People and things I find interesting

"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.)

You also have no friends with you. Singing loudly along to your music (sans headphones) on the train is generally the sort of behavior we expect from people with friends. Were they scared away by your inability to carry a tune, or by your bad manners?

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And the beaches are closed

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(E suggested that the real worst is when you think you like it until you actually look up the lyrics, then you realize they're ethically dubious and promote rape or something.)

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( Plot and porn in the wrong order )

( Too much backstory )

( Not nearly enough backstory )

Seriously, is it too much to ask that they have the exact right amount of backstory? Enough so I don't have to think about it, but not so much that I end up thinking about it.

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(and also lots of real life people too):

I get that you have to live with your father's wife who hates you for being an affair baby (or your newly widowed stepfather who just hates kids, or your third cousin twice removed who hates that your mom was on drugs, or whatever) because the alternative is Real Foster Care. But who told you that this is worse? Was it your terrible family? And if so, why do you believe them?

Listen, I've read enough children's fiction to know that things can always be worse... but can they? Can they really? Foster care would probably be as bad as these awful people, but would it be worse than staying with people who won't let you take hot showers, force you to work and hand over all your wages instead of studying, or otherwise mistreat you in a way that belongs in a novel or a news report? At least they wouldn't be holding that threat over your head every time you blinked funny. And there's always the third, unofficial option of Staying With Friends. Depending on how much they resent you versus how much they'd rather not be bothered, they may be happy to let you do it, and lots of people do.

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The "host of our podcast" is entirely too chipper to be hosting a real-time podcast about trying to catch and contain a vampiric serial killer. The killer is a vampire, as are the detectives, but the victims are not.

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