When you pick up a sword for the first time you will be slow and awkward. This is frustrating, but refuse the temptation to try and become a “faster” fencer. Chasing after speed is like trying to catch smoke. If you try and pursue speed, all you will accomplish is haste. Haste is the enemy of 1st class fencing.
Speed is a lie the untrained mind tells itself when it sees an action it cannot follow. The truth is a combination of timing, control, and fluidity. Fluid motion, even done slowly, will always arrive before a hasty strike. Control will allow you to move without wasteful motion that will slow you down. Timing will eliminate the need to move fast almost entirely. There is no need to get somewhere fast so long as you get there at the right time.
Tip for mymutuals who engage in bladed armed combat
signal boost
This is true for plenty of other things too!! When you’re learning anything that involves moving your body, don’t forget that quality of movement is more important than speed!
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
THEYRE LYING JUMP AT YOUR OPPONENT JUMPSCARE JUMPSCARE BACK FOOT FORWARD AND LEAP AT THEM!!
send them to HELL!!!
Transcription, because it is worth reading:
There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”
So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.
It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.
I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.
First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.
Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.
Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.
In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]
Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]
Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.
There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”
Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.
And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”
The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.
Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]
A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.
Finally, fifth: Fiction.
However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.
Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.
One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]
Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]
Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.
This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…
The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.
And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.
It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.
Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.
But it plays out along the same general lines: Primary sources replaced with modern fiction, victim perspectives replaced with perpetrators, specificity replaced with Star-Bellied Sneetch-style “Why can’t we all just get along?” metaphors.
I bet there's at least one guy who uses a wheelchair who became a sneakerhead just for the laughs. Wearing pristine bright white brand shoes like "if you let your shoes touch the ground you're a bitch. If you keep them on display and never wear them, you're a coward. I'm the only one doing this correctly. Fuck you, get on my level."
i love this thing
my favorite celebrity non-controversy was when lorde wanted to express her love of baths so she posted a picture of her bathtub captioned “and iiiiiiiiiii will always love youuuuu” not realizing that whitney houston died in a bathtub
like oh my god. it’s such a non issue but it’s so so funny
this is the type of thing my anxiety thinks is gonna happen every single time I say something
The two tracks werent synced right and it sounds like everything’s gone to shit at MTT Resort
Found this digging through my tags, though you might like it.
burgerpants losing his shit at work
Fun fact: if you, as an adult, tell miserable children that their youth is the best that life will ever be, and that it's all just downhill from there, there's a percentage of them who will hear this and think "well, I guess I better kill myself before that happens." And a certain percentage of those will proceed to do that and succeed.
Anyway what I'm saying is that any time you feel tempted to say that, you should instead consider shutting the fuck up. Just because you peaked at 16 doesn't mean anyone else did. Most peoples' lives get better than that.
The worst part of those stepparent forums is that they refuse to admit that being a stepchild sucks. Not because you want your mommy and daddy to get back together soooo bad or because you’re jealous that you’re not daddy’s only baby in the world anymore. It sucks because you are a child with absolutely zero agency. It sucks because you have no say on who your parents choose to bring into your life and you can’t do anything about it if that person hates you, mistreats you, has beef with you, a literal child. It sucks because you can’t even choose where you lay your head at night, you are bound by court order to go stay in a house you know you are not welcome in. It sucks because adults often take their hatred of another adult out on you and there is nothing you can do about it. Being a child sucks in a lot of ways, beyond the childlike wonder and the lack of financial responsibilities. It really does suck to be dependent on the adults in your lives and have them fail you. Being icy to your dad’s girlfriend of the month is sometimes the only way you can exert your power and hopefully warn her to get away, even if you can’t.
someone just literally interrupted me mid conversation to tell me “what wonderful big dark eyes i’ve got” and on the one hand extremely flattering that she couldn’t even wait until the end of my sentence to comment on this, on the other hand did she have to say it like im the big bad wolf
We laugh at how The Art of War is basically just, "An army can't fight if the soldiers aren't eating," but I'm reading this document about conservation of ancient yew trees and it legitimately says, "You should never fill the center of a hollow yew with concrete," so I think that probably making blatantly obvious statements is just the bane of being a specialist in anything
My local mayor posted this and I'm mesmerised. Every time I look at it I spot a new problem. It's like a rorschach test.
Not only did the AI fail to make a functioning UK map despite TONS of accurate maps available, but then a team of people actually thought "that looks about right, that's probably the North, it's got at least one Hull that'll do" and posted it.
I'm so relieved you understand my crisis ^
its unfortunate when words have two meanings and one of them is signifigantly worse than the other. because every time i see "dog groomer" in the wild my initial instinct is "youre doing WHAT"
