#if we don't respond on that level it's not a meaningful resistence

[hearthfire-heartfire]

let's talk about trump and the tea party.

for folks who are a bit younger, you may or may not remember that the response to obama's 2008 election from the right was to fracture: the tea party was a grassroots movement of right-wing folk who thought the GOP was too centrist and corrupt. they positioned themselves as defenders of the constitution and, essentially, a populist party composed of the scions of the founding fathers, hence the name 'the tea party' and the adoption of 18th century iconography like the 'don't tread on me' flag and tricorne hats. they won a bunch of seats in congress and having to capitulate to them in the name of diplomacy created a lot of the deadlock that obama ran up against when his administration tried to do anything following the 2010 mid-term elections. this became the blueprint for what constitutes 'normal' behavior in american politics.

trump became a media darling both because he was regularly on tv on 'the apprentice' (all the way until 2015 when he was fired by nbc over his remarks on mexican immigrants while campaigning) and because his tweets became really popular among tea party members. he was the one who really put fire in the rumor that obama was born in kenya by tweeting about it, he rallied people with cries of 'show us your birth certificate,' and his jabs at obama were taken very seriously by what would become his core base. this was how he launched his political career.

i do not think we would have q-anon without the tea party. project 2025 has been in the works thru a network established in the reagan era (side note: please sign up for sarah kendzior's substack. she was a political journalist specializing in covering autocracies before trump was elected and i've been following her since then), but their methods have become much less subtle the more the right is rewarded for their unhinged tactics and outright insurrection.

if trump goes away, the momentum behind his base is still a threat to the world. if he is defeated at the polls, his base is going to take that as proof of the vast conspiracy they have constructed around him. and the truth is that individuals within the democratic party are beholden to the network organizing project 2025 even if they don't agree with nor explicitly endorse their aims. the dnc is actively campaigning against their own members who are unfriendly to AIPAC, like jamal bowman, and biden is talking about how only god could make him step down at this point.

i don't blame people for being afraid, but i will blame folks who are choosing to point their fear at a strawman version of the left instead of recognizing that we have been hamstrung by our own. what should be a time to reinvest in our mutual values has become a frenzy of panic and regression. we can't go back to 2019. wear a mask and see if there a street medic training or a mask bloc or food distro near you.

[legionofpotatoes]

700 hours is 29 days (+ a couple hours). Just as a thought experiment, do you think Zagreus himself would be able to achieve all that he sets out to do in Hades within that same timeframe (making all of his escape attempts, building relationships, honing his skills, collecting valuables, redecorating the entire House for the hell of it, etc.) or do you think he'd spend more/less time?

Personally, I feel like he's skilled and determined enough to maybe do it faster, but I could also see it taking much longer, maybe months, considering his journey is its own "mythological trial" and even the most stubborn of people tend to slow down and let doubt take hold (even if only temporarily)

I will try not to get distracted.

I think your question is organically answered by the individual canon of the game itself, per player? I really believe it's as simple as that! It would be however many attempts you took. The gameplay loop keys us into the physical struggle, while the per-death progression of the story unravels Zag's internal change in however long it takes us to reach those crucial milestones. That's I think one of the (many) pro-ludonarrative masterstrokes in its game design; you sort-of chart the canon timeline of that effort literally by hand, and it all conforms to your specific playthrough in the end.

Which then makes it difficult to measure how Zag "himself" would do it since it's? us? There is no framework of that game's form-and-function synergy that excludes player perspective. His engine of internal change is gated by physical milestones, and those are in turn tied to player skill/determination, who then in turn engage with a progression system with so much potential variation that it becomes impossible to really parse that into an isolated character arc in a logical way. Am I making sense? 😬 sorry if I'm blowing this out of proportion, but your question is such an interesting one lmao.

But I also think you're ultimately right in lending it a read through a mythic lens, rather than a purely logical one; if this were a linear and finite narrative with greek dramatic overtones, it would certainly allude to labors, cycles of futility, and really-really hard-earned catharsis. It's a somewhat straightfoward hero's journey all-in-all; resisting responsibility, finding purpose outta nowhere, and then through that purpose accepting the responsibility, yada-yada.

In that read, to me Zagreus feels like a small, seemingly insignificant cog in the House of Hades, struggling against personal duties, the bureaucratic whims of hell itself, and the post-traumatic abuse from his dad. He's a lonely kid rebelling against a world without his mom. Personally, I love the idea that it takes him eons. Just fucking ages. Dying hundreds of times per chamber, creating his own sisyphean torture of apathy, never really believing he can escape but keeping that north star of Persephone as a motivator to just keep trying. That becomes the kernel of his personhood that allows all of his growth and change to occur; the persistence is the key, and the game drops that key squarely into the player's laps. We get to be this kid's nagging persistence that finally, finally allows him to win.

The fact that the game then opens him up to an entirely new path of healing, once he does find his mom, is just such a. I don't even know. It's like the game is still responding to the meta of our relationship to its infinitely looping gameplay system; it will engineer a functional combat-based struggle that is eternal, yes, but will bombard us with story-level catharses the more we choose to engage with it. Eventually it will turn the entire premise on its head and settle into an idyllic vignette of a functional family and a kid that chooses to go to school and clean his room and take care of the house and enjoy it all cause his mom and dad are happy at home and his friends are on good and healthy terms with him and he's finally content.

It's like they gave us a meaningful story and bolted on a massive fix-it fic on its ass for good measure. They looked at the very DNA of roguelike narrative potential and just went for fucking all of it. What a game.

Anyway, I got distracted. Did that answer your question?

[eduquip]

07/03:

Me personally, I'm a writer. I love writing and I get excited reading others' writing, but not everyone feels the same. School makes this environment for students, I feel, where students "have" to do what the teacher tells them to for a variety of reasons, like "getting a good grade" or impressing parents and family because of their marks. Work can feel draining when there is an absence of interest and lead to adherence, resistance, and other negative emotions. One thing I want to do is make learning "fun" for my students. A lot of teachers feel this way— and the addition of humor or interest can appeal to more students, but factors like a lack of knowledge or confidence can make some students, especially secondary level students, hesitant. And sometimes, learning just isn't fun.

What is the role of motivation in writing instruction? How can we motivate students to care about their writing?

Motivation and fun can go hand in hand. To me, student interest is reliant on effective instruction. Every student is unique, different strategies will help different students. Building motivation starts with building confidence, something like a gradual release model ("I do, we do, you do") can help model new skills and transfer responsibility onto students (Frey & Fisher, 2013). This theory also develops around Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development" (ZPD) which determines the distance of learning development through problem solving with aid of mentors, like peers and teachers (Daffern & MacKenzie, 2020). With the inspiration of ZPD, gradual release shows students what is expected of them and gives them a safe environment to experiment with some help, and students are released to use this skill in their own independent learning. By making students confident in their skills, intrinsic motivation has a chance to grow because students are able to execute a task on their own and apply it to their own interests.

Another key part of building motivation is interest! I'm pretty good at math; if you show me how to use an equation, I can do it and explain it to someone else with little problem, but I'm not interested in solving equations in my free time. I don't have any mathematic motivation, and the same can be said about students who are confident in their writing abilities but don't feel motivated to write. I think part of engaging students is learning about their interests and incorporating it into lessons. While this can't be done for every occasion or lesson, writing strategies like inquiry and journaling can allow students to explore their own interests and find it within themselves to write (Gillespie & Graham, 2011). Inquiry allows students to explore a concept of their choosing and write about their findings and how they were meaningful to them, and journaling can tap into a student's personal feelings in a non- threatening way.

During my student teaching, my host teacher encouraged students to keep journals. There would be a question up on the board every day that students would respond to each prompt with five sentences in their journals with a "free write" on Fridays— students would write a letter to either me or my host teacher for us to read and write a response back to. My host teacher would often use questions like, "Which super power would you rather have: x- ray vision or flight?" or "What does respect mean to you?" They ranged from silly to thought- provoking and meaningful. We got a lot of complaints the longer we did journals, but once I took over the classroom and decided to stop having students write journals, many were asking when they'd come back, and suddenly, they were "fun"— they were intrinsically motivated to have a chance to talk about themselves and have it be read by their teachers. They liked getting responses back from me and my host teacher and liked the chance to talk about themself.

For other students, this was just another thing to be graded and receive a lesser mark on for lack of completion/ things to say. I'd like to implement journaling and free- writes into my future instruction, and I think that grading for completion is an extrinsic motivation to do the work and teaching students strategies for elaborating on writing (5 Ws and 1H) can help students go beyond five sentences. I think this practice is important; both structured and unwriting time in a personal way allows students to practice and explore areas that interests them and writing becomes fun. For emerging bilingual students, journaling can also be a place where students don't have to write in English to answer a question. Journaling allows students to process their own thoughts and ideas in order to create concepts and sort ideas, or even make illustrations— this use of language, even visual, still represents meaning, and asking a student to label, explain, or narrate the scene is multi-modal learning (Montague, 1995).

Increasing motivation to write is like an equation:

Effective writing strategies + student interest + freedom = motivation to write

Preparing students with effective strategies can help build the confidence to write and serves as a foundation, but engaging students' interests, such as allowing them to talk about themselves or delve deeper into a topic of their choosing, and entrusting students with the freedom to do so can help students find the drive to write.

References

Daffern, T., &MacKenzie, N.M. (2020). Theoretical perspectives and strategies for teaching and learning writing. In T. Daffern, & N.M. MacKenzie (Eds.), Teaching writing: Effective approaches for the middle years (pp. 15-34). Allen & Unwin Academic.

Frey, N. & Fisher, D. (2013). Gradual release of responsibility instructional framework. The formative assessment action plan: Practical steps to more successful teaching and learning (pp. 120-122). ASCD.

Gillespie, A., & Graham, S. (2011). Evidence-based practices for teaching writing. Online.

Montague, N. (Summer 1995). The process oriented approach to teaching writing to second language learners. NYS Association for Bilingual Education Journal, 10, 13-24.

[hummingaita]

Hi, I’m anon. Some of the feedback has been helpful, and I am going to try to stop humming.

These two responses were the most helpful to me. It makes a lot of sense now that you point it out that her little comments were actually her making it clear that my humming is a big deal to her. Coming from a neurodivergent family and friend group/social circle, my standard of It’s A Real Issue is if someone directly tells me it’s a real issue, but I now understand that for her brain, the little comments probably are her way of telling me it’s a real issue because she sees that as the polite way to tell me.

Another person pointed out that my humming probably annoys my other coworker who started singing then stopped herself saying it was annoying, and that made me consider that I probably would’ve stopped humming already if it had been a different coworker expressing dislike. (I have a lot of issues with the coworker who dislikes my humming, which definitely tainted my view of the situation, because I now realize that if it had been my coworker M who I really love and respect, for example, then I would have stopped. And I owe this coworker the same level of basic respect even though I have my issues with her.)

Another person suggested advocating for music I wouldn’t start to hum along with, and I think that might be a great solution. I sent this in before December, and in December we have exclusively been playing Kenny G type Christmas music that I haven’t been humming along to because I just don’t have the urge to. This to say, that responder’s idea works - so in January, I think I’ll campaign for music that I enjoy less and won’t mindlessly hum along to.

My last bit of thoughts is more so for my own brain to process some things, so I put it beneath the cut.

I see my social role at work as the charmingly 'off' person. Like, they all don’t explicitly know I’m neurodivergent because I think it's none of my workplace's business, but they all definitely recognize I’m 'different' in an unspoken way. It works for me because they generally find my 'quirks' amusing, so I’m able to get away with a lot of stuff there (aka act like myself) because they’ve accepted it’s how I am.

I stuck out like a sore thumb my first two ish months there because they had yet to recognize that I'm just Like This, I think. My coworker who dislikes my humming treated me like an incompetent child, my boss and I had a long back and forth over my gender performance (though she didn't see it in that terms, just professionalism, which is fair), a few of my other coworkers found me off-putting I think, etc. But now that my role as The 'Off' One is established, my awkward way of speaking is seen as funny in an endearing way. My refusal to wear makeup is seen as just my personality, rather than resistance to office culture. When I make mistakes, I'm treated with the presumption of competence just like everyone else is when they make mistakes. And I went from being excluded in conversations to people finding my contributions to conversations 'cute', which made them willing to listen to me enough that some of them now see me as having meaningful things to say sometimes.

I'm content with my social role in this office. It's different than my previous jobs because we were in a relatively unprofessional environment, so it took me time to adjust to this one. And I think the humming might be one of those adjustment things - I thought it was accepted as part of my weirdness in this office, and my coworker's annoyance was in the same vein as her unfair treatment of me at the beginning, but now I have to learn that the humming thing is something that is important for this type of work environment. It's an adjustment I have to make, like when I agreed to wear tighter fitting clothes. It sucks to me, and I don't necessarily understand why it's a big deal, but if I want a place in this workplace, for better or worse, I have to make this adjustment. (And this adjustment is giving my coworker more respect, rather than something arbitrary like the clothes, so I feel better about this one anyways.)

(I think I'm supposed to tag @am-i-the-asshole-official so you see this response but apologies if I'm doing this incorrectly.)

AITA for continuing to hum along to the music at work even though I know it really annoys my coworker?

I work front desk in a medical office. We play easy listening 70s folk-ish music at a medium-low volume, and I hum along to nearly every song. My volume is about as loud as the music, but sometimes I am accidentally louder.

My coworker has tried to hint to me at least 3 times that she really hates my humming. Today our other coworker was singing along to the music before stopping herself and saying “Oh sorry for singing, that’s annoying.” I responded “Don’t apologize! Hell, I sing here all the time!” The coworker who really hates my humming then said “Well, remember this is a workplace, and you do work with other people.”

I hum without realizing it most of the time, and it would be a sucky inconvenience to try to get myself to stop - but if it’s something that really bothers her, then it’s worth the sucky inconvenience because I do want to be respectful to her. Honestly, I’d like to ask her if she’s really bothered by my humming or if it’s just annoying, but I don’t know how to ask that without basically saying “because I’m going to keep doing it even if I know it annoys you, I’ll only stop if it’s serious.” Which feels like a jerk thing.

So AITA for continuing to hum without any regard to her feelings about it?

What are these acronyms?