BF2S Forums EE Chats 2142

gravity's rainbow is pretty hard to read by design, yes, although i should say its difficulty is overstated in the same way ulysses's difficulty is overstated. they have kind of become the totemically 'difficult' reads of postmodernism and modernism, respectively.

ironically much of the difficulty in pynchon comes from the fact that he folded in his years of expertise working in scientific institutions, the defence industry, etc. a lot of the high-concept stuff underpinning his works is basically the philosophy/history of science. imagine! a guy who did engineering physics at cornell using all those literary pyrotechnics in a novel! someone should tell him that metaphors are a waste of time.

Last edited by uziq (2025-05-23 10:32:47)

dilbert has this weird notion in this head that every single humanities student is basically the arrogant pony-tail guy in the bar from good will hunting. he talks about oxbridge grads as if every single one is a caricature like boris johnson, from eton (our phillips exeter or equivalent), bumbling through life with inherited ease and blagging everything with a few latin quotations. when really even at the very top-ranked colleges most enrolled students now are from state schools and probably a lot less privileged than someone from dilbert's own stratum tbh (his anecdotes about idlers he knew and grew up with reminds me of a concept from freud, of 'the narcissism of small differences').

it's also so funny that, in an era when the reactionary right has been stereotyping and piling on liberal-humanistic education for 'woke mind virus' stuff for the last 10 years, dilbert is still going to war with a stereotype from the patrician 1950s. mention 'arts degree' to anyone else in the world and they picture some student with blue hair who is chaining themselves to a fence, chanting 'free free palestine!' and reading judith butler and 'queer theory'. but in dilbert's mind the BA undergraduates are all still improbably upper-class brideshead revisited toffs. the man is completely and utterly divorced from reality.

Last edited by uziq (2025-05-24 06:39:46)

i'd probably have held my nose at where we're going with generative ai even if i'd never touched a colored pencil in my life. slop is even in our ads now. won't catch me turning off my blocker. that stuff's already a vector for malware.

i get the whole "it's just a tool" (or toy) argument from the pro-ai people and understand that there is some work in a good prompt and back and forth between the computer. but i want to read books and watch movies and listen to music made by people, not facsimiles of human creation. it screams "we have media at home." now even governments are posting slop. ugh.

at least provide full disclosure on ai involvement, you know? front cover stuff.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2025-05-24 11:14:48)

high school testing has very little emphasis on long term retention, i think. for instance, ask any given millennial or a boomer if they remember much from french iii. cram mentality, no good, imo. all the bullets and defunding probably aren't helping, either.

i have faith that mac can balance the demands of his canine murder dungeon and his classroom with minimal difficulties. all that, and still able to sneak-100 crabwalk right under a cucked soldier's nose.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2025-05-25 00:36:33)

Welcome back to Ken's nature series. Yesterday I saw this cute little guy out on the trail



I belive it is a Southern Pacific Rattlesnake. If Androoz comes back from his sexcapades in SEA Im sure he can verify/clarify

Pretty sure I told the story here of me catching a snake not once but twice at one of my previous jobs.

I'm the resident snake-handler of bf2s. No qualms about it.

I saw another snake cross the trail, but it was too quick for me to snap a pic. I think that one was a gopher snake.

Here's a Greater Roadrunner I saw down on a beach trail earlier this week

I never taught ELA (English Language Arts.) I can't comment on the best way to teach reading but I think that any system probably works if you have a student who wants to learn and doesn't have anything else holding them back.

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.

OK, here's the actual context which you did not provide:

"This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English.

The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption."
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346

OK, so poor readers at rural colleges find Dickens, which they aren't familiar with, difficult, even after two years of college.

i was reading dickens at 12 or 13, pretty well when anyone should be nudged onto that sort of literature.

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.
"Read chapter one, what was the author really thinking, discuss the imagery, read chapter two - repeat" etc.

the decline in literacy has been precipitous, and it's not a good thing.

We're doomed, accept it.

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.

I think you have to accept my lived experience.

"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.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2025-05-26 03:51:48)

Did anyone force you to spend thirty hours watching Cats?

Probably spent about 30 hours class time just on Dickens.

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.

erm, the parataxis and obscure legalese in that passage is there to elicit a point. lmao.