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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • Once you lift the narrative requirement, the number of hits balloons into the millions. I would personally draw the line between education and edutainment on the issue of thoroughness. Education needs to be fairly thorough, while edutainment can skip all the boring (but necessary for full understanding) parts and exclusively handle the fun ideas-based stuff, usually with some oversimplification here and there just to keep things moving in an entertaining way.

    I would describe Kings & Generals on youtube as a solid example of good quality military history edutainment.


  • If you’re looking for a medical drama that health care workers seem to find an acceptable representation of their work, take a look at The Pitt. Apparently they put a lot of effort into being as accurate as possible.

    Overall I think your definition of edutainment as requiring a narrative is overly restrictive, I think we could call narrative-less science shows like this edutainment, despite lacking narrative:

    https://youtu.be/5HKH1ZjGutA

    All that said, the specific combination of scientific accuracy, narrative and for-adults does seem to be a rarer combination of traits. I cannot think of very many at all, and those I can do tend to fudge some of the accuracy here and there for dramatic appeal.



  • For the traditional toe the line imagery, it helps to imagine a very rebellious kid that you have firmly told to absolutely not cross some line under any circumstances.

    Imagine the kid looking you dead in the eye and smirking, as they stretch out their big toe and put it all over the line while barely not crossing it.

    This captures the aspect that you don’t have to follow the spirit of the rules or believe in them in any way, you simply have to follow the letter of the instruction to be “toeing the line”. There is an inherent malicious coloring to the term that is important, where people that only toe the line are bad people.

    edit: It needs to imply that you’re searching for ways to break a rule and get away with it on a technicality.

    edit2: This got me curious enough to google the origin of the term, and it actually has a wikipedia article, amusingly. Apparently it has a military origin, and the article makes no mention of the negative connotations I mentioned. This makes me think my personal interpretation is actually incorrect, and I now wonder why I picked up on it. In the US, toeing the line does have a subtle negative connotation to it, and people that do it are looked down on somewhat.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line













  • No, it’s been around for awhile. In US law, any book over 95 years old is considered public property, and can be shared for free. So, there’s volunteers that take old books and scan them, then put the digital versions online for everybody.

    If you’d like to make digital copies of things from your native language/culture and add them to the collection, I imagine that’d probably be fine. I’m not part of the project though, so I don’t know the details of how these are submitted/who you need to talk to/etc.