No author is entitled to comments, to interaction, to reblogs or likes or reviews or anything, but in a community where you’re essentially a bunch of indie writers, that’s the lifeblood that keeps people *posting*. Writing doesn’t necessarily stop, but when someone feels like no one gives a shit whether you’re sharing or not, you quit sharing.
In the simplest possible terms: creators aren’t entitled to your support, but you’re also not at all entitled to their creations.
If you want content, support content creators.
Even better: stop viewing your fellow fans creating things as content creators. We are not on YouTube and we do not get money for this.
Support your fellow fans by letting them know— human to human— that you enjoyed what they did. If we stop putting people who create on pedestals, maybe we can kill the influencer culture that’s invaded fandom.
I don’t say this often because it sounds bad but I learned about behaviourism in uni and just never stopped doing that.
You want a given behaviour to increase you reward that behaviour, the more direct the better. If the behaviour you want to see is writing, art, good posts, whatever, the easiest and most reliable way to reward that behaviour is attention.
I do this with kids, I do this with coworkers, I do this with friends and family. If I have no reason to object to a behaviour, I reward it with attention. I say thank you for things that should be done regardless of thanks, I respond with a compliment or a question on any topic, I make eye contact, I smile, I do my best to make the other person feel seen.
The reward feels nice, the behaviour continues and my life steadily improves as the people around me are happier and more interested in sharing their lives with me.
Every single time I say the phrase “I was classically trained in the art of multiple choice tests” everyone in the room who’s not a millennial laughs at my joke while all the other millennials in the room immediately look like they just walked in on a funeral by accident.
teach me please
Why? It has nothing to do with the real world and I’m mad that the school system taught me how to take multiple choice tests rather than write a report for a job or properly research what issues are important when deciding who to vote for in an election. Or like… accurate history. You know. Actual stuff you need to know to be a person.
im currently stuck in the school system and I want cheat codes
Okay, I completely understand wanting to know the actual stuff, I want to know those things too, and those are things im working on learning. but to be able to get to the information that tells me these things I need to survive this hellhole of a system and im bad at tests, which means i dont survive very well.
Okay fine.
Read the entire question twice to look for tricky wording. If you’re allowed to write on it circle or underline words like NOT or EXCEPT or other things your brain might skip over. This will make it less likely you’ll skip over them.
Read all the answers before answering. Sometimes the wrong answers are so stupid you don’t even have to work out the problem or try to remember the thing.
If the entire test is about the same subject (Colonial America for example) answers might be found in previous questions. Like question #6 might ask who wrote Common Sense. You might remember that back in question one it said “In Common Sense by Thomas Paine” and there’s your answer. This happens a lot more often than you’d think.
If you don’t know the answer cross out the answers you know are incorrect. If there are four answers but you know one of them is wrong your odds of guessing right just went up from 25% to 33%. If you can eliminate two answers then you have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.
If you can’t eliminate any answers at all guess C. The placement of correct answers isn’t completely random and C is the answer slightly more often than other answers. If you guess randomly your odds of getting the answer right actually goes down.
Read study guides and take practice tests. Actually read them. Especially if they’re written by the same person who wrote the test you’ll be taking. You’ll be more likely to pick up on their quirks and what kind of trick questions they write if you use the study material. You’ll also know what to study and what to leave.
For sections where there’s a list of words you have to match to definitions read the words first. You’re probably more likely to know the definition of a word then the word that goes with a definition. (or time period or math method or whatever). Answer the ones you know and leave the ones you don’t until you’re completely done with that section. Then look at your remaining words and definitions and match them to the ones that sound the least ridiculous.
Don’t take a test on an empty stomach unless you’re fasting for religious reasons. I don’t care if you haven’t eaten breakfast in twenty years. You’re gonna eat something before you take that test.
Remember that taking multiple choice tests is a skill that not everyone is naturally good at and it’s a skill that means absolutely nothing in the real world. So however you do on this test doesn’t dictate your worth as a person.
As someone who is also classically trained in the art of multiple choice test, I can confirm
Yeah I learned all this shit too. And like while most things public school teaches you is such fucking bullshit, this is actually true.
The C trick isn’t always useful, especially when it’s a computer-generated test. But I would recommend choosing an option to stick to, if only because it limits the brain energy you use on questions you can’t answer.
Similarly, don’t panic if you’re getting A for five questions in a row: if the teacher has made any attempt to randomize answers, this is entirely possible. I’ve also known teachers who do this on purpose to mess with students (yes, really).
Also, this is very important: As long as your test doesn’t deduct points for wrong answers, you should always answer every question no matter what. Use the last 5 minutes to fill them all in.
If ‘all of the above’ is one of the answers, there are good odds that that’s the correct answer. If you think that two of the potential answers sound right, then ‘all of the above’ is a Very good guess.
If the question is one of scale—the answers are like “100 years / 1000 years / 10,000 years / 100,000 years”, the answer is almost never the biggest or smallest number. If you don’t know, choose one of the middle numbers.
“i don’t understand what people mean when they talk about a constant state of the self. come on, we’re always shifting like water.”
“that’s true, but our experiences stay with us for our entire lives as there’s a fly ball to left field and it’s caught by Pollock at the warning track, the person we are is built upon what we learnt as the person we used to be, you know?”
“of course, we are always shaping what we will become in the future. Castillo dots the corner for a called strike.”
“man that hot dog guy’s really killing it.”
“i can hear him from all the over here. he’s making me hungry. do you like relish on your hot dog?”
Honestly who gave Wicked the RIGHT to express what’s expressed in For Good.
You’ve changed me and I’ve changed you. Permanently and inescapably and completely and nearly beyond recognition, certainly beyond being able to undo it or even knowing where to start, where to begin to untangle the twisted threads of our intertwined lives.
Was the change for the better? I’m not sure. The change has been too deep and too complete; i don’t know who i am without you.
But i think it was for the better. In any case it was for good.
moment of silence for everyone who relied on AI chat bots for research when it’s going around saying shit like this.
[image description: search that reads “country in africa that starts with K”. the featured snipped is from www.emergentmind.com and reads “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.” /end ID]
since I’m paying more attention to drac daily stuff this year I’m seeing a lot of posts saying “scholars always get the book wrong” and guys, ya gotta read better scholarship. poke around on jstor and google scholar for publications from the last ~15 years. see if you can find queer / feminist / postcolonial centered journals with online public archives. find a writer you agree with and see who else they cite. I prommy that academics are not your enemy and a lot of them are in their line of work precisely because they’re just as not normal about their blorbos as you are. hashtag don’t turn this into another “historians will say they’re just friends.”
Honestly not even the last fifteen years — try since the 1990s. A lot of the language we use to talk about social issues today comes from academia, and it is language that has been in use in academia for far longer than it’s been in vernacular. “Social constructs” and the ways in which texts produce/subvert/question them have been, broadly speaking, the primary concern of literary scholarship since the ‘80s. The third wave of feminism started in the late ‘80s; Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1989, and very soon after it gets picked up by a lot of literary critics. Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is pretty much the starting point of postcolonial theory, came out in 1978. By the year 2000 Queer Theory and Gender Studies are flourishing. Fuck, I was so busy talking about those guys I almost forgot to mention that Marxist lit theory has been alive and well since the fucking ‘70s!!!! If you go back and read a piece of literary theory from 1998 you will probably be surprised by how much it sounds like it could have been written yesterday. But that’s because many of the ways we now describe gender and race and sexuality were invented by academics — queer and female academics, academics of color, other marginalized academics — thirty-forty years ago.
Obviously, criticism from the early/mid-20th century is, to generalize a little, going to suck for all the reasons you think it will; back then, most critics had this idea that a text had one objective correct meaning, and the critics deciding on that meaning were overwhelmingly wealthy straight white men (that said, we even owe some things to those nerds — mainly close reading, looking at a paragraph or a sentence of a work and examining its form and content and using it to draw conclusions about the work at large, AKA what’s happening in 90% of tumblr media analysis). But since the 70s literary criticism has been primarily post-structuralist, and since the 90s that post-structuralism has primarily turned its attention to examining how a text understands structures of class, race, gender, sexuality, culture and society at large in very nuanced, intelligent ways. There are a lot of fantastic scholars doing a lot of fantastic work!!! Post-Colonialism, Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, and New Historicism are all doing quite well at the moment — within the past fifteen years or so you can start throwing Ecocriticism into the hat, if you want to see people talking about how literature treats the natural world. By dismissing “scholars,” you’re ignoring the fact that there are a lot of really cool literary critics you could be learning from RIGHT NOW!!
And this is a little beside the point but I do really want to note that also: you’re neglecting the fact that YOU are doing scholarship, even if you’re not “scholars”!! Like, I hate the people who invented close reading, but holy shit close reading is the foundation of like every piece of tumblr media analysis ever!! Furthermore: Frankly, if you’re talking about the latent meaning hidden within the text you are probably also doing a little bit of psychoanalysis because that’s where we get that idea about reading literature (sorry, fellow Freud haters). If you’re talking about the emotional reaction the text provokes, if you’re interested in how the serialized nature of dracula daily changes the experience vs reading it as it was published — congratulations, that’s Phenomenology, the study of how people experience a text!!!!!! Plus there are (as previously mentioned) all the ways that we get our vocab on gender and race and class and social constructs from theory. Your blorbo analysis post is a form of literary criticism that is deeply, deeply indebted to both modern post-structuralist theory and earlier 20th century ideas of close reading and psychoanalysis, even if you don’t know it. In that respect, and in the fact that modern criticism is going to be working under many of the exact same methodological and ideological influences as you, I promise literary scholarship is worth your time.
I don’t know if there really is any science behind workout routines separated by sex, but even if there is benefit to doing exercise “for women” i don’t give a shit. and i will intentionally seek out guides made For Men. because by and large, this is how the different video thumbnails shake out
23rd August 2023
Reblogged From roach-works
Notes: 74345
ALT
