#or textbooks that im reading

[voulezloux]

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[xxplastic-cubexx]

what other silly little antics do you think charles and erik got up to in that cube besides play chess because my money's on book discussions. like them book clubs with suburban moms where you drink wine and talk about books you read except theres no wine i dont think thats permitted in the plastic cube prison and theres not even a club its just two old men

[corviiids]

hi!!! all the fic updates/uploads recently have me bouncing off the walls i am so appreciative of all of them!!!! i just hope the procrastination doesn’t have terrible consequences, for your sake

I have this for you!

your dialogue is always so so entertaining i had to do something with it at least once!!! look i know it says slightly manic in the fic but i couldn’t help myself. idk maybe it is only slightly manic. he’s normal. a secret third thing. i’ll leave that judgement in your hands! :D

DUDE. dude. you genuinely have no idea what this did for me. this is exactly precisely the morale boost i needed because i in fact right now at this moment am trying to teach myself all of family law in one night. it's going bad. those are the terrible consequences you referred to

in all sincerity thank you so so much, for this fucking hilarious and incredible drawing (holy shit) but ALSO for your extremely kind words and i am so happy if you've been having fun with my fic :D but ALSO. for this drawing. im in tears. this is the perfect comic. ren startling in the background. goro's manic face. this is the correct level of mania. im feeling it right now. i will never be able to express my gratitude to you

(context this is a scene from my akeshu australian law school au yes you read that correctly)

[butchkaramazov]

my beloved mutuals i need yr help......could you please recommend a book (preferably one that made you go crazy) that’s, like, 500+ pages long?

[lemongogo]

college … wasted on the youth (me)

[friendlyorange]

The weirdest thing about going to college for teaching in the united states is the giant CANYON of disconnect between what we're taught and what we actually do in a classroom.

like we're taught how to diversify methods of instruction in order to most equitably reach the diverse populations of our classrooms and inspire them to do their best writing/reading/speaking (im an English teaching major) but then in reality the students in your classroom are insanely below the level they need to be at in order to engage with age-appropriate lessons for them

we're taught how to take common core standards and transform them into meaningful and deep lessons but we're only given 45-90 mins of planning per day (if we're lucky) and the rest needs to be done outside of school or after hours if you can't do it quickly enough, and teachers are always expected to do research outside of the classroom, as well as collaboration, tweaking of lesson plans, etc.

we're told that students crave learning and they crave fun projects and they crave kinesthetic exercises, but then when I try those things in the classroom everyone complains and halfasses their participation, and im lucky if half of them actually pass something in, whether its an assignment, a test, a project, or an assessment.

we're told that we need to have open communication not only between teachers but between teachers and admin and parents, but then im lucky if one of the ten parents I email about their kid failing emails me back, and im luckier if admin takes a behaviorally disturbed student out of my class for insulting me or other students.

like... i guess my point is that teaching education is so idyllic and utopian, and actual classrooms are a goddamn nightmare of behavioral issues, lack of time/resources, exhausting interactions with students who don't want to be there or participate, and insane expectations from students, parents, and admin alike.

Like... no wonder the teaching field is hemorrhaging teachers right now. How can ANYONE work under the insane conditions we're forced to try and teach in. I'm so tired and I'm not even out of school yet. It's actually psychotic.

[lord-squiggletits]

Thinking about IDW Optimus again and the fandom's aversion to even acknowledging he exists bc he's a cop or whatever and like. Most of the time people literally just replace him in fic with some white bread knockoff archivist/librarian, not even bothering to keep in IDW OP's personality (which just bolsters my theory that the problem isn't him being a cop the problem is that he's too multifaceted but I digress).

And it's annoying because you could totally write IDW Optimus as not a cop while still keeping his canon personality. You just have to realize that the reason IDW OP became a cop in the first place is because his formative experiences when he was young shaped him to basically have two priorities: 1. To help people and 2. To do it by being on the ground actively doing something about the bad things happening to people.

IDW OP would not be a fucking librarian or archivist because even though those are noble pursuits that can help people and change the world, and Optimus is educated/smart enough for the profession, he wouldn't be satisfied just teaching people or spreading information about activism or social-historical studies or whatever. He's a mech of action: he needs to be doing things right now, in front of him, to people he sees/interacts with in his own eyes, improving society with concrete actions rather than indirect action or abstract inspiration.

So basically the alternate job ideas I can think of for IDW Optimus are something like being a firefighter (or any first responder really) or even whatever the equivalent would be to international charity organizations, those ones that send volunteers across the world to do stuff like build housing/infrastructure or distribute food or whatnot. I mean I can't imagine that the equivalents to these things would be exactly the same in IDW Cybertron, so you'd have to get a little creative with it, but these are just some ideas of jobs that would fit IDW Optimus' personality while still filling the niche of "not a cop" for people who are just that opposed to it.

Though I think the revulsion against coptimus is annoying in general tbh because IDW is already a continuity that rejects the idea of easily defined good/evil people or groups. It feels like people really want Optimus to be a good person in a very sanitized and academically approved way, so he has to be nice and squeaky clean but also like, a perfect leftist who knows theory and holds the most progressive opinions on every single issue....

There is no room for the idea that good people join bad institutions, there's no room for the idea that the reason people think cops are good guys who help people is bc of the government propaganda everything is saturated with. Hell there's even later issues of the Optimus Prime series by John Barber where Optimus like, MULTIPLE FUCKING TIMES, is shown in flashbacks grappling with the fact that he as a cop/Zeta's regime that he works for might not actually be improving society like they say they are, and dealing with the fact that he feels more like a lesser evil compared to the Decepticons (perhaps not "lesser" at all).

It's like there's this idea in fandom of like, fictional media and opinions on media having to strictly adhere to progressive ideals at all times. So people just go "cops bad, this character is a cop, therefore they suck" without being willing to engage with the idea of like. IDW OP is born wanting to fight injustice and protect people -> a good way to protect people is to fight the people who are hurting them and committing crimes -> surely following the law is a reliable moral code to guide him in this -> becomes a cop because he's been indoctrinated into a society (much like our own) where he was told that the state/the law exist to protect the people and being a cop means you get to fight bad guys that hurt people. There's really so many interesting concepts there that could be (and CANONICALLY IS) explored about how good, well-intentioned people can be led to harmful actions simply because they have been fed the idea that the things they're doing are good/helpful/noble. Which is especially important for a character like Optimus, I think, who has a cultural icon status as The Irrefutable and Perfect Good, so it's really important actually to use IDW Optimus as an example of how even the most noble people you know have held problematic beliefs or done bad things at some point in their life. You know, because no one is born perfect and ideologically pure, and in fact society is constructed in exactly a manner to make people drink the kool-aid and believe that the systems designed to hurt them/others are just a normal, if flawed, society.

I mean the writing in IDW literally has Optimus deal directly and indirectly with the harm he's done as a cop and how people don't/didn't trust him because of that. I don't know what the fuck else this fandom wants if the source material literally saying "OP realizes that cops suck and he hurt people and earned their disdain by doing the things he did" doesn't stop them from going EW cop bastard sucks and is the worst Optimus. Like the narrative barely stops short of outright saying ACAB and Optimus himself would agree with this sentiment.

At that point, the collective fandom beef with IDW OP isn't because he's a cop and the narrative didn't do enough to condemn that. The problem is literally just that people don't read and don't care

TLDR: Consider the fact that good people can do bad things sometimes especially when living from birth in a corrupt society that thoroughly disguises its vices/oppressive structures as completely normal parts of existence

[poughkeepsies]

???????????I GOT A 100 ON MY PHARMACO EXAM????

[raindrvq]

me when i said i was gonna do my homework like 5 hours ago and im just now starting it 😇

[shafran-saffron]

Hey langblr check out this mythical pull I got the other day:

That's a russian to burmese textbook, I've been searching for something like that for MONTHS(I've even found a scan of the first few pages of that exact book online tho), but then I found out that the site of the biggest bookstore in Moscow (and probably the whole of Russia by extension) had LITERALLY ONLY 1 COPY so I went there and bought it!! It was pretty cheap too (like 15$)!!!

The wildest part is that it's from 1971 and was published by the ministry of foreign affairs of the Soviet Union!! There are people out who think their textbooks are too old because they're from early 2000s and I got this relic.

[mejomonster]

How did you learn Chinese, like did you use a specific program like Duolingo or did you take classes? How hard was it to read Priest's novels with where you were at in your language learning journey? I want to get back into learning (been wanting to since I watched The Untamed,) but I gave up about 8 months ago 😭

Hey ovo)/ so uh. That's a big question. I have a studyblr @rigelmejo so if you really want the full on journey lol its on there, steps i took and what I studied and progress and study tools I found and used and stuff I've linked for people.

For the shortest tip I can give you? Would be to check out the Heavenly Path site if you're interested in learning to read novels. You'll need to figure out your own way to study about 1000 common hanzi, basic grammar, and basic pronunciation (I link resources on rigelmejo), but after that point the Heavenly Path site has reading resources for graded reading, easier kids novels, easier manhua, webnovels by difficulty level, all the way up! So you can at that point just follow their recommendations and use reading tools they link (like Pleco and Readibu apps which I suggest you download asap - they include tools where you can click a chinese word when reading for translation and audio pronunciation and pinyin). So yeah at 1000 hanzi, just start reading from their suggestions! (Also consider downloading Bilibili Comics app as it has English and Chinese free manhua, so you can start reading manhua earlier, and youtube/viki.com learn mode and Any platforms with dual english/chinese subs and start trying to look up 1 word every 5 minutes or more as curious and practicing reading the chinese words in subs you've learned). I suggest you check out all pages on the Heavenly site, they link a ton of resources.

The short-ish version of what I did the first year I studied chinese? I fumbled a lot, read through an entire grammar guide summary in a few weeks here http://chinese-grammar.com/, watched some YouTube tone videos and went through a pronunciation guide here https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin which took a week or two and I'd do it every few months, read through the book Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1-3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters by Tuttle publishing in about 2 months (I really liked their mnemonics to help me remember hanzi), started Ben Whatley memrise decks 1000 Chinese common words and 2000 common words (took about 2 weeks to finish one then I took a few months break then studied the other 1000, mainly focusing on studying new words and not reviewing until the last week if I had time - in retrospect I think learners would do better with the Chinese Spoonfed Anki deck but the memrise courses I used worked fine for me). I was watching cdramas as usual most weeks, English subs with the Chinese hardsubs on the video file like most youtube cdramas, with Google Translate app on my phone to look up a word every several minutes as curious. Once I was 3ish months in and learning the memrise Ben Whatley 2000 common chinese words, I read some Mandarin Companion graded readers in Pleco app then some more 300-600 word graded readers in Pleco. That gets me to like month 6ish. Then I started reading manhua and looking up words in pleco or Google translate when I needed to in order to grasp main idea overall (or was curious about a particular word). Kept reading graded readers in pleco.

Around month 8 I tried 天涯客 and 镇魂, both brutally hard. I was reading in Pleco in the Clipboard Reader (from websites) or the Reader tool (i bought it for like $20 dollars along with handwriting recognition, OCR, and expanded dictionaries). Mandarinspot.com has a good reading tool too that can add pinyin if you need it, and Readibu in some ways i prefer to Pleco depending on your particular reading needs on a given day. Tried a few easier webnovels, tried a pingxie fanfic 寒舍 which was hard but easier than priest novels (love that fanfic). I kept bouncing between webnovels then around month 10 天涯客 novels took about 1.5 hours to read through a chapter. At that point I brute force tried to read it or 寒舍 daily with 1 chapter a day, got 28 chapters in before i burned out with 天涯客 and 60ish chapters into 寒舍. It was about a year in. I cram studied 500 hanzi in some common hanzi deck with mnemonics I found on anki over a month, hoping if I improved vocab I'd read easier. I also was gradually trying to watch more cdrama with only chinese subs, around month 6 I finally watched Granting You a Dreamlike life full episodes with no eng subs (about 5-10 word lookups an episode), watched 15ish eps, then after that shows got less daunting to try watching.

A little over a year in Word of Honor came out and I watched it in chinese first because I was too impatient for eng subs. After that went decently I got braver about reading, tried Listening Reading Method (see @rigelmejo for those experiments), more stuff etc like extensive reading with no word lookups.

In retrospect I WISH I'd started with easier novels Heavenly Path recommended. However on the other hand? I've seen people who read their first cnovel with Pleco as early as 3-6 months in which blows my mind. So me picking hard novels to start isn't the Hardest thing in comparison lol. This past year (so at start of year 3 studying lol) I actually read like 10 things on Heavenly Paths easier recommendations and it helped immensely in filling in gaps in vocab and reading fluidity I had. So if you do pick a priest novel as your first novel and manage to chug through it without giving up, be aware "easier" novels may still have stuff you can learn later so don't rule them out as reading materials later on.

I've also seen people do literally no study except maybe some curious Google searches on hanzi or grammar or pronunciation, then brute force read novels in Readibu until they improved. A brutal way to do it but possible. (I really recommend at minimum learning hanzi are made of radicals though as it makes recognizing and remembering them so much easier).

I think the best thing I did for learning to read was just being Brave and Trying to read regularly. And it gradually got less hard.

[aashiyancha]

In-game and au Ares

[vague-bisexual-crimes]

And what if I said Allister John Bird? What then?

[sforzesco]

Mazarin and d'Artagnan! like. listen. I'm reading Charles Samaran's book on d'Artagnan, and 'Colbert a dit que d'Artagnan fut une créature de Mazarin; rien n'est plus vrai,' sure was a sentence to read.

D'Artagnan, Capitaine des mousquetaires du roi, histoire véridique d'un héros de roman, Charles Samaran

society6 | ko-fi | redbubble | twitter (pillowfort, cohost) | deviantart

[funkle420]

2 commission slots left!

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[junk-culture]

can we be serious. can we grow up and be serious and stop talking about invisible hands and unseen forces for one second please . you might as well tell me that every day the magical economy stork comes down from market heaven and leaves goods and services on the doostep.