One of the things I love most about MacGyver (1985) is that we get a hero who gets to be bad at things sometimes. Little things, too: small, random human things.

He can’t cook. He hurts his hand when he punches people, and shuts his fingers in doors sometimes. He speaks a little of several languages, all with a terrible accent of which he is very conscious. He gets cranky when he’s tired. He hates heights. His home is a mess.

He’s a ridiculously talented agent with an incredibly impressive skillset but he never stops being human to be a hero. That man is going to save the world and then he is going to go home and make a terrible tofu casserole and it is exactly that combination that makes him one of my favorite characters of all time.

This is... well, it's not the only way to make a relatable hero, but it's a very good way! Not "relatable" as in "I could imagine chatting with them over Beverages at the Place To Hang Out" but "relatable" as in "oh, just like regular people, this character is quite good at their primary skillset but outside of that there's a good chance they're as useless as I am outside of mine."

I'm too old to get invested in characters who are perfectly competent at nearly everything in practically every physical and social situation. Give me characters who've got some dumbass in their makeup... just like I have.

The linked article

This article is genuinely insane. I learned to read at the same time and it was completely different. I was taught to sound out the words and if I came across a word I didn't know, they did suggest we use context clues to figure out the meaning, but it was also made clear that that was not a perfect solution and the best option is always to look it up. But seriously, just a memorizing? That is inside.

I taught English as a second language for over ten years. In order to become a proficient reader in English, most kids will need to be explicitly taught phonics. To become proficient in Japanese, you need to learn radicals.

Three-cueing is essentially crutches that help you get by but let you down eventually. It's very common when learning a foreign language, I misread kanji sometimes because I pattern-recognize based on context instead of really looking. The solution is to do some proper studying, but I don't wanna.

It's also interesting that this sort of contexual confabulation and pattern-recognizing is how LLMs work. Not sure what to do with that.

Absolutely fantastic article, but I do want to say that this...?

... Is absolutely terrifying in the context of all other anti-intellectualism happening right now. This guy is STILL pushing his 'observations' while denying evidence that it doesn't work.

Woman in the article with a genuine and apparently severe reading disability talking about how she taught herself to read as a child too ashamed to ask for help because she was brilliant and excelling everywhere else in the 1990's:

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

That same woman observing her child being taught to read by a teacher in 2019:

"I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

WTF?

Children should not be taught how to read with the half-assed, impromptu methods a child bad at it uses to cope on their own and make up for their inability. That will NEVER teach them to read the right way.

Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

This is a deeply egotistical man with a learning disability trying to validate himself and make himself the norm.

There's nothing wrong with a learning disability of any kind, but forcing the way someone copes with that to be the way EVERYONE is taught the material is.

Reading and writing ARE precise processes with clear steps and guidelines, not a GUESSING GAME.

Huh, that's abruptly explained a thing that's been driving me mad for years, when people are reading aloud something I've written and they just say completely the wrong word. Instead of actually reading it, they're guessing what it might be. Jesus fucking Christ.

i want to copy this from the replies, because i've read all these articles and listened to the whole Sold a Story podcast on this issue and this paragraph does a good job summing up what exactly went wrong, to my understanding at least:

Fair warning, this isn't going to be anything close to a cohesive response, just a bunch of thoughts.

On the bright side, it looks like some states have been rolling out legislation to advise reading instruction based in phonics, and even ban cueing in some states. It's even fairly bipartisan!

This is the article (which also has more on what @dragontastical said above):

I am absolutely biased here because of my experiences with districts choosing curricula based on sales pitches, but any time I see a law requiring or banning certain types of curricula, I want to know who gets to make the decision on what counts and what they base that decision on. Is it education professionals and researchers, or is it career politicians? Is it based on what the publisher says about their curriculum and their sample lesson, or do the decision makers have access to the the entire curriculum and all its materials?

Personally, I'd like to see more requirements on teacher training, ensuring that preservice teachers are taught accurate science about reading and taught how to read and evaluate the research themselves. It wouldn't fix the scripted curriculum issue, but it would make more teachers able to identify the bad practices in scripted curricula and work around them.

That's a great point re: who is enforcing this! Though I think it is, if not a step in a better direction, then at least indicative of a larger cultural shift in a better direction. I absolutely agree that teacher education programs need to be held to a better standard as well-- the article also points out that individual teachers get around the legislature if they don't believe in the changes, or just don't know how else to teach.

The comparison to LLMs above is apt, because one of the things that gobsmacked me about this when I first heard of it was: it teaches kids to guess at what a text says, based on what they already know and assume. And that is the opposite of what reading is for.

If you want to just make something up based on your preconceptions, you can do that on your own, for free! If you're reading it's because someone wanted to communicate with you, and pass on knowledge you don't already have. That's the purpose of written language. It is an essential function of reading that it can surprise you. The most interesting and important texts are the ones where you can't actually guess at an unfamiliar word because it's telling you something new.

books with non linear narrative, experiments with the form, etc: go!

please do not all say house of leaves i know some of you bitches read books

Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire: each chapter takes place in the same chunk of London over something like 1000 years

if we can count comics, Moore's Promethea too, one of the volumes is a trip around the Tree of Life, i think the whole narrative can be mapped on the Tarot Majors too

Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions is a book length prose poem that you read from the ends in to the center. i haven't gotten through it but respect the ambitious structure

i feel like Hal Duncan's Vellum & Ink had something interesting structurally between them but i don't think i finished them, specifically bc i waited too long to start Ink after Vellum & got completely lost

Honorable mention/not sure if it counts but the language was interesting enough that I'm tempted to include it: The Tide Will Erase All by Justin Hellstrom is an Improbability Drive-style apocalypse told by a ten(?) year old but might also be a radio/satellite announcement of their story after the fact? needs a revisit

OH SHIT Koji Suzuki's Ring Cycle. Ring is a horror novel that happens on an entirely different level of operation than what we find out about it on Spiral & Loop

Jeff Vandermee's Dead Astronauts, i actually don't know how to describe what he did with it but it's nuts

The Dictionary of the Khazars is a novel that's a lexicon

this is turning up a whole bunch of things I hadn't heard of which is EXACTLY what i wanted god bless you all:

So Stories of Your Life and Others has been on my wishlist for ages as has Pale Fire; Voice of the Fire is on my bookshelf waiting for me and I think I read Promethea or parts thereof when it first came out; I read Catch-22 recently and will rave about it at the drop of a hat, read Cloud Atlas… a couple of years ago I think? After having it on my shelf for a million billion years & dug the matryoska structure muchly, but yeah! Otherwise I hadn't heard of most of these?!?! excellent work everyone well done

Got a few I haven't seen in the notes:

Blake Butler's There Is No Year is decidedly nonlinear, bordering on nonsensical, with upsetting vibes and such perfect pacing that I couldn't put it down

Matt Bell plays in this territory a lot; pretty much anything by him is going to be fighting you back a little but my introduction was the short story "The Cartographer's Girl"

John Elizabeth Stintzi takes a pretty oblique approach to structure in Vanishing Monuments and, I understand, in My Volcano. (Disclaimer: they are also a friend of mine, but I make the recommendation in earnest)

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins is like if Warren Ellis tried to write House of Leaves, and I mean that as a compliment

I'm sure you're aware of Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, but it is, in fact, all that and a bag of chips, especially in its structure

Monica Ojeda does some fun things with structure, especially in Nefando but definitely also in Jawbone, though I'll note that Nefando especially deals in some very dark territory

Steven Millhauser's short stories are pretty distinctly nonlinear and often outright weird in a very fun way -- I love his collection The Barnum Museum, notably the source of the short story that inspired the movie The Illusionist

I feel like Ayse Papatya Bucak's The Trojan War Museum fits here, but I also just feel like that collection is underrated, so cum grano salis

I think the movie is better-known, but Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango is formally and topically very weird in a way that I found delightful

I also enthusiastically cosign the recommendations of Coup de Grace and Pale Fire. For what it's worth, Pale Fire is also one of the funniest books I've ever read.

I am not aware of Our Share of Night! Also, "bordering on nonsensical, with upsetting vibes" is like catnip. Thank you.

253 by Geoff Ryman (originally published on the web with hyperlinks, later published as a paper book) now at : https://www.253novel.com/

The Bridge by Iain Banks

and

Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh

(both have the dude in a coma)

See Under: Love by David Grossman. It's in four parts, two of them are straightforward lit fic, one is salmon point-of-view, if I recall correctly, one is a story told in dictionary definitions.

And short stories:

Stet by Sarah Gailey (the story emerges from the footnotes)

Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel (a story in forum posts)

I'm frankly shocked nobody's mentioned David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," which is an interconnected set of six stories in different times and with different narrators that are all split in half and work towards the center, like this:

1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1

The stories leave off, sometimes mid-sentence, and resume later in the book, while working forward in time from the first story that's an Age of Sail story until the 6th one, the only one not interrupted, is in the far post-apocalyptic future. Then each story is resolved in reverse chronological order.

What amazes me about this book (it's one of my favorites) is that Mitchell somehow makes each of these stories entirely distinct and unique. I don't know how he managed to write in six such distinct voices to the point that you'd think six writers had collaborated on this work.

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice definitely plays with "when" the narrative is taking place from POV to POV, not to mention playing with the POV itself. The later books become a fair bit more conventional (but no less entertaining for the change) in that regard. I think her later The Raven Tower does some of that as well but it's been a bit so don't hold me to that one. (I remember being amazed by what it pulls off, mind you, so it's another big recommendation.) But definitely, Ancillary Justice.

how it all feels lately

There’s something so uniquely terrifying about memory issues. I feel like my self is slipping away from me.

Here’s the thing I feel like a lot of folks don’t get: I’m not trying to forget what you said. Honestly, I really tried not to. I can’t control what I do and don’t remember—forgetting things just happens. It’s annoying for you, I know, but for me it’s distressing as hell and when you make a big deal out of it rather than just reminding me you make me feel ashamed. I’ll remember that, at least.

It costs you nothing to be kind to people with memory problems. Please. It’s scary enough without people treating memory lapses as a personal failing.

Hey, reblog this version instead, please!

The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be done with it and the sooner you can stop thinking about it. Go on, up you get, it won't be as bad as you think.

You won't want to do it later either. You might as well just do it now. Even if you don't finish it all, anything you manage to get done now is something you don't have to do later (when you still won't want to do it)

Brush your teeth!

Sure would be a shame if thousands of people saw this...

After having gone thru acct recovery a couple times early in the days of OneDrive, I got the vibe that saving ANYTHING to a propriatary service was a huge mistake, ESP anything MS. Nice to see that vibe continues to check out.

MS does not care how many years of your life you have backed up to their cloud- they can take it away/delete it for any reason at any time. Keep your stuff local on an external drive.

Especially everyone who has had to deal with social media and shop platforms denying you service because your work is too sexual, too queer, etc: it won't end there. Don't rely on 'the cloud'. Keep your stuff local on an external drive.

It feels almost unbelievable that there's an Olympics this year. Not just this year but next month. Like can you please come back another time thanks

At least they're in Italy though

THE WOMENS TOURNAMENT HWHAT

Webtoon just attempted to replace me with ai for the second season of a webtoon I was the illustrator of (don’t ask me for the title it’s so shit and I drew it under such gigantic time pressure that my back has permanent damage from it) but yeah fuck you would’ve loved for another actual artist to pick the project up under better circumstances (and better writing) but ig this shitshow is cursed from start to finish

So. Fucking pardon me if I’m very protective of my drawings and don’t subscribe to the whole steal like an artist rhetoric which has been stretched far beyond the reasonable. Every day I wake to someone in some way treating my drawings like they’re free real estate which is annoying enough only for the sucker punch of “were gonna feed the whole 1st season of a comic you did into an ai that will spit out the second season without paying you a single penny for it” to hit me square in the jaw. What’s the silver lining here? That the project was already dead bc they couldn’t afford to pay me anymore anyway? Be nicer to artists I’m so fed up

-via Design Bloom, November 24, 2023. Very cool! Some excellent info on exactly why these will be so useful in the comments.

WHY ISN'T THE U.S. INVESTING IN THESE I mean I know why, obviously, but WHY

I just recently started reading Gokushufudou: The Way of the House Husband and these two are so great 💕 

You start off getting to know Tatsu, seeing what an absolute madman he is, and you wonder, "What's a nice upstanding career-minded woman like Miku doing with this guy?" And then you get to see them interact more and more and it's like oh. No, they're perfect together. I love them, Your Honor. Partnership goals times eleventy.

‬

I wish every artist a very "drawing something so gleefully stupid you cackle the whole time" at least once this week

Anyway if you want to know if an illustration is AI micro-analyzing it will reveal nothing because AI is constantly advancing to hide known tells and also human art is imperfect and may have mistakes you're blaming on AI because you only want to see nails.

The best way to vet illustrations is to find the source and see if the original artist/poster has things in that same art style; whether or not they post wips, sketches, etc.; or whether they straight up claim or display more obviously AI art. Going over visual art with a fine-toothed comb is almost never going to help you and will result in false positives and therefore false accusations against actual artists.

You have to build your personality around fact checking instead of around doing bad-faith over-analysis. This is the em dash thing all over again and I'm starting to think some of you are just both mean and stupid.

You can survive your childhood and escape the horror of your parents by creating and existing solely in a rich inner world in which you contain all your thoughts and feelings and this will not have any effect on your relationships as an adult

As someone who has been on the Internet longer than many of you have been alive, I cannot emphasise enough what a good idea it is to block fools, bores, and drama-starters ON SIGHT. That means, on the FIRST sight. See the take, do not wait.

You are not a court of law. You are not required to hear them out, argue, nor give them a second chance. Block them. Nothing bad will happen to them without you! It's fine! Goodbye forever! Prevention is better than cure.

My fellow aunties will be with me on this.