sleepy bitch

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.

How did I manage before ChatGPT... I failed the old fashioned way, by just not turning in assignments.

do y’all remember before direct messages tumblr had a dumbass ask limit of 10 per hour and communication was impossible until they introduced dumbass fan mail and we were basically sending telegraphs back in forth trying to communicate those were…dark times

Do y'all remember when they finally gave us direct messages and instead of doing it normally, they gave it to a few people at a time and we had to infect each other with it like a virus

remember when any post with more than like 6 people talking was unreadably smushed except for the last few additions remember when any post of over 500 characters became a link back to op’s blog readmore style remember when video and audio posts had about a 10% chance of working when you click play

As a recent user I love finding out shit like this from older users. What the fuck guys???? Why were you USING IT AT ALL?!??

believe it or not, we liked that more

its worth noting that immediately after these updates that made everything better, we were all angry about it

To this day, XKit has an option to turn Tumblr’s background color back to the old one because of just how angry people got when they changed it. Genuine widespread rage at the color change.

The old color was also blue, just a slightly different shade.

Tumblr sometimes feels like the closest thing that some of us get to the community of an old fashioned small town neighborhood. People will stop and gush about each other’s special interests. They’ll notice someone being a bit of a crank but overlook it because they’re alright in other ways…just part of the neighborhood. And anytime there’s a general change to the infrastructure everyone becomes old man Jenkins: “I didn’t vote for this! What kind of fatheads are running the council now?!”

soon may the wellerman come, your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb

the reviews are in

So I saw a post, I forget on which site, where someone found out in real time that Emet-Selch was, in fact, a character from critically acclaimed MMO Final Fantasy XIV and not an original character for a Stardew Valley mod

Naturally, I had to find said mod and try it out

So for the past couple days I've been playing the long-awaited sequel to SDV, Stardew Valley But Also Emet-Selch Is Here

Hmmmm I wonder who could have left this strange note...

BASTARD SIGHTED

BASTARD CONTACTED

I don't think he's happy to see me

But that sounds like permission to come back :3 :3 :3

Hey. Hey. Wake up

Whether by oversight or design, his door is not locked like other npcs', and therefore I can bother him at any hour of the day

He went to the egg hunt and didn't have a good time at all :(

They should comb their hair🙄🙄

how i'm handling my students using AI to write papers:

-don't accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don't know the meaning of

-ask to see their original file where they "wrote" the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like "certainly! here's an essay about...."

-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don't, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.

And this is much better than the immediate accusations. Some students have a good vocabulary. Stop accusing them of faking their essays without proof, and this is a good way to check.

Fellow students please stop using AI, go back to promising not to kill the school nerd if they do all your homework or something.

Sonic's burger store has recognized the strategic importance of America's drink infrastructure and implemented tamper seals to prevent your large Diet Dr. Pepper being poisoned by ISIS lone wolfs or seditious court advisors

soda hymen

"UM OP DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT THIS INNOCUOUS VIDEO/IMAGE/POST IS ACTUALLY FETISH CONTENT"

everyone is correct in that i missed a crucial option 3. i'm into that actually

4. Please consider some internal exploration of why you "recognized" this as fetish content.

Devils sacrament?!

5. All content on the internet is fetish content if you believe in yourself.

BEHOLD!

Fetish content!

distraught that i understand this

how did suzanne collins go from writing for this

to writing this

WAIT, HOLD THE FUCK UP

HOLY FUCK WOW

She got tired of writing for kids so wrote a story where they kill each other damn

You missed the stage where she made the series about the kid who visited the underground world under New York where rats and bats and spiders and cockroaches talk and you can ride the bats and it was amazing

A series

An addition:

Small dogs are good dogs too!

top gun is great because tony scott was like “i want to make a movie about sunsets” and the us navy was like “No you’re gonna make recruitment propanganda for the navy” and val kilmer was like “the studio has tricked me, juilliard trained val kilmer, into being here, so i’m going to portray a closeted homosexual” and tom cruise was like “i’m in a ray bans commercial!”

you know it really isnt immoral, if you do it right, to raise cows and sheep for meat. so. well. i think there should be a story about, vampires who have a town of humans that they keep well-maintained, so long as the humans donate their blood once a month, like vampire blood farm stuff

but instead of antagonistic everyone's like. no he's a nice man you leave the count alone. he keeps us safe and cared for and he just needs a lil snack now and then, it dont hurt anyone. like a cow that loves the farmer and the farmer that loves the cow, even with both knowing one will end up on the other's table. because its like. its like. cows just have such pretty eyes, you know? they love you so much. i think it should be like that

literallyyyyyy

i want to be part of a vampire's herd. and i want him to pet me like a cow

It's only safe for humans to donate a full unit of blood every eight weeks (and even if they only manage to get a partial out of you, they still recommend you wait 2 months), so our hypothetical count would need to have 56 healthy, non-anemic humans in his pool, presuming he needs a full 500 mL of blood each feeding, and he needs to feed once per day.

Obviously, a vampire family will need a larger community to care for, scaling linearly with the number of adult members of the family, assuming the above blood intake.

This still lets a vampire build a healthy relationship with his herd, presuming that he has Traditional Human Dinner with his donor before feeding, or some other social bonding ritual, on a rotating basis.

official vampire post

A lot of people genuinely do hate or dismiss romance novels because they think all sexual frankness in fiction is immoral and harmful, or because they think women (and only women) are too stupid to know fiction from reality, or because they think it’s gross and laughable for women (especially ones they don’t consider fuckable) to have sexual desires, or because they automatically assume that anything popular with women is inferior, or because they only care about fiction being formulaic or light entertainment when it’s something women like. This doesn’t mean that every romance novel is great and deep and progressive, but these people aren’t coming from a good place with their criticism and they don’t deserve a pass.

As an alternative to 'sugar, spice, and everything nice'

I present: 'salt, vinegar, and everything sinister'

do y'all remember when they found all that tf art in Osamu Tezuka's drawer post-mortem because I think about it often

anyway keep chasing your bliss and draw weird shit, god knows we need that right now