AllySaurus

Hey you have a church so you even have the requisite high ceilings…

Writer and scientist here - niche weird shit is storytelling *gold*. As are the people who know that stuff - excellent character material 😁.

THANK YOU

Soooo bad. Right up there with autocorrect on my phone.

Lots of Francophones in my corner of BC, but yeah, French not necessary.

🤣🤣🤣

I used to teach those classes. Very worth it if you’re scared of the water yourself so you don’t transmit that to your kiddo and learn how to have fun at the pool. Otherwise, just go swim and splash and have fun.

Also my kiddo.

You’re totes gonna win.

Aquila make a set of piccolo strings tuned an octave higher than the regular gcea that will make a sopranissimo sound like it inhaled a helium balloon. Excellent author procrastination material.

The number of parents of autistic kids who will shun vaccines, but try this… 😣😩

Idk what the chair test is but sounds like the tilt table test for POTS (perfectly fine if you don’t have POTS, puke fest if you do). Definitely worth avoiding, go you.

Boring gray bike with a neon pink bell, purple pedals, and vinyl clings in neon pink/green/purple/blue tiger stripes.

I put tiger stripes on my bike

Yeah, and the folks who think this is the most appropriating of land ever meeeeebbe ought to consider the land we swiped from Indigenous Nations for the whole damn transcontinental railroad. Find excited 7yos instead. Or 19yos - mine would gladly volunteer our condo!

They almost always want money, in exchange for exposure to readers. I assume it works often enough to keep them trying, just like the Nigerian prince stuff.

Queer steampunk fantasy (from one of my Canadian peeps, woo!) anyone?

I just got one congratulating me on my series ending (it is not done). WTF don’t start that rumor 😝

🤣🤣🤣

Yup. My autistic kiddo is a bit clueless on personal space, so grocery stores are endless apologies as other people are sorry for standing where he happened to decide to walk or drag the cart 🤣.

Seriously. The goodwill I feel toward our government just tripled (parent of autistic kiddo, time changes are a month of sleep deprived hell).

Honestly most assessments don’t parse that. Or they parse it only in highly academic excerpts. They don’t test if folks can parse subtext in a 3rd grade excerpt. That’s considered an advanced skill and first you have to know big words and complex sentences. It’s soooooo full of dumb assumptions.

But it made me seeeeriously eye anyone using these kinds of scales to shame people.

To conclude that isn’t “literate” is obnoxious. I have passages that get lyrical and full of big words, and those suddenly jump up five grades. Eh. All one story. And frankly those are usually monologues or my poet character going off. Easier to follow than a six character convo in “easy” English.

And the tools don’t evaluate that at all. I believe I read something when I was looking into it that said conversational English tends to be primary school level. So to score a higher reading level than that, you gotta get “literary”. Which is just elitist.

Yup. Mine tests at 3rd grade mostly because I write deep in character POV, so lots of short sentences and “easy” grammar and vocab (despite that I swallowed a dictionary, lol). But my work has endless subtext and emotional framing, a big cast of characters.

It was really interesting - and changed my view of the literacy scale a lot!

I absolutely agree with you on the systemic issues, I just think one of them might be deciding the average reading level of adults in the US should be given the name “sixth grade” on some scale that clearly doesn’t reflect actual reality.

Eh, my books are apparently written at a third grade reading level (there are online tools to check). So I think sixth grade is way more competent and functional than they’re trying to make it sound.

You’ve probably already been to the store, but Ransom Notes is hilarious, with two mods: 1) don’t score or make up your own scoring system; 2) if anyone doesn’t like the prompt card, pull a new one or make up your own.

I love this for you!