#no english licenses

[egophiliac]

it's been an absolute shitball of a week, so here's something massively self-indulgent to make myself feel better.

[yioh]

[kaizokucujoh]

satoko & gato icons • like/reblog if you save or use

[thatlittlemouse]

I got the DMBJ artbook by 阿堂堂 and it's soooooooo pretty, I'm in love with it 💖💖💖

[risetherivermoon]

yall should give me ur dndads headcanons so i can have smth to doodle, and bc i like hearing other ppl's interpretations of the sillies

[ladyofrosefire]

saw this post. had a burst of Feelings About Pedagogy. Bon appetite.

Your teachers didn't lie to you.

Well, okay, if you got to your senior year of high school and they're still saying 'a paragraph is 5-8 sentences,' yes there is something wrong, but that seems like an unlikely thing to have happen.

In teaching, we start with 'a paragraph is 5 sentences' for the same reason you might practice a specific type of spin in ballet by putting your hands on your shoulders while you turn half circles. The end result does not work like that, but it builds a skill essential to what the result will look like in the future. Just like practicing with your hands on your shoulders helps you practice balance and spotting, being told 'it must be 5 sentences' or 'it must be 5-8' sentences pushes students used to writing 2-3 sentences to practice developing their thoughts.

It also removes some ambiguity when a teacher says 'I would like a paragraph response' and means 'I would like a well-developed response that isn't multiple pages long.' I've taught 7th, 8th, and 11th graders. If you say 'paragraph' to 11th graders, they understand what boreal-sea is saying, to some extent. They are still practicing recognizing when they have tried to jam two points into one paragraph, but they do recognize that a paragraph is a unit of thought.

The 7th and 8th graders are still trying to figure out:

what a paragraph is

how to think through ideas and write those thoughts down

possibly how little work they can get away with doing (the 11th graders might be doing this, also, but have a better sense of it)

and so on

This list is not exhaustive, and there will be variation by school district/country/etc, however. Something something tumblr post disclaimer about not applying to every situation ever.

TL,DR; Saying a paragraph is 5 sentences is a stepping stone tool used to build skills and clarify meaning and it is NOT meant to stay with a student for their whole career. It is meant to give you a metaphorical flotation device for when when the student is chucked into the deeper water of 'having to write responses requiring enough complexity that you probably need more than 2-3 sentences.' You are not just "feel[ing] that shit in your soul"— you have internalized the function of a paragraph and understand it on some level, even if you have, for some reason or another, never articulated the logic to yourself.

[skrgtn]

this is all i think when i see hyouta

[deadscanlations]

50 Watts Books is putting out an English publication of Sasaki Maki's "I am a Wolf, After All" in Summer 2024.

[caribous]

thank you so much for drawing karaoke/famiresu iko fanart i look at it every day!!! (its my current obsession and there's near zero english discussion/fanworks so thank you i owe you my life

BROTHER IN ARMS.... the worms truly infected my brains too i feel u soooo hard. lately its been my second job to scroll endlessly thru twit absorbing Content

[knifekris]

every day i struggle to make choices

[elmaxlys]

*clenches fist* I love them

[ariaofsorrows]

have you ever seen a man so beautiful you started crying

[compacflt]

Okay, so I was re-reading your Slider one-shot for like the twentieth time, and what really struck me (beyond the brilliance of your writing, and the way you’ve presented the disillusionment of growing up, expecting the world to be a certain way, only to realize that life doesn’t quite work out the way you think it will, when you’re seventeen), is the casual sexism just tossed ‘round by our main characters!! :o We have canonical evidence of both Ice and Mav being pretty sexist (what with “the plaque for the alternates is in the ladies’ room” and the downright stalker-ish behavior exhibited by Mav at the O-club…), but it still surprised me a lil’ when twenty-y/o Ice was just like: “The Soviet Union did the impossible and taught women to drive” —and I realized that ah, he truly was born in 1959, or something. There’s little scenes throughout your story where I find myself wondering, which one of them is better, in this sense: When Ice tells Mav that Sarah isn’t talking to him ‘cause of his combat kills, justifies it by saying: “You know how women are”, and Mav tells him all women aren’t the same… I thought that maybe, it was Mav; but then later, Ice shows a distinctive amount of empathy for Juno, sees and respects her for the skilled pilot that she is… and I thought that maybe, it’s Ice after all—he does seem to be more progressive and accepting than Mav, in general? It also made me wonder, that if either of them had been a woman, would they even have respected the other person enough to consider them to be a rival??—or would it have a been a mildly-amusing circus side show for them, to have a female pilot at TOPGUN?

Ty for the ask anon!! ice is more socially progressive than mav yes.

But—maybe this is my experience growing up in one of the bluest counties in Commiefornia and then going to one of the most leftist-coded colleges in one of the most leftist-coded cities in The World; uhh, even if a white man votes D all the time & has professional respect for women/minorities to their faces etc, get him in a room with a bunch of other white men, especially in a masculine and competitive environment like the gym or the navy, and uh. progressive or not, what you get is a lot of “The Soviet Union did the impossible & taught women to drive.”

And it was the 1980s. (As a reminder, in top gun’s 1986, less than 45% of Americans even approved of interracial marriage.) It sucks to say it, but if Ice was making fun of Cougar for quitting the navy cause of his psych issues such as they may be, and openly calling bullshit on Maverick’s MiG story in front of everyone, I am quite confident in saying he Would Not respect a female pilot to her face—if they were the same rank. At the same rank, it’s a competition. All weaknesses, even perceived biological ones, are to be exploited and called to attention. —But, once he’s advanced in rank, proven his own superiority, he’s more inclined to favor a meritocratic “sex doesn’t matter just fly good” attitude, ergo his relationship w/ “Juno” (she’s just a literary symbol to show that Ice may have respect for other minorities in the Navy “your career speaks for itself” but NOT FOR HIMSELF as a closeted man). This “who cares about gender/race just fly good” attitude is probably where 50s+ Maverick lands too, which is why no issues with Phoenix.

but jesus GOD maverick is a sexist in the original Top Gun. That’s why I wrote the prologue to WWGATTAI—a part of me definitely believes both he and Ice are definitively queer, but a part of me also wonders, are they just also conditioned to dismiss women as intellectual/societal equals because of their time in the 1980s male-dominated Navy? CAN they really only have a truly equal relationship with another man? I have no idea what my Ice’s sexual orientation is for exactly this reason. Yes, he’s functionally gay by the end of it, and that’s what I keep calling him—but sexuality is fluid & complicated. It’s definitely more-than possible he’s mostly straight and it’s just the circumstances of his wildly intense trauma-bond relationship with Maverick that led to their relationship as I wrote it. If you don’t LIKE/understand/respect women, and only feel at home/excited by committing acts of male-typified violence with the few men you respect, how does that bend your definition of the word straight? ...its still straight, but only straight-ish!

not to take it a step further, but WHY ELSE is canon maverick single in TGM? he canonically can’t make it work with women until he retires from the navy!!! he doesnt know how!!! His military environment is not conducive to normal long-term relationships with civilian women!!!

[takeshitakyuuto]

Life is so cruel because Kino no Tabi is so good but I can’t even recommend the books to anyone because only the first volume was ever translated and it’s been out of print for presumably over a decade. Plus part of what makes it so good are untranslatable (into English) qualities of the Japanese language such as the general avoidance of gendering Kino. What other book has a motorcycle get into an argument with a dog

[remythologise]

jr is like. you are a straight man who is soooooo in love with this girl from your year at university and she is a lovely angel to you but oh no! you run into this extremely handsome man and then he makes you an employee. and then you have these feelings about him like he’s the most BEAUTIFUL man in the world the BEST person in the world and also you have a recurring dream about kissing him but probably in a straight way? (???) anyway then you keep telling your boss that you’re SOOO in love with this girl you’re gonna stop her arranged marriage she’s going along with… and your boss is like cool good luck! have fun! best wishes! and disappears off the face of the earth. causing you to have severe obsessive depression about it. meanwhile literally everyone (and I do mean everyone) from The Girl You Like to Every Customer of The Store to Random Person On the Street is like OBVIOUSLY HE’S IN LOVE WITH YOU and OBVIOUSLY YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH HIM. and you’re like naur.... couldn’t be. doesn’t compute. I like that girl, right? what is love anyway? anyway then the girl you like comes out as aroace to you and you go off and pretend to be your boss’ fiance in order to foil an extremely elaborate racist inheritance scheme. and then you are prepared to go to prison FOR LIFE just to protect your boss’ happiness.... then you basically exchange rings… and keep flirting with each other daily… anyway then you go back to japan and the absolute FARCE of this all is you and your boss both think neither of you is in love with the other. I (and every other secondary character in this story) want to kill myself btw

[deadscanlations]

That Kafka anthology by Nishioka Kyoudai that we scanlated years ago has an official English release now.