JFK and Stalin.]

my point is not that the oxford comma is good or the oxford comma is bad--my point is that prescriptivism is nonsense and that language should, first and foremost, communicate. grammar should serve that, not the other way around. And it’s not just about reducing ambiguity, it’s also about tone, mood, style etc. all those articles that are like “why you should always use the oxford comma” and “is the oxford comma necessary?” and “the polarizing debate over the oxford comma” are always missing the point. it’s not about the fucking comma!!!! the oxford comma is not a beacon of grammatical clarity any more than like, any other punctuation mark. they serve purposes, they are not purposes in and of themselves. I use a period at the end of questions in written dialogue sometimes because I think a period conveys my intended tone better, not because of some bizarre notion that the period is a superior punctuation mark to the question mark. it’s such a ridiculous argument. (that might be a false equivalency, i’m tired and i can’t dissect my own logical fallacies after midnight pls try again in one business day)

i have nothing against the oxford comma, and I think it’s very useful in many contexts. I am, however, quite peeved at the way we talk about it in mainstream debates because I think it obscures the real issue, which is the encoded prescriptivist attitudes in our studies of grammar and language and the consequences thereof. see: “lawyer dog” vs “lawyer, dawg” vs what counts as a clear and unequivocal request for a lawyer in a court of law. these are separate issues, and law is, of course, very concerned with precision of language.

From what I understand of how the US citizenship exam works, it’s not quite this.  It’s a test that is very much set up to encourage lots of rote memorization--they’re very helpful about listing all the possible questions on the USCIS, along with concise approved answers.  They really encourage you to memorize 128 (formerly 120) questions and answers.  Simple answers, usually not even a full sentence.

Given that, making the language technical and opaque mostly just serves to make things very difficult for people without a fairly high level of English--not a working level of English, but an ability to listen (this is a spoken exam) to formal test-taking language. 

The earlier form of the test wasn’t much better, but they did lean towards more direct language.  eg:

“Who is in charge of the executive branch?”  You still have to memorize the phrase executive branch, but--importantly in a spoken exam--the key words are easy to pick out.  Who tells you that the answer is going to be a person.  The sentence structure isn’t too fussy.  It’s a sentence structure that’s useful: Who’s in charge of the cafeteria?  Who’s in charge of car rentals?  Who’s in charge of hiring new employees?

vs the new version: “The President of the United States is in charge of which branch of government?”

What are the key words here?  President of the United States?  Well, that phrase is in many questions here.  So are the words branch and government. There’s not a lot to latch onto here, if you’re struggling to listen to a language you’re still learning.  And look at that goddamn sentence structure!

Similarly, several questions have been changed from things like “Why did ______?” to “Name one reason that ______”  For a language learner, it’s useful to be able to pick out question words: A who question is going to need a person for an answer, where needs a place, why needs a reason.  This is hard to do, but it’s an important daily-function language skill.  “Name one reason ____” is an important test-taking language skill.  The citizenship test is intended to test your English--but it’s not supposed to be gauging whether you’re ready for the SATs.

The basic memorize-a-bunch-of-specific-shit hasn’t changed, as far as I know (though I have no knowledge of how things look internally among the people doing testing).  But the shit you have to memorize has been made much wordier in much more abstract ways.

WELL. so i thought about wen ning for approximately a millisecond and immediately started tearing up. so thats a pretty good summary. to elaborate:

(I imagine you’ve seen the meta on the universe rewarding him for preserving his culture?) Anyway it is 100% a fair point but I’m not sure how else to solve it. Like obv we can’t have a twelve-year-old explicitly killing someone in a children’s show. I’m curious if you have alternate ideas?

i have not seen that meta but i am already a little skeptical of it lol. i’m not so interested in him just getting rewarded, and honestly fee like that is still extrapolating more from the show than what is actually there (not having read the meta myself) 

I actually don’t think aang not killing ozai is necessarily the problem--it’s the way they get there; he never has to sacrifice anything, be challenged on any of his beliefs in a way the narrative takes seriously, or actually mature as a character. His arc really gets lost after he leaves the guru in book too. 

The narrative just gives him ways out instead of having something for once have a Consequence-- the rock in the back to open the Avatar state actually still makes me so mad thinking about again bc he gets off the hook for lying to everyone about mastering the avatar state with the guru lol) 

the energybending literally coming in at the last second is also problematic--if they set it up earlier, had Aang actually have to do something to unlock that power, then it would be fine

@bodhimcbodeface replied to your post: reading that article and like  I Don’t Know What I...

I was gonna say, these people definitely do get the text (more than a lot of the “Jesus will forgive your Bread Crimes” folks do), they just don’t agree with it.

(for this meme here! Please feel free to send me more characters, y’all!)

First impression

Oh my gosh, this sweet disaster child. Between the terrible, terrible jokes, the fact that he was very much thrown into the whole Zero-One and CEO of a major corporation in just one day, and the fact that he genuinely cares for the Humagears (you see that right from his first scene, where even though he’s in a screaming rush he still takes a moment to say hello to the amusement park’s greeter Humagear and he greets her by name), I’ve been rooting for him from the start.

Impression now

Still a sweet disaster child (honestly, I keep reading his character as closer to his actor’s age of 18/19 rather than Aruto’s age of 22). I think a lot of his mistakes and/or bad ideas come from the fact that he a) wants to be liked very badly and b) is still trying to figure out stuff as he goes with very little guidance. Case in point would be a lot of his early interactions with Gai, where he seemed to be taking seriously some of President Amatsu “I’m gonna feed this AI a bunch of data on human malice and act surprised when it turns out to be genocidal” Gai’s suggestions about what makes a good CEO, because Aruto was trying so hard to be better at that part of his job.

Favorite moment

That thing from the firefighter arc? That I’m not gonna spoil here but that made me cry? *chef’s kiss*

Idea for a story

Hiden Aruto and the mad shopping spree he inevitably went on between episodes 1 and 2 in order to get outfitted as a Proper CEO — or at least how he thought a Proper CEO should dress.

Unpopular opinion

I actually like his jokes.

Favorite relationship

On a purely platonic level, because I don’t really ship him with anyone, I love how his relationship with Izu has developed. In a lot of ways, she’s the closest thing he has to a mentor as far as the CEO thing goes (goodness knows Fukuzoe doesn’t seem to have stepped up in that regard), and watching Izu develop a sense of humor and her own quietly quirky personality under Aruto’s influence has been a delight.

Favorite headcanon