
And I didn't find the story particularly interesting. I got a third the way through it.
And we are at the age where nobody is impressed by the books you read anymore. And that's a shame.

Last edited by uziq (2025-05-23 10:32:47)
i've been to two different colleges and did visual arts and stem at both. nobody in english or media design/visual arts guffawed at or even thought about the electrical engineering students. it was pretty much all one-way. i also interacted with the humanities people from the stem side of things. generally quite pleasant. meanwhile, stem students squatted at the 'help desk' making fun of humanities professors' last names like a bunch of 3rd graders at a hyperactive sleepover. even the old guy stem people were in on it. it still rubs me the wrong way. just do the support tickets and go home, omg. zero need for that toxicity. lots of scott adams clippings on those corkboards. i later ended up in the class of the nice professor who the stem sweaties were mocking behind their back.uziq wrote:
you just know this long rant is grounded in reality. dilbert went to imperial college, a sciences-only university. i'm sure he had lots of daily interactions with 'humanities students' in south kensington. the only other educational establishment in that part of town is the RCA, with a bunch of trainee architects with geometrical haircuts.
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granted, but some of that probably folds into overemphasis on testing.uziq wrote:
not testing. the technique of reading.
Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2025-05-25 20:42:08)
OK, here's the actual context which you did not provide:uziq wrote:
it's from an article in a higher-education journal. it's literally about college-age students who can't cope with figurative language.
I was reading New Scientist and Scientific American at 12-13, being forced to listen to a simpering berk witter his way through 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' and 'Great Expectations' seemed like a monstrous act of intellectual sabotage at the time, and my opinion is unchanged being able to view the history through the lens of time - not that time can really be a lens or be used to really view history - made slightly worse by the knowledge now that he was almost certainly a latent paedo.i was reading dickens at 12 or 13, pretty well when anyone should be nudged onto that sort of literature.
We're doomed, accept it.the decline in literacy has been precipitous, and it's not a good thing.
I think you have to accept my lived experience.you bring every single issue down to your personal grievances. you've mentioned repeatedly your 'trauma' at being made to read boring literature in school – what? – all of forty years ago? nobody cares that you had a bad teacher and didn't enjoy slogging through 'a tale of two cities'. grow up man. flinching from reading fiction for your whole life because of poor pedagogy in 1970 is truly fucking pathetic.
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erm, the parataxis and obscure legalese in that passage is there to elicit a point. lmao.Dilbert_X wrote:
"On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them."
Who the fuck actually wants to wade through this stuff?
Page after page of turgid prose which goes nowhere, its obsolete.
No I think I'll teach a community college class on live-action remakes of children's books.unnamednewbie13 wrote:
not to come down harshly on the comic book bilgewater relentlessly sucked directly out disney's wrinkly corporate anal cavity by its Very Discerning Fans…
you enjoy that stuff for reasons you couldn't elaborate much on. you really should give classics another pass. more in that pool than just dickens. fresh start and all. add to the ol' box of tools.
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2025-05-26 05:47:30)