(no subject)
Oct. 5th, 2025 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sparklecat LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. In the interest of proving something to myself, I'm going to be going through and re-interpreting this paragraph. I got the idea from Project muse's study on the reading comprehension of English majors.
The setting is London. Michaelmas is a holiday on the 29th of september, but the next sentence mentions November, So i assume the main thing to note would be "term", which implies a longer time period, maybe of a month or so, and maybe in reference to school, ie "the spring term" or the "fall term". Michaelmas term is probably a length of time used in a school setting, which means that this Lord Chancellor is related to universities in some way, because its more likely they are talking about University/college than a "primary" school. right now, we are both describing the literal setting and also the mood. We see a man, the Lord Chancellor, sitting in a place called Lincoln's Inn Hall. there is alot of mud in the streets, likened to a time when the dinosaurs walked the earth. soot is mixing with the snow, and the author implies the snow is darker because it has metaphorically gone into mourning, due to the cold and the dark of the time of year. dogs and horses, covered in mud. humans walking down the street in foul moods, falling in puddles of mud and making new puddles of mud for someone else to fall into. overall, the tone being set here is incredibly dreary and cold. noone is happy right now.
Alright, onto some interesting articles!
The dawn of the post literate society
Is the Decline of Reading making politics...dumber?
I am of the digital native generation (Gen z) and being on my phone, and i would argue many of my friends feel the same way, is pretty much synonomous with being apart of the real world. I got my first phone, an iphone, at 12, and since that day, I had never gone anywhere or done anything without my phone until a few years ago. I was hanging out with my then-friend-now-girlfriend, and we were having so much fun we left to run errands before i realized i didn't have my phone. It felt so freeing, I didn't realize how much my phone felt like an extension of me until that moment.
I left social media recently due to how horrid it makes me feel. I would spend hours upon hours sitting in bed staring at reels/tiktok/shorts (it didnt matter which app), feeling just plain bad. I didn't care about any of the stuff i was seeing, but it didn't matter, because all i had to do was scroll and i would see something new that i would inevitably also not care about.
I also used to consider myself a voracious reader, someone obsessed with learning and debating and trying new things. I'm not going to pretend its all the phones fault, I think my generation has gotten enough shit about "always being on that damn phone" for a lifetime, but I do agree, the Apps, the Algorithm. it feels a bit like a psychic snake, worming its way into my brain and keeping me from doing what i really want.
I dont want to fear monger, but its scary to me that there is a greater access for the common folk to information than any other time in human history, but it seems people are just...choosing not to. arguments I have heard often in my job (i work as a librarian) is that it all being accessible is the problem. noone worries about internalizing information, because they can always just look it up again. I personally all through highschool was of the opinion that all these tests and quizzes and essays were useless, because anything you could ever want to know you could just look up.
At least in my case, I have learned now that it is far more annoying in the long run to look the same thing up over and over again, not to mention the lack of confidence in your own intelligence that grows when you cannot even trust yourself to remember something important to you.
The setting is London. Michaelmas is a holiday on the 29th of september, but the next sentence mentions November, So i assume the main thing to note would be "term", which implies a longer time period, maybe of a month or so, and maybe in reference to school, ie "the spring term" or the "fall term". Michaelmas term is probably a length of time used in a school setting, which means that this Lord Chancellor is related to universities in some way, because its more likely they are talking about University/college than a "primary" school. right now, we are both describing the literal setting and also the mood. We see a man, the Lord Chancellor, sitting in a place called Lincoln's Inn Hall. there is alot of mud in the streets, likened to a time when the dinosaurs walked the earth. soot is mixing with the snow, and the author implies the snow is darker because it has metaphorically gone into mourning, due to the cold and the dark of the time of year. dogs and horses, covered in mud. humans walking down the street in foul moods, falling in puddles of mud and making new puddles of mud for someone else to fall into. overall, the tone being set here is incredibly dreary and cold. noone is happy right now.
Alright, onto some interesting articles!
The dawn of the post literate society
Is the Decline of Reading making politics...dumber?
I am of the digital native generation (Gen z) and being on my phone, and i would argue many of my friends feel the same way, is pretty much synonomous with being apart of the real world. I got my first phone, an iphone, at 12, and since that day, I had never gone anywhere or done anything without my phone until a few years ago. I was hanging out with my then-friend-now-girlfriend, and we were having so much fun we left to run errands before i realized i didn't have my phone. It felt so freeing, I didn't realize how much my phone felt like an extension of me until that moment.
I left social media recently due to how horrid it makes me feel. I would spend hours upon hours sitting in bed staring at reels/tiktok/shorts (it didnt matter which app), feeling just plain bad. I didn't care about any of the stuff i was seeing, but it didn't matter, because all i had to do was scroll and i would see something new that i would inevitably also not care about.
I also used to consider myself a voracious reader, someone obsessed with learning and debating and trying new things. I'm not going to pretend its all the phones fault, I think my generation has gotten enough shit about "always being on that damn phone" for a lifetime, but I do agree, the Apps, the Algorithm. it feels a bit like a psychic snake, worming its way into my brain and keeping me from doing what i really want.
I dont want to fear monger, but its scary to me that there is a greater access for the common folk to information than any other time in human history, but it seems people are just...choosing not to. arguments I have heard often in my job (i work as a librarian) is that it all being accessible is the problem. noone worries about internalizing information, because they can always just look it up again. I personally all through highschool was of the opinion that all these tests and quizzes and essays were useless, because anything you could ever want to know you could just look up.
At least in my case, I have learned now that it is far more annoying in the long run to look the same thing up over and over again, not to mention the lack of confidence in your own intelligence that grows when you cannot even trust yourself to remember something important to you.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-05 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-06 10:35 pm (UTC)Yes! This is why I'm a big fan of note-taking. Especially being in a system with memory issues. When we don't write down our thoughts on the things we read and consume, those things tend to be half-remembered by one headmate and no one else in here. But there's something about taking the time to write notes that helps process information in a way that makes it more readily accessible to many of us. It's also really fun to take notes as a group and bounce ideas off of each other.
-Adelaide
Our child self was a voracious reader. In elementary school, I loved getting books from the library. For us it wasn't the internet that killed our interest in reading. As someone on the tail end of the millennial generation, I can attest to the fact that kids were being burnt on reading and learning well before social media became a common thing. In fact, it was a school program that was supposedly meant to reverse this trend that ended up killing our own interest in it.
We were good at multiple choice questions and inferring meanings of words from context, which meant we were assigned to read "college reading level" books in middle school. Which I think is horseshit; we may have had an advanced vocabulary but that doesn't translate neatly to literacy and understanding adult concepts and worldviews. That made fínding any sufficiently high enough level books we could genuninely understand or enjoy in our school's library really hard, and severely limited our choices in what we could read. It was especially painful given kid-us's genre of choice was fantasy. The school did at least make an allowance for us to read high school level books, but see, that led to the unfortunate occurance of us being exposed a Piers Anthony novel. That was... something. Let's just leave it at that.
In general, being expected to do something we would do on our own volition tends to kill our interest in doing that thing. School took things like reading and learning, which we naturally love, and made them painful.
-Cecil
no subject
Date: 2025-10-14 05:38 pm (UTC)