EatingWithForks

Like I said, the founding of such studies predates the increases in tuition. Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim. There are far more direct, closely related situations, like the federal and state governments decreasing funding or the inverted proportion of funds coming from govt/grants vs student-paid tuition via the loan system.

I do, but I would argue that local community colleges is still most certainly in the "university system", just another tier/flavor of it. I would consider participating in community college activities to be participating in academic institution style activities that also happen at universities.

I don't know if grievance studies is a cause of tuition bloat. Most of the departments I know to be labeled as grievance studies were founded well before tuition increased, so it makes not much sense to attribute them to increased tuition. The increase in tuition hews much more closely with the decrease in government funding to these institutions, which requires more tuition from students, which means students desires must be catered to... so increased lifestyle luxuries makes sense there...

> If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely.

I disagree with this. The university system is really good for exposure, assuming that people who are attending the system actually take advantage of the exposure. e.g. I was able to take dedicated lessons in multiple languages, artistic mediums, theories in various fields, by experts in each field. Many of these experts were presenting their work for free outside of lessons, and often times provided free food and drink to boot! Also, because my institution was larger, we often had scholars travel here to present their various works and even little get-togethers where multiple scholars from multiple fields collaborated and presented work. For free! With free food and drink!

I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.

How do I test it properly in science, except through what she did here? Genuinely asking. Am I paying people 10$ amazon gift cards for the opportunity to sexually assault a woman? VR-cut-and-drink-woman-blood?

I dunno, when I saw this, I wanted to draw flowers on her skin instead, since she provided the rose as reference, and I do a bit of art myself. If people instead painted her, put her in robes, braided her hair or something else nonviolent, wouldn't that also be a spectacle?

I'm only arguing that it makes complete sense why people are resisting if someone is telling them otherwise. I would also cling to my livelihood if my alternative was losing my home, my healthcare, my stability. And I'd further be insulted by people offering me retraining programs that don't actually train me to a lateral career. I'm trying to practice some empathy, man.

I'm arguing that retraining isn't really the lifeboat people are saying it is.

Just be upfront: removing jobs is drowning people. That's it. Don't comfort yourself with "retraining" programs like they mean anything. They don't. Acting like you're giving them an oar is just insulting them on top of taking their livelihoods, so I understand the anger.

Yes, I'm just pointing out the retraining isn't actually the real alternative people think it is. It's directly lowering the quality of life and destroying the economic future of an entire industry's worth of people and all their families/dependents. This is important to deal with as it is, not with some bs "well we offered them retraining!" as if that means anything.

Gonna be honest: if someone told me my tech job had been replaced with all its benefits (wfh! office stipend!) and now I have to retrain as a plumber, including back to the shitty apprenticeship system for low pay and low benefits (starting from the bottom again) I would also get really damn upset and resist that. There will be a lot of tooth gnashing on my end even if you pay for my apprenticeship and initial training, I'm still significantly worse off for the literal rest of my whole life.

I might be in a bubble but in my circle the writer's strike was indeed widely supported. It's only among my techy friends that the AI replacement thing was ever really considered. My artist friends and my gymbros were just "yeah fuck the man".

I think we're actually talking about different phenomena. It's not that booktok is driving sales for all books, it's that certain books sales are primarily driven by booktok and there's an attempt to figure out how to make that trigger consistently to drive traffic where publishers want it to go. Consider that Night And Its Moon is critically panned, but has a huge following on BookTok and was primarily got a book deal due to the initial pitch going viral on BookTok.

Of course one of the things to note is that the books with disproportionate BookTok audience whose sales are driven this way are often written by pretty, white, well-off women.

I really struggle with this list, for me, the books that stayed with me aren't on BookTok. Albeit for me, it's because these books are challenging on a craft/architectural level.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is a time travel story, kind of, through the lens of a descendant of the protagonists of the main novel, kind of. It's a fantastical ancient story told to a descendant by an aging relative in relatively modern day, and while that story is told it is also told to the reader as if it's actually happening, and then timelines are crossed over.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera is about a guy who starts a support group for the almost-chosen-- people who, by happenstance, weren't chosen by prophecies. Like literally it's like "yeah, so my sister was chosen to herald the apocalypse, but I still have visions of angels and I have to drink myself to sleep", "yeah, my cousin was chosen to kill my godfather, I'm just stuck with chainsaws for hands". But it's much more dissociated, and much more unattached-- and the reason for this becomes clear at the very end.

I recently finished The Archive Undying by Emma Meiko Candon. That book is full of characters with ambiguous identities, characters with ambiguous motives-- everyone is hiding who they are from everyone else, not in a murder mystery way but in a complex conspiracy format where everyone actually has their own mini-conspiracy going on. Of course this is in the context of "giant mech-god corpse is being resurrected to fight mech-god monsters", so there's a fundamental awesomeness. But, y'know, when god-AIs can jack into your brain, or connect brains to each other, or jack into each other, the story can no longer hold linearity in an easy sip read.

I would still disagree. Someone apparently drank her blood which is totally out of pocket with seeing a knife on a table, honestly, and is not justified by "well there was a knife there".

I think art does capture a perspective of humanity in a way that science does not. In a sense, you can argue science is a kind of art, also, with its own perspective of humanity-- notions of conclusions drawn only from observable phenomena isolated from interference/the world can somehow apply to a world full of interference and knock-off unforseen consequences.

I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.