people talk about how media literacy being at an all time low, but this right here is just the death of regular literacy

  • quarrk [he/him]
    ·
    4 days ago

    This probably goes without saying, but to analyze why the “easy” version feels so shit. It loses information. A book transformed in this way would be a different book.

    • Narrator no longer identifies youth with vulnerability
    • The father’s statement is no longer advice. It could just be him saying “ligma”
    • The visual metaphor of physically inspecting a thought-object is lost
    • 4am@lemm.ee
      ·
      4 days ago

      And they’ll try to claim that it’s considered “fair use transformation” under copyright law, the joke ass Supreme Court will hand them a win and the United States will become blanketed in datacenters as a million grifters try to set up their own unnecessary LLMs in order to get illiterate dumbasses to sign up for subscriptions they hope they forget to cancel

  • Sephitard9001 [he/him]
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    4 days ago

    Why use Great Gatsby for the example? Impress me, sell the product to me. Show me a sample from Ulysses I dare you coward dont-laugh

  • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    This is an incredibly bleak view of writing.

    Like, that prose exists as an obstacle to understanding the story instead of being part of it and that you can optimise a story into a Wikipedia-ass summary.

    All the meaning of a work burnt away for something with all the dryness of an CRPG battle-log.

    Jason strikes a harpy

    Critical hit! 20 hp damage

    Harpy is defeated

    70 exp is distributed to the party

  • Egon [they/them]
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    edit-2
    4 days ago

    The great gatsby was easy though? Like very comfortable reading, just super cozy, like a late summer evening in text. That's not the point at all, but like why choose this book instead of something notoriously difficult?

    • CommunistBear [he/him]
      ·
      4 days ago

      I think you're forgetting that a large amount of the American populace are functionally illiterate and even many of those that are literate are at a ~6th grade level

  • Owl [he/him]
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    4 days ago

    I don't get it, if your books are too hard you should just tear the covers off.

  • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 days ago

    Everything must be smooth. Iron out those unsightly folds in my brain! Remove that texture from literature - blend it into a uniform paste!

  • SoyViking [he/him]
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    4 days ago

    Harness the powers of AI to make Readers' Digest even shittier.

    • MovingThrowaway [none/use name]
      ·
      4 days ago

      Last time I tried this with chatgpt it was able to give well-worded summaries that were basically what reddit thought the book was about. So like, if you're only ever gonna get a superficial understanding of something I suppose an ai simplification is as good as anything.

      Kinda fun to have it write a debate between Marx and deleuze lol

    • yuli [she/her]
      ·
      3 days ago

      10,000 B.C: Understanding Earth’s Layers

      Professor Challenger, who made the Earth scream with his pain machine in a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a talk after mixing books on geology and biology. He said the Earth is like a body without organs. This means it has many different things moving around inside it.

      But that was not the main point. He talked about something important that happens on Earth called stratification. This means there are layers, like belts, that form and organize things. These layers capture and hold things together, like black holes.

      Professor Challenger read a sentence from a geology book. He said we need to remember it: "A surface of stratification is a plane of consistency lying between two layers." The layers are strata and they come in pairs. The surface between them is a special area that connects them.

      God is like a lobster with two claws. Strata come in pairs, and each layer has two parts. This double articulation means layers have two steps: first, they pick units from moving particles, and second, they make stable structures from these units.

      In geology, the first step is sedimentation, which makes layers of sediment. The second step is folding, which turns sediment into rock.

      obviously a lot is lost, but it exceeded my expectations to be honest

  • Guamer [she/her]
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    4 days ago

    I would love to read the Lord of the Rings like this

      • Owl [he/him]
        ·
        4 days ago

        Imagine gravity is fractal... because light is just a wave, and gravity is just a wave... So imagine there's a big piece of glass that splits up gravity like a prism, so that there's, like, blue gravity and yellow gravity. And then somebody gets hit by the red gravity, and it makes them super heavy, so they have super strength, but, like, they're also really slow. And another guy gets hit by microwave gravity. So he's trying to zap everybody, and just when he's about to zap the main guy, we see a lady come out, and she turns out to be Ultraviolet Girl, and she has Super-Speed, so she beats him. And it, like, also gave her giant cans. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

  • nothx [any]
    ·
    4 days ago

    I love that they chose a dogshit book for highschool sophomores.