Mockingbird Quester

I really enjoyed Green City Wars despite the shocking lack of spiders, which is my usual metric for how likely I am to enjoy a Tchaikovsky book. However, I will say, our protagonist sure is slow on the uptake as to what, exactly, his mouse target may have invented. Also, plangent is a really, really weird word to pick to be the name of the intelligence booster drug. Who was in charge of that decision in-universe!?

As for The Raven Scholar, this is my third try at reading it, and the first time I got past the prologue. Thank goodness we're not in their viewpoint for the entire book, because omg I just could not. The rest of the book has a viewpoint I much prefer, thank you. And that twist really did shock me! My goodness, the villain really is a nasty piece of work.

which means that my neighbor with the chihuahua, the one who feeds the cats but has yet to TNR any of them, has started dropping not at all subtle hints that we inadequately sweater our dog. The dog is 15, I'm sure she's fine, she hasn't shivered to death yet. She just really hates clothing! Anyway, the easiest way to handle this is to walk an entirely different route, so we're fine.

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Founder of restaurant that helped put Staten Island on the culinary map dies at 68

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I'm not terribly surprised, but I still didn't exactly *expect* it. And only 68! His daughter's young, too. It's awful to lose a parent at that age.

I sent Jenn to buy food yesterday, with instructions to tell his family we were thinking of them.

Yaaaaaaay! When we get closer to a release date I guess I'll relisten to season 1.

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And only about four hours of it is YMCA!

(I kid, but only just slightly.)

When I'm at the one house, I'm happy with a lot of YMCA, as C likes to dance to it and that's really the whole reason I made a playlist. When I'm at the other, playing it during breakfast, I spend a lot of time saying "Not today!" and skipping past it. So, you know, my thoughts when listening to this playlist fall into two broad categories:

1. Wow, this playlist is fucking amazing, whoever compiled it is a genius

2. Who the fuck put so much YMCA on this fucking playlist, like whyyyyyyyy

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"speak and read at a 6th grade level, which is about the same as an IQ of 70"

Literally all of that is wrong, but what I said is that reading levels are not very scientific. And then he comes back and says "I agree they're arbitrary, but..."

Yeah, no, kid, they're not arbitrary, they're bullshit, and I can prove it. Let's take a look at this representative sample of AR ranked books:

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There are a few different reading level systems, their methodologies are all suspect, and none of them line up with each other at all. You can't even compare books and say "if book A is harder than book B on this system then all systems will rank A as harder than B" because they won't.

You see this sometimes at /r/whatsthatbook too - people will look for a book and say "Well, it's a third grade book" or "it's a tenth grade book". It's, honey, no. Books are not that finely grained that we can sort them by grade level.

I'm willing to believe that you can very broadly divide books - and literacy, I guess - into bands of "nonreader/functionally illiterate", "elementary", "middle school", "high school", "college", and "post-graduate". But you're going to have to make some judgment calls to do so, and if you don't explain your methodology then it is garbage.

And people don't have any concept of what they're talking about when they say things like "oh, Americans read on a sixth grade level". Like, what does that mean? What do they think that means? They can't tell you, and they're astonishingly ignorant of the fact that if you're saying something like this you ought to be able to tell us what you mean! That, I think, is a far sharper indictment of their education and critical thinking than whatever reading level we're assigning them and their literature to.

(And he is a kid - I keep forgetting. I need to put him on ignore, because he's very argumentative and while normally I'm all for a nice, rousing internet argument it's just not fair to pull it on an actual high schooler. I'm just better at it than he is. I'm better at a lot of things than he is, like assessing the information I've been given. And it's not that he's a particularly stupid or ignorant person - in fact, judging from what he's said I'm fairly confident that he thinks he's pretty smart, academically speaking - but I've got three decades on him.)