anime-academia

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Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov

from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

submitted by anon

[anime-academia]

the goal for this year and for every year is to be kind and also to stop being scared of literally everything

[anime-academia]

Everyone clap for non consensual body modification everybody loves a character whose body has been altered against their will

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reading and watching “classic” books and films is such an interesting experience because, before you get into them, when you only know them by name and maybe the vaguest plot outline, they’re intimidating and stuffy and up on a pedestal, but then you finally take the leap and check them out and realize that almost every story that’s achieved such a legendary level of popularity did so because something in its emotional core reached out and grabbed a lot of people by the throat and you are NOT immune.

[anime-academia]

The thing you have to keep in mind about Moby Dick is that it’s an explicitly anti-racist text written by a white guy in the 1850s. So you end up with stuff like Ishmael spending an entire paragraph complimenting a Polynesian guy on his skull shape.

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[anime-academia]

i’m obsessed with these…

(From DepthOfWikipedia on Instagram)

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a tumblr mutual is like the curator of a beautiful museum

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Responding to common douyin hooks

English added by me :)

[anime-academia]

end of january affirmations

im not doing anything wrong and no one is mad at me

there must be a place for me in this world because here i am

my art doesnt suck

instagram is nothing to me

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I am not saying here's a link to a free online version of the 1984 graphic novel but if it was there you should probably go read it.

[anime-academia]

初心 (shoshin) "beginner's mind"

Obviously, the new year is a traditional time to start new things.

Another option is to continue something old, but look at it anew.

In Japanese this is known as 初心 (shoshin), or “Beginner’s Mind”.

初 = for the first time, in the beginning. 

This is the same kanji as 初め (hajimé), meaning “for the first time”, as in the common Japanese greeting 初めまして (hajimémashité).

(Note: 初め is not to be confused with 始め, which is pronounced the same as has a very similar meaning. 

The difference is that 初 functions like an adverb of time, whereas 始め is more like a verb - as in “to begin”.)

心 = heart, mind

Having a “Beginner’s Mind”, viewing a situation from a fresh perspective, can lead to insight and innovation.

An example of this is the success of the go-playing AI program AlphaGo.

The Asian board game go (known in Japan as igo), is well known for having so many permutations of moves (apparently more than the number of atoms in the universe) that programming a computer that could beat a human player was long considered the holy grail of AI.

When AlphaGo eventually beat a human player, it used moves which humans would consider deeply eccentric, and at one point it made a move which no go experts had ever seen before.

What allowed the AI to win wasn’t necessarily the computational power, although this was immense. It was the fact that the machine taught itself to play from scratch, without being taught by a human who would necessarily be steeped in thousands of years of go history, culture and tradition.

Instead of going along with the preconceived narrative of how go should be played it used its own ideas with few fixed beliefs to get in the way.

Sometimes, less knowledge can be a good thing.

[anime-academia]

Practicing the Arabic Alphabet

I honestly lucked out so much taking Arabic in college and learning basic MSA reading/writing/grammar from an excellent professor but I’m gonna compile the most useful things we did in class here to help people learning on their own (this isn’t focused on resources, just strategies, might do a separate post with worksheets and videos but they’re pretty easy to find):

Get the alphabet in front of you. We had a packet with a page for every letter with the letter written in the three positions, pronunciations, names, and lines to trace and write like 100 times. And then a page with all the diacritics. These sheets abound for free online. Make yourself an alphabet packet. Watch copious videos/listen to recordings going over the letters and how they sound. Repeat it back. Work in chunks and don’t move to the next set until you can recognize and write the current set.

Tracing! Learn to write the letters right to left and with the proper order from day one. This sounds obvious but people in my class were still drawing letters left to right as isolated shapes next to each other so idk maybe it’s not. Having nice handwriting in Arabic is both satisfying and absurdly helpful. Learn how the letters connect. Spend more time than you think is necessary on this.

Write English words and sentences phonetically using diacritics and Arabic letters. Do not worry about translation and spelling. Just make the connection between shape -> sound. Use anything you have. Lists of names, entire pages from books and magazines, texts from friends, menus. Literally anything. Work through how to make those words with the new alphabet. You will learn a surprising amount about the language and pronunciation by doing this. How do you translate sounds that don’t exist? What about multiple sounds where English only has one? Read it back with the accent.

Transcribe English phonetically. Same as above but do it without the English in front of you and just listening. Make that voice to visual connection.

Hand write word lists once you get to vocab. Then type them on your laptop and phone (if you want to be able to type in Arabic, also highly recommend a keyboard cover with the letters next to the Latin alphabet). Copy all the diacritics even though that’s not necessarily how native speakers do it. I have a notebook that looks like it belongs to lunatic toddler because it just has the same words and snippets written over and over again lmao.

Finally, transcribe Arabic. If you can use something with a transcript or captions to check your work even better! But don’t check for perfect spelling, check you used mostly the right letters and marks. You will definitely smash some words together and miss a silent or elided letter or something but try and hear the difference between ع and ا or ق and ك etc. The more sources you use the better.

We did this for one full semester of 50 minute classes 3 times a week while sprinkling in some basic vocab towards the second half. It felt like forever at the time but I never lost my ability to phonetically read and write in Arabic despite 4 years of complete non-use while living in America in an area without any significant Arabic-speaking population or language presence. It is absolutely CHISELED into my brain.

[anime-academia]

if you want to know what the situation is for gay people in portland oregon my friend got comradezoned last week

[anime-academia]

"Why does this 19th Century novel have such a boring protagonist" well, for a lot of reasons, really, but one of the big ones is that you're possibly getting the protagonist and the narrator mixed up.

A lot of 19th Century literary critics had this weird hate-boner for omniscient narrators – stories would straight up get criticised as "unrealistic" on the grounds that it was unlikely anyone could have witnessed their events in the manner described, like some sort of proto-CinemaSins bullshit – so authors who didn't want to write their stories from the first-person perspective of one of the participating characters would often go to great lengths to contrive for there to be a Dude present to witness and narrate the story's events.

It's important to understand that the Dude is the viewpoint character, but not the protagonist. His function is to witness stuff, and he only directly participates in the narrative to the extent that's necessary to explain to the satisfaction of persnickety critics why he's present and how he got there. Giving him a personality would defeat the purpose!

(Though lowbrow fiction was unlikely to encounter such criticisms, the device of the elaborately justified diegetic narrator was often present there as well, and was sometimes parodied to great effect – for example, by having the story narrated by a very unlikely party, such as a sapient insect, or by a party whose continued presence is justified in increasingly comical ways.)