Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
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User ID: 214
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
After getting farther in I have to downgrade my rating on the plot from serviceable to actively awful, so I'd say the other review you read had it just about right. I find it increasingly difficult to just enjoy the gameplay when I feel so disconnected from the story it services, but YMMV.
The character designs are pretty goofy, but at a certain point I just got used to most of them. I chose the male main character but am starting to think this was a mistake. He has a lot of feminine character traits that I find very grating on him, and would probably mind less if he were a woman.
I've been playing and thoroughly enjoying Fire Emblem Engage over the past week. The story is bland, with some of the worst hero worship I've ever seen in an RPG, but the gameplay is probably the best it's ever been in the series. Here are my thoughts on it as someone who's played about half the entries in the series. I'm maybe 3/4 through right now, so I suppose my impressions could still change.
The presentation is solid, with better environmental design and seemingly less asset reuse than Three Houses. Many lines are unvoiced though which feels like a step back from Echoes and 3H. The character designs range from trashy gacha game tier to quite good, depending on who you're looking at. The environments are gorgeous and the music is incredible.
The story is pretty generic with fairly obvious plot twists. It's serviceable though, and not actively terrible like Fates. The characters take the unfortunate Awakening route where most of them are one-note gimmicks who just repeat their gimmick(s) in every support conversation. The cast is large enough that despite this, you should find yourself with a full roster of people you like and want to keep alive. I like Alfred, Diamant, and Ivy quite a lot, as well as many of the meme characters that the gameplay makes you grow attached to. I prefer how 3H and Genealogy handled their characters better, with a tightly connected cast of characters whose interactions developed both the characters and the world, but I like the new cast nonetheless.
The big new mechanic of the game is the Engage Rings, which are 12 rings that each contain the soul of a protagonist of the previous entries. Characters can "Engage" them to receive guidance and significant power from the hero stored inside them. The game glosses over the sheer existential horror of being a disembodied spirit bound to a ring for seemingly forever, aware of the world around you but unable to interact or communicate with it until the main character awakens your ring, so... I will too, I suppose. You steadily acquire more of the rings as the story progresses and assign them to your units, who can use them to call on extremely powerful abilities.
Storywise, the rings are pure fanservice, and often feel like a missed opportunity. Many of these characters are already very similar to eachother coming into it — at least half are infantry lords with similar personalities who use swords in their own stories — and Engage flattens their personalities even further into basically a single, happy, supportive blob with one personality between the 12 of them. It might be more interesting to have the rings be the spirits of characters and heroes or villains from the game's own worldbuilding, with distinct personalities and histories that vary between the spirits, but I get why they went the way they did. I've played the games about 2/3 of the included characters and it is fun to see them here, even if it does feel like the I clapped when I saw it meme.
Going by gameplay the rings are awesome. They give varied, interesting abilities that can play to a unit's strengths or shore up their weaknesses, and each one has a flashy, single-use move you can use each time you Engage it. Many characters have unique mechanics that echo the mechanics from their own games (Lucina's abilities are based on pair-up attacks, Corrin has terrain-altering moves, Leif cheats and uses whatever weapon is most advantageous when attacked, just like the enemies in his game.) that make the unit you attach them to play radically differently. The rings are definitely overpowered, but the game throws so much of its own nonsense at you that they actually feel somewhat balanced, though your experience may vary based on difficulty and how much you grind.
The game itself is a blast, minus some tedious minigames like the fishing. The map design is strong, units have varied niches, fights are challenging and feel cinematic, skill inheritance and ring placement give you lots of unit building options, and I can go on. Engage is easily shaping up to be one of my favorite entries in the series. Strong recommend if you enjoy RPGs, strategy games, or Fire Emblem.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Late response, but I didn't save the prompts for any of the monsters, since the prompts were usually just something like: "Generate me a statblock for variant of a kobold for dungeons and dragons 5th edition. It has an ability to place curse debuffs on enemies that debilitate them throughout combat. It should be extremely threatening and a high-priority target."
I wanted that particular enemy to feel occult and threatening. I wanted it to cast nasty debuffs that weren't any existing spell. They didn't need to be fancy, but I didn't want to just fill another monster statblock with existing spells. I had a general idea of what I wanted, but didn't have any ideas that stood out to me for what the debuffs should be.
It gave me a basic kobold that had a few daily use abilities, basically ray attacks that forced a save or the enemy would suffer some serious nastiness for the next few hours. One made them vulnerable to all damage, another gave them disadvantage on anything strength related. The AI even gave it the ability to cast one of them as a reaction to being targeted for an attack, which was very funny. I wound up reducing the effect from several hours to just the end of combat, since the effects were so powerful for such a low-level enemy.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I can’t imagine showering less than 40 times a year. Aella is weird and often offputting, but is obviously someone who understands physical presentation. I suppose I believe her when she says she doesn’t smell, but I’m interested how she manages that.
Hygiene is a fun subject. Physical activity and clothing are obviously important, but dirt and genetics seem to matter a lot to your personal experience with it. I have a friend who smelled of mold and BO for years and didn’t seem to understand despite me hinting/outright telling him for the longest time. He almost certainly showered more than Aella but still smelled awful. He eventually had an embarrassing encounter where his coworkers told him frankly how bad he smelled.
I like showers in general; they’re pleasant and being freshly washed helps me feel presentable and confident when I go out. I shower once a day, and feel shlubby if I leave the house without washing up beforehand. That’s mostly psychological, but I get terrible bedhead and it’s obvious if I don’t get it wet. I wash my hair with water every day but only shampoo once a week or so.
3 a day seems high, but I would probably do that many days if drying out my skin and hair wasn’t a concern. Season and exercise will make the average number very. How often do you shampoo and moisturize?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I've been asking it to generate some new monsters and other content for D&D. I've been adding new enemies to Roll20 and wanted to generate new variants of existing monsters, so I'd say something like "generate a kobold, but it has these attributes and does X, Y, and Z." I'm also working on a growing system as a player downtime option, so I asked it to "generate a list of fantasy plants. Give each one a growing time in weeks, flavor text, and if it responds to X, Y, or Z type of cultivation." I was fairly impressed at what it could consistently give me, though it obviously has a ways to go. It was a great way to fish for inspiration and mechanics before refining them into something usable.
Right now, it's best used as a way to rapidly generate ideas/content before someone who knows what he's doing polishes and fixes it. I haven't seen it output anything that was passable out of the box. This is how I feel about AI image generators too; in the hands of an artist, they have insane potential.
The real strength of the software is its working memory of context. You can issue corrections, prompt it with more information, tell it to adjust something, and it'll do it. That's what impressed me more than the generation itself, I think. The main limitation right now is it doesn't remember anything outside of a session, and it has trouble going past half a dozen revisions or so. This is to be expected since it's a free service at the moment, so I only see this improving.
There are the full-on brain upload robot body people, of course. And it’s hard to defend people like Yud who speak of immortality while ignoring their physical health.
But I always saw transhumanism as a broader thing; using medicine or tech to supplement/augment/replace/fix failings of the body. So glasses and walking canes are low-tech examples of it.
I have a high hereditary risk of developing macular degeneration. I do what I can with diet and supplements to minimize the chance of this, but if my eyes start dying in my 40s I’m just SOL. Right now it’s something I have to accept, but there’s no reason that has to always be the case.
Your body breaks down over time, regardless of how well you treat it. Would you accept going blind if you could not go blind? Would you accept a bald crown if you could have a full head of hair?
That’s the essence of it for me.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Wow, I didn’t expect my first QC to be about Genshin Impact of all things. TY to whoever nominated it
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
Yep. That's why the only winning move is to not play, IMO. Willpower is a finite resource, while entire industries of highly-paid optimizers are working full-time to break it with their products. Limiting your vectors of exposure is the best way to live a life free of negative drains, but this is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more things become gamified services. This involves more than just Gacha, but that industry is where it's really easy to see the psychological tricks laid bare.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.
The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.
If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.
Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.
It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.
The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.
So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
I don’t expect it to be easy, or for them to get it right until at least a few decades are out.
I agree with your concerns. Still, a lot can happen between now and then and I’d hate to reject an amazing breakthrough due to our current dysfunctional relationship with capital and our countrymen.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
Even if Trump loses the primary, I don’t think his ego will allow him to not run as an independent. It’s looking like he either wins the primary or nukes the winner’s chances of taking the general by splitting the vote.
So… four more years of a Democrat in charge of the White House or four years of him playing the perfect boogeyman to the left while failing to get anything meaningful done*.
I can accept that in a lot of ways, he was genuinely sabotaged by lawfare and trumped up criminal charges that made it difficult to keep competent staffers. But if there’s someone who can fight back against that, it’s not him.
Trump opened a lot of doors, but I wish he were capable of stepping aside and letter more competent people build on that, rather than forcing it to live (and die) with him. But that’s his whole thing, isn’t it? He does not back down on stuff like this. It’s his biggest strength, but also the biggest weakness of a political movement that is tied to him.
*To be fair, if you were motivated by Roe v Wade, he really did deliver on this.
If we could produce meat indistinguishable from the real thing at a competitive cost and scale, I would eat it. This seems a ways off to me from what I've read in the thread so far, with the most viable solutions being mere facsimiles of this. I don't eat the Impossible stuff and the current leading synthetic meat seems unappetizing to me. I want to emphasize that this isn't due to fear of synthetic meat per se, but the idea of replacing genuine meat with an inferior product. If we can make synthetic meat as good as real meat, that's an amazing feat and should be celebrated.
Supposing we manage to do this, I'm mixed about some of the second-order implications. I don't like the centralization of food production that would likely result from this. Also, the potential banning of hunting and fishing as you said, or of consuming actual animals. I'd still want to pursue the lab meat. Making more of something for less time, money, and resources is how the species has avoided its Malthusian limits for so long. Any big advancement brings about issues we couldn't have conceived of before, but the tradeoff has almost always been worth it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
I'll say their search system is impressively bad lately. Every search gives you maybe three results for what you're actually searching before recommending you things you've already seen that are completely unrelated. The only explanation I can think of comes from my experience in a completely different field. My boss will often have me make adjustments to our site or ad network that, without getting too into it, essentially trade a little bit of the system's health or user experience for a short-term bump in impressions/clicks.
With the search problem I described, it's possible that a PM had a bonus or other incentive to increase the clickthroughs on the "recommended" tab. Not being able to make this increase through genuine growth, they tell the engineers to cannibalize the search feature to also promote recommended videos to the user. The engineers ask "are you sure about this?" before just doing their job. And then another part of the user experience is shortsightedly consumed.
Any other ideas/explanations as to why this happens?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is.
OP never says anything like this. They say that there's nothing wrong with generic wine, but that there is a world of wine minutiae to explore if you're willing to get into it.
It does not matter that anyone who watched the show and read the books could identify that they are not related in any way aside from labeling. Labeling, and what it implies is POWERFUL and should affect your experience.
The impression I got was that they are willing to spend a lot on certain vineyards because the wine they produce has qualities the OP finds worthwhile, not that the vineyards are worthwhile because of their brand name.
I'm not a wine person; I don't tough alcohol at all due to a familial history/predisposition to substance addiction. But I do have hobbies, and I understand that with any hobby there are vast differences in the understanding of a layman, intermediate hobbyist, and high-level hobbyist. The same goes for entry-level versus high-end equipment. I'm not an audiophile or photographer, but I can accept that when they drop thousands on top-of-the-line equipment, they're doing it because it makes a difference to them.
That doesn't mean you can't get enjoyment out of things at a laymen or entry level. To be honest, the effort to reward ratio of many hobbies seems better at the entry level, when you know enough to enjoy yourself but not enough to know what you're missing. But I can believe someone when they say the 2000 dollar camera has qualities the 200 dollar one doesn't. Same goes for this subject for me. I don't think this makes someone a slave to brands or whatever you're saying.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
The admin of the Kiwi Farms, Joshua Moon, is blackballed from most credit card payment networks and large crypto exchanges like Coinbase will even block crypto transfers to his wallets if you attempt to send him money through them.
This blacklisting, as well as his site going down for months, is all due to pressure campaigns from activists and journalists, not any legal wrongdoing — he claims to have never been charged with a crime nor has he lost a civil suit.
Bringing cryptocurrency under the same unaccountable bureaucratic blob as our current financial system would further reduce his ability to operate and fund his site. It remains to be seen if the site will even remain up, as this is not the first calm period of things looking stable since the pressure campaign began.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
I'd love to see nuclear implemented at all, so if we have to put them out at sea then so be it. I'm a layman when it comes to this, but I guess there's the risk of contamination going directly into the sea if things go wrong. That said, we've detonated nuclear bombs over the oceans in testing before so it's probably not an existential problem, and we still run the risk of ocean contamination with traditional power sources via oil spills.
I don't think this will change the minds of many who aren't on board with nuclear already. Most of them oppose it on concerns of safety or the supposed permanence of the waste. I suspect there is a large group against nuclear because it can address power sustainability without fundamentally restructuring our economic and social system, but this is getting close to CW thread territory so I don't want to get into that.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
The framing of abortion as an issue of men controlling women always struck me as odd. In my own circles at least, the strongest pro-choice and pro-life people I know are all women. Most men I know have opinions on it, but they are rarely as firm or hardline as the women in my life. When discussing abortion with another man, there is room for nuance and whatever our opinions on the subject are, we can agree that the issue is uncommonly complex and difficult to find common ground on. I think both sides are correct in their own way so trying to untangle the mess that is the abortion debate is maddening.
I tread lightly if it comes up with women because it's always personal and it's always touchy. There isn't much room for disagreement, so I avoid saying too much if that's the case. Even if we agree on policy, any attempts by me to add nuance or explain the feelings of the other side don't go over well. I don't say this to condemn women or say men are better, but the energy in the debate reads to me as one driven by women. That being said, this is my personal experience, so I'd like to hear if this is the case for others here.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
By offering a legitimate, state-sponsored path we run the risk of turning euthanasia into a goal to be worked toward as described by this recent quality contribution by @VelveteenAmbush. He is talking about gender transitioning but uses this topic as a directly analogous example, and makes a good argument that providing a legitimate path will wind up doing more harm than good.
With women this could be a big problem, as they are more likely to attempt suicide but tend to do so with less lethal methods. If there was an accepted path to suicide that had a 100% success rate once approved, we'd probably see more deaths overall.
I agree that whatever changes we make to a system like this should be carefully tested in a small region. Then again, after seeing how easily studies are manipulated and misrepresented, part of me wants to just put a big "do not cross" line over this particular policy. Once it becomes accepted policy and people are used to it, it's a lot harder to turn back the clock than it is to just keep it taboo.
My condolences to you and your friend. I'd like to chime in as a secular person who is against assisted suicide for young, physically healthy people but is fine with euthanasia for people who are terminally ill, elderly, or extremely physically disabled.
Some other people have put this more eloquently, but I believe by okaying euthanasia for the first group we will get a lot of people opting to end their lives who would have stuck it out and become happy, productive adults. If a healthy person wants to take their life, I'm not going to cast moral judgement on them. But they should do it on their own terms — by bringing in the state we legitimize it and widen the net of people who will be lost. Suicide may be an option, be it should remain culturally taboo.
In the case of someone with no future due to terminal illness, or for someone physically incapable of ending themselves (the example I'm thinking of is someone who is paralyzed from the neck down due to an accident), the suffering is both clear and incurable at our current level of medicine. It's a lot easier of a call and has clear limits that won't (shouldn't?) lead to healthy people being killed by the state.
I suppose my guiding principle would be: what societal guidelines/guardrails will lead the average person to happiness and produce a functional, healthy society?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
In practice it’s more of a popularity marker. I think Southkraut’s version of the idea is better thought out
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
Agree and I'd possibly like to see a second upvote/downvote button that people could use to indicate "well-argued" or something like that. Even if I disagree with their points I hate seeing our resident lefties get downvoted to 0 and dogpiled every time they make a post. I would like to think that would help, but there's also the future where it becomes an I disagree even more button...
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
That one is interesting, because Wikipedia is claiming it affects "5-15% of women of all ethnic backgrounds," which is less than the number of women I've seen with facial hair. I'm guessing it's fairly easily managed with a razor, and in any case facial hair is far from the only physical tell of sex, so that doesn't seem to pose an issue to what I'm saying.
To be more charitable we can go with whatever rare genetic condition may cause a woman to appear extremely mannish. In which case I would probably assume she is male unless corrected. That would be very unfortunate and I feel sympathy for her having to go around life that way, but she is by definition a rare genetic outlier. We can openly say that this is not the way it normally biologically works and don't feel the need to collapse biological gender categories over it.
If it was a political issue where people were identifying with this disorder or trying to medically induce it, demanding at risk of job loss you accept it, trying to normalize and give it to children, etc. and this was all surging at once within the last 10 years? At that point it leaves the category of weird genetic outlier and I start to ask what's going on here.
So really, is the only sin of “transpeople” being early?
I wonder this myself sometimes. For trans adults, much of my antipathy comes from people who are clearly (visibly) not women forcing people to deny the reality they see in order to validate them. And you can lose your job if you don’t. If surgery were at the point where they all passed perfectly and they had all female parts and not facsimiles, this issue would probably be sidestepped.
Of course, none of this applies to children transitioning. The number of people doing irreversible damage to their bodies without knowing the true risks based on social pressure has exploded, and I don’t want to get too into it because others already have done it much better here. I don’t think it’s a good thing nor do I want it to continue.
And then the natural question is, does tolerating the first thing lead to the second? It seems like it to me. In its current state trans ideology seems to allow for no opinion besides a maximalist one. And despite their small numbers, as an influence group they are incredibly influential in tech and online discourse due to the demographics of most people who transition to women tending to be people who are very online and in tech. See the deplatformings of the Kiwi Farms spearheaded by several trans activists for a recent example.
So futurist medical procedures would sidestep a big issue of mine with transgenderism, but it is far from the only one.
Quick edit: I forgot to mention the people that will want to be considered their chosen gender without doing the work to physically pass, which is a thing now and will most likely still be even in this hypothetical future. The question of how we respond to those people is important. Is it, yes you are your chosen gender? Or will we say l: I’ll call you a woman once you don’t have to tell me you’re one. I’d be okay with the latter option, not the former, but I can’t see it going that way culturally.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
I considered trying other systems, but my tabletop friends have all played a lot of 5e. It came down to teaching 8+ people how to play a brand new system vs adding (a lot of) homebrew to a system we were all already familiar with. I went with the latter option. Maybe if I was running for 3 dedicated players it'd be different, but this campaign is designed for players to be able to jump in and out. Onboarding each new player with a new system was... not appealing.
5e has many issues, but ease of use and range of adoption make it hard to pass up.
I worked as a writing consultant in college, a position my college hired English-proficient students for. The job was to be there for appointments other students would schedule to have their essays looked at and the like. This required me to take a semester-long course as training, and the doctrines I was taught there were both extremely bizarre and line up neatly with the CW elements of phonics I've been reading here.
There was a guiding principle for the people who taught this class and who wrote our books that it was wrong to teach a student the "correct" way to speak English. By correct we could instead say hegemonic; the way that educated, well-off people tend to speak and write English in America. Who are you as a (white) educator to tell a (nonwhite) child that the way he learned to speak at home is wrong? It was extremely upsetting for me to learn this was a popular position in the field of English education. But...
It's obviously been a while, but my experience with phonics as a young lad were that they were essentially drills. You have sound-letter association drilled into your brain through constant repetition and reinforcement. It's perhaps not a very Western way to learn on the face of it, as we pride ourselves on being creative learners who don’t rely on rote repetition. But there's a time and place for more rote learning. Like in art, you can't really express yourself in English if don't have the fundamentals down first.
You have to understand that for the type of person who usually gets into English Education, sitting there and beating the sounds of letters into the malleable skull of an underprivileged minority child feels like a form of violence. Your way of speaking is wrong, here is the correct way to talk and write. It is reminiscent of British boarding schools forcing students to copy lines into their books over and over, or of colonial efforts to educate the savages. This may sound like a weakman, but that really is how they seemed to view it.
This conflicts with a more practical understanding of language and the job of an educator. Yes, there is a way that educated people tend to speak. Yes, people go to school so they can fit in with those people and make money. Yes, it is your job as an educator to teach them how to do that. No, it is not your place to decide that this hegemony is unjust and must be overthrown. And finally, how dare you use young students as your pawns in this game to do so.
To the credit of my instructors: they acknowledged that this is, on some level, why people want to get an education. For reasons of practicality, English teachers have to teach English. They made it clear that we should push back against this where we could, and that it was a long-term goal to overthrow this paradigm. To bring it back to the "whole language" model... based on my experience with educators, I know that of the two methods, they would very much like this one to be the one that works. I can see them convincing themselves that it does, especially since it lacks the blunt objectivity of phonics. It makes sense that it took this long before people start raising the alarm on this.
I have some more things to say about English education, but that might be better for another post. I also don't want to lump all teachers into this bucket. I know many of them who just want to educate children and keep their mouths shut about this stuff for the same reason you don't openly push back against your workplace's DEI policies. It is a shame, because mass literacy is a cornerstone of success for a culture, and it seems standards are constantly falling.
I'm not a blank slatist and don't believe that we can equalize outcomes through education. But if we're forcing children to go to school, we should get some form of literacy as a result, and not have the time and money sabotaged by what to me looks like institutionalized white guilt. We could do a lot better by people if we just stopped digging the hole deeper.
A funny aside. As consultants, we weren't supposed to fix the grammar in a student's essay, even if that's what they came in with the intention to do. Just help them with ideas and maybe teach them writing rules they didn't understand. This was... perhaps overselling the importance of the place. Maybe it was to comply with a looser definition of plagiarism the university had (I'm doubtful). However, this was what about half the American students in my appointments wanted me to do, and what almost all of the Chinese students wanted me to do.
This is understandable, especially for the Chinese kids. It seems logical that a writing center for students would be at least in part about an English native fixing your paper so it isn't riddled with basic grammatical and usage errors. English is a difficult language and has a lot of weird rules that make it trivial for a non-native speaker to out themselves as such. After a while I just started doing grammar checks in my consultations, and my consultees tended to be much happier for it.
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