Obviously Clever

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.

their identical expressions killed me

my crack team of internet addled 16-24 year olds have been working day and night to invent a belief system that is near identical to that of the average white father in the 1950s. No its ok we are using words that are newer and also dumber.

the monkees is great because boyce and hart were like “we want to make approachable pop music opposing the vietnam draft” and bob rafelson and bert schneider were like “no you’re gonna make recruitment propaganda for heretofore unthinkable innovations in deconstructive televisual media” and mike nesmith was like “the studio has tricked me, closeted homosexual mike nesmith, into being here, so i’m going to portray a closeted homosexual” and davy jones was like “i’m in a davy jones commercial!”

the pope copies brandy’s necklace

"lolcow" is ultimately a colloquial term describing a phenomena that actually precedes the internet (and well, most of history too) but I can't think of another shorthand with implications that are tacitly understood the same way when gesturing to the spectacle that the world makes around acceptable targets. you go on reddit and someone has crossposted a Courtroom Freakout video like that's some shit anyone should want to derive entertainment from. your mom's cohort watches Dumb Criminal Fail youtube compilations and nod their heads as the perpetrator of a failed robbery bleeds out on floor of a kfc like that's some shit anyone should want to see. your peers are heavily invested in the Worthless E-Drama Industrial Complex, where thousands of people are made collateral of all kinds of violence in the name of forwarding the narrative of the spectacle. and you can't ask any of these people why any of this behavior is normal to them unless you want to be accused of condoning immoral tendencies, compulsion to punish The Other already metastasized in their minds. it sucks how easy it is to kill your own interest in this shit but not anyone else's.

it's time for top/bottom discourse to end. the only thing i want to hear about is which one is the sex crier.

The reason they put the death penalty on the table for Luigi is as a threat. Both to the people of America and to Luigi himself.

They want him to take a plea. They want him to plead guilty. To swear in front of a court of law that he did the crime and the NYPD solved the case.

They don't want to have to prove it. They don't want to take it to trial and have the world see what a farce it all is.

So they said "say you're guilty or we'll kill you".

That's why the death penalty is on the table. To remind him and the American people that the punishment for not blindly agreeing with the police is death.

uihhhm waiter. theres a challenging theme in my soup

my solution to copyright is that everything unconditionally becomes public domain with the creator's death. anything held by a group will lose their rights with the death of its leader; whether it be a CEO for corporations or a president for state media. this will solve no problems but will lead to extremely funny assassinations

Fun fact: the creator of dwarf fortress has a contingency for this in his will. The source code of the game gets publicly released upon his death, unless he’s murdered. Then it stays locked away forever

AHHHH Sequel

my hottest take

Counter point, those machines can make me a peach sprite.

guys did you know the tech in that nefangled machine revolutionized preemie healthcare

yeah the guy who invented them made incredibly precise infusion pumps (as opposed to gravity fed ivs) which not only meant they could give medications to teeny tiny babies safely, it's also used for insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines. the key element is that it's a peristaltic pump so the liquid stays in sterile tubing for safety

(unholy drink cloaca uses it to dispense precise amounts of flavored sugar syrup)

Perhaps if I own a jacket for every occasion on god's green earth I will know inner peace