The Mediocre Muggsy

this emote was MADE for this experience.

I do not get trying to update classics rather than teaching about how languages change over time.

gatsby is not a hard read

feed some faulkner into that ai and tell me how well it does

Finnegans Wake

yeah honestly their example for making it easier is...shorter, but it strips the narrative personality

I mean god forbid we have anyone just like

look up words they don't recognize, so they can learn what they mean

the incredibly difficult vocabulary word "father"

kindle literally has a define word function but i can't imagine you'd need to define any word that fitzgerald ever wrote

trying to figure out a way to politely say some stuff because folks in a server we were discussing this in are all for it because it makes it easier for people who aren't good at reading to understand, or people who're ESL.

I can understand maybe for people who are ESL, but like: 1. Consider watching a film version with subtitles in a more familiar language 2. You can read easier books until you're ready for harder ones

But on the other hand, when I was a kid, I loved Moby Books Classics, and this isn't different. Neither are Classics Illustrated comics, really. Maybe if someone likes the story, they'll come back to the real thing later.

I brought that up and got told that the people I was talking to "don’t think it’s for me to say what’s right and wrong for other people to consume media."

Abridged things are, like. They're not bad, necessarily, but they're also not really the same media.

Great Illustrated Classics homepage - find the compl... these were and are the greatest thing. I can't hate on them.

I read so many classics this way when I was like... eight. I did come back to the real thing later if I liked the story.

And I think that's where it's really coming down to for me, like. It's a way to get familiar with the story, but it's no longer told the same way and it's really no longer the same thing you wanted to read when you started using this app on it.

I think it may come down to that "what is Taste" discussion (and Lewis's On Criticism) I was talking about recently: if a person is a one and done reader they aren't going to get much out of this kind of thing because it's not the real experience of reading the works the app is presenting.

if they're a person who Savors Art For Art's Sake (which says absolutely nothing about their morality, only that they have a specific kind of aesthetic/artistic palate/appreciation) then they will reread, savor, keep getting something out of it.

or they might get something out of the simplified version but maybe not quite the same thing that they might have gotten out of the original. It's hard to say. It probably isn't the same experience, though.

throw some H.P. Lovecraft character dialogue in there and watch it go from seven paragraphs to "it was scary"

much spoop

I definitely see a good usage case for ESL learning assistance, but they aren't really leaning into that in that post.

Though it's certainly possible they're going the "As Seen On TV" route and just not saying who their actual target demographic is

(and by that I mean a lot of the wacky devices you see in ASOTV commercials are actually meant to assist the elderly and/or people with mobility issues and difficulty doing certain tasks, but they're convinced it won't sell if they make that apparent)

this is like people who want to hack d&d to be a gritty space travel game and you're like "...traveller is right there"

you can have a second-rate experience with something, or you can go find another thing that actually meets your needs

"Is there a way to play Cyberpunk Edgerunners in D&D?"

i am 9000% convinced that was a joke

I would believe that if they hadn't edited it twice and then removed all mention of the article from social media

lolllllllllllll