Made A Mouthwashing Animation Yayyy

the big three questions of media analysis: what the author wanted to say, what they actually said, and what they didn’t know they were saying

via Neil Slorance

so i just spent $355 dollars paying for standardized tests i need to take to apply to graduate school. for 2 tests. i’m salty as hell because its not cool that schools require you take these tests to apply, then the testing institutions can charge whatever they want because you have to take the test. more proof regarding how its hard for poor people to pursue a higher education, keeping them poor

I feel like we need a refresher on Watsonian vs Doylist perspectives in media analysis. When you have a question about a piece of media - about a potential plot hole or error, about a dubious costuming decision, about a character suddenly acting out of character -

A Watsonian answer is one that positions itself within the fictional world.

A Doylist answer is one that positions itself within the real world.

Meaning: if Watson says something that isn't true, one explanation is that Watson made a mistake. Another explanation is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a mistake.

Watsonian explanations are implicitly charitable. You are implicitly buying into the notion that there is a good in-world reason for what you're seeing on screen or on the page. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie all the time because they're from a desert culture!")

Doylist explanations are pragmatic. You are acknowledging that the fiction is shaped by real-world forces, like the creators' personal taste, their biases, the pressures they might be under from managers or editors, or the limits of their expertise. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie because somebody thought they'd sell more units that way.")

Watsonian explanations tend to be imaginative but naive. Seeking a Watsonian explanation for a problem within a narrative is inherently pleasure-seeking: you don't want your suspension of disbelief to be broken, and you're willing to put in the leg work to prevent it. Looking for a Watsonian answer can make for a fun game! But it can quickly stray into making excuses for lazy or biased storytelling, or cynical and greedy executives.

Doylist explanations are very often accurate, but they're not much fun. They should supersede efforts to provide a Watsonian explanation where actual harm is being done: "This character is being depicted in a racist way because the creators have a racist bias.'" Or: "The lore changed because management fired all of the writers from last season because they didn't want to pay then residuals."

Doylism also runs the risk of becoming trite, when applied to lower stakes discrepancies. Yes, it's possible that this character acted strangely in this episode because this episode had a different writer, but that isn't interesting, and it terminates conversation.

I think a lot of conversations about media would go a lot more smoothly, and everyone would have a lot more fun, if people were just clearer about whether they are looking to engage in Watsonian or Doylist analysis. How many arguments could be prevented by just saying, "No, Doylist you're probably right, but it's more fun to imagine there's a Watsonian reason for this, so that's what I'm doing." Or, "From a Watsonian POV that explanation makes sense, but I'm going with the Doylist view here because the creator's intentions leave a bad taste in my mouth that I can't ignore."

Idk, just keep those terms in your pocket? And if you start to get mad at somebody for their analysis, take a second to see if what they're saying makes more sense from the other side of the Watsonian/Doylist divide.

Fabiola Gianotti Becomes First Woman Physicist to Take the Reins at CERN

Previously, Gianotti headed the ATLAS collaboration, one of two teams responsible for the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson on July 4, 2012.

Particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti has become the first woman to head CERN, the organization based in Switzerland that is home to the Large Hadron Collider. She succeeds outgoing director-general Rolf Heuer, who oversaw the laboratory’s operations for the last seven years.

Previously, Gianotti headed the ATLAS collaboration, one of two teams responsible for the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson on July 4, 2012. She quickly became a favorite figure in the media coverage surrounding that achievement — partly because of her gender (only 20% of the ATLAS team were women), and for her elegantly understated style, but also for her good humor.

For instance: Her use of the much-derided Comic-Sans typeface on her Powerpoint slides during that historic announcement was the source of much Internet amusement. Gianotti took the ribbing in stride. She even made an April Fool’s Day decree to make Comic Sans the official document typeface for all of CERN. She was a runner-up for Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2012.

Gianotti’s father is a retired geologist, while her mother had a passion for music and art. Their daughter, born in 1962, effortlessly straddles both cultural realms, excelling not just in physics, but also music, cooking, and even dance (she trained as a ballerina as a child). “Musical harmony is based on physical principles while in cooking, ingredients must be weighed out with precision,” she told the Guardian in 2014, when her selection as the next director-general of CERN was announced. “At the same time, you have to able to invent, because if one follows the same recipe all the time, you never create anything new.”

I was on a retail website on my phone recently and I was trying to get to some information it did not seem to want to provide -- and just in case, out of desperation, I clicked on the little "universal sign for wheelchair user" logo in one corner.

It pulled up this menu, which was intriguing...

[ID: A website sidebar menu, headed "Accessibility features"; it offers the option of turning on a number of features including those for blindness and colorblindness, epilepsy, motor skills disorders, dyslexia, and crucially for me, ADHD.]

I'm not someone who uses digital accessibility tools much but still, I don't think I've ever seen such a visible accessibility function on a website before, and I've definitely never seen one that offered ADHD accessibility. What did that even do? So...I clicked it, and:

[ID: A screengrab of the website with the ADHD accessibility turned on; most of the site is greyed out, including a header listing my subscriptions and a subscription ID. A narrow bar of the site is illuminated in normal white, showing my next shipment is July 25th and offering me the option to view or skip it.]

The damn thing darkens the entire page except for a narrow "light" bar that highlights whatever your looking at, which you can drag up and down the site with your finger. Honestly it's super cool. It's not something I desperately need, but I may go looking to see if there's an app I could acquire that would do the same for me across browser and e-reader functions on my phone.

i dropped by my favourite secondhand bookstore and found what is possibly the most incredible knitting book iver ever seen. that teaches you how to knit little gardens and sew them into a massive quilt 3d. the photos i took are atrocious and do NOT do this book justice

thats a PRIORY GARDEN WITH MONKS

IT EVEN TEACHES YOU HOW TO MAKE ALL THE TOOLS ABD BASKETS AND POTS AND PLANTS

LOOK AT THE SOME OF THE FOLIAGE

i have never been more upset to not have $30 ready to buy this. its incredible. i have to find it online somewhere. i knew the moment i saw this i had to share it with EVERYONE

CINEMA'S BEST SWEATERS

Basic Instinct (1992) · Let's Make Love (1960) · Scream (1996) · The Big Lebowski (1998) · Lucky Number Slevin (2006) · A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) · The Holiday (2006) · The Devil Wears Prada (2006) · While You Were Sleeping (1995) · Home Alone (1990) · Good Will Hunting (1997) · 21 (2008) · Sweet November (2001) · Knives Out (2019) · How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) · Ocean's 8 (2018) · The Matrix (1999) · Mystic Pizza (1988) · Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) · Clueless (1995) · House of Gucci (2021) · The Lighthouse (2019) · When Harry Met Sally... (1989) · Awake (2007)

I HATE feeling like an outcast. I HATE feeling like an alien. I HATE having to try hard to appear as normal. I HATE how my way of thinking makes me so strange. I HATE feeling and being different. I HATE feeling and being alone. I HATE being autistic.