Neocities

8 months ago

Friday Flashback 2 I received a great email. https://moheb-rofail.neocities.org/post?p=Friday_Flashback_2_I_received_a_great_email

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moheb-rofail updated Moheb Rofail

8 months ago

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saddleblasters iwillneverbehappy

8 months ago

responding a little late re: rote learning. a lot of the people in the classical chinese study discord i'm in, especially the ones that are most generally knowledgable, often post pictures of long texts they've copied, all with very careful and neat handwriting. i think copying, especially by hand, is very much a comprehensive learning method: you're not necessarily conscious of all the things you learn doing it

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saddleblasters 8 months ago

copying is essentially a very slow kind of reading. back when the literary language was often very different from the spoken language, comprehension wasn't some immediate thing that could be taken for granted. even the surface grammatical meaning of a sentence might not be obvious. struggling with all of that leads not just to the thoughts the author intended, but all sorts of other alternate possibilities

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saddleblasters 8 months ago

the same thing happens when i read mathematics (esp. research papers). for close readings, you treat the written proofs as a "cookbook recipe" for reproducing the argument in your own brain. often there are steps that are unclear at first and which require deep thought, but in the course of trying to understand those, you learn other things the author perhaps didn't intend, or didn't find worth writing

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saddleblasters 8 months ago

e.g. many of the developments in algebraic geometry up to the 80s or so could essentially be characterized as ideas people had while reading EGA and SGA.

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saddleblasters 8 months ago

I guess what I'm trying to say is simply that reading is a much slower and more complicated process than we might give it credit for, so rote methods of learning like copying and memorizing are ways to trick ourselves into slowing. of course this only works when one is doing it willingly. when forced to memorize or copy by a teacher, many people manage to learn to do so without actually paying attention to the text

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saddleblasters 8 months ago

(sorry for writing so much -- in retrospect this probably should have been an email...)

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saddleblasters 8 months ago

Also, rereading these now, I realize I was basically doing some version of "redoing" by writing these: taking the ideas you wrote about and reworking them into my own words. I guess this is the particular sort of "copying" that a modern university education generally trains it's students with (as you noted with your reference to "the last few hundred years of scholasticism")

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iwillneverbehappy 8 months ago

Thank you for the thoughtful comments and no need to apologize, these are all great. What is interesting to me is how pointless (close) reading is if you don't apply yourself to it 100%, yet how useful it is in learning something. And there's no external way to tell the two apart; it's even difficult for the learner themselves to tell if they are in fact learning something. The "inefficiency" of rote learning (1/2)

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iwillneverbehappy 8 months ago

and how easy it is to make it an utter waste of time, plus the fact that the yields aren't immediate or quantifiable, might all be part of the reason why it's looked at so negatively in American schools nowadays, but we lose a lot if we banish it entirely. (2/2)

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dear-cam updated serenibee V4!! ♥

8 months ago

gamesi.html

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reviews.html

frictioncomic

8 months ago

Blog looks ugly asf but it's functional and I've converted the default posts into actual posts.

readingproject

8 months ago

New review today: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

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frictioncomic updated PASSWORD:

8 months ago

blog/posts/2024-12-06-nanomango.html

blog/posts/2024-12-05-looking-ahead.html

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frictioncomic

8 months ago

I can't join the trans ring because I chose violence (translation: my comic has blood)

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dear-cam updated serenibee V4!! ♥

8 months ago

gamesi.html

about.html

lepetitcanard updated le petit canard

8 months ago

archiver.html

readingproject updated Reading Project

8 months ago

BookReviews/Middlesex_JeffreyEugenides.html

usersCovers/bikerbuddy_2024Covers.html

Users/bikerbuddy.html

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Reading Project

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frictioncomic

8 months ago

Rarebit implemented

frictioncomic

8 months ago

RSS feed functional

frictioncomic updated PASSWORD:

8 months ago

comic/characters.html

comic/archive.html

frictioncomic

8 months ago

I've put my site down for so long I'm like... man I need to integrate some fixes that I've started but idk what needs updating and where it is stored.

frictioncomic

8 months ago

I fixed the splash so the art is better. It's a colab between me and Matt. I need to fix the colors later tho...

projectc190 updated project c190

8 months ago

project c190

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dear-cam updated serenibee V4!! ♥

8 months ago

shrines.html

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featherfae updated faerie glen

8 months ago

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readingproject updated Reading Project

8 months ago

blog.html

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bright-eyes 8 months ago

I know that I wouldn't have read many of those books that are on the list simply because I am not a big reader of classics (whether traditional 'classics' like Jane Austin), or more modern ones. Most of of the books I read tend to be published between the 70's and mid 2000's, but I have read a fair number of well known female authors in the fantasy genre - Juliet Mariller, Robin Hobb/Meghan Lindholm, Naomi Novak etc

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bright-eyes 8 months ago

Two of the authors I have enjoyed the most this year have been by female authors, Marie Brennan and Heather Fawchett.

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