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verybadatwriting · 2 months

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Just a Little Stab Wound

Summary: Reader, a vigilante, is injured and goes to Peter for help.

Warnings: injuries, blood loss

Notes: I experimented a little, and wrote this on paper for the first draft. I think I like it.

Gn!reader

Word count: 1,141

He was just trying to study for a chem test when his phone buzzed. At first he ignored it. After two more buzzes, he finally glanced down at the notifications, and saw they were from you. He smiled before reading them.

Need you

Pete

i’m hurt. on way. be ready.

He hurriedly replied,

how hurt?

u there?

Y/n??

When it was clear he wasn’t going to get a fast reply, he went about gathering a whole bunch of first aid stuff.

“Pete?” He heard a tired but authoritative voice. Crap. He’d thought Aunt May was asleep.

“What’re you doing?” She asked, both bemused and amused.

“Science homework?” He said, wishing it had sounded less like a question. Aunt May did not look like she was buying it, but instead of challenging the answer she sighed and reminded him to clean up once he’d finished “Whatever it is you’re really up to.”

Peter nodded itching to go prepare his room. He grabbed a heavy blanket from the bottom bunk and laid it on his floor. He tossed a pillow on top, and made sure that the first aid boxes were close at hand. This next part he always hated. The waiting was excruciating. Never knowing if you were only a moment away, or if you had bled out in some grimey back alley.

You were a vigilante, like he used to be, before he joined the Avengers. You though, you did not have the favor of law enforcement, since some (okay, much) of your activities weren't exactly legal. Peter met you while you were both stopping a robbery. Both of you had a fun time, probably due to the fact that you had the same sense of humor. Just before the cops arrived, you and Peter fled to a nearby rooftop.

All that said, you and Peter had become friends, and then something more. You’d been to his home before, usually just to hang out, but also if you were injured he’s who you’d head to.

For the most part, Peter was used to it. He appreciated having someone his age who really understood the weight that came with having superpowers. If talking to you came at the price of occasionally patching you up, he’d happily help you out.

Finally, after what felt like hours, but was really only ten or so minutes, you landed on the fire escape and knocked on his window. You smiled when he looked up and let you in. As he got closer, he saw it was more like a pained grimace.

“Oh my God,” Peter whispered, eyes drifting to your abdomen, which was painted red with your blood. You held your hand against it, but the blood still leaked out.

“Hey Pete,” You said, gasping through the pain before promptly tumbling through the window and into his arms.

Peter gingerly lifted you over to the blanket and set you down. You held pressure on the wound as you lay there, splayed out on the floor. Peter was readying a wad of gauze bandaging when out of the corner of his eye he saw yours start to drift closed.

“Hey!” He said. “You need to keep your eyes open, okay?” He asked. Reluctantly, you complied.

“You’ve got pretty eyes,” You murmured.

“Thanks,” Peter smiled, not taking his “pretty” eyes off the gash across your body as he continued bandaging.

“Keep talking, love,” He prompted you.

“M’kay,” You hummed. “Just for you, pretty boy.”

At this, Peter’s cheeks flushed and he glanced at you, worry filling his eyes.

“You must be delusional from blood loss.”

“Nuh uh!” You protested as he turned back to work. “I’m just incredibly lucky and got you.”

A few minutes later, Peter had you all patched up. Then he helped you sit up, a rather painful process. Your shirt was filthy so he helped you out of it and upon seeing how much blood and grime covered your skin, he retrieved a basin and rag to gently wash the filth away. After he was done, you put on one of his t-shirts.

“It’s comfy,” you said.

“Looks good on you,” He replied.

After a moment, you looked up at him, truly taking in the worry lacing each and every one of his features.

“Thank you,” you finally, quietly said.

“Of course,” he replied.

“What’d I do to deserve you?” You asked, leaning your forehead onto his shoulder. His arms wrapped around you, holding you close, but he stayed careful not to hurt you.

“You’re in no shape to even think about going home,” Peter said. “So you might as well spend the night.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

He gently scooped you up and somehow managed to climb up his bed’s adder. He set you down on your side, facing away from the wall, and tucked you in. He climbed back down, and started cleaning up while you drifted off to sleep.

You later felt him slip into bed behind you. It was comforting, having his chest against your back. You nestled into his arms and stayed like that the rest of the night.

Peter woke up first. He didn’t dare move a muscle. From how peaceful you looked right now, nobody ever would have guessed that you’d come awfully close to death just a few hours ago.

He heard his aunt get up and start making breakfast. Her footsteps slowly came down the hall to his room. Hastily, he covered your face with the blanket.

“Hey, Peter,” Aunt May called as she entered the room. “Do you want eggs? I’m making some.”

“Sure! Thanks!” He said, internally cringing at his voice, which sounded way too cheery. For one wonderful second, Peter thought she was going to leave. Then, her eyebrows shrunk together as she noticed the suspiciously human shaped lump in her nephew’s bed.

“Uh,” she started, “Who’s that?”

“Promise you won’t get mad?” He asked after a moment. She raised an eyebrow in response.

“Uhm, Aunt May,” Peter said, “This is my partner. They’ve got superpowers, like me, and they don’t really want other people to know who they are. Last night they got hurt, like really hurt, and they came to me. Please don’t be mad at them, they didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

His aunt just stood there, this stressful moment stretching on forever. Finally, someone broke the silence.

“I’s okay, Peter,” you said, pushing the blanket away from your face. “Hi Ms. Parker. I’m Y/n.” Your groggy voice wavered slightly, as if afraid of what she might say. Your face, soft from sleep, made Peter fall in love with you all over again. Seeing the way Peter looked at you, combined with your honesty and desperation, Aunt May seemed to relax.

“Nice to meet you, Y/n,” she said. “Would you care to join us for breakfast?”

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fangirlies · 1 year

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Stargazing- (x.t)

Pairing: Xavier thorpe x gn!reader I dont think I used any pronouns in this one.. I can’t remember

Request: Xavier Thorpe x fem reader stargazing together plsss

Warnings: literally just too much fluff to handle. soft reader. (Please let me know if I should be aware of anything else)

A.N: fangirlies 🧚🏼‍♀️ I’m sorry. this is so cheesy but that’s right up my alley. i wrote thorpe boy as a best friend but I’m sure you could just read it as boy friend.

“every now and then, the stars align. boy and girl meet by the great design . could it be that you and me are the lucky ones? everybody told me love was blind. then I saw your face and you blew my mind. finally, you and me are the lucky ones this time” these lyrics from Lana’s ‘lucky ones’ felt fitting. here I go including lana del rey in yet another writing.

You sighed as you slammed the cover of your botanical sciences textbook shut and tossed it aside. You'd been studying for an upcoming test for so long that you could feel your brain rotting.

“Hey xav?” Trying to capture the attention of your best friend. He hasn't taken his gaze away from his sketch book since he started drawing and you began studying.

You had fun hanging out in his art shed. Being surrounded by trees and hearing the wind roar while working on school assignments has a strangely soothing affect on you. Or perhaps it was the fact that you felt so safe in the presence of your best friend. He loved having you in here, and you knew it. On some days, when he's in one of his moods and struggles to express his feelings, you end up being his muse. It wasn't one of those days today. He was so absorbed in his work that he probably didn't even remember you were there.

You called his name again, but he didn't respond, so you walked over to him and gently tapped his shoulders making an effort not to startle him. He still didn’t turn to face you. Instead, as he proceeded to run his pencil across the paper, a barely audible "hmph?" came from him.

“Do you have any extra blankets?” Although you felt awful for annoying him so much, you would soon be out of his hair. Your head hurt from the overwhelming amount of information you read about plant cells, and all you wanted to do was be outside admiring the stars. No plant cells, no thoughts, just you under the million stars. When you were feeling overwhelmed, you found yourself doing this. It always made you feel that the vastness of the world was so big that you and your troubles were so insignificant.

He quickly uttered, trying not to lose the inspiration he was currently experiencing, "bottom shelf in the cabinet."

You proceeded to the place you were instructed to look, and you took one of his blankets and a throw pillow from his couch. He truly turned this old shack into his safe haven. Decorating it to his liking and even gave you a small corner for you to decorate. You contributed with the snacks seeing as you were in here just as much as he was.

You found your usual spot outside his shed where it gave you a clear view of the sky, free of any trees obstructing your view. The absence of nearby light left the sky covered in bright, beautiful stars. The sky tonight was stunning causing a slight smile to spread across your face. You spread the blanket out and positioned the cushion beneath your head as you allowed your mind to wander. Trying to trace a straight line with the patterns of the stars.

Your train of thought was cut off, and you cocked your head to the side. On the blanket next to you, Xavier was now sitting.

“Hey, did I distract you? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to” you apologized to your best friend, eyes full of worry.

He shook his head and said, "No no, I just felt lonely when I didn’t feel your presence. Besides, I think I needed to clear my mind too. Didn't realize how badly my fingers ached" Xavier twisted his fingers trying to get them to crack and suddenly found himself lying down next to you with his hands clasped together and on top of his tummy. You smiled gently at him.

“Are you going to share the pillow with me or will you leave me with a stiff neck too?” As you giggled, he gently pulled the pillow out from under your head. Causing you to slightly lift your head.

The two of you gazed silently at the twinkling of each star for a while. When it came to Xavier, you enjoyed that you didn't feel the need to keep the conversation going at all times. The mere thought of having each other by your side was enough.

“Isn’t it crazy how we both managed exist at the same time, same place?” You broke the silence.

“Please don’t make me go into an existential crisis right now. . . you always do this when we’re stargazing”

You chuckled. It's true. Your thoughts would frequently go straight to the strangest concepts.

“Xavier, do you think the moon landings were real? Be honest.”

“But xavier, think about it, we can’t be the only living species in our galaxy.. aliens are real and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

“xavi, isn’t it strange they haven’t explored the entire ocean yet? They must be hiding something from us”

“I’m serious xavi, I’m glad we found each other in this lifetime.” Tears are about to escape your eyes as you say, "You mean a lot to me.” When Xavier realized how emotional you were getting, he sneaked his hand under your head and drew you into his body. The hand under you encircled your body as you flipped to your side and laid your head on his chest.

“Hey hey, no crying when the stars are looking right at you.” You giggled at what he said. You were constantly reminded of the one time you told him those exact words when tears of frustration fell from his eyes. It now became something you told each other often as a way to comfort one another.

“You mean a lot to me too, y/n. Without you, I honestly don't know where I would be right now”. Letting out a sigh as he expressed his thoughts, Xavier was drawing tiny figures on your shoulders. Under the stars was a vulnerable place to be.

“With all your bottled frustration, you'd likely be in prison for murder, not to mention lonely.”

“That was strangely specific, but okay.”

He always managed to make you laugh.

“But seriously, y/n, I'm glad I found you in this life, and I hope I find you in the next," your best friend said, a tear streaming down your cheek at the lovely moment you two had shared.

You shifted your attention back to the flickering stars that illuminated the night sky. He was so special to you, you thought. You were sure that without him, you would not have survived some of your most difficult days at Nevermore. On your first day of school, your awkward fencing partner was someone you never imagined would mean so much to you. Being under the stars brought you nothing but peace. Or maybe it was the fact that you felt so safe around your best friend.

A.N: feed back always welcomed friends! It makes my heart explode.

if you sent in a request, I see you! waiting to get home to start working on them so I can give it my full attention.

for the bestie that sent in this request- ty. i didn’t know I needed this. i hope it was more or less what you were hoping for. thank you for requesting 🤍🦋🪴🧚🏼‍♀️

if you enjoyed this one- you might like ‘mission accomplished’ if you haven’t read it yet!

As always— requests are always open! Share your thoughts! Talk to me! Get something off your mind! ✨

#wednesday #wednesday netflix #xavier thorpe #xavier thorpe fanfic #xavier thrope imagine #xavier thorpe fluff #imagine #percy hynes white #fangirlieswriting #xavier thorpe fic #xavier thorpe x y/n #xavier thorpe x reader #xavier thorpe blurb

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astrosye · 9 months

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How about some bullets for a Traveller!reader who gets along spectacularly with Itto? Absolute chums. Paimon is not pleased with Bull Chuckers ability to lower the collective intelligence of the room.

➻ astrosye

a/n⇶ I love this request so much omg I'M GONAN HAVE FUN WITH THIS 😈😈 also im alive now😘 changing my theme in a bit, be patient 4 me babes🤍 GIVE ME SOME CRITICISM SINCE IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE I WROTE😞😞

cws/tws ⇶ platonic, swearing here and there😋 kind of a crackfic?? Both modern au and regular teyvat ykyk!! Just a lot of chaos

⌗ scene I — modern AU (college or highschool students)

♡ now, this could go both ways: If you have a personality that contrasts Itto's, he would be a great ally and protector to you- but if you had one that matches him more,, the both of you are skipping school, driving motorcycles, and possibly getting dumber each second. Though,, if you do have a more quiet, and reserved personality- far from Itto's- it could still lead to the same result as the other one! Maybe..

♡ anyway- with both results, Paimon is very much displeased from you and Itto's relationship. PAIMON SAYS STOP HANGING OUT WITH ITTO AND HANG OUT WITH HER INSTEAD, HE'S MAKING YOU DUMBER!!! <— the exact words paimon said.

♡ both you and Itto get a lot of tutoring from the person whom has the highest grade in your class — Kokomi Sangonomiya. With you being around Itto- he practically just affected you with his dumbass-ness! You have no choice but to get a tutor..

♡ but if you managed to resist the dumbass-ity, you tutor him instead! Just a warning, he's annoying as fuck, but you already know that.

♡ anyway- with you tutoring Itto,, it seems he finally got that one math question correctly! (The math question was literally 4th grade math..)

♡ but studying under the wing of Kokomi.. Itto will act like a total smartass even though he's the exact opposite😭 He's more knowledgeable about the subjects, yes, but does that mean he's not an idiot anymore? NO.

♡ but even if he's still got pretty low grades.. you have to admit, you're proud of him for improving!

♡ ^and he WANTS you to show him that you are.

"[name]! I passed my science test! Aren't ya proud of me?"

he boasted about his paper with a winning smile -- despite him having a score of 37/60, you can't help but smile as well.

"Right, right! You're amazing!--"

⌗ scene II — modern au

♡ there are times the both of you are separated; as horrible as it is, this is a big school, you can't help it!

♡ so as soon as the both of you learnt that the both of you were in different sections.. you were all bawling your eyes out!

♡ ^cue paimon dragging the both of you away

♡ but apart from that, the both of you always meet up at the cafeteria to do whatever it is that you both please!

the straw was stuck in itto's nostrils - as disgusting yet hilarious that it was - a pathetic attempt that made you laugh.

"pfft — bwahaha!"

the loud laughter echoed throughout the room, as itto gave you a wide grin,

"you're an absolute idiot, itto.."

༶•┈┈⛧┈♛ ♡ ♛┈⛧┈┈•༶

⌗ scene I — teyvat

♡ the oh-so popular traveler, walking around inazuma in search for another adventure — they'd eventually find that adventure as they come across a small village, seemingly terrified for their lives.

"t-the monster.."

♡ the villagers would mutter, a feared look flashing across their eyes.

♡ when you ask what happened, they'd stumble to find words- muttering as you make out the words, "white-haired.. oni.." leaving you and paimon to wonder, what oni?

♡ deciding to ask more about the situation, the villagers had finally said it in a full sentence, 'a red-horned monster that dwells among the village, allergic to beans, and with a strong, muscular build.'

♡ an elderly man asked if you would be kind enough to find and get rid of the monster, and being the kind traveler you are: you accept.

♡ venturing off to find the oni, you and paimon camp nearby the village to try and find the monster.

♡ what you didn't know, was that the so called monster was just some silly guy that screamed at the sight of you holding red beans.. and that your personalities would just click..!

♡ paimon was quite displeased — we were supposed to fight him, not gossip with him!

"traveler!!— weren't we supposed to throw the stupid bean things at him and tell him to leave the village?!"

"oh- right, yeah.. just lemme finish talking to him, then we'll fight!"

♡ upon your ignorance, paimon tugged at your sleeve, "c'mon!!"

♡ it had seemed that you had forgotten your quest, and managed to befriend the monster..

⌗ scene II — teyvat

♡ upon realizing your mistake of chatting for too long, paimon sighed in relief - 'finally..' she'd mutter under her breath, as you now explain to itto about the situation,

♡ he took it well!

"ah- right, yeah— sorry about that!.."

♡ he understood the situation, but you eventually introduced him to the villagers not as some kind of monster- but like a normal person!

♡ it was clear he was grateful that you didn't treat him like the others did, which only heightened your bond!

♡ after that, the both of you we're just absolute buds, two peas in a pod! (or three if you include paimon)

♡ the both of you would so often join each other on these little ventures into the forest, searching for onikubato bugs for your next fights -- always flexing on how "mines bigger!" "no, mine is!" like little children bragging about their toys.

♡ oftentimes, the both of you get into little dog-fights as a joke, whether it's about some puzzle the both of you had bought, or whatever!

♡ but other than that, the both of you really just chill in each other's presence.

the both of you laid on a rock, arms behind your head as you leaned into the grass. the both of you laid besides each other in peace, silent chatters exchanged among you two as you both gazed at the sky above,

"remember the first time we met?"

the both of you talked about whatever, whenever.

another a/n ⇶ grabe.. it's been so long since i wrote HAHAH!! i so missed writing oml.. i had SEVERE writers block, man, it's so good that i can write again even if it's not as good as before😭😭 CURRENTLY WORKING ON OTHER REQS I GOT DURING MY HIATUS WHAUAHAH slow process but it's going pretty good so far😼😼

#itto x reader #arataki itto x reader #genshin x reader #genshin impact x reader #arataki itto #itto #SOMEWHAT OOC ITTO?? IM SORRY I FORGOT ALL ABT HIS CHARACTER...

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ahedderick · 10 months

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CLEP

College Learning Examination Program (?maybe). A while back I got a notice from the local school system recommending CLEP as a way of getting college credits. I wanted to let you know what I’ve found about that so far, and I’ll update as we go along. This is a sample of the adverts they put out.

So. My first question was: How can I find out if my kids’ colleges will give credit for CLEP exams? I wrote to the admin dept of my son’s school and got a clear affirmative. Then I got clued in that you can search the college website for “CLEP policy” and get an answer for any college.

Second issue; where are tests given. I was able to search CLEP’s website for their testing sites and found that the local community college has CLEP testing.*

So far, so good. Where it gets a bit stickier is the actual coursework to prepare for this exam. If you’ll read the advert above, you will note that they promise “free and affordable online study resources.” That is . . an exaggeration. Like many other education sites I have investigated over the years, you don’t get to see even a small sample of what you’re buying until you have already bought it. In this case, the ‘study resources’ consist of a pdf, 23 pages of which consists of promo info for CLEP and details of testing rules and 14 pages of which consists of 60 sample questions for the chemistry exam. They are multiple choice, and the correct choice is given at the end, but the actual worked-out answer is not given. Nor any other study material. Instead, you are supposed to go find your own resources and study the (very large) number of topics covered. All you get from CLEP is. One sample exam. Sixty questions.

Well, we are going to try to make this work. Primarily because the (only) prof who teaches this class at my son’s school is an absolute maniac. As I said, I will keep anyone who is interested posted on the process. I DO have an actual chemistry textbook. Youtube Bozeman Science, here we come.

* however when I actually bought the exam and tried to get access to the local testing center, I got an error message? That is a concern.

#uni #college #student #tutor #teacher #exam stress

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the-marron · 8 months

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got sent this one today. of course you can ignore this, but i'm sending it anyway <33 - Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love 💖

Awww, thank you, that's so nice! Hmm, picking five is hard, but I will do my best! I am as usual not counting fics I've written with Ascel because writing with her is on another level altogether 🥰

Having said that, let's see:

It's Not a Safe World For Kids - BatCat, DC Comics, 12k words

A bit of a character study, a bit of me trying to wraggle different, often contradictory canons into one story about Selina making a place for herself in the Batfamily one Robin at a time. I liked writing this and I do like how some part turned out.

In Dreams You Lose Your Heartaches - Puzzleshipping, YGO, ~93k words

A rather odd mix of cinderella motifs woven into the YGO lore. I took my time with secondary characters here and I could come up with different games and riddles the characters used to test each other. In hindsight politics could have been done better, and I am sure there are some rather awkward phrases here and there, plus this is a story that broke my poor little heart once upon a time, but it made it all the more dear to me, since I did finish it after all, and some dialogues there are brilliant, if I do say so myself.

So Many Chances Unseen - Grindeldore, Fantastic Beasts, 6k words

A crack about Dumbledore being a jealous, suspicious bitch that morphed into an actual canon divergence au with a happy ending. Yeah, don't ask me how that happened, but I am very fond of this story till this day.

Deceive me kindly (while I'm still here) - Weilan, Guardian, 13k words

Steampunk au with all the sads. I wrote it while deeply in love with Asian steampunk as a concept and Weilan fit the uneasy, changing world of magic and science all too well. Plus it's inspired by one of my favourite songs, so it's double pleasant whenever I re-read it.

It's falsehood's flame, it's a crying shame - Luolin, Weilan derivatives, 13k

historical mafia!au with LNS being a part of a gang instead of the Station - it doesn't make his relationship with LF any easier. I was torn between this and we devour, like a falcon in the dive (also Luolin) but a) I cannot choose my fav Luolin ok b) this was the first one I wrote so I am sentimental about it. But it wasn't an easy choice.

Thanks again for the ask, it was indeed very nice to recall all these stories!

#ask #my writing #marron gets personal

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cellarspider · 1 year

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Oh boy I am poked

For those in need of context: I mentioned my desire to fight Noam Chomsky behind a Dennys, after reading The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker (2001).

What follows is a 2000 word essay on why. Holy heck this took all night.

Top-level disclaimer: I am not a trained linguist. I am an enthusiastic amateur at best, thanks to my hobby of constructed language-making. If anybody would like to correct something or discuss the topic, feel free!

Because l have loud feelings about The Atoms of Language. I think the way it conceives of the world has a lot of parallels in how people view science in general. So despite its age, it’s worth giving it a bit of a kicking. Both for its specific claims, and the big picture.

To summarize: the shape of our languages aren’t hard-coded into our brain by genetics. Languages don’t fall into immutable, hard-edged categories based off of binary choices. The author presents only one alternative: random chance, unconstrained by any environmental factors, that each child must learn without pattern recognition. This is a false dichotomy, and one that cuts off far more reasonable means by which languages can evolve and be learned. Science is not a fight between absolute order and absolute chaos.

I have to begin with a two paragraph digression to set the scene.

The sciences are home to a perennial nerd squabble about whose field is the best and most pure, usually in a "physicists and chemists versus everyone else" divide. This is timewasting nonsense, but it's worth acknowledging that physics and chemistry allow for experiments where one can test universal truths to a ludicrously high degree of certainty. This cannot be done in other fields, because there are too many complicating factors. My chosen field of genetics deals with systems that have so many moving parts, they're impossible to fully predict. Social sciences study behavior, which is even harder to make generalized statements about.

Now, this does not mean physicists and chemists can explain everything about genetics or social sciences. Their tools are not suited to the problems tackled in these fields, and anybody who claims otherwise is a blowhard. But sometimes people can get jealous of the certainty of physical laws. They may try to legitimize their field or their pet theory by describing it in terms of physics and chemistry.

And so Mark Baker wrote The Atoms of Language.

You may be able to see where the problems start with this book.

So, what is this book trying to authoritatively explain? Well, a couple of big questions in linguistics are "how do babies learn languages when they are small and bad at everything?" and "why do so many unrelated languages share structures that function similarly to each other?"

Baker subscribes to Noam Chomsky’s theories on the subject, which can be summarized like this: The grammatical structures of all languages are formed from a limited and definable set of parameters, which are predefined by a “Language Acquisition Device” in the brain, found exclusively in humans, due to a single evolutionary event that no other organism has replicated.

In fact, Chomsky asserts that not only is this the root of all language, it’s also the only way that babies could ever learn a language. He posits that they don’t receive enough information to learn their language. Instead, they instinctively pick up on linguistic parameters that the Linguistic Acquisition Device is hard-coded to create, selecting those that are relevant to their first language and discarding the rest.

Using these parameters contained within the Language Acquisition Device, Baker posits a periodic table of language. One that could be used to describe and predict all possible grammatical constraints of language.

This is highly controversial on every level. I’m going to start with the Chomsky stuff and move on to what Baker does with these parameters.

The human exclusivity of syntactically complex language is currently up for debate, with Carolina chickadees and prairie dogs arguably being capable of the same feat in the wild.

Chomsky never tested this theory in a rigorous manner in humans either. However, its structure is similar to many experiments from the past few decades. There was a wave of neuropsychology studies that claimed “we found the brain region responsible for [behavior] via an FMRI study!”. These usually ended up being shaved down by later investigations into "actually that part of the brain does at least six things, and that particular behavior is split between at least fifteen different regions.”

To this date, no single region of the brain has been identified as the source of childhood language acquisition. While it’s hard to get a kid to sit still in an MRI machine, this is backed up by one of the oldest ways to study the brain: looking at what breaks when it’s injured. While there are many brain injuries that can affect one’s ability to speak or to comprehend language, none have been conclusively shown to abolish the ability to form grammatical sentences. Even ones you think really, really should: witness the man who had a key language center of the brain surgically removed, and somehow continued to speak pretty damn coherently all the same.

This is a problem, obviously, but one could argue that a circuit could form between multiple areas of the brain to create a Language Acquisition Module, right? Okay then. Let’s examine the parameters it supposedly contains. These are the fundamental categories that human languages are locked into, according to Chomsky and Baker. While Baker begins with the metaphor of the periodic table, what he actually describes is more of a flow chart: an increasingly specific pattern of choices that build up to form a unique language.

Baker admits he doesn’t have the complete periodic table of language. In fact, he backpedals in the last quarter of the book, and says well, we don't have a periodic table of linguistics yet, maybe we never will, but we could!

And he’s pretty sure of the chart that he does have. And he still considers it to demonstrate immutable categories of language. For example, he says there are two basic word orders: Subject Verb Object (“I eat apples”) and Subject Object Verb (“I apples eat”). He presents this as the most basic thing a child learns about their language’s structure. This is first, all else comes after.

…Except he then admits that actually, there are other word orders, but they’re really rare, so that proves him right anyway.

This, as the astute in the audience may note, does not in fact prove him right. Language is not behaving like the perfect, hard-edged system he wants, it’s messy. And it doesn’t get any better from there. More and more exceptions pile up, perfectly reasonable in the context of their languages, but they’re problems to this model. Baker asserts that culture has no meaningful effect on the structure of language.

To Baker, these parameters cannot have evolved independently based on cultural trends. This must be set in stone, or everything would be chaos. He argues that two languages coming up with similar structures independently by means of culturally-influenced linguistic evolution would be like two people flipping a coin a hundred times and getting the same sequence of heads and tails.

How languages end up the way they do is still a topic of study and debate. But Baker is pulling out an argument often used by creationists, so we’re in my wheelhouse here. I will briefly use biological evolution as a metaphor to explain why he’s wrong.

Biological evolution keeps coming up with similar structures and adaptations across wildly different species. Birds and scallops have eyes, even though their last common ancestor didn’t. Bees and bats can both fly. How is this possible, if evolution is a random process and isn’t directed according to some plan? Because all organisms are dealing with similar environmental pressures. Why are snakes and ferrets and eels all long, thin, slinky tubes? Because hunting and hiding in small burrows is easier that way. Snails and turtles and beetles have hard shells because being chewed on is bad. The environment creates restrictions on what sorts of bodies can feasibly exist, and that results in convergent evolution.

Language is working within a more restricted environment: You have a vocal tract.* You are a social animal. It benefits you and your kin group to be able to communicate things about yourself and the world around you. What does that mean? Telling people about the location of things. The qualities of things. Describing actions that have a cause and effect. You need some way to say "There is food here" or "I hit it with a stick, and then bees came out."

These desirable qualities mean that languages are subject to massive environmental pressures to maintain a minimum level of ability to communicate specific kinds of information, regardless of how they change over time. And you're presenting the information through a linear medium, one word at a time. These physical and behavioral traits limit the possible things a language can do.

So while I do not have the technical knowledge to propose a detailed model of linguistic evolution, I do not find it unlikely that human languages could experience convergent evolution, producing highly analogous structures completely independently of each other. Are there components of human cognition that lead humans to prefer some forms more than others? Almost certainly. But again, they’ll be messy! And they will be very, very hard to tease apart from the social context of language.

So, why did I just spend 1500 words ranting about this? Because despite the fact that this book was published not long before most linguists rejected these premises, it still plays into a lot of misapprehensions people have about science. Can we come up with absolute, iron-clad laws for everything? No. Many systems are so complicated that with our imperfect knowledge, they resist the language of certainty.

Does that mean that science is useless in those cases? No!! You can still figure out restrictions on what can and can’t happen, what is and isn’t reasonable to expect. This is the language of probability. The more we rigorously study a subject, the more precise we can be. That’s what we do in science.** We describe the world as precisely and carefully as we can, using the resources we have. It’s not always elegant, but not everything will be.

And I think that’s a good excuse for me to end this without a neat little closing thought.

---

*and hands, but I am not qualified to discuss sign languages.

**The desire to be achingly comprehensive is strong. You have no many times I had to delete tangents in this thing. They would have made my points more precise. I could have talked about synaptic pruning in the developing brain. I could talk about multiple testing correction while calculating probabilities. I wrote a footnote ramble about Japanese serial verb constructions, but I deleted it! Go me!!!

#spider rambles far too much #that was a lot #haven't gone on a ramble this long in ages #that was fun but tiring

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torestoreamends · 2 years

Text

A Permanent Fixture

G rated, 3.3k words

Frustrated with Sholmes's constant mess, Yujin asks him to tidy at least half of their shared suite at 221B. But he doesn't really expect Sholmes to actually do it, and he certainly doesn't expect seeing his tidy half of the living room to make him feel the way it does.

Note: This started as pointless fluff inspired by the canon Holmes story, The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, which begins with Watson complaining about how messy Holmes is. But as I wrote, it developed feelings, and now it's less banter and ridiculousness and much more about Yujin and Herlock's relationship, and Yujin finding a home at 221B Baker Street.

Read the fic on AO3

Living with Herlock Sholmes is simultaneously the most joyful thing ever to happen to Yujin, and the most frustrating. On this particular morning, his opinion of the experience leans very much towards the latter.

“SHOLMES,” he roars over the violin music that’s floating through from the living room. “Why is your pipe inside my slipper? AGAIN?”

The violin music stops. “So that’s where I put it!” Sholmes calls cheerfully into the sudden quiet. “I was about to turn everything upside down looking for that. You’ve saved me quite the job, my dear. Would you be so kind as to bring it here?”

Yujin growls to himself. He’s of a mind to stay in his room with the pipe, but he knows that would be a greater punishment to himself than to his partner. He needs his morning tea, after all, and Sholmes will probably have forgotten all about the pipe in about thirty seconds time. So instead he marches out into the front room, half barefoot, slipper in one hand, the offending pipe in the other, muttering a string of colourful suggestions for where Sholmes might like to keep the pipe other than inside his slipper.

Sholmes beams at him, apparently immune to the glowering. “It’s a fine morning, don’t you think my dearest fellow? I was considering a stroll in the park after breakfast.”

Yujin folds his arms. “Sholmes. This cannot go on.”

Sholmes blinks at him. “You, however, don’t seem to be in the finest mood. Whatever is the matter, my dear?”

Yujin waves the pipe at him. “This, Sholmes.”

Sholmes reaches for the pipe. “Ah yes, thank you for bringing that. I was quite at a loss as to where I’d misplaced it.”

Yujin holds the pipe out of his reach. “You are at a loss as to where you misplace everything. Our rooms – our rooms, and you will kindly note the collective pronoun – are a mess. This is the second time this week you have lost your pipe and it has shown up in one of my shoes. Yesterday, I got to work and discovered a portion of my patient notes had been replaced by some manner of chemical formula, which I assume belongs to one of your experiments, and several pages of a Bach Sonata—”

“Ah! Was it the Sonata in C Major? I’ve been wondering where that got to.”

“I have no idea which sonata it was. My point, Sholmes, is that this cannot continue. If I open the kitchen cupboards and have a stack of beakers and test tubes fall on my head one more time we will have another case on our hands. Your murder. And I will be quite happy to let Klint van Zieks prosecute me for it to the fullest extent of the law. In fact, I shall march into the Bailey and confess to it quite readily.”

Sholmes studies him in silence for a minute. “You’re serious about this.”

“I cannot imagine what gave you that impression.”

“The fact that you’re still holding the slipper even now the pipe has been removed suggests a state of some distraction. And you’re not usually the murderous type. In fact you’ve always seemed quite well adjusted, all things considering.”

Yujin takes a very long, very deliberate breath and silently counts to ten. When he’s done he drops his slipper onto the ground and slides his foot into it. “I need you to tidy up, Sholmes. Please. And if you cannot tidy everything – I do understand there’s a precise science behind at least some of your chaos – then I need half of this room to myself. Because this isn’t just a matter of you losing your pipe. This is a matter of me losing my mind. Do I make myself clear?”

Sholmes nods seriously. “Quite clear, my dearest fellow. I have just one request.”

“And what is that?”

“Would you be so kind as to return my pipe now? I will be needing it if I am to complete the most onerous task you have set before me.”

Yujin hands him the pipe. “You’ve set it before yourself, Sholmes.” And with that he retreats to the kitchen to make a very much needed pot of tea.

If Yujin is completely honest with himself, he doesn’t have particularly high expectations of Sholmes acting upon his words. The man is notoriously easy to distract, especially when a necessary but boring task is set before him. There’s a reason Yujin has taken control of most of their shared financial matters.

When he returns to 221B Baker Street that evening, he unlocks the door to their rooms not with trepidation but with resignation. Nothing will have changed. Sholmes is incapable of being anything other than staunchly himself.

He steps into the apartment fully expecting to immediately fall over some stack of papers or stand on a discarded Petri dish. But he doesn’t. Because the flat has been… transformed.

Half the space has been completely and miraculously cleared. The shelves are perfectly empty. There’s a desk whose surface is visible in its entirety, not a paper in sight. And all the surfaces seem to have been cleaned, possibly for the first time in their existence.

The other side of the room is a very different story. It’s darker than ever, precarious stacks of books and accoutrements blocking out the light from the windows. Most of the floor is obscured by papers and books files, and the shelves bulge from all the stuff that’s been squeezed onto them. It’s quite clear the mess on the floor is mostly there because there is physically nowhere else it will fit.

Yujin decides not to worry about that side of the room. It is, blessedly, no longer his problem. Instead he focuses on his side of the room and the space in front of the fire, where the sofas have been pushed together to make a cosy seating area. Between them, in place of a coffee table, is a large metal chest he’s never seen before. It’s standing open, and Sholmes is curled up on the floor beside it, surrounded by a blizzard of notes and records.

Yujin puts a hand on the nearest side board to steady himself. “This is quite a… a transformation.” He doesn’t know why but he feels strangely and delightfully warmed by the sight of his half of the room waiting empty for him to fill. Despite them taking the rooms together, this has always very much been Sholmes’s space. He has such a particular way of living that it quickly spreads and overwhelms everything else, in a not dissimilar way to an incoming spring tide flooding an estuary. It’s easy sometimes to feel like a guest in Sholmes’s life. An honoured guest, of course, but still one who might be uninvited at any moment.

But now, to see his own sparkling expanse of space, created by Sholmes’s own hand in just a few short hours… It’s perhaps the clearest sign Yujin has ever been given that they’re partners in this relationship. That he belongs here.

He swallows hard and tries to bring some composure to his voice. “I… I don’t quite know what to say.”

Sholmes waves a hand at him without looking up. “Say nothing, Mikotoba, and come and look at this. I have uncovered a treasure trove.”

Yujin leaves his shoes, hat, and bag by the door and goes over to join Sholmes on the floor. “I wasn’t expecting… I thought this would be a… a long term project.”

“I was feeling particularly morose after your telling off this morning, so I decided some mindless work was in order. And it appears the tedium has paid off. Here, help me go through these.” He thrusts a stack of leather-bound books into Yujin’s hands. “I feel they ought to be catalogued.”

“And these are?”

“Old case notes of mine. From before your time.”

Curious, Yujin flicks open the first book on the pile to find a sort of preface, written in an ungainly, childlike version of Sholmes’s hand. “‘What follows is an account of my investigative achievements between the summers of 1874 and ‘75, that they might be…’ What’s this word? Instructive? Your handwriting was dreadful. ‘That they might be instructive to those of more modest talents than myself.’” Yujin snorts. “Humble, Sholmes. Very humble.”

Sholmes reaches across unblushingly and plucks the book from his hands. “Honest and realistic as always, my dearest fellow. Nevertheless, perhaps this would be one notebook best kept uncatalogued. Just between us, I had a tendency to write rather freely as a child. I imagine this is more of a diary than a case log.”

“In that case I simply have to read it.” Yujin lunges for the diary, but Sholmes dodges and throws the book over his shoulder, where it disappears into a pile of mess near the Stradivarius.

“Oh dear it seems to have misplaced itself. And a word of warning, If you try to retrieve it I’ll be forced to move all my things back into their proper places on your side of the room, which would be an immeasurably unpleasant experience for both of us, wouldn’t you agree?” He laughs at the thought, throwing back his head, and Yujin rolls his eyes.

“Spoil sport,” he mutters, picking up the next book from his pile.

Over the next hour they unearth nothing nearly so exciting as the diary, but Sholmes does come across a series of rather thrilling cases from the summer after his sixteenth birthday. It turns out that teenage Sholmes was as formidable in his observations as the adult version, and just as much of an annoyance to Scotland Yard too.

They compile all the books into chronological order and stack them back into the metal chest. Even once they’re done, the chest remains less than a third full.

Yujin dusts off his hands and pushes himself up onto his knees. “A good afternoon’s work. And it was nice to see you haven’t changed a bit over the years, Sholmes. Your old cases are as remarkable and ridiculous as your current ones.”

Sholmes laughs again. “Why of course my dear Mikotoba. The ridiculous is what keeps things interesting.”

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” Yujin gets to his feet and brushes the fluff of a dozen years of memories from his knees. “Tea, Sholmes?”

Sholmes holds up one finger. “A moment, my dearest fellow.”

Yujin looks down at himself, wondering if perhaps a spider infestation has taken up residence on his trouser legs. There were enough cobwebs in that chest.

But Sholmes isn’t looking at him. He’s frowning at the chest. “Might I make a suggestion?”

“What is it?”

“Your case notes are far more meticulous and articulate than mine ever were.”

“I suppose a little distance helps with such things. Distance and patience.” Yujin weights the word patience, but Sholmes doesn’t seem to notice the dig.

“My point is, it seems a shame to have a library of my deductions that excludes your work. And there’s plenty of room left in this trunk.” He looks up at Yujin. “How would you feel about storing your notes in here, alongside my own?“

Yujin blinks at him. “You want to add my notes to your archive?”

“Only if you find it agreeable. But if it will help to persuade you, I believe our adventures have brought out the best in me. And I would hate for there to be no record of my beloved partner. Besides, as I said before, you are a considerably better writer and note-taker than myself. So.” He looks up at Yujin, and there’s a small flicker of doubt in his eyes. “What do you think?”

There it is again. That surprising rush of warmth blossoming in Yujin’s chest. As pleasant it is, it gives him a sense of unsteadiness, as if he’s standing on the deck of a ship and hasn’t quite found his feet yet. “Are you feeling alright today, Sholmes?” He asks, because he doesn’t quite trust himself to be capable of expressing anything more heartfelt without giving himself away. “You’re being unusually… accommodating.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

Yujin swallows. “I mean…” He gestures to his empty side of the room. “All of this. My notes in your archive. It’s as though you’re making room for me.”

“Might I remind you, my dear, that you were the one who asked me to clear half of the room for you.”

“Yes, I know that, but…” Yujin trails off, at a loss for how to put it into words. “I-I hadn’t anticipated how this would make me feel as though I was being… welcomed into your life as a permanent fixture.” He tries to add a dismissive wave of his hand to the phrase, to somehow diminish its impact.

It doesn’t work.

Sholmes looks steadily up at him from his seat on the floor. “If I have ever given you the misapprehension that you were temporary, my dear Mikotoba, please accept my most profuse apologies. You have made an indelible mark upon myself and my work. You are irreplaceable.”

Yujin sighs and sinks back onto the carpet opposite him. “That wasn’t what I meant, Sholmes. I was simply trying to express…” He struggles to put what it is he’s trying to express into words for a moment, and when he fails he clenches a fist and shakes his head.

Sholmes shifts so he’s sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest. He always looks smaller sitting like that. Childlike. Vulnerable in a way. Yujin expects him to say something, but he doesn’t. He just waits. Waits while Yujin grapples with whatever it is he’s feeling.

“You’re so… you,” Yujin says finally. “You take up space. You take up attention. And I in no way mean that as a criticism. It’s simply an observation.”

“An honest observation is the key to a great deduction.”

“Right.” Yujin nods. “I am also keenly aware, sometimes more than others, that I’m not going to remain in London forever. And…” He shakes his head again, still struggling. “What I’m trying to say is that the space you give me now is one day going to be empty. Do you understand that?”

Sholmes gives him a flicker of a smile. “Perhaps I don’t understand it the way you do, but it is something I too am keenly aware of.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

Sholmes sets his pipe to his lips, the smile more than a flicker now. “Look at it this way, my dear. That space will never be empty. The chest will be full of your case notes. The room will be full of your memories. It may be painful to look at one day, but that is in the future. You’re here now. That is an undeniable fact. And if I have observed anything from the plethora of clients who have crossed our threshold since we set up home here, it is that it is perhaps better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Would you not agree, my dearest fellow?”

Yujin bows his head. “I suppose, all things considered, I would.” He looks up at Sholmes. “It hurts, though. It does things to you. I don’t know that I could stand to be the cause of that pain for someone else.”

Sholmes meets his gaze. “And I don’t know that it’s your choice to make. In fact I’m not even sure it’s mine. The heart is a law unto itself.”

“Then, I should say…” Yujin meets Sholmes’s smile with a small one of his own. “That to be given space in your life is an honour. Thank you, Sholmes.”

Sholmes’s smile widens and his eyes glint. “The pleasure is entirely mine, my dearest fellow. Now.” He uncurls himself and is on his feet in a second. “I believe someone said something about tea?” He looks around as if he’s surprised it hasn’t already materialised before him.

With a heavy, fond sigh, Yujin drags himself up off the floor again. “That was me, Sholmes. And you ignored the offer entirely in favour of talking about my case notes.”

“Did I? Whyever would I have done that?”

Yujin rolls his eyes. “I have absolutely no idea. I assume you would like tea then?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble my dear.”

“I suppose not. Give me a moment.” He heads out into the kitchen, scooping up a couple of Sholmes’s used cups on the way.

Once the kettle is boiling, he takes a moment behind the safety of the closed kitchen door to bury his face in his hands and allow everything to overwhelm him.

Sheer joy, warm as the summer sun. Bold and bright as the tulips that grow in the flower borders in St James’s Park where he and Sholmes sometimes walk. And so unexpected.

This trip to London was supposed to be about burying himself in work so he could forget for a while. It was maybe supposed to be about learning how to be okay again. He wasn’t supposed to find something new. But here he is, and here Sholmes is, and this joy, this love, this home they’re making for themselves. They fill the cracks in his broken heart like molten gold running through a damaged pot.

He beams and taps his toes in a little dance until the kettle whistles. Then, still smiling to himself, he opens the overhead cupboard in search of fresh tea cups.

Instantly, an avalanche of test tubes and beakers tumbles down on his head. In his happiness he’d completely forgotten about that particular trap of Sholmes’s. By some miracle he manages to catch all but three of the pieces of delicate glassware. One of those bounces on the worktop and doesn’t break. The other two hit the tiled floor and instantly shatter.

Yujin closes his eyes and inhales slowly through his nose.

A second later the kitchen door creaks open behind him. “I heard something break. Is everything—”

“Sholmes,” Yujin says wearily. “You know very well what happened.”

“Ah,” Sholmes says brightly. “I knew there was something I’d forgotten to tidy up. The notes in the trunk must have distracted me before I could get to the kitchen.”

“So it would seem.” Yujin carefully deposits his armful of beakers and test tubes onto the worktop and turns to give Sholmes a hard look. “Perhaps this can be your task for tomorrow, then.”

“I shall make a mental note to do just that.” Sholmes taps his forehead and gives Yujin a bright, thoroughly unconvincing smile. Sholmes’s mental notes almost never manifest into physical action, unless they’re attached to some case or other.

Yujin sighs. “Don’t worry. I’ll remind you.”

“That would be much appreciated. Now, how is that tea coming along?”

Yujin shakes his head in despair and fetches the clean cups from the cupboard, while Sholmes finishes off making the tea, humming lightly to himself while he works.

It is entirely possible the cupboard will never be cleared out, Yujin knows that. He may be endangered by an avalanche of chemical equipment every single time he wants a clean tea cup. But that seems a small price to pay for everything else. And right now, with the warm scent of tea flooding their tiny kitchen, and Sholmes softly singing the tune of a Vivaldi violin concerto as they work around one another, hips and elbows occasionally bumping together, he thinks he just might be persuaded to live with it.

#homumiko #yujin mikotoba #yuujin mikotoba #herlock sholmes #ace attorney #dgs #tgaac #dgs fic #dai gyakuten saiban #great ace attorney #my writing #I really wasn't expecting this to become as feelsy as it did #but I love it #and I hope other people do too #it's also worth noting that I'm leaning in to writing my ships in a more queer platonic way #and this is hopefully an example of that

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inkofamethyst · 1 year

Text

January 3, 2023

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

INVITED TO MY CHOICE 2 [Choice D] FOR AN INTERVIEW WEEKEND

okokokokok lemme back up a lil

So I put together a rough list of PhD programs in the order of “would like to attend” and it’s not entirely accurate, because each of theses programs has pros n cons that are unequally weighted, but I’m keeping it as is because why not [I have since decided to list them alphabetically to better reflect the wibbly-wobbly nature of how I feel about these schools (ex. my “Choice 7 is now my Choice A because it comes first in the alphabet) and to also use an alphabetical system to minimize undergrad and grad admissions confusion]. ANYWAY I finish my TA thing today (more on that later), do some grading (what a bizarre thing to do suddenly after.. seventeen years of being graded), then get set to walk home. I open my email while I’m somewhere in the middle of campus to find an invitation to a recruitment day from one of the people I contacted. They’re paying for my flight, for my hotel, for my food... Of course I screamed and called my parents and apparently I screeched again so loudly on the phone with my mom initially that my dad had to come out of a meeting and tell my mom to turn the volume down.

NOW. I am ecstatic. This is one of the top programs for my field in the US. It would look fantastic to be able to graduate from a place like that. It’s perhaps not in the city environment that I want, but it seems a little more lively than where I’m at now. Not to mention that the campus is beautiful.

However. Allow me to back up a bit more.

I was told (after I had reached out to the guy), that one of the potential advisors I was interested in doesn’t.. have the best reputation with lady scientists, if you catch my drift. I might’ve even lamented over this here because it’s something that’s unfortunately common in male-dominated fields (or fields that are equally split but have older big-name men). And so I wrote in my personal statement that I was interested in working with another person at the school instead, but I still put that guy in on my app as a potential advisor because you have to name three people. The guy I don’t want to work with is the one who emailed me though. And like, he’s not director of admissions or graduate studies or anything.. he’s just a guy there. So it worries me just a little (because what am I if not a little bag of worries) that the institution might’ve paired me up with that guy. To be fair, his lab definitely aligns more with my previous research experience and my actual interests, but uh. I’d rather not be paranoid for six years around a person who can become as close to you as a really good friend or parent, in some cases (not to mention that they can be lifetime collaborators).

But. That very well could be me entirely overthinking. For now, I just want to bask in the fact that what was probably my best application overall has yielded some results.

What a way to start the new year.

It’s a little funny, but uh, this morning, before the class started, I thought to myself “I am going to get into [Choice 1 [Choice E]].” That didn’t happen, not today, anyway, but it’s a weird coincidence that I got this email on the same day. Something, something, speak it into existence, I guess.

Today I’m thankful for the invitation to interview :)

Even if I have to miss the first day of my classes to do so :P (I am very much understating the effect that missing a full day of class will have on me.. not to mention that it’s the first day and most of these my two academic ones are upper-levels so they’ll spend ten minutes on the syllabus before rockin n rollin into day one content (but but but. it’s day one content. I can review day one content on my own. I’ll be okay.))

Also the TA thing went alright, I’d say. I overestimated how much background knowledge they were coming in with... it’s a science class and none of the students are natural science majors, so things like hypothesis testing aren’t really part of what they do. I recognize that a) they haven’t had a full lecture yet, b) they’re taking this to “easily” fulfill a science requirement, and c) I didn’t prepare as much as I needed to (I won’t fault myself for this, as it’s been a minute since I’ve taken this class and I’ve never TA’d before), so I’ve been pretty lenient with grading the first assignments. I’ll inevitably improve and settle into my own style, but I’m happy with how today went. Very happy.

What a good day, wow.

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stayarmytinyzenmoa-l · 2 years

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I know this question isn’t related to any stories on your blog but do you have any study tips? Recently I’ve really had to buckle down and study but some of the information just won’t stick in my brain. All throughout school I’ve luckily never had to study because I was just someone who picked up on things rather quickly but now that is really coming back to bite me in the ass. I’m currently taking a course online and they provide videos but the instructor’s voice is really monotone and I notice myself zoning out more easily than I usually do. They also include a lot information that can be considered “fluff” so I’m not sure how to decide what is important for me to know and what is considered “fluff”. Only taking notes on what my teachers had on their PowerPoints also came back to bite me in the ass. 😭😭

I’ve been following your blog for awhile now and noticed that you take mini hiatuses to focus on your studies and am wondering how you do so especially considering the difficult classes that you take and have to keep up with year round.

Any tips are greatly appreciated 💕

Hi, love! Yeah I’m happy to help! Studying can be a pain so I get it. Just for context tho, I’m a STEM student so a lot of my studying skills are geared towards Science/Math based classes, but I’m sure these tips can be applied universally. Anyway, onto the tips!

Pomodoro Technique - Online classes are such a pain too, it’s easy to get distracted! That’s where this comes in. 20 minute study intervals with 2 minute breaks in between, and after two hours have elapsed a 30 minute break. This especially helped me with online lectures as I couldn’t just sit still and watch an hour and a half lecture every time, and this works for general studying too! As you get more proficient in this method, feel free to extend the study interval in increments of 5. And if it’s too hard, feel free to decrease it to 15 instead of twenty.

Active Recall Techniques - Flash cards, flash cards, and more flash cards. I think I killed a couple of trees in my last quarter alone (it’s okay I use ecosia LMAO). See, it’s nice if a professor provides a formula sheet, but that’s time wasted during an exam. Pick out key words and remember phrases. Cornell notes also helps a lot especially when writing down questions to ask your professor later during office hours or such, and it helps with revising later!

Different Notes Methods - There’s no one way to write your notes! I’ve always hated it when people said “you can only do your notes this way!” Because every person is different! For me Cornell works well, but I can see why that wouldn’t work for some people! But if you’re following active recall, try not to just copy paste your notes onto paper from the PowerPoint, rather, try writing your notes from memory instead! Copying your notes activated passive learning, which isn’t as effective for some people. Again, just try what works best! To revise I usually make mind maps, for example.

Mind Maps - Write the central topic of one chapter and expand upon it similar to a branching tree! The leaves are the details while the branches are broad ideas! Do this from memory first and, with a different color, write in extra details you missed when cross referencing with your notes.

Practice Problems - I cannot stress this one enough. You can be amazing at concepts in theory, but if you don’t practice them you won’t fully grasp them. The best way to test if you understand concepts is to do a problem on it!

Summarize - When it came to studying for exams, I found that blatant revision, at least for me, wasn’t effective (but if it works for you go ahead!) instead, I would try to summarize the chapter (by memory) in a compact form (1-2 pages) as if I were making a study guide. Similar to the mind maps, if it wasn’t something I could recall off the top of my head, I wrote it in a different color.

Unfortunately, I can’t help much on sorting through fluff. For me I had to memorize or understand everything because I never knew what would be on the exam, but hopefully the methods above can help! Happy studying! You got this, love <3

#asks #anon

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sunkenightmare · 3 days

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Afrofuturism Blog #1

I've always loved science fiction because it's exciting to see aliens taking over the world. But my introduction to afrofuturism happened when I read Olivia Butler's book Kindred for my African American Studies class. The main character, Dana, is a strong and spirited woman who mysteriously travels back in time and encounters her ancestor, Rufus, a slave owner. She tries to save him from harm and change him for the better. The novel draws parallels to the modern world with its portrayal of breaking stereotypes, complex slave owners, and the reluctant bond between family members. I was happily surprised by the book's theme of rewriting history and finding healing in the past. Taking this class has been exciting, and I've learned a lot.

Among the works we've studied, The Space Traders really stood out to me. Derrick Bell wrote this science fiction story in 1992 as a commentary on racial ideals at that time. The story imagines space traders arriving on Earth and offering to restore America's former glory if they're given all the Black people living there. Throughout the story, there are debates about this trade proposal. Most of the American government chooses to accept it, but the only voices of opposition come from Black Americans themselves and businessmen concerned about the economic impact of losing a significant portion of consumers.

The story also tackles the issue of colorism, which is still prevalent today. It explores how lighter skin is often seen as more desirable, perpetuating a historical sentiment that values fair complexions. In the story, Black individuals who are able to leave must pass the "paper bag test." This test has symbolized a negative sentiment throughout history, as nobody wanted to be darker than a brown paper bag. However, in the story, there's a poignant reversal of this sentiment. A woman longs to pass the test so she can be accepted by her family. She tries to darken her skin by sunbathing, changing the struggles faced by darker-skinned individuals during slavery and the early Reconstruction Era. By presenting this reversal, the author highlights the lasting effects of colorism and helps the audience understand the historical and present-day challenges faced by individuals with darker skin tones. It prompts us to critically examine the harmful impact of color biases and the ongoing journey towards healing and inclusivity.

In The Space Traders, Derrick Bell uses science fiction to capture our attention and explore the serious implications of racism in America. Through exaggerated fictional characters in a dystopian setting, he encourages us to reflect on these ideas without feeling personally attacked or guilty. Instead, the story invites us to think deeply about these issues and their significance in our society.

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imarawbu · 30 days

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So since I saw that video from my ex's brother's wedding in my feed I have had the flashbacks resume full time really bad. I've not told anyone, no need to say anything. I really wish I had just ended my life back then a few weeks before I met my ex just like I had planned to before I did something dumb and called a helpline where they forced me into the hospital where I met my ex.

There was no way to get away from my family back then, even when I ran away to Canada with my ex, we ended up back here. I ended up back with my parents after the divorce. Idk I probably won't go back with them as there's no way for me to especially with my daughter after this divorce. Besides I am not leaving until I'm financially secure anyways and can stay where I am. I know what will happen if I go back with them.

Financial security is all I want and need now. Lol. So does everyone else in this shithole country with few exceptions. There's no point getting remarried, I am already isolated from everyone and I have a kid so no friends. The social groups I had before marriage are all dormant and gone as everyone has moved on in life now. Maybe I can find a way to double my own investments and find a way to gain total financial freedom for a couple of years, go back to school and finish a degree, no job pays decently anymore for college degrees though. I probably wouldn't get any better pay than what I get at this job. I want a degree(s) to showcase intelligence not really for a specific job- but that's not an option with a kid, especially as a single mother.

I messed my life up, yeah I know. No need to tell me. I am always quite aware of what's my fault, I just don't go around saying it all the time. I try to give myself the benefit of the doubt instead.

This Ramadan series I mentioned is called why me and so there are other things that obviously resonate with people in hard times. Other videos about how praying Istikharah turned out to not bring a good end, how blessings or things you really want are withheld from you because the idea is to elevate your status or prevent you from falling into sin are pretty relevant to me- obviously.

I used to be an atheist before I met my ex husband. Yeah, one of the worst humans that exists on this planet was part of the reason I decided to become Muslim (I'm not really going to give him credit for anything because he didn't do anything, it's mostly the fact that I liked him and studied up on his religion that got me into Islam). These kind of things you see as an atheist and the knee jerk reaction is to say well there obviously no god because he could just do X and nobody would suffer. This was why I was so militantly atheistic (a long with the belief in logic and science somehow proved the lack of a god.) looking back it seems so immature and juvenile to be an atheist and go around talking so sure of yourself and that you, a being on a tiny speck on he edge of a galaxy thats an even tinier speck compared to this universe has all the answers and knows how things should function and be.

Lol. I'm sure that will get a lot of atheists mad. I don't really care. There's nothing logical or scientific about atheism, agnosticsm, maybe, at least you admit you don't know everything. Once you write a scientific paper and get published. Your view on science, the scientific method, really change. Maybe that's more apparent after all the stuff related to the COVID and the vaccine, if you were paying attention into the science community and having to pivot every couple of weeks until the realization came that nobody if following any evidence of anything, COVID or otherwise. I'm not anti vax, I'm just saying how things developed. I wrote a couple papers on COVID. It's very boring and uninteresting, I read through 1000s of papers, no joke, to get references. You realize after awhile, yes, we have the scientific method but these experiments we do are not always reproducible, especially in biology. You can do the same test 5 times and you will get different results every time, if the results are similar or reveal a pattern then you use that as evidence. It is very similar when it comes to things you have no evidence for, at some point the evidence doesn't support anything and humans have pattern recognition and so you can logically go with that because there are no exact answers. Then you can be angsty, be an atheist, and say the lack of evidence is evidence for your position and make leaps about what you would do as an all powerful being when you can't even master your own mental health. Anyways enough on atheists, probably what I wrote doesn't even make sense.

I'm not perfect but I never did anything to have to grow up with parents that made me the scape goat and blamed me for everything. When I tried to leave, I ended up in an abusive marriage. Coming back was literally suffering and tried to escape again to the same thing but a little less abusive with a kid in tow now. You should have done this, you shouldn't have done that. Yes. I know. Not helping. Where should I have learned that? Osmosis? I got that after the fact. Who should have taught me? Parents? Really? Interesting. Let's go back to what I said at the beginning. Is my messed up life my fault? Yes and no. Yes, I did it, I did somewhat know better but that option was better than my current reality. No, it's not my fault, why should I have to choose between known horrible and potentially horrible? Isn't there a non- horrible option? Homelessness? How would that be helpful..

Anyways this is long enough. Nobody reads these things but me.

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panglossesanddiadorims · 5 months

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Theories, conspiracies and delusions

Sometimes life make us question our beliefs, creeds and comprehension of facts, so, as characters from Plato’s The Cave, the citizens Class Y from Huxley’s Braved New World, Parson in Orwell’s 1984, Mildred in Fahrenheit 415 or the “Burn the Witch” mob in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, we desperately cling to biases as some sort of life raft to not plunge in the depths of the unknown and fossilize them as the only true, acceptable – and comfortable- reality. It seems as if truth either does not matter anymore or it is only truth what we want to believe in. We even create alternative facts to destroy validated facts so our twisted reality can fit in. It seems as if all were confined in a dark environment but if one tries to light a candle, the others blow it out, for darkness appears more soothing.

Sometimes it’s because we just can’t get it no matter how hard we try; it can be the fear to be exposed to the contradiction or to engage in a debate on ideas not character assassination; a religious creed, a superstition, a prejudiced upbringing, a crippled cognitive system, or just sheer ignorance. In fact, sometimes, we just want to adhere to our bias, ridicule dissent, be accepted in a niche, and just too lazy to be curious, listen to different ideas and have a real scientific perspective. We become Galileo’s inquisitors rather than accepting the Earth maybe revolves around a star.

When I was a teacher, I had a student who would always erase the correct answers to write wrong ones instead in Reading and Listening & Comprehension sections of a test. The True and False were replaced until wrong answers were eventually chosen. After a while, I asked if she could not understand the tape excerpts from the audio, if she would like the tape be played one more time, whether she could not focus on the text context. I even said most times she had got the answer correctly, so it could be a source of insecurity. She said she was not responsible for the wrong answers, but “The Voices” (plural) who ordered the change of her answers, not subsiding until she wrote what they had determined. Since I do not either dabble in the occult or have a major in psychiatry, I advised she ask the voices to also attend the classes, because only showing up on the day of the test did not make them prepared to provide correct answers.

The student never came back. I was informed by the administrative staff she had decided to not finish the semester by claiming financial reasons, but I suspect the voices hampered her from finishing the semester because they were perhaps reluctant to have to both attend class and pay attention to the lessons, besides, of course, the doing homework assignments, which I can completely understand.

I admit I am inclined to understand the voices; in life, sometimes just guessing or embracing alternative facts, conspiracy theories and pseudo science, or not having to study seem far easier and simpler. Per my life experience in seeing idiots and morons being elected and appointed corporate positions or becoming coaches, I must agree the world favors stupidity and shallow speeches. On the other hand, this dishonest behavior and egotistical false sense of moral superiority, which prevents people to talk analysis, that enables the belief that a validated fact is not true bring dire consequences to society.

The moment we decide to only accept what we want to hear, to question not the hate and lack of empathy of sectarian groups, the obscurantism of non-scientific “findings” but the facts, then we embrace ignorance; to apply sophistries, biases, and dogmas, whatever fits our narrow-minded idea of comprehension to comfort a reactionary mindset and throw away centuries of scientific and historical facts, we relinquish our ability to evolve. Imagine where we would be if Galileo, Mendeleev, Da Vinci, Darwin, Tesla, Santos-Dumont, Newton, and Kepler and many others chose to accept an event because it is what it is or it was conceived by a Supreme entity.

On another occasion, while attending a class of Numerical Calculus at the university, after developing an interaction through the Ronge-Kutta method, the professor said, per the results, one could conclude the result varied. The problem is that he did not use the word VARIED, but something like VARIATED, if I can roughly translate it. In Portuguese, he said “o resultado VAREIA”, instead of “o resultado VARIA”, which sounds horrible, one of those cringy grammatical mistakes. When I asked the person sitting next to me if I had heard correctly the affirmation the result variated (VAREIA), he chortled, adding it was absurd. When I was about to agree with him, he added he had calculated it by himself, and the result was a constant. Well, at least the professor could say he knew Calculus because the result indeed did vary (or variate…).

Finally, another time I took a taxi home after watching the movie From Hell adapted from the graphic book on the story of Jack the Ripper. The driver asked me about the movie and said he preferred Western movies (Note: He used the word Bang-Bang, which is how in Brazil we refer to Western movies due to the sounds of the gun shootings) and said his favorite Western movie was TITANIC.

I thought I had misheard him, but he confirmed it.

Perhaps because the ship indeed banged-banged against the iceberg, there was some gun shooting during the ensuing mayhem, and most immigrant women and children died as would have the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Apache ones in Western movies, he could be right. He liked the movie so much he had watched it 8 times! However, there was one part he never understood, so he asked if I could tell him who the old lady was, the one aboard the ship equipped to locate the Titanic wreck, the one who had tossed the worth-a-fortune diamond necklace into the depths (instead of bequeathing it to her granddaughter as a token of gratitude for her selfless devotion looking after the old lady). I said it was Rose, the character played by Kate Winslet, who had aged. Because she was on the floating plank, the one she never cared to share with Jack, the love of her life, she did not drown or die from hypothermia.

It was a breakthrough for the driver. He seemed so relieved to lift a burden he had grappled with for so long that he did not charge me for the ride. Glad I could help him, more than the old Rose did for her granddaughter or Jack.

I intend to use these 3 examples as an attempt to illustrate my perception of how Orwellian, delusional, obtuse, and uncouth we became as a society whose truth is based on social media biases, sophistic approaches and totalitarian speeches created by sectarian rabid groups and ignoramus individuals.

A society who only listens only to what it accepts as an absolute truth, who misuse sophistry by claiming to be using democratic ideals or freedom of speech, who embrace conspiracy theories and fake news by coaches and influencers (Hitler, Mao and Stalin were influencers, if we give it a thought),who fosters mass hysteria, who mars one’s character because of his ideas instead of debating the ideas, and who behaves like Chinese Cultural Revolution Red Guards and Hitler’s Youth members, believing all their leaders say and detesting anyone who does not, becomes a tyrannical and autocratic one.

The pathological need to believe in fake news and conspiracy theories has been well-studied in academic research, just look it up in the decent sources. In fact, we have always steered towards that direction, social media just helped, a lot, by dosing fuel to the bonfire of the ignoramus, intolerant, and sick society. As Carl Sagan feared and rightfully foresaw, a demon-haunted world.

I will limit myself to historical facts with which I am familiar or, at least, I believed I was. I will disregard bizarre ideas or paranoid delusions about Lizard men in government agencies, the Moon landing hoax, a harp (?) designed to control the climate, the pedophile rings sponsored by Democrats located in pizza parlor basements, vaccines causing autism, the Holocaust denial, immigration disrupting societies, rigged elections (especially if their politicians lose them), or the US government 9/11 plot to implode the WTT.

I am sorry, but every time one of these creatures tries to persuade me to believe in his ideas, my ID drops as if their stupidity were a virus. Their language stenches with rabid, shallow, incoherent, delusional, risible and vague arguments, their speech so focused on key words such as the media, the elite, racist, homophobic, communists ( anyone who thinks differently from them, not necessarily Marxists), the atheists, the feminists, etc. their beliefs so biased and never scientifically validated by peer-reviewed and based on empirical evidence, their conversation so self-centered and condescending, their approach on those who point out flaws in their analysis so belligerent and hateful by attacking the character and dehumanizing the individual, I feel like talking with one who believes ETs built the pyramids, the universe time is established by the Bible, and the Earth is flat.

Just as a parenthesis, for the 9/11 conspiracy theory, indeed there was a 9/11 one fabricated, sponsored, and led by the US government, but it was not aimed to happen in NYC, but in Chile; and it was not in 2001, but in 1973. It was also conceived and developed by terrorists and war criminals, not Al-Qaida ones, but by ones like Kissinger who were part of a democratically elected government, the crooked Nixon administration, to sabotage and obliterate another democratically-elected government, the Allende one, by toppling down - not buildings - but the pillars of a solid democracy, and to institute a homicidal dictatorship run by sociopaths who murdered, tortured, and exiled tens of thousands of people regardless of age, sex and ideology. Its ideals still fester in many hearts in minds of those who, like Shakespeare’s The Tempest character Caliban, prefer to destroy others rather than accepting his own deformed reflection in the mirror.

As a metaphor how sectarians fanatically adhere to fake news and conspiracy theories think, imagine a fake news believer gets a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle (I hate puzzles) of a Monet painting and starts assembling the pieces until the final one is placed. When the montage is completed, another person comes and realizes the outcome has not coherence because the picture in the mounted pieces does not resemble the image printed in the box cover. The pieces had the exact format and shape necessary to mount the puzzle, but few really belong to the Monet one. All the others should belong to puzzles portraying different images like animals, other paintings, and city skylines, but were mistakenly included in this box. When indicated this irrefutable fact, he refuses to accept it. He says that if all the pieces matched and fitted one another, then the puzzle must be true. The difference in the images is a small detail and reflects the people’s inability to think outside the box (this time, a puzzle box). Finally, he bellows the outcome is a proof of his freedom to create and question rules, instructions and facts imposed by the tyrannical society. He then frames the picture and hangs it on the wall as a symbol of his resistance against those who want to abolish his freedom of speech. Finally, as a means to show the other one is wrong, he dehumanizes the person by mocking his personality, thought development and character.

But let’s go to the NewTruths (remember 1984?) that have drawn my attention and made me question what I had considered to be realistic and true. The first one is in this blog’s next post. It is about a person conspiracy theories claim did not die as History says. Not Elvis Presley, but a WWII big personality.

See you there.

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libramonthlyhoroscope1 · 1 year

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Power meter for running

Let’s assume, for the moment, that you want a device that measures your running power. Yes, there are reasonable questions and spirited debates that verge on the philosophical about what running power really means, and whether it offers anything that you couldn’t get from a GPS watch or a heart-rate monitor. But as I discussed in the March issue of Outside, lots of runners are leaving those questions behind and wondering instead about more practical issues—like which running power device they should spring for.

Power meter for running

That’s what a research team at the University of Murcia in Spain, led by Jesús Pallarés, decided to explore in a new study published in the European Journal of Sport Science. They report no outside sponsorship and no conflicts of interest. (Neither do I.) They recruited 12 trained runners, strapped on equipment from the four main players in the running power market, and put them through a series of tests to assess how the various power meters performed.

The power meters they used were: a Stryd footpod linked to either a phone or a Garmin watch; a pair of RunScribe footpods linked to a Garmin watch; the Garmin Running Power app using a Forerunner 935 and a chest-mounted heart rate monitor equipped with accelerometers; and Polar’s watch-only estimate of running power. Bear in mind that because of the lag between experiment and publication, these likely aren’t the current versions of any of these devices.

The runners did four days of testing: two identical days on an indoor treadmill, and two identical days on an outdoor track. (The Polar device was only used outdoors, since it makes its estimates based on GPS data.) By comparing the data from nominally identical sessions, the researchers were able to calculate various measures of repeatability: if you measure the same thing twice, how close do you come to getting the same answer? This is obviously a pretty important characteristic if you want to base any training or racing decisions on your power data.

There are various ways to measure repeatability, and the Stryd device came out on top in all of them. For example, the coefficient of variation should generally be less than 5 percent to get meaningful data from exercise tests. In the outdoor tests, Stryd came in at 4.3 percent, compared to 7.7 percent for Garmin, 14.5 percent for Polar, and 14.8 percent for RunScribe. Even for Stryd, that variation was the equivalent of 12.5 watts, suggesting that you shouldn’t get too stressed if your power output fluctuates by a few watts from one day to the next.

The other set of tests involved comparing running power to oxygen consumption, or VO2, which is a proxy measure for how much energy you’re burning (at least during relatively easy running). Here, much as I’d love to avoid it, it’s worth dipping back into those arguments about the meaning of running power.

As I wrote in 2018, the concept of power has no useful intrinsic definition in running, since each stride consists of a mishmash of positive, negative, internal, and external power as your legs and arms swing backwards and forwards, your tendons stretch and recoil, and so on. Instead, what people think of as running power is basically an analogy to cycling power, where the power applied to the pedals has a consistent relationship to how much energy you’re burning and thus how sustainable your effort is. As a result, my conclusion in 2018 was that a running power meter is useful only insofar as it successfully tracks VO2—which, as it happens, was precisely what Stryd was trying to rig its algorithm to do.

Not everyone agrees with that definition. While reporting my recent magazine piece on running power, I went back and forth with an engineer at Garmin about the goal of its running power app. Their algorithm, they insisted, is not designed to track VO2. Instead, it’s designed to estimate the power applied by your foot to the road. I still can’t quite figure out why you’d care about that number in isolation, if it doesn’t also tell you something about how much energy you’re burning, like it does in cycling. Be that as it may, it’s worth noting that the VO2 tests below are only relevant if you think (as I do) that VO2 matters.

They did three sets of VO2 tests, each of which involved three-minute bouts of running separated by four-minute bouts of rest. The first test started at just under 11-minute mile pace and got progressively faster with each stage until the runners were no longer running aerobically (meaning that VO2 would no longer provide a useful estimate of energy consumption). The second test stayed at about 9:30 mile pace, but subsequent stages added vests weighing 2.5 then 5 kilograms. The third test, which was only performed indoors, varied the slope between -6 percent and +6 percent in five stages.

Here’s a set of graphs showing the relationship between running power (on the horizontal axis) and oxygen consumption (on the vertical axis) for each of the devices for the running speed test. If running power is indeed a good proxy for energy consumption at various speeds, you’d expect all the dots to fall along a nice straight line.(Courtesy European Journal of Sport Science)

Once again, you can see that the Stryd data is pretty tightly clustered around the straight line. Their calculated standard error is 6.5 percent when connected to the phone app and 7.3 percent when connected to the Garmin watch. (For what it’s worth, I see no reason that the Stryd device should give different data based on what it’s connected to, so I assume those results are equivalent.) The picture gets a little uglier for the other devices: 9.7 percent for Polar, 12.9 percent for Garmin, and 14.5 percent for RunScribe.

When you vary the weight or the slope, the Stryd remains just as accurate, with standard errors of 6.3 and 6.9 percent respectively. But the other ones don’t handle it as well, particularly when slope is varied: Garmin’s standard error balloons to 19.0 percent and RunScribe’s to 18.5 percent. Polar doesn’t even get a score for slope, because it doesn’t work on the treadmill.

A side note: Polar does reasonably well in the VO2 test, and it’s worth pausing to understand why. The other three devices are all using accelerometers to estimate the accelerations and forces of your feet smacking into the ground, and feeding that data into an algorithm that essentially estimates VO2. Polar is completely skipping the middleman, because it doesn’t even bother trying to estimate the forces and accelerations. It just uses the speed measured by your GPS and the slope measured by a barometer, along with other personal data you’ve inputted. In a sense, it’s taking my claim that running power is only useful as a VO2 estimator to its logical conclusion—though calling its calculation a “power” seems a little cheeky.

A couple of other caveats to consider. One is that they forced everyone to maintain the same cadence (based on their individual cadences during an initial familiarization run) throughout all the test sessions to “improve the quality of the repeatability.” This strikes me as bizarre: one of the main points of the study was to find out how repeatable the measurements were, so eliminating one of the potential sources of variation sort of defeats the purpose. Maybe one of the devices gives terrible data when you change your cadence due to natural variations in pace or slope, while the others handle it fine. If so, that would be worth knowing.

The other caveat, as I mentioned above, is that all of these devices and algorithms continue to evolve. My article in the print magazine focused on how the latest Stryd devices can now measure and account for wind conditions, which is a pretty cool new feature that doesn’t make it into this study. The other devices and algorithms continue to evolve too, so this isn’t the final word on the topic. But for now, if you’re in the market for a running power device—and if what you really mean by that is a consistently repeatable estimate of oxygen consumption—this data suggests that Stryd is your best bet.

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gayacademicwriter · 3 years

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a snippet | you’re welcome | hero x villain

part two here part three here

The hero groaned as she glanced at her watch. There were three more hours of this godforsaken party until she could leave. Her dress was too tight; the room was too hot. Too many people were crowded into the ballroom.

It was odd, she thought, showing up to a celebration where the person being celebrated didn’t even show up.

Or, she thought as she took a sip of champagne, not in the form that people expected her in.

There were posters of her plastered over the wall, her well-recognized hood and mask keeping her face hidden. She had seen some people dressed up as her, and others regaling others with exaggerated tales of her exploits. Being invited to parties like these as a classy woman of high society and truly understanding how closely people followed her was... unsettling, to say the least.

“May I claim a dance from you?”

The hero set the champagne flute down and looked at the man in bewilderment. People rarely talked to her, let alone asked to dance with her. He was quite probably about her age, with fine brown curls and amber eyes. His suit was well tailored; he must be well off.

“Of course.”

The orchestra on stage was playing a gentle waltz; the man brought her out into the middle of the dance floor, slid one gentle hand around her waist and clasped hers with the other, effortlessly leading. She winced with every wrong step; it had been far too long since she’d reviewed any sort of dance. The hero almost yelped as he dropped her into a dip, her back arching over his arm, eyes snapping upwards and trained on him now.

“I know who you are.”

She raised an eyebrow. “A lot of people happen to know my name. It’s no surprise you would as well.”

He brought her up and his grasp on her waist loosened as he spun her around. His voice dropped to a painstakingly familiar tone. “I know who you are, hero.”

The hero felt time slow down as the pounding in her chest sped up as connections lit up in her head like sparks before flame.

“Sorry,” she tried, voice shaking a little, “but I’m no hero. Just here to celebrate them.”

“No hero, hmm? Then what would you do if I lit off the detonator in my pocket?”

“Every one of them has a deactivation button that can be used fifteen seconds before—oh, God.” No ordinary civilian would know that. He knew—the villain knew—he’d figured out her civilian identity.

“You’re not looking so good, Miss.” His voice was noticeably louder. “Let’s get you some water.” The villain escorted her off the dance floor in such a gentlemanly way that the hero was having a hard time believing it was him. But there was no mistaking that tone of voice.

“Our jackets, if you please. The lady’s not feeling too well.”

The hero blinked. Hadn’t he just said that they’d be getting water? But no; the footman handed them their jackets, wished them a pleasant evening, and let them out the front door, where a car idled.

“What—”

“You’re welcome,” the villain said simply.

“How did you know it was me?” There was no point in pretending any longer.

“Nobody else moves like you do,” he replied. “They walk. You glide.”

“Well, yes, because my whole thing is levitation—”

The villain cut her off with a glance to his watch. “I’m scheduled to rob a bank in thirty minutes. I’ll expect payment for getting you out of there early. Don’t worry,” he added with a wink as he strolled over to the idling car, “I’ll come collect myself.”

He slipped inside the passenger seat and slammed the door shut, leaving the hero’s head spinning.

That’s when she remembered.

Her thing was levitation. His was telepathy.

#hero x villain #writing #my writing #i wrote this instead of studying for my science test #snippet #not a prompt

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karynlibrarian · 3 years

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I’m going to be a different kind of nerd than normal, but I’m avoiding doing anything productive. @trinuviel linked to an article I haven’t looked at closely before about networks in ASOIAF and how well linked Sansa is. It provides a glimpse of the difference between articles and actual results as well as a bit of research bias.

The Popular Science Article - Sansa Stark is the Key to Game of Thrones (2016)

Six or so paragraphs, mostly focused on the author’s shock that Sansa might possibly be important. Two of the paragraphs are actually reporting on the paper Beveridge and Shan wrote. There’s one line that refers to Tyrion and Jon having the “relationships and heft to control the Seven Kingdoms.”

Fortunately there’s also a link to the PDF of the paper.

The Math Horizons Paper - Network of Thrones (2016)

Some important starting notes:

Math Horizons is a magazine aimed at math undergrads, not a peer reviewed journal. This is testing out a method of analysis instead of full research

They did this study only on A Storm of Swords which likely affected how low some of the characters like Bran ranked

They don’t clarify if they only focused on the Stark/Lannister/Baratheon/Targaryen families or if these were the 14 highest ranking characters

They used 6 different centrality ranking systems and there was a clear most connected character:

Tyrion

He ranked first in 5/6 systems. Which makes sense, given the number of chapters the man has and how much he’s involved in. Beveridge and Shan call him the “true protagonist of the book.”

The Popular Science article ignored this, likely because the author expected Tyrion to be important so that wasn’t a catchy headline. Boring victim Sansa being important? That’s a shocking result.

Jon and Sansa

Then, usually taking turns in second place, are Jon and Sansa. Their conclusion:

Meanwhile, Jon Snow is uniquely positioned in the network, with connections to highborn lords, the Night’s Watch militia, and the savage wildlings beyond the Wall. The real surprise may be the prominence of Sansa Stark, a de facto captive in King’s Landing. However, other players are aware of her value as a Stark heir and they repeatedly use her as a pawn in their plays for power. If she can develop her cunning, then she can capitalize on her network importance to dramatic effect.

This is where they get weird:

Robert and Daenerys?

The authors decided to end their conclusion by pulling out The Ghost of Robert and Dany as being unusually important; one representing the past of Westeros and one representing the future. Which isn’t really a followthrough from their data? Let’s take a look:

Robert does rank higher than I’d expect for a dead guy, I’ll give you that, but Dany is generally one of the least connected characters. It makes perfect sense, she’s on another continent, she isn’t going to have as large a network as the others. Their justification is that she over performs for that situation, but the analysis tools where she ranks highly are ones that work well with her role as the only main character in her network. That doesn’t change her overall score.

My guess is that they went into this analysis assuming their results would say Tyrion, Jon, and Dany were the most connected characters and weren’t pleased when the data placed Sansa higher than expected and Dany lower. In their explanation of each ranking there’s a justification of why Dany ranks so low or a ‘this one doesn’t penalize her for being in Essos!’ type of comment. Meanwhile though Dany getting a fourth place result is cause for celebration, Robb regularly being in fourth never gets commented on.

I’d say the real conclusion is that network analysis isn’t the only way to determine how important a character is, but it can point out where a surprise contender is hiding.

#It annoys me that I have to be like Sansa isn’t the most connected character Tyrion is #but I am a nerd 😔#I also worked out the median rankings which weren’t that different #My rambling

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