Rynling R&D

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My own experience as an undergraduate was that professors would go out of their way to penalize every little thing, and I never understood why they did this. Like, we’re all adults here. We’re just sitting around a table and talking about novels. I’m not your dad, and I’m not here to discipline anyone. Meritocracy is fake anyway. Let’s be chill and enjoy learning.

I'm putting together a slideshow about the contemporary glorification of Japanese wartime imperialism in otaku media, and.

Like obviously I don't think it was in any way good for Japan to commit genocide on the Asian continent, or that it was fun times for Japan to force its own citizens into a military that was, by all accounts, nothing less than hell on earth. Obviously. But listen. The aesthetic of that era was sick.

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I say with nothing but sincerity that I'm against authoritarianism in all forms, but also I'm starting to think that progressive movements need better propaganda.

Rom is one of the more mysterious characters in Bloodborne, so I want to try to summarize what we actually know about her. Content warning for body horror.

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Anyway, TLDR, this is my theory:

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And that’s essentially what happened to Rom.

Fam, be careful with your time online.
https://greenjudy.tumblr.com/post/771760180357742592/weird-cultural-shift-detected

If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.

I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.

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My post-pandemic experiences in higher education have led me to believe that a lot of us are, in a very real way, at the point of Long Covid where being able to read a book from cover to cover has become a distinct and useful cognitive skill that can almost visibly put you a head above your peers in terms of performance. Literally: reading makes you smarter.

Anyway, I want to shout out to all the writers who are still using their own human minds to create books worth reading. I love you.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

The crux of my raging hatred is not that I hate LLMs or the generative AI craze. I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it's impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate. Nothing wrong with that, but it did not end up being the crazy productivity booster that I thought it would be.

Same. I had my fun with ChatGPT before deciding it's functionally useless.

An executive at an institution that provides students with important credentials, used to verify suitability for potentially lifesaving work and immigration law, asked me if I could detect students cheating. I was going to say "No, probably not"... but I had a suspicion, so I instead said "I might be able to, but I'd estimate that upwards of 50% of the students are currently cheating which would have some serious impacts on the bottom line as we'd have to suspend them. Should I still investigate?" We haven't spoken about it since.

This is where I'm at right now. I have regressed to assigning handwritten quizzes and live in-class presentations, because well upwards of 50% (and probably close to 80%) of students will automatically default to using ChatGPT even when explicitly warned not to. And there's nothing to stop them, because none of us has the energy or time on this earth to hold them accountable. Most universities are already failing financially, and they're just going to kick students out for cheating? Not happening. It sucks and I hate it.

Affective Uplift During Video Game Play: A Naturalistic Case Study
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659464

Do video games affect players’ well-being? In this case study, we examined 162,325 intensive longitudinal in-game mood reports from 67,328 play sessions of 8,695 players of the popular game PowerWash Simulator. We compared players’ moods at the beginning of play sessions with their moods during play and found that the average player reported 0.034 (0.032, 0.036) visual analog scale (VAS; 0-1) units greater mood during than at the beginning of play sessions. Moreover, we predict that 72.1% (70.8%, 73.5%) of similar players experience this affective uplift during play, and that the bulk of it happens during the first 15 minutes of play.

Sources (tentatively) say yes!

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The United States perceived Communism to be a danger in Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s partially because Japan was geographically proximate to two large and powerful Communist countries. What were those two countries?

My Ivy League undergrads couldn't answer this question. Can you?

The University of the Arts is closing June 7, its president says
https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/1d57wx2/the_university_of_the_arts_is_closing_june_7_its/

In an abrupt and stunning development in Philadelphia’s higher education market, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia is planning to close its doors for good on June 7, president Kerry Walk said Friday evening. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, its accrediting agency, reported that the school with nearly 150-year-old roots notified the agency of its imminent closure on Wednesday, the same day it started a summer term. It comes following a precipitous decline in enrollment and a severe cash flow problem that had been building over time.

Apparently, the school decided to close without telling anyone on Wednesday. The Philadelphia Inquirer broke the story on Friday afternoon, and a lot of people only learned about it from the Reddit post on Friday evening. Students received an email a few hours later, but faculty have yet to be officially notified as of Saturday morning. Awesome.

As people have noted in the Reddit thread, a lot of smaller colleges (including art schools) announced their permanent closures in April and May of 2024. This is a general trend, which makes the current situation at University of the Arts all the more frustrating. What a university will do when the writing is on the wall is to hire an "undertaker president" whose job is to make sure the closure goes smoothly. University of the Arts would have known they were going to close since they hired their own undertaker president, and not telling anyone (to the extent of admitting new students and hiring new faculty for the next academic year) is extremely negligent and cruel. This doesn't affect me personally, but it sucks and I hate it.

I wrote a short review of Ngozi Ukazu's new graphic novel Bunt that I posted on Goodreads and then took down five minutes later. Here it is:

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But who is it going to benefit if I say any of this in public, you know? The potential benefits just don't outweigh the potential backlash.

ETA: If it seems as though I'm taking the negative portrayals of these characters personally, that's because I am. I feel like these characters are my students. As someone who teaches classes about Japan, I definitely have autism spectrum students who wear furry ears to class and transgender students who ask for make-up quizzes because their "family thing" is an anime convention and international students who don't speak 100% "proper" English. So what if they come off as weird. They're just kids. Let them be.

So I’ve seen a lot of theories about the identity of the "runesmith of Byrgenwerth"
https://skelayton-lord.tumblr.com/post/167523600216

I'm not sure this post is going to make much sense to anyone who hasn't played Bloodborne. It doesn't make much sense to me, to be honest. I found it by googling "what does the Memory Altar do," and obviously this isn't an answer to my basic gameplay question, but it's as good a place as any to start looking for lore.

What I'm picking up on is that whatever happened in Yharnam is the end result of the studies of a group of scholars at a university called Byrgenwerth. Among other things (that I am still trying to piece together), these scholars decided that it was a good idea to literally open people's heads via craniectomy and carve runes into the inside of their skulls. Or something of that nature:

She heard the utterances of the great ones and had their runes literally burnt into her skull, just as we learned that Willem's goal of lining brains with eyes was in no way metaphorical. She heard these arcane utterances, and it literally left marks in her skull. Same with the hunter's mark - it is actually in the head of our hunter.

As far as academia goes, that sounds about right to be honest.