Many young wizards have taken to transmuting swans into humans and marrying them. One day, you are lucky enough to find a swan in the wild, and without hesitating, you turn it into a beautiful lady. Unfortunately, that ‘swan’, was a goose. You have just given a goose a human form.

After I explained the mistake, she laughed uproariously.

“You’re damn lucky I’m not a swan!” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “They get by on their reputation for being pretty and graceful, but buddy, a swan ain’t nothing but a bigger, meaner goose. What do you all want swan wives for anyway?”

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. Honestly, I hadn’t actually stopped to think about that much. It had become a mark of status, having a demure, graceful woman following on your arm, always dressed in white and gazing soulfully about.

“They all seem very nice,” I said finally.

She pursed her lips thoughtfully as she finished pulling on the robes I’d brought with me. “Then there’s something else going on,” she said. “I’ve met my share of swans and not a one of them would put up with that shit. Are you sure they were swans to begin with?”

“Well, no, now that you mention it. I mean, everyone says that’s what they are, but I’ve never actually seen anyone else do it.”

“Do they talk? Act like humans? Do they seem intelligent?”

“Well, they are humans, so I suppose they must be, right?” This conversation was not going the way I had expected it to.

“Hah! Fat chance. Transmutation is just changing the shape of a thing. You turn a swan into a human and all you’ve done is put a swan mind in a human-shaped box. Wouldn’t do a wizard much good to be able to turn into a wolf or whatever if they suddenly only had a wolf’s brain to work with, would it?”

“So, you’re saying that if those women were swans originally, they’d still act like swans?”

“Hoo boy yeah,” she said. “Absolutely. Hissing, biting people, trying to build nests, shitting everywhere. The works.”

“Wait, but what about you?” I asked, desperately trying to get the conversation back on track. “You seem like a human, but you were a goose ten minutes ago.”

She grinned wickedly at me.

“I was shaped like a goose ten minutes ago,” she said. “And I appreciate the makeover. But I wasn’t a goose to begin with. Now come on. There’s something hella creepy going on around here, and we’re gonna figure out what.”

She started walking back up the path towards town.

“Wait!” I shouted, hurrying after her, “If you weren’t a goose, then what are you? And what’s your name?”

“You can call me Gwydd,” she said. “And as for what I am, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you some day. But first, you’re going to tell me everything you know about these swan ladies.”

Podfic is the ultimate portmanteau btw

Okay, so when I saw this, I was like, "The 'i' stands for 'internet'??" because I remember back when the iMac—the first of Apple's 'i' products—launched, and my impression was that the 'i' was more about the individual: I, me.

So I got curious and went down a little rabbit hole. Most unofficial sources say that, yeah, the 'i' was for internet, but again, that doesn't have the Apple vibes I remember from back then. Long before the iMac, there was the famous 1984 Apple commercial directed by Ridley Scott that ran during the US Super Bowl, which was all about individuality/breaking the mold/etc.

Anyway, I found this post from 2011 on the Apple community forum:

ALT

And I felt like that list of multiple meanings seemed more on-brand. Plus, user danielpena mentioned a specific keynote speech, which made it easy enough to look up. I found the transcript and video of the full keynote, and took a screenshot of the slide mentioned above:

ALT

So yeah, the 'i' does stand for 'internet,' but it was also meant to stand for 'individual,' 'instruct,' 'inform,' and 'inspire.' Congratulations, everyone is right! 😂

The only Apple product I've ever owned was an iPod, and I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fanboy that you can be, so this was all new info to me!

There is something so incredibly tender about walking through a bookstore or a museum and stopping in a section you usually breeze past, just because the person you love loves it. Suddenly, a specific genre of sci-fi or a niche era of art history isn't just "a thing"—it’s a map of their mind. You’re standing there looking at a shelf, thinking, oh, they would lose their mind over this. Your brain permanently reserves a little room for their joy, and I think that’s so beautiful.

a second bumblebee has hit the flowers

Taking a bit of a weird swing here, but I figure I've got enough academics, educators, and assorted nerdy types following this blog that it might pay off. I'd appreciate any help y'all can give me with this.

I'm looking for readings to assign to my Introductory Composition* students, and am hoping Tumblr might have good recommendations... that seems weird typing it out, but whatever.

* The writing kind of composition. This is the "welcome to college, here is How To Essay" course.

Specifically, I'm looking for material on the history of the English language, but if y'all want to throw out other ideas, I'm always happy to add new stuff to the rotation. (The specificity is because as a medievalist, I'm very interested in the history of language & writing before the modern age, and I'd like to give my Composition students some exposure to those sorts of things because I don't think it gets covered much in the standard curriculum, but I've never been able to find the right readings to make it work.)

Here's why I'm having difficulty finding good options myself: the goal isn't just "give students information on the history of the English language". One of the aspects of the course that seems to be particularly effective in getting students to engage & learn is the student-led class discussions we do most weeks, each of which is centered around an article / essay / something from outside the textbook, all of which are about topics related to writing and/or language. So I'm looking for texts that can be the basis for a student-led discussion; through trial & error over my time as an instructor, I've found that texts' degree of success in this role seems determined by how well they exhibit the following traits.

Criteria

1. The text should be opinionated in some way. Reading something that's mostly/entirely informational and forming an opinion on it, especially if it's not a subject one is particularly familiar with, requires more cognitive labor than reading something that presents an opinion or an argument and taking one's own stance on that same argument. And while I DO think that's a type of cognitive labor that's worth asking students to practice, it's one I tend to reserve for solo writing assignments, where if students struggle with it, it doesn't cause an in-class discussion to flop and screw up the lesson plan.
2. The text needs to be the right length. There's plenty of wiggle room here, but the ideal is around ~4,000–5,000 words. It's my experience that if we drop below ~3,000 words students have difficulty finding enough material in the article to have a decently long discussion, and if we go above ~6,000 words the proportion of students who just refuse to read the whole thing rises to untenable levels. (I mean, there's always some, and even ~3,000 is enough that I'll get complaints about the length, but the discussions tend to fizzle out after 15 minutes or so if I actually assign texts as short as they want, because they run out of things to say.)
3. The text needs to be able to stand by itself. It can't be something we work through over multiple weeks, because we've got other readings to discuss. Individual chapters from books sometimes work, but usually don't, unless we're talking an anthology and each chapter actually is a stand-alone essay.
4. The text needs to be at an accessible reading level. Again, cognitive labor. I do WANT students to have the educational experience of working to understand a text that they don't initially grasp, but that's better saved for other assignments -- if too many of them aren't willing to put in that labor in this case, the discussion flops for everyone. This doesn't quite map onto any measurable "reading level" scale: if a text is difficult in an interesting way, creative or unusual, they're more willing to engage than if it's difficult because it feels too formal or technical. (E.g., students will buy into trying to interpret Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture, but react to George Orwell's "Politics & the English Language" with notable hostility.)

Anyway.

Thanks for reading this far -- any ideas? I'd appreciate any suggestions y'all might have.

you learn something new everyday. unless you're a historian. then you learn something old

no dude it's so cool how attached you are to that character who is singled out and ostracized due to the external monstrousness that clashes with their internal spark of humanity. and i love how drawn you are to themes of horror and love, nature versus nurture, otherness, isolation, and the abject. i bet you have normal feelings about your own personhood

I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting

People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results