One Hell of a Steep Learning Curve

hopethesunshiines: lucindasparks: andrew-jason: pixiedust-payc...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:06:11 -0700

lucindasparks:

andrew-jason:

pixiedust-paycheck:

broadway-aradia:

the little girl in this video watched mary poppins over and over when she was in the hospital fighting cancer, and got to meet mary on her make-a-wish trip to disney.

i’m in tears!

I just cried so hard at that long hug. Oh, dear.

I’m sorry, now I’m just too emotionally unstable to be seen in public for like a week… I just… can’t…

omfg she kissed the page after she signed it i’m dying ;_;

how is she not balling.

Um…

...aaaand naphthalene poisoning.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:59:21 -0700

So when my sweetie’s mum got to their main Missouri home from their vacation Florida home (yes, they are Moneyed People), she decided that the Big House (that’s what they call it, without irony), smelled musty, so she put bowls of mothballs everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Closets, bathrooms—and by the heat pump, so that the ventilation system picked it up. We walked in and I thought,”Oh Liz, you’re just being a wuss, you know that taxidermy smells like mothballs and you’re scared of taxidermy so you’re being hysterical, you just need to get used to it…or, wait, maybe you just need to sit down…or, wait, maybe you need to throw up…” Seriously, my eyes were watering. So we negotiated a retreat to a nearby hotel. Which is good because bed. Big big comfy fluffy bed. And here at the end of thirty-seven hours without sleep, that is the size of my world.

Night, loves.

Pennypaperbrain: eldritch-horrors: Plans for Penny’s visit:Outdoor gun range with an...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:47:55 -0700

Pennypaperbrain: eldritch-horrors: Plans for Penny’s visit:Outdoor gun range with an...:

nympheline:

professorfangirl:

eldritch-horrors:

Plans for Penny’s visit:

Outdoor gun range with an introduction to the beauty of the FAL. There will also be skeet shooting. Since she is a newbie we will be omitting the glow-in-the-dark skeet shooting and accompanying hallucinogens.

Alligator preserve tour that includes…

I want to suggest beignets at Café du Monde just to see if E-H’s eyeroll can break the Internet.

once upon a time, there lived the city of new orleans.

and while there have lived hundreds, thousands, millions upon millions of cities (built on the failures and foundations of millions of others), there is only one city as immortal as it is young; and that city is new orleans.

(there is danger here, and death: a district of gardens where bibliophiles are pulled into cars and pulled apart and left, bleeding and broken and resolute, at the front steps of their priceless and pristine homes. a city that offers no quarter but one, and takes no prisoners but you. tread lightly. ask nothing. offer all. thank everyone. and take it all back.)

deep in an alley, so close to the bright lights of the world that your eyes smart at the edges, is a kitchen, a wall, and a row of windows. decades of powdered sugar heaped like regret, keeping everything below hidden from view. prying eyes—yours, mine—indulged, but only a short while. so look close. press your toes against the old road and raise your sights to the glass. there he is: the man you did not know you were here to see, the man you will remember all your life. he has the heart of the city hard in his mouth, and tattoos climbing-crawling over him, bleeding bougainvillea, thick. he’s taller than myth and blacker than jazz and twice as wide as the deep steel sink.

he’s handling liquid fire.

watch him pull a beignet, two, three, twenty, from the boiling oil. he wears no gloves. he holds no tongs.

his hands are the most beautiful things you have ever seen.

watch him toss them out to drain dry, leaving half their ills behind, soaked into the paper. his mouth moves a measure a minute, words and grunts and deep-cave laughter spilling from him eager and inaudible behind the glass. watch him watch the busboy, the waitress (with her eyes high and tight, her shoes unforgiving), the dishwasher with another life so ready to be squeezed out that she bends herself like a willow to reach the white plates. in this, the hottest, heaviest city since god razed sodom, watch him stand before the boiling oil, and never spare it a glance.

watch him feel your eyes, though it’s dark and past dark, and the kitchen lights are bright. watch him pause, and stare, and know your presence; watch him nod, his hands never stilling in their movements. watch him work. watch him feed thousands.

once upon a time, there lived the city of new orleans.

tread closely. look quickly. taste everything. forget nothing.

Jesus, Nympheline.

THE BRANSON AIRPORT IS FULL OF TAXIDERMY. And I have a morbid fear of taxidermy. Thought I was gonna...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:13:07 -0700

THE BRANSON AIRPORT IS FULL OF TAXIDERMY. And I have a morbid fear of taxidermy. Thought I was gonna faint.

Sherlock's Hamlet syndrome.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:59:12 -0700

professorfangirl:

Ways in which Sherlock is like Hamlet:

Contemplates suicide

People think he’s crazy

Has one friend

Morally compromised pursuit of justice

Caught in the conflict between mind and body

Uses deception and disguise in pursuit of justice

Arch-enemy pretending to be someone he’s not

Talks to a skull

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES SUCKS DONKEY BALLS. That is all.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:59:28 -0700

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES SUCKS DONKEY BALLS.
That is all.

Pennypaperbrain: eldritch-horrors: Plans for Penny’s visit:Outdoor gun range with an...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:10:37 -0700

Pennypaperbrain: eldritch-horrors: Plans for Penny’s visit:Outdoor gun range with an...:

eldritch-horrors:

Plans for Penny’s visit:

Outdoor gun range with an introduction to the beauty of the FAL. There will also be skeet shooting. Since she is a newbie we will be omitting the glow-in-the-dark skeet shooting and accompanying hallucinogens.

Alligator preserve tour that includes…

I want to suggest beignets at Café du Monde just to see if E-H’s eyeroll can break the Internet.

My tale of woe.

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:31:44 -0700

Which is actually my manfriend’s tale of woe, because his da died five months ago and we’re going to his memorial service. So I am all love and support and darling-what-can-I-do-for-you. But…but…but this is my Tumblr and I get to share my pain: his parents are moneyed luddites: they live in a freaking museum, but they have no television. And not even on some principle—they just don’t care for it. And that’s not the worst: they made their money in telecom, and they were the first ISP in Springfield, MO—and there’s NO INTERNET AT THEIR HOUSE. Warren’s all “we’ll just get temporary dial-up.” DIAL-UP. Okay, okay, I only complain because, fuck, we’re going to be there a week, which means that during the Hannibal finale I’ll be a house with NO TV AND ONLY DIAL-UP.

*ugly selfish sobbing*

Okay. Done. Love and support and darling-what-can-I-do. For real.

Patron Saint of Mediocrities: how to be an ally for reals

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:41:32 -0700

Patron Saint of Mediocrities: how to be an ally for reals:

elfstaranymore:

1. Don’t identify yourself as an ally. Don’t treat it like a special identity not to hate an oppressed group. Because if you do, you are reinforcing hatred of the group as the default position and presenting yourself as a super special exception who should be showered with…

cranberryloops: Dear Anon, whoever you are, you made me very...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:40:00 -0700

cranberryloops:

Dear Anon, whoever you are, you made me very very grateful today.
From the bottom of my heart - thank you.

Seconded and thirded. There’s a fanfic of hers that’s the most haunting I’ve ever read, and one of the very best. Love cranberry.

kryptaria: prettyarbitrary: hollydiggity: imsuggestingcoconuts...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:27:20 -0700

kryptaria:

prettyarbitrary:

hollydiggity:

imsuggestingcoconutsmigrate:

hiddles-batched:

bearyourcross:

yeahmicah:

mythosaur:

quellingmyboredom:

Muppet Treasure Island…

Fern Gully tbh

Jackie’s Back

Home Alone 2

If I’m perfectly honest, my original is It, because I grew up in a horrible household

Mine is rocky horror, so I’m unsure what that says about my household. Other than it was awesome.

I first remember him in Clue.

Technically, Rocky Horror, but I first saw it when I was around eight or ten, when it came to HBO. My parents caught me watching it again, because at that age, I couldn’t understand what the hell the plot had been — I just liked the dancing and singing.

So I suppose the first movie of his that I understood was Legend. But still, Rocky Horror.

And I will forever regret not seeing Anthony Head play Frank, though I’ve caught some youtube clips of it.

I will always associate Tim Curry with the thrill of being half naked in a theater and the thunk of toilet rolls hitting the screen.

havingbeenbreathedout: peninsulamamoenam: emmadelosnardos: Thi...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:24:18 -0700

havingbeenbreathedout:

peninsulamamoenam:

emmadelosnardos:

Thinking about Susan Sontag today after all the hullabaloo about one child or more in The Atlantic, and Zadie Smith’s rebuttal in The Telegraph of the idea that creative women should only have one child (thanks to peninsulamamoenam for pointing me towards these stories).

I can’t say I know a terrible amount about Susan Sontag, but her Notes on Camp were very influential to me as a college student, and Illness and Metaphors and Regarding the Pain of Others have been texts that I’ve come back to from time to time as a clinical psychology student.

So Sontag is someone I respect, greatly, and I pay attention when people speak of her. As for her having children (or child) — Sontag was someone whose work habits, from what I’ve gathered, were always very deliberate and part of a larger intellectual plan that she had for herself, and I could see her as someone who might intentionally choose to have only one child. But of other one-child authoresses? The number of children that women have is not always an intentional decision, thought out beforehand with great attention to a woman’s future career aspirations.

One of the problems with articles like The Atlantic’s is that it seeks in statistical trends the answer to the question ‘how should we live our lives?’. Statistics use large data sets to draw conclusions about aggregate group behavior, but group averages are not good bases to predict or prescribe individual behavior, because individual vary widely and that variability is obscured when we aggregate data. So just because more successful female writers tend to have fewer children, does not mean that we should have fewer children if we want to be successful female writers; there are always individual exceptions to group trends and what works for the group may not work for an individual.

In addition, just because we know that productive female authors tend to have fewer children than productive male authors, it doesn’t mean that having more children is what causes women to be less successful writers. That is a poor conclusion to draw, statistically speaking, because there are other factors involved, besides procreation, that determine how good of an author a person can be, not the least of which include hard work and creativity, talent and originality. So even if we choose to have fewer children, if we lack the ingredients that make a writer a writer, we won’t succeed on that account, either.

Finally, it’s a bit ridiculous to prescribe a certain kind of reproductive behavior with the expectation that it will make women ‘better’ in another area that has absolutely nothing to do with reproduction but has a lot to do with available time. In social science we would say that there is a ‘third variable’ involved here that is mediating the relationship between number of children and writerly success, and that is the number of free hours available to a woman. Having a child certainly may reduce the number of free hours available that are so desperately needed to engage in meaningful creative work, but working three jobs to pay off debt will also reduce that available time, as would having to take care of aging parents, or to return to school for additional education, etc.

If anything, this finding that successful female writers have fewer children is probably a reflection of the fact that child-rearing takes a lot of time (who knew?), that most of that work falls to women (really?), and that women who spend more time taking care of children will have less time to write (obviously). So, I agree with Zadie Smith that the issue here isn’t the number of children that a woman has, but rather the number of free hours that she has, time that can be secured in any number of ways, such as having a willing stay-at-home spouse, the financial means to hire child-care, grandparents who live near by, or a high quality early-child education system that is sponsored by the government (think Sweden, France).

But it’s easier, from an American perspective, to take for granted that women are the ones who care for children, and to conclude that if a woman wants to be creative, then she should just have fewer children. Easier to focus attention on women’s individual choices (and what of their partners’?) than to rebuild a social system that devalues the unpaid work of women, that is only starting to think about early childhood education as a worthwhile social investment, and that still looks to aggregate-level statistics to determine the ideal path for individual behavior.

EXACTLY.

Everything Emma said.

Also, as a creative woman who doesn’t have children and personally never wants any, I found the Atlantic article’s unexamined assumption that “have fewer kids” means “have only one kid,” to be a bit jarring.

Yes, yes, and may I add yes. The number of children a woman has doesn’t make her more or less a writer or more or less a woman. (Shakes hbbo’s hand.)

"The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:18:00 -0700

““The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level.””

- What Kids Are Reading, In School And Out

Walk into any bookstore or library, and you’ll find shelves and shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for kids. But research shows that as young readers get older, they are not moving to more complex books. High-schoolers are reading books written for younger kids, and teachers aren’t assigning difficult classics as much as they once did.

Children are reading significantly less challenging material in school every year. Read more or listen to the full report at NPR.

(via pacificstand)

I assigned a fairly classic anthropology text to my students in a Four-Year University and received a chorus of “This was too hard.” When I countered with, “I read this exact same book my Freshman year,” a student said, “Yeah, but you like this shit.”

(via praxjarvin)

I think there are genuine issues with college students being less prepared to work hard or engage with complex material. I just wish this article didn’t conflate that problem with, “Because they’re reading young adult fiction.” I’d venture to say kids who actively read for pleasure are not the ones causing problems in college. And teachers assigning complex ‘classics’ is no guarantee of the students reading them; if anything, ‘classics’ are easier to cheat with because Cliff-notes type study aids are so readily available.

(via madmarvelgirl)

Boo hoo. What percentage of the U.S. population do you s’pose completes a high school education, compared to 100 years ago? What aptitudes do they expect every one of these kids to possess? Which KINDS of intelligence does the system value? The answer, post-…well, Enlightenment, tbh, is, “the ability to close-read Western literature, and memorize a bunch of facts and STEM formulas,” and not much else. How many straight-A English students do you know who are incapable of drawing a box, panic at the sight of Ikea flat-packs, are mortifyingly awful at reading social situations, have never once dunked a basketball, couldn’t wire a lamp if their lives depended on it, can’t memorize a ten-item grocery list, and would die if left alone in the woods for two weeks? I’m not saying everybody should have all those abilities — quite the opposite. I’m saying high school probably at some point made your genius bike mechanic believe she was stupid because she never grokked King Lear.

Here, have a whiteboard animation:

[RSA Animate: Changing Education Paradigms]

(via stultiloquentia)

Also, to what purpose was the “challenging” material being put? Kids in my classes were being assigned King Lear and Siddharta and pretty much doing shit with it. It didn’t enlighten them, it didn’t instill in them a love of reading or practical reasoning, it did sweet fuck all except, bluntly, make them hate their class.

As someone with a degree in English Lit, as someone who actually was reading “challenging material” for pleasure and as someone who regularly gets, from strangers she’s struck up a conversation about a book with, “Wow. You should TEACH. Suddenly everything about this is six times more meaningful - why didn’t they teach this to me this way in school?”, I’ll tell you right now that you can make more use of Harry Potter to teach about literature, literary history, literary conventions, critical thinking, textual deconstruction and liking to read fucking books to a class of kids who have some interest in Harry Potter and can actually see what the fucking point is, than handing out Jane Eyre with a bunch of worksheets and a lecture to a class whose eyes glaze over at Victorian sentence structure.

Which, I don’t blame them. I’m perfectly capable of reading Victorian sentence structure, but I am also perfectly capable of reading Freud: it doesn’t mean either of them enlighten me, or are something I’d do for pleasure.

(To be fair, I am not sure this is what’s being done by any means, but that’s not the point - the point is “challenging texts” is a fucking bullshit metric, and also, ffs, CS Lewis had a character complaining in bewilderment about how twelve year olds were no longer taught Plato. FOR INSTANCE.

(via tygermama)

Why are those texts complex?? Because they’re old?? Keep in mind, most of the things on assigned reading lists were written in a bygone era where people talked and thought differently than they do today. They were also written by educated adults FOR educated adults. Not adolescents in the process of obtaining an education. This can make the cultural differences, the historical difference and the language differences impenetrable to today’s youth without a massive, MASSIVE history lesson first. It also makes the characters and the text entirely unrelatable to anything the young adult has experienced thus far in life. While they may have been relevant to adults, or young adults when they were published, they offer little to today’s kids. And lastly—assigned reading lists of days of yore were filled to the brim with dead white European males. Is it so tragic to get other voices into a reading list? Things not by dead white or British dudes? Seriously? Basically they’re saying it aint good if it was written by a minority or a woman. Only the finest in dead white dudes will do for our children. Those books may have been thought of as the height of education by our parents and grandparents, but they’re just furthering the Dead White Dude agenda now days.

(via deducecanoe)

I said it on Facebook regarding this issue, and I’ll say it here:

The Hunger Games, while probably lexically being “an easier read” than say…1984, still deals with many of the same incredibly complex, layered, and serious concepts. Is one better than the other because it was written earlier and by an English dude? Not really.

(via dontbearuiner)

What’s frustrating about all of this is that literature classes serve multiple purposes, ideally. They teach us different way to think, different ways to argue, different ways to write. and different ways to approach texts. Yes, The Hunger Games can be, and hopefully is, used to examine many of the same issues as 1984 in classrooms.

I was lucky enough in high school to have classes where we read The Turn of the Screw and Red Dragon in the same classes. I understand that my education was privileged and for many people probably profoundly not useful or interesting, but the fact remains I’m a better thinker and writer than I could have been because I was exposed to both types of material this post is discussing.

Can and should super popular, and “easy to read” texts be a part of classroom curricula, especially if it gets students who would not otherwise be engaged, engaged? You bet. But the idea that these texts are a solution that requires the elimination of older, more formal, or more complex texts concerns me. Diversity of content and style is key, and as far as I am concerned that diversity means, among other things, geographical, experiential, and stylistic.

Writers learn to write through reading. For me, in high school, that’s Cicero to Anne Rice to Maya Angelou and back, with like the fucking Baby Sitter’s Club somewhere in the middle.

I am uncomfortable when the response to an over-simplified article is to want to dispose of any category of text in education wholesale. I don’t really give a crap what kids are assigned to read in school, as long as they are taught to reason and express themselves through it. I don’t teach, I haven’t the soul for it, but a few hours on Tumblr is enough to make me wonder if argumentation is not only lost in schools regardless of text selection, but is in fact actively discouraged.

That to me is the problem. Not Harry Potter, and not Dickens either.

(via lettersfromtitan)

The Shakespeare prof who teaches fanfiction refuses to enter this discussion of false dichotomies.

misha-in-the-tardis-at221b: in-demigodishness-and-all-that: con...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:08:59 -0700

misha-in-the-tardis-at221b:

in-demigodishness-and-all-that:

constitutionclass:

england-made-a-spooky-blog-and:

nega-che-chalaga:

salt-water-chardonnay:

latinagabi:

thenoodledude:

emergencysalsa:

Tumblr: #this fucking donut #can we talk about this fucking donut for a minute #can we #because on this donut #the sprinkles just comfortably melt into the icing #you can tell that they are so perfectly in tune with each other #and they’ve come so far from when the sprinkles just sort of sat on top #barely touching for fear of rejection #just ugh I can’t #otp: comfortably melting

4chan: here’s a picture of someone putting their dick in a donut.

reddit: that donut needs to go back into the kitchen and make me a sandwich.

academia.edu: Here is a pdf of the seminar paper I wrote about the erotics/poetics/semiotics/science of donut eating.

deviantArt:I did not steal this donut. I traced it so now it’s mine.

It got better

Fanfic.net: The donut is the setting for a high school AU, were two sprinkles meet and realise they have more in common than they ever thought possible, however, the mean chocolate sauce has caught wind of their secret relationship. Will they be able to make it together before it’s too late? M for a lemon flavoured donut.

This has officially become one of my favorite posts.

I JUST REBLOGGED BUT FANFIC MADE IT PERFECT

Well this is going on the syllabus.

In which roane has forgotten how icky straight cis-males can be

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:59:38 -0700

I've been being a little more active on OKC lately and revised my profile to indicate that I was interested in both men and women. This led to an influx of 'hey babys' and 'hey sexys' and occasionally creepier messages. It has hit its nadir this afternoon:
Local 22 year old: hey there would you like to meet and have some fun casual sex :) I love bigger women and id be willing to even pay if you werent too thrilled on it
Me: *too shocked to respond at first*
L22O: guess not :(
Me: Okay, I just reported you, because in WHAT FUCKING UNIVERSE is it okay to approach a stranger and not only ask for sex, but follow up by asking them to prostitute themselves? I have had some shitty propositions come my way since I've been on OKC, but yours, child, has zoomed to the top of the list as the creepiest and the worst. You're fucking lucky I'm not a cop, because you just solicited prostitution, asshole.
L22O: *deletes account*

Photo

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:22:52 -0700

stephrc79: Okay, I’ve seen this pic a bunch load of times, but...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:04:30 -0700

stephrc79:

Okay, I’ve seen this pic a bunch load of times, but this is the first time I’m noticing this.

Is he wearing two hats???

Every time I see this I get the most horrible Thompson Twins flashbacks. That fucking ponytail thing BEN STAHP.

Photo

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:20:29 -0700

The Colbert Report | 4.25.2011 “…researchers have discovered...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:13:23 -0700

The Colbert Report | 4.25.2011

“…researchers have discovered that masturbation calms restless leg syndrome. That’s right, the cure for restless leg syndrome is restless hand syndrome.”

mad-hot-mads: This is the stuff dreams are made of… Very, very...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:30:09 -0700

mad-hot-mads:

This is the stuff dreams are made of… Very, very sweet dreams. #Gorgeous

louche (adjective): disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way.