I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

This is also a good string on this topic.

For the foreseeable future, and maybe for the rest of your life, the first question anyone is going to ask themselves after reading a written document from you is "did they really write this?" And unfortunately, this is an easy question to answer, because GPT has a very distinctive tone and if you don't read or write much you can't detect it enough to fudge it.

As a professor, I know when my students are using GPT. The problem is proving it beyond a doubt. So you can get away with this sort of thing in high school and college, but someday you're gonna have to write a cover letter or an email to a client. And then you'll either have to write something for the first time in your life, or you'll rely on your old friend GPT, and either way your cover letter will get thrown in the garbage.

There are no academic integrity committees or redos in the HR office. Hard as it may be to believe, we're giving you these assignments for a reason.

I miss when everyone on my dash listened to Welcome to Night Vale so there’s be a good chance that on any ole day someone would reblog a quote that would grab me by the throat and forcibly ascend me to a higher plane where I understood myself and the universe better and with more kindness but also a little spook

“The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present” are you kidding me this quote has propelled me through at least three emotional crises

“The desert seems vast, even endless. And yet scientists tell us that somewhere, even now, there is snow.” That quote literally got me through grieving my brother like WTNV goes HARD

A List of Some of My Favorite Quotes From This Insane Podcast:

I discovered this podcast at the beginning of high school, and let me tell you, it rewired my synapses.

Not only was it my first experience with positive LGBT representation, it was the show I clung to when everything else went to shit. Whatever was going on in my life, I knew I had this show in my corner, making me laugh, making me cry, making me feel okay about my place in the universe.

I owe the creators of this podcast more than I could express.

"the lights over the Arby's" is such an intrinsically queer piece of writing that it hits me *hard* every time.

"We will never be the same again. But here's a little secret for you: no one is ever the same thing again after anything. You are never the same twice, and much of your unhappiness comes from trying to pretend that you are. Accept that you are different each day, and do so joyfully, recognizing it for the gift it is. Work within the desires and goals of the person you are currently, until you aren't that person anymore, and everything changes once again." (from Episode 75)

"The universe is vast. You are also vast. So is an ant. There are different sizes of infinity."

i have been slowly working my way through the podcast. (i’m still on episode 68 or something.)

and mentions like this remind me why i love it so much, and make me wonder why, in the absemce of listening to it, i forget how much i love it.

Whoever runs dropouts instagram is killing me in the comments under their video announcing that the subscription price is changing

missed the best one

HAPPY FIRST CONTACT DAY !!! don’t worry guys only 39 more years until we meet the vulcans 🖖

38 Years to go!!!!

mentally taking a drag of my mental cigarette because I don’t smoke but life has been very smokable lately

Shipping a man in a canon het relationship with another man but I'm shaking my head the whole time so you know it's not out of misogynistic disregard for the woman character

i have a suggestion

lets hear out tumblr user isuggestpolyamory

I would dearly love for more people to be capable of differentiating between public risk and personal risk.

Examples: drinking is a personal risk. Drinking and driving is a public risk. Going scuba diving is a personal risk. Running a scuba shop with faulty equipment is a public risk. Riding a bicycle without a helmet is a personal risk. Not maintaining public transport safety standards is a public risk. Foraging for mushrooms is a personal risk. Advertising a mushroom identification app that uses shoddy AI is a public risk. Elective surgery is a personal risk. Not wearing a mask in a doctor's waiting room when you are sick with a contagious illness is a public risk.

I could go on just about forever here. But it's a really important distinction and it drives me nuts when they get conflated, and it's so common.

"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"

MYSTERIOUS LOTUS CASEBOOK 莲花楼 — 2023, dir. Guo Hu, Ren Hai Tao

i can't be the only one who's just straight-up ... bored with women hating themselves. my mom keeps lamenting to me how upset she is about her gray hair. my friend stares at her laugh lines every day in agony. my sister loses sleep over the horrible unbearable thought of looking fat. and every time these women i love open up to me, i can't help but think ... then stop staring at yourself? stop drowning yourself, narcissus, and just fucking live your life instead of sitting in front of a mirror obeying cosmetic corporations' lies. just stop it. this is getting ridiculous. you're too smart to be falling for this bullshit. "oh no but these men who hate women told me that if i'm ugly i'm worthless!" girl if you actually believe that then good luck. but i am getting worse at being supportive of people whose nonsense worldviews keep them trapped in pain. stop looking at yourself start fucking living i am pleading you deserve to be happy and it is stupid that you disagree

Someone in the comments said "you really said just stop being insecure" and yes :) make an effort to stop spiralling about your looks, challenge insecure thoughts and stop doing things that lead to you feeling insecure.

I always come back to this: Do your insecurities match your morals?

Do you truly believe that having belly fat makes people disgusting? That the media should have final say on how you feel about yourself? If you don't believe it and there is a mismatch between your moral beliefs and your gut reaction to your appearance...

Then yeah. Stop being insecure. It's work but it's worth it.

Promoting @sarkywoman 's tags as that's a perfectly distilled mantra:

I am not the exception to my beliefs

Every time I get ads for cars and jewelry and real estate it makes me laugh. You fool. You stupid fucking fool

i was so sad, i drew a little bat so i wouldn’t be sad. and now i am no longer sad.

here is a little bat to banish your sadness

This nice little bat reminds me of this other nice little bat who was drawn in the 1200s:

This is the only website where I routinely see people say things like “oh this reminds me of something I recently saw from the 1200s”

soooooooo I couldn't get this thought out of my head, so I finally buckled down and noodled around for a bit and made this little progress idic. just in time for pride month to be over lol. but yeah. fully gonna be using some of that temp tattoo paper I got for these, I think they'll work really well! and I wanna make stickers, too.

anyway, llap, y'all 🖖🌈✨

First Contact Day reblog 🐟🎉

Also I do want anyone who cares to to feel free to print these out on stickers/tattoos of your own, the more the merrier, I don't own this shit peace and love🖖

One of the highlights of the description of younger Kirk as a bookish and severe Academy instructor is that Gary Mitchell, the friend describing him that way, seems to have been his student back in the day and was trying to pass his notoriously difficult "think or sink" class at the Academy.

Present-day Mitchell mentions reading "that longhair stuff you like" to Kirk (now that he's acquired godly powers that include being able to read Spinoza) and there's this random lore drop about how Mitchell helped a lab technician with a crush on Kirk orchestrate her dating campaign, in hopes that it'd distract Kirk enough for Mitchell to survive his class.

It seems pretty widely accepted that Kirk had a romance with Mitchell himself at the time, which is not my take at all, BUT honestly it's hilarious to me that there's this whole Clueless-style "student matchmaking plot to get a strict teacher a girlfriend so he'll chill enough that you can pass the class" history established almost immediately about Kirk. Comedy gold, especially since Kirk and the lab technician ended up in a long-term relationship and he nearly married her.

Bonus: Kirk and Mitchell became close friends but Kirk is still incredulous at the idea of Mitchell voluntarily reading Spinoza in the episode. And when Mitchell flips into obnoxious god mode and describes Spinoza as simple and childish, Kirk is pretty evidently affronted and alarmed. It's not surprising that Kirk has big philosophy opinions given that futuristic humanism is half his personality, but the idea of him as a former philosophy instructor with Spinoza feelings who goes to space and still can't escape Bad Philosophy Takes is incredible. Even by Season 3, it's just like:

Watson writing The Three Garridebs, published in 1924: "For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain."

Sherlock Holmes, who has been taking Watson out to concerts, dinners, and vacations since 1881: "What the fuck?"