some of my ocs sitting down politely

Commission for @veloxaraptor !! Their lovely Vanya with Felassan in his bark muncher outfit :3c

Hey @elodieunderglass leucistic fur seal!

Thank you so much! Little mozzarella stick. Little unseasoned chicken wing. Little cocktail sausage

Not me losing my mind over a book series that ended 9 years ago.

Ohh!!! I love this series! It felt like a hidden gem when I found it!

It’s so good. Why is historical fiction but with dragons such a good concept? Also!! Laurence forgetting his entire past as an aviator and everyone dancing around all the horrible things that went down!! I eat that kinda stuff up!!! I accidentally did nothing but read for 2 hours this morning at the coffee shop. For ed myself to stop when I finished part one.

I was watching someone play Undertale for the first time on youtube and the comments were like "I hope the fandom doesnt ruin this for you" Because of how common it is for youtubers to drop Undertale because of the overbearing fandom.

And it got me thinking and I think I know why this happens. Its because the neutral endings arent fun.

If I hadnt known that pacifist was the 'best' route when I first played it and gone for it.........I dont think I would have liked Undertale if I got a neutral route.

Yeah you are told you can replay and get a better ending, but if I had played Undertale and gotten one of the endings thats just a phone call and then was told "replay the whole thing to get a better ending" I wouldnt have done it. I would have felt like I wasted 8 hours.

And I think thats where the toxicity towards new players comes from.

Because even if people dont want to admit it, they know the neutral endings will probably make people go "that was the game everyone hyped up? Thats it?" and think it was ok at best. So people backseat HARD to try and make sure people get the most out of the game.

Because if you went in truly blind to Undertale and got a 'phonecall' ending, why in the world would you work hard for another ending that might just be another phone call. You would only know that the Pacifist ending is really THAT GOOD, if someone tells you.

Undertale is one of my favorite games of all time. But only because I knew to play Pacifist first

oh hi Mark

I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.

the admiralty discussing laurence after the events of empire of ivory

Speaking of which…

Solas 🧡

Ingredients of a Temeraire book

pick any 11 out of 16

Will Laurence + The Onion headlines