Sporadically speaking

After a few rounds of this recently I’m honestly starting to wonder if schools don’t teach children to read the damn question anymore. One of the basic things I was taught when it came to exams was that I ought to read the question as many times as I needed to make sure that I understood what it was asking, and if I wasn’t sure that I needed to ask an invidulator for help. I even recall being told to read the question at least twice slowly to make sure I understood what it was asking so that I didn’t make the mistake of answering what I thought was being asked only to discover much later, probably just before time ran out, that I’d misread the question and that the answer I’d given wouldn’t be applicable.

Alongside this I’ve also been recently coming across statements, usually of specific facts, that are entirely irrelevant to the discussion. They’re always complete non sequiturs though they usually have some casual relationship to what’s going on; the most recent example being equivalent to having a discussion about the character of Von Rothbart in Swan Lake and having someone interject with a list of places Swan Lake has been performed. Do people honestly think that sort of thing is relevant? Is it due to some burning urge to contribute with something, anything regardless of how tenuous a connection there is? Quality not quantity, children. If you throw up every line of text that features a key word, regardless of the context of said key word in each case, then nobody will ever be able to figure out what you’re actually saying.

I really have to wonder: has reading comprehension, the ability to sift data and being articulate gone out of fashion these days?

Prompted by this bad_rpers_suck post I have to say that I’ve never understood this RP buddies = actual friends theory. I can understand becoming friends with the people you RP with, I can understand joining an RP because your friends are involved in it, I can even understand that perhaps many people do genuinely ‘want to meet new people’ and other such stock tripe that gets put on UCAS applications but that still doesn’t make friendship an instantaneous occurrence.

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Why is sex so hard to put into words? - Maeve Haran (Telegraph.co.uk)

By now, though, I was beginning to learn a few lessons, the first of which is that being convincingly erotic is hideously difficult. It seems the writer can be erotic or convincing, but rarely both at the same time. For this, blame sex itself. The awkward truth is that real sex is often anything but erotic. It is awkward, kinky, funny, tender and messy.

Which says it all. Writing about sex is nothing like the real thing and I wish people would learn this. Or stop writing.

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Having made a brief foray into Batman fiction recently this mostly constituted an excuse to read Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and complain about the casting of Cillian Murphy in the role of Scarecrow, again. But beyond that it did trigger the beginnings of something that’s been nagging at me from time to time, namely the portrayal of mental asylums in fandom.

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From the 7_deadly_sins_ community, just jotting down some drabble information for what I may write later.

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( In which I don’t quit fandom at all really )