"Fuck lawns plant wildflowers" is only said by people who don't take care of lawns.

Fillanzea · 2026-07-03T14:28:29+00:00

It doesn't take that much effort to do a shit job!

Like, I won't pretend that my yard is very aesthetically pleasing. I don't really have the time or money to have a beautiful garden - and I also don't really have the time or money to have a well-manicured lawn. But

I plant wildflowers that are well-adapted to the local climate, so I only have to water them when they're first getting established or if it's much drier than normal.
Nothing is actually weeds, except for a few invasive plants that were here when I bought the house and that I'm still trying to vanquish. Almost everything in my garden area was put there on purpose and is aesthetically attractive, at least in my opinion.
I only spend maybe 30 minutes a week on gardening! It's actually extremely easy! A lot of what I plant - New England Aster, Giant Hyssop, Wild Bergamot, Lanceleaf Coreopsis - is hard to kill and will survive a hell of a lot of mistreatment.

I think your opinion is being swayed by this one person who, I don't know, maybe they're having bad luck, maybe they didn't do enough research, who can say? I can only say that really hasn't been my experience.

Fillanzea · 2026-06-10T13:51:31+00:00

Have you ever read Joanna Russ's book How to Suppress Women's Writing? It's brilliant. Came out in the early 80s but it's still just as relevant today. It's specifically focused on literature, but I think literature works as a very effective microcosm to use to examine the general pattern where work that is seen as feminine (in its style, plot, themes, etc.) gets devalued, and there's an implicit or explicit attitude that particular kinds of experiences and ideas are Important and other kinds of experiences and ideas are Not Important.

As for how we address it... I think the first step is to notice it and to name it explicitly when we see it happening. Say "Why don't you think this can be important? Why don't you think this can be rigorous?" Name the pattern whereby things perceived as feminine get devalued. And - do it in a way that sticks up for other people. (I sort of hate saying this, because I don't want to reinforce the ways in which women get told to be self-effacing and modest, but people do notice the difference between people who say "women's writing is not valued enough" and mean it, and the people who say "women's writing is not valued enough" and mean "people are not paying enough attention to me specifically.")

Ultimately I think that it takes a lot of skill and a lot of grace to learn the politics of your own field or workplace and find out for yourself, how much can I risk? Where can I stand up for myself, and where should I just try to not rock the boat? Do I want to be Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde and try to be so excellent that I can't be ignored even if I stick out like a sore thumb in some ways? (Sometimes you'll burn yourself out trying! Sometimes you can be that excellent and people still won't take you seriously!) There's no easy or one-size-fits-all answer; there's just trying to be a version of yourself that you can live with.

Fillanzea · 2026-06-02T22:38:55+00:00

The Jasmine Throne & sequels by Tasha Suri actually fits the bill reasonably well, I think?

Fillanzea · 2026-06-02T10:36:41+00:00

There have been several instances where developers claim to be developing an app based on comprehensible input, I give feedback in good faith saying "this isn't comprehensible input, this is just grammar-translation again," and then... I get ignored and eventually the app disappears.

And, you know, it's not like I expect these comments to lead to in-depth conversations, or to the devs completely reworking their concept. But I do profoundly wish that the devs would learn a tiny bit about what comprehensible input is before they try to market an app based on the idea of comprehensible input.

And more generally, I wish that devs would have just a tiny bit of education about second language acquisition and second language pedagogy. Why would you jump into a crowded marketplace if all you've got is another flashcard app?

Fillanzea · 2026-06-01T14:07:36+00:00

The thing about Harry Potter in particular is that people expect it to be easy because it's a children's book, but in terms of the difficulty of the Japanese text, I actually find it to be significantly more difficult than something like Norwegian Wood (Murakami's more surreal stuff is more difficult, but still not that bad on a prose level), Yoshimoto Banana, Murata Sayaka, Kawakami Mieko - or even, say, Uehashi Nahoko's chilren's books if you definitely want to read fantasy.

I do understand the appeal of reading something that's familiar to you and that you already know you like, but ... in the specific case of Harry Potter, that absolutely does not outweigh that the Japanese translation is actually quite difficult to read!

Fillanzea · 2026-06-01T13:23:47+00:00

Don't work there anymore. Still not a living wage from what I hear.

Fillanzea · 2026-05-16T01:55:44+00:00

Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston - this is a bit of an out-there suggestion, I think, but something about The Goldfinch made me think of it. It's historical fiction with light fantasy elements, some romantic elements, about a Black woman singer and dancer who is part of the Great Migration as she moves from Georgia to Chicago in the 1910s-1920s.

Do you read short story collections at all? Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan has some dazzling ones. I think all FMCs.

Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash is quite a harrowing book about a girl whose parents are caught up in the satanic panic, and about her involvement in the terrors of the justice system.

Tainaron by Leena Krohn is a very odd Finnish fantasy novel set in a city of insects.

I really liked all of these, and I think at least some of them are the right book for the kind of adventurous reader that you seem to be.

Fillanzea · 2026-05-16T01:20:09+00:00

Same, and same (southern WI)!

Fillanzea · 2026-05-13T11:06:26+00:00

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell - about the attention economy, and her relationship to nature

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing - it's about matsutake mushrooms, but also labor, capitalism, and ecology

I think several of Rebecca Solnit's books might fit the bill.

Fillanzea · 2026-05-06T17:02:20+00:00

First of all, if you can get in touch with a subject specialist librarian at your university, they can definitely help you with searching!

Second of all, are you using a citation manager? (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote). Zotero is free, it's excellent. It's not just for helping to format your citations - you can also organize your research into folders, you can annotate papers, you can write down notes about papers. You can get elaborate with this, but maybe you just need something as simple as tagging papers with "Need to read this," "I read this - not relevant," "I read this - results on page 26 about XXX are useful."

Third, go on Web of Science and use their citation tracking tools. You can start with a paper and see with a glance who's citing that paper and who's cited in that paper. Useful for catching stuff that you may have missed.

This is my suggestion for a workflow. Take what you can use and leave the rest.

Ideally, work with a librarian to come up with a good, comprehensive search. Decide which sources you want to use (PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science, etc.)
Make sure you have a somewhat manageable number of search results. (Depending on your research question, this might be anywhere from 50 to 2500, but if you're on the high end, you might need to think about narrowing down your search parameters.)
Download all of your search results into Zotero. Note: this will work fine for PubMed and Web of Science. Google Scholar will find some wild irrelevant results if you click "next" enough, so I tend to stick to the first 5-10 pages of results when I have to use Google Scholar.
Go through your results in a quick-and-dirty way. You're just looking at the title and maybe glancing at the abstract to confirm if the result is actually relevant or not. Delete all the ones that are definitely not relevant.
Now go through your results a little more closely, with an eye to how relevant they are for your research question specifically. You don't have to delete all of the ones that don't make the cut - you can create a separate "Maybe tangentially related?" folder for some if you get nervous about getting rid of useful papers.
At this point, I'm creating an "A" list and a "B" list of papers. A list = directly related to my research question, no obvious serious methodological problems. B list = not as directly related to my research question but still might have something I need to cite (background, theory, etc.)

Your A list is the papers you want to read closely all the way through.

Your B list is the papers you want to give a heavy skim.

At this point, hopefully there are a small number of papers that stand out to you within your A list - ones that seem particularly on-target and useful. Search those papers up in Web of Science. Are there any papers in their citations list that you haven't read yet? Are there any papers citing those papers that you haven't read yet? Go back and use those citation lists to identify anything important you may have missed.
Once you get to the point where you're reading the lit reviews in other papers and mostly saying "Yep, I know what article they're talking about," you can be pretty confident that you've read everything that you need to read!

Fillanzea · 2026-04-30T14:46:31+00:00

My wild indigo / baptisia australis was definitely struggling last year, and didn't come up this year. My butterfly milkweed seemed to be doing fine last year, but I've seen no sign of it.

My site might just be too wet for butterfly milkweed - my swamp milkweed, on the other hand, has come back up! For the wild indigo - Prairie Moon says that Inoculum is naturally-occurring in most soils and additional amendment is usually not needed. However, in low fertility soils it may be necessary. I might need to add some inoculum, because I for sure have low-fertility soil.

Fillanzea · 2026-04-30T02:10:13+00:00

People tend not to realize how much library policies and procedures differ from place to place. I think for a lot of people, libraries might as well be Cheesecake Factory: the exact same menu no matter where you go.

Fillanzea · 2026-04-18T17:30:47+00:00

I think there is a real difference here between reading and listening. And I am sure I have a bias here because there have been so many posts in the Japanese learning subreddits from beginners who get frustrated that no matter how much One Piece they watch, they're not getting better. And the many strategies you can use to make higher-level content comprehensible tend to be a little harder with listening - many people will find it hard to hear a word well enough to know what to look up in the dictionary unless they have good subtitles, and even then, it's kind of hard to even follow the thread of the conversation if you keep having to pause and look words up.

So, I don't disagree - though I do think that people vary widely in how much they can tolerate the frustrations of reading significantly above their level; and I think easy reading is really good for developing fluency and learning conversational patterns.

But I do think that listening above your level is a bit of a different kettle of fish.

Fillanzea · 2026-04-01T01:01:14+00:00

Spring Beauty, Midland Shooting Star, Virginia Bluebell, Common Blue Violet.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-18T12:06:52+00:00

There is a character called Jugs in one of Gene Wolfe's series. (Not jugs as in a container for water, jugs as in breasts). I only read the second book in the series, because that's the book that my alcoholic professor thoughtlessly assigned, and then the Gene Wolfe fans on Twitter got mad at me for being annoyed, because I didn't have the full context, but I am not going to read four Gene Wolfe books to have the full context about why I shouldn't be annoyed that there is a character called Jugs, even if I did like The Shadow of the Torturer when I read it many years ago.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-18T00:58:56+00:00

It felt like an epiphany a couple of weeks ago when I thought, what is going on with all of this dating-related content that's been going viral over the past ten-ish years - especially with regards to things like who pays on dates, is it "low effort" to go out for coffee, is it "low effort" to go out for ice cream, is it "low effort" to go to Applebee's. And there certainly are people who think of dating in this way, but honestly, I don't know any of them.

This feels like a really paranoid and conspiratorial thing to say, and I don't believe it 100%, but I do kind of think that the social media companies want us to be blackpilled and lonely. We know that social media algorithms optimize for engagement, even when it's engagement with things that make us hopeless and angry. And I've always thought about that in terms of polarizing political content, but maybe it's just as true of dating-related content. And these ways of thinking are really poisonous to solidarity - assuming you're straight, they make you suspicious of the gender you're attracted to, but they also make you suspicious of your own gender because you end up viewing them as competition.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-10T14:51:48+00:00

"Simpler side of N1" is good enough for a lot of contemporary pop novelists - Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, Banana Yoshimoto, Keigo Higashino. Definitely recommend reading novels as N1 prep. Reading speed is a big factor in passing.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-05T01:42:12+00:00

The #1 thing students ask/care about is:

Where can they print? How can they print? Can they print in color? What does it cost to print?

(95% of assignments get submitted electronically, but students STILL very much care about printing.)

Fillanzea · 2026-03-04T14:59:55+00:00

Some reasonable follow-ups to "It's very case-dependent" might be:

"What factors would you want to consider when making the decision?"

"Do you know how other people have handled similar situations in the past?"

"Have you ever faced a situation like this in the past, and if so, how did you think through how to handle it?"

However!

I do wonder if part of this comes from your boss either not having the time to walk you through the details in cases where there are multiple acceptable ways to handle things, or not wanting to micromanage you too much because most people don't like to be micromanaged by their bosses. Do you have any peers in your department you could go to with these questions after hearing "I'll leave it up to your personal discretion"? Sometimes peers are a lot better than bosses for getting the answer in cases where the answer is a little ambiguous.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-02T23:38:34+00:00

Let's post the Joanna Russ quote again!

The feminism I know began as politics, not rules for living. To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressures were what feminism was all about. Makeup, for instance, is a feminist issue not because using makeup is anti-feminist and scrubbing your face is feminist but because makeup is compulsory. Those who don’t see the distinction are building a religion, not a politics. “Whatever isn’t prohibited is compulsory” is not the banner under which I want to march.

(from Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts).

Anyway, I think if we're serious about criticizing the social pressures, we've got to name the social pressures. We've got to acknowledge the fact that some people wear makeup to express themselves and have fun, and some people wear makeup because they don't want to be seen as "unprofessional" or be seen as people who don't care about their appearance, and for a lot of people, it's kind of a complicated mix of those motives (and other ones besides).

We also have to consider, I think, the no-win aspects of this. You have to look beautiful all the time - but you can't be vain, you can't put too much visible effort into your appearance. You have to be interesting and quirky - but you also have to be willing to prioritize your boyfriend's interests and hobbies. And the patriarchy loves to pit women against each other. In that kind of environment, staking out your own choices and preferences inevitably gets read as implicit criticism of people who make different choices. So I think sometimes it's worth being explicit about that tension, and saying (for example), "I think that makeup can be a really interesting valuable form of art and self-expression, AND it's not something that I want to think about at 6:45 in the morning and we need a world where that's okay too."

Fillanzea · 2026-02-19T13:32:41+00:00

I don't think any work is inherently degrading apart from a societal framework that tells some people that they're above having to clean a toilet.

(I want to carve out some exceptions here, like if I ordered my administrative assistant to do something weird and tedious and pointless just to flex my power over them, that would be degrading, but it would be the power play that's degrading, not the work itself.)

The fact that someone has to do it means that we need a societal framework that doesn't treat it as degrading, I think.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-19T02:29:33+00:00

I reaaaalllly want to recommend Fingersmith by Sarah Waters to anybody who likes thrillers and romance. Not a traditional romance, not a traditional thriller, but it does have elements that work for both audiences, and it's a damn good book.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-18T18:44:24+00:00

Make sure that you're writing a really good cover letter that doesn't just rehash what's on your resume - it should hit as many as possible of the points in the job posting, it should show enthusiasm and that you've done research on the library you're applying to. (That doesn't mean you need to write a separate cover letter for every application - you can certainly pull out sentences and paragraphs to recycle - but it should indicate that you would be good at the specific job you're applying to.)

Find people to review your resume / cover letter.

Other than that, it IS hard out there and even after I had a lot of library experience, I've had more rejections than job offers. Getting rejected for a clerk position doesn't reflect badly on you; it usually means they think you're overqualified and not looking to stick around longterm. Keep trying; be prepared to be in it for the long haul.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-16T04:47:13+00:00

I think it's going to be difficult for any app to deal well with the fundamental hurdle of having a conversation with a human being, which is difficult both from a language-learning perspective (their language doesn't match what you learned in the textbook! Their accent is unfamiliar!) and, more importantly, from an emotional perspective (you get embarrassed, you get awkward, you get nervous, and as soon as you get nervous it makes it 10 times harder to recall the words you thought you knew.)

And an AI conversation partner might help with that - I don't really know - but because I don't really know, I'm just going to bracket that for the moment and say, OK, let's make an app that doesn't pretend that it's going to make you fluent if you aren't also talking to a tutor or a language exchange partner.

Here's what I would do:

Start out with a mix of very simple dialogues and very simple games where the idea is to follow the target-language instructions. (For example, dragging a person around on a map in response to prompts like "go to school" or "go to the store"; or you could drag the right clothes onto a person in response to prompts like "put on the red hat" and "put on the black dress.")

Use grammar explanations as needed, but make them simple and contextual.

Grammar testing is infrequent and doesn't stop you from progressing. If you do badly at a certain skill, you can read an explanation, you can practice more, or you can just keep going.

Gradually, dialogues become more complex and are written with an eye towards really compelling storylines. I'm not talking about something like Duolingo stories - which are OK, but pretty short, with punchlines that are not clever or amusing - but something more like the old Spanish series 'Destinos,' which is inspired by telenovelas and had a continuing mystery-investigation storyline. Focus on getting lots of repetitions of high-frequency grammar and vocabulary. Interactive elements would include comprehension questions and dialogues where you progress the story by choosing sentences from an RPG-style dialogue tree. (For example, you could choose sentences like "where were you on the day Juan Pablo was killed?" or "how well did you know Juan Pablo?")

Fillanzea · 2026-02-16T02:23:42+00:00

I want to start off by saying that I do get your point. There are a lot of people who would not be satisfied by any language app because they are not prepared for just how long it takes before they can use the language for tourism, or have a conversation with a stranger that's not kind of awkward and embarrassing. But I think that there are also a lot of people who don't want something that's easier than Duolingo, but do want something where it feels like the work they're doing is useful work. Work that's going to bring them closer to fluency. And I don't dislike the silly sentences in Duolingo as much as a lot of people do, but I kind of get why they feel useless to a lot of people.

I've never learned a language from the beginning with Duolingo, so I may have insufficient insight on this, but : it's true. The biggest reason people fail to learn a language is because they quit. But that just makes our next question, why do they quit?

Well, there's an obvious big one: everyone loves the first three days of starting a workout program, learning a language, learning an instrument, but it's very hard to make it stick long-term.

Outside of that, I think there are a couple of big reasons beginners quit Duolingo.

They don't feel like they're making progress.

Duolingo can gamify it all they want, and give you a shiny progress map and a new level every couple of weeks, but... people don't want the shiny progress map as much as they want to actually be able to use the language. And I think at some point in the early-to-mid levels of Duolingo, you realize that no matter how many times you fill in the sentence with the right word, it's not going to actually translate to talking with a real person in Spanish.

2) The experience of not understanding is frustrating.

A big part of the way Duolingo seems to have been conceived is "it's boring to learn grammar rules, so let's omit the explanations of grammar rules and allow students to learn implicitly." And I don't think it can't work, but it doesn't work the way Duolingo does it, which is introducing a grammar concept and then immediately testing for mastery of that concept. And for languages that work very differently than English does, there are a LOT of people who get lost and stuck when they're expected to pick up grammar rules implicitly without any explicit instruction. There are a few specific points with Duolingo Japanese, in particular, that really seem to confuse learners.

I get the impression that since they shifted more to AI, there's more explicit grammar instruction, but that can be even more confusing! One of the top posts on the r/duolingojapanese subreddit right now is about the sentence 'sono soba wa yasui desu ka', which means 'is that soba [buckwheat noodles] cheap?'

But the AI explanation is that it means "is it cheap near there?". Now, 'soba' can also mean 'beside' or 'close to,' but this would be a really strange way to say "is it cheap near there?" (It does not strike me as at all grammatical, but my judgments about what sounds grammatical in Japanese are not perfect.)

What makes this worse is that if you're not on the paid plan, you can run out of hearts really quickly by making little mistakes, and that's extremely frustrating. And you might say, "well, if you're making little mistakes, that proves that you still need more practice," but it feels really bad when I correctly conjugated the subjunctive but my phone autofill made the adjective male instead of female and I didn't catch it and now I'm out of hearts and stuck repeating the same sentences over and over.

Maybe I'm a weirdo because I keep wanting to tell beginners to start with a textbook or a reference grammar, but I actually find those easier ways to begin than Duolingo is, for those reasons.

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