The Leewit @ghost_bird@witches.town

(One minor perk of working in a university is that I get free WiFi from eduroam anywhere that’s near a teaching department. As here, at Kew Gardens.)

“Life in Death” - installation of dried flowers and plants at Kew, by Rebecca Louise Law. Hard to get the the full effect of the composition in a flat photo, sadly.
https://witches.town/media/0ZVBKQVvx63VSSZgFDg
https://witches.town/media/p70VpQ_wtNHoh2O0gI0
https://witches.town/media/6Jprg4FwmK2gwawTgFQ
https://witches.town/media/Szz4NVh0kvSCUu4Guns

@paeneultima Tapes deteriorate, so I wouldn’t guarantee it’s in listenable condition. But still.

@paeneultima Wow.

@fluttergirly At the very least, I think it’s significant that I know a number of gay fans of Drag Race but no trans ones.

@fluttergirly I’m with you on this, but I do also see how people could find drag can be liberating precisely because it reduces gender signifiers to parody. (Judith Butler helped make sense of this for me, in particular.)

@mona I’d say the problem in this case is marketing and planned obsolescence, not stagnation - professional and home toasters seem like efficient minimum designs to me.

@mona I guess you could make a more efficient element or better controls, but the cost of a basic model is so low I think it’d be hard to compete.

@mona Is there any special virtue in not being frozen in time for the past several decades?

@agave The “honor system” is basically unknown here in the UK (as far as I know, anyway) but the emphasis on competition over collaboration is a definite problem. It goes with university education as a positional good.

@Murkrow You’ll get there. Take it easy.

(The other thing that review makes clear is that, really, it’s a bad idea to collect LeGuin’s “Hainish stories” in one labelled place because it encourages people to treat them as a single body of work.)

Read this piece on LeGuin’s Hainish novels and stories, and... why are so many people so desperate to believe that Anarres and Urras are meant to be equivalent in any way?

(No, it’s OK. I know why,)

@guerrillarain That’s disturbing even at one remove. Literal Satan is right.

@Sparrow That’s interesting, and I think it might be even more interesting to survey where and how it’s applied across the system.
But I’m aware there’s a whole body of academic work on education and educational technique that I don’t know at all.

@danielemereb That’s interesting, and something I’ll have to look up.

(I remember a frustrated teacher venting on Twitter about pupils who “didn’t try”. She wanted to help them but they wouldn’t make an effort. It made her angry.
And everyone has a right to get frustrated and vent about it, but... I found myself thinking about what makes a “good pupil”, and of a blind friend who complained that the volunteers in her sheltered accommodation wanted her to try her best to live independently but not to actually succeed. Because if she did, they wouldn’t be needed to help.)