Person Under Construction

@omocat I had some really good ideas for plushies you should sell! It's ok, I don't need credit.

Somewhat inspired by @fishysplayhouse's Mari plushies

"DNI: Standard DNI criteria" is so funny, like anyone checking if they should interact is gonna be familiar enough with dni's to know the standard redundant options. really exposes the purpose of them, they signal an in-group to other people with the same DNI rather than actually being a warning for potentially unwanted interactions.

me when im a self-identifying Bad Person and someone says not to interact: "oh, thanks for letting me know, i'll be off"

DNI's are functionless posturing.

You have a block button for a reason.

If you really have information you want people to know before following, try a Before You Follow. It's basically the good twin of a DNI. Rather than being a prescriptive instruction that the reader needs to somehow divine (but can't ask questions about without risking violating the DNI), it gives information to the reader that they can then evaluate given their own boundaries. Plus, someone who is considering following you is more likely to look at your profile than someone scrolling through their dash.

For example, here's a snippet of one from a friend:

Nothing shaming, the same cover-your-ass disclaimer as "minors DNI", encourages good faith clarifying questions, etc

I'm not gonna say it can't fall victim to the same distortion as whatever initial benefit there might have been in a DNI, but at least they start from the desire to inform, not deter.

(via the author, at the Ex Bird place)

Tweet by Joseph Fasano:

"I first wrote this on the back of a student's paper, and two weeks later he turned in a paper about an issue he really cared about. It earned an A.

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper

Now I send it back into your own hands.

I hear you. I know this life is hard now.

I know your days are precious on this earth.

But what are you trying to be free of?

The living? The miraculous task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

-Joseph Fasano"

Second tweet by Joseph Fasano:

"For the record, I believe in stillness, contemplation, & not needing to "work" or prove anything in moments of pure being. Perhaps my poem is misunderstood by some. It's not about drudgery or homework. It's about learning a life lesson when you get addicted to shortcuts. It's saying that if you get too attached to that trick, you'll make similar mistakes when it really matters: love."

Reply tweet by Debora Ewing:

"this is so true, and gets to the heart of the Al issue: for WHAT are you trying to make your work easier? what are you going to do with the brain cells you didn't engage?"

Reply by Joseph Fasano:

Heart emoji. Candle emoji.

Groundbreaking. A poem asks a question, people answer it, poet insists that they just don't get it, so someone restates the question with slightly different wording, bet they won't listen to or engage with answers either.

I do not think that it is good for students to use AI to write papers - it accomplishes nothing and causes real harm to the environment via resource consumption.

I also don't believe that laziness exists.

"what are you trying to be free of" and "well what else are you doing with your brain?" Are two sides of the same coin, admonishing the student who does not want to write a paper.

The answer is universally "Things that the student actually cares about, is passionate about."

If the student has been presented with a topic (usually a piece of literature) and has no thoughts or opinions about it that they feel motivated to write down and present to you, whose fault is that? What did you do, as a teacher, to actually interest students in the work and prompt them to react to it?

It is important that the student was allowed to write a paper about an issue he really cared about.

Why wasn't that the assignment in the first place, though?

I understand the original poem, and how it's not about drudgery or homework. But it's still incredibly dismissive of the experience from the student's perspective. 'addicted to shortcuts' is pathologizing the basic human drive to streamline or eliminate -tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding-

'If you use shortcuts with things you hate, you'll use them on things you love!' which is absolute bullshit and not how humans operate.

I feel sorry for the students of both of these teachers.

Are we sure it wasn't? It reads to me like the student was given that assignment, but defaulted to using AI because they thought it was some boring make-work rather than an opportunity to express something they did care about.

Stop and consider why you are striving to frame this as the student being in the wrong rather than the teacher. The adult being right and the child being wrong about the nature of the assignment and its importance.

Who has a responsibility to whom in a classroom?

Who has power?

Who has agency?

We know that the assignment was not originally something that the student really cared about because the first paper is contrasted with the second paper.

The student is not here, in the discourse, to explain their rationale or answer the questions posed.

Lots of assignments in school -are- boring make work, not opportunities. Denying this about the current state of academia helps no one. I highly recommend this video:

https://youtu.be/fe-SZ_FPZew?si=l-etpZZuhRQbcsOz

Mostly because it seemed that comment was letting teachers off the hook to effectively care and communicate that care.

"Write an essay on something you're passionate about" could mean "Write an essay on something you're passionate about because I genuinely care what you have to say and want to help you effectively formulate opinions" or it could mean "Write an essay on something you're passionate about because the state needs a certain amount of benchmarks and I'm burnt out on coming up with new things rn".

Though looking at the twitter post again, it seems strangely judgey towards hypothetical students reading it when the entire anecdote seemed to me to be showing an effective way to communicate that care.

Bah. Yeah. It really should've been geared towards teachers about how to connect with their students.

(via the author, at the Ex Bird place)

Tweet by Joseph Fasano:

"I first wrote this on the back of a student's paper, and two weeks later he turned in a paper about an issue he really cared about. It earned an A.

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper

Now I send it back into your own hands.

I hear you. I know this life is hard now.

I know your days are precious on this earth.

But what are you trying to be free of?

The living? The miraculous task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

-Joseph Fasano"

Second tweet by Joseph Fasano:

"For the record, I believe in stillness, contemplation, & not needing to "work" or prove anything in moments of pure being. Perhaps my poem is misunderstood by some. It's not about drudgery or homework. It's about learning a life lesson when you get addicted to shortcuts. It's saying that if you get too attached to that trick, you'll make similar mistakes when it really matters: love."

Reply tweet by Debora Ewing:

"this is so true, and gets to the heart of the Al issue: for WHAT are you trying to make your work easier? what are you going to do with the brain cells you didn't engage?"

Reply by Joseph Fasano:

Heart emoji. Candle emoji.

Groundbreaking. A poem asks a question, people answer it, poet insists that they just don't get it, so someone restates the question with slightly different wording, bet they won't listen to or engage with answers either.

I do not think that it is good for students to use AI to write papers - it accomplishes nothing and causes real harm to the environment via resource consumption.

I also don't believe that laziness exists.

"what are you trying to be free of" and "well what else are you doing with your brain?" Are two sides of the same coin, admonishing the student who does not want to write a paper.

The answer is universally "Things that the student actually cares about, is passionate about."

If the student has been presented with a topic (usually a piece of literature) and has no thoughts or opinions about it that they feel motivated to write down and present to you, whose fault is that? What did you do, as a teacher, to actually interest students in the work and prompt them to react to it?

It is important that the student was allowed to write a paper about an issue he really cared about.

Why wasn't that the assignment in the first place, though?

I understand the original poem, and how it's not about drudgery or homework. But it's still incredibly dismissive of the experience from the student's perspective. 'addicted to shortcuts' is pathologizing the basic human drive to streamline or eliminate -tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding-

'If you use shortcuts with things you hate, you'll use them on things you love!' which is absolute bullshit and not how humans operate.

I feel sorry for the students of both of these teachers.

Are we sure it wasn't? It reads to me like the student was given that assignment, but defaulted to using AI because they thought it was some boring make-work rather than an opportunity to express something they did care about.

Ah yes, the symbol of wholeness and infinity

The uwubuwus

The Owobowos

The ouwobowos

y'all awooboros was right there

@quonit37 actually it's a coyote, not a fox. false alarm!

one of my fav tumblr phenomenons is when there's a poll where all the answers are just patently absurd and yet somehow there's a clear winner

it'll be like 'which of the world's oceans is the most fuckable' and i'll be like hmm well i'm not an oceanfucker so i don't really have an opinion on this but if i had to choose then i guess the pacific and then i vote and like 60% of people voted for the pacific and its like ok whats going on there

Okay now i have to know

Reblog for bigger sample size!

JESUS?? 

JESUS????

i had no idea they were so frickin huge

I love them so much because they’re about as sharp as a baseball and their anatomy is ridiculous to the point of them literally being classified as plankton for years because they just sort of get blown around by the ocean and look confused, but because they lay more eggs than ANY OTHER VERTEBRATE IN EXISTENCE, evolution can’t stop them

Why is no big predator coming and gnawing on them?

Their biggest defense is that they’re massive and have super tough skin, but they do get hunted by sharks or sea lions sometimes and they just sort of float there like ‘oh bother’ as it happens

Even funnier, because they eat nothing but jellyfish they’re really low in nutritional value anyway, so they basically survive by being not worth eating because they’re like a big floating rice cracker wrapped in leather.

So basically the only reason natural selection hasn’t taken care if them is because they are the most useless fish

yes, they’ve perfected uselessness to the point of being unstoppable

a true inspiration

Evolution didn’t care about fittest or best, it cares about the CARE MINIMUM.

Which is a being a giant leather rice cake.

AUTO REBLOG OF PACIFIC SUNFISH. MOTHER NATURE AT HER MOST WHIMSICAL. THE FARTHEST YOU GET FROM FISH DESIGN AND STILL CALL IT A FISH. AKA FLOATING CARDBOARD IN FISH FORM.

They aren’t useless, you monsters! The fact that they eat so many jellyfish is their exact ecological purpose. They are a key part of controlling jellyfish blooms. Sunfish keep jellyfish from taking up all the available space

All hail these jellyfish vacuums who make sure the other delicate creatures of the deep are not accidentally murdered by the jellyfish

Sea Roomba, you say?

After being in Japan for one of the Jellyfish blooms these giant floating rice cakes might be in my top three favorite fish now since they eat the damn things.

just so you understand how important it is for things to eat jellyfish, this is what jellyfish “blooms” look like

if anything we wish sunfish were twice as big. We used to think almost nothing eats jellyfish, but thank goodness we’re finding several other creatures snack on them, but very few specialize in them as much as sunfish do

@wtfgaylittlezooid

Another creature I think you’d like

A spooky and snakey little short I've been working on! 🧡 Happy Halloween!

hot take incoming: revolt and revolution doesn't create a fair and equitable society. it creates a power vaccum, which is terrifying because it is incredibly fertile ground for all sorts of warlords, aspiring tyrants, paramilitary extremists, and imperial powers to swoop in and start doing atrocities over it. You can put a new society in a power vaccum, but so can anyone else, and most of those potential outcomes are going to be horrifying, not to mention to the hellscape interim period.

To create a fair and equitable society you need to know civics, administration, diplomacy, and yes, statecraft. Yes they're boring and unglamorous and icky and gross. But i promise that you need them. They are mandatory. Not optional.

Oh god, this takes me back to that time I was talking to an otherwise sensible person who is absolutely a leftist, and generally a great person. And then, out of nowhere, they tell me they're voting for Trump because "only by destroying the country will the communist revolution happen".

I had absolutely no idea what to say to them, and still don't.

The Revolution truly is the Rapture for leftists.

You guys remember the Reign of Terror, right? Everybody remembers the Reign of Terror?

How about the Red Terror?

Let's not forget China's Great Leap Forward, in which about 40 million people literally starved to death in 1959. Everyone in the country went hungry, and that stress is possibly the reason why diabetes is so rampant among older Chinese.

"The old regime was bad" and "The Revolution killed a lot of people and resulted in a new regime that was also bad" are ideas that can and should coexist.

People who subscribe to accelerationist ideas of "vote in fascists so the people will rise up" 1) drastically overestimate the willingness of their neighbours to rise up as long as the trains run on time and it's only "weird" people getting killed, and 2) demonstrate their abject disregard for people who depend on a functioning society with things like healthcare and such.

In a way, they are the mirror image of gun-owning right-wingers: they fantasise about a situation in which they, they personally, are called upon to save the day with violence. Just like every "feral hogs" or "what if the store gets robbed" 2A extremist is just itching to be a hero and shoot some shoplifter, these accelerationist "leftists" are just itching for some grande old massacres of cops, politicians, and the wrong kind of neighbours.

They don't want to solve the problem, they want to be the solution, at any cost.

It's egotistical, infantile fantasising. People want to be Batman, Robin Hood, or Luke Skywalker for a day.

And, like I said. As long as it's only black people, jews, muslims, and chronically ill tranny faggots like myself going into the gas chambers, the vast majority of people won't rise up. No matter the excesses of a fascist regime. Germany wasn't defeated because the civilian population rose up against industrialised mass murder, it was defeated because Hitler was warlike enough that the US and USSR couldn't let him do as he pleased, which they were more than willing to do before he attacked them.

On a similar note: does your revolution have a clear plan for how I'm gonna get my meds?

And bear in mind, I'm relatively okay without them. There've been several times where I've had to miss a few days and it's been manageable. Not good, but manageable. I'm not gonna be much use in your revolution without them.

But what about for the people who can't? The people who need this medication to live? How is your revolution gonna ensure they get what they need? And not after, but during?

Unless you can answer that question in a way that makes sense and accounts for the contingencies, why should I trust you can offer what you promise?

This is feeding ducks bread all over again.

I know this is tempting but please don't feed immolationdeer gasoline; the refined hydrocarbons aren't good for them in a metabolic sense and this can really mess them up. Also if they're getting all the refined hydrocarbons they want, they're not eating resinous (mostly coniferous) deadwood off the forest floor and in suburban areas that can meaningfully contribute to wildfires over time. If you really must hand feed immolationdeer in your area because they're so cute and so sweet and you want pictures of you handfeeding wildlife like a Disney princess, consider carrying around fatwood twigs , natural pine resin chunks, or even just paraffin and sawdust based fire starters. These are much closer to their natural diet while still being rich enough to count as treats, and provide much more nutrition.

don't listen to her lies

Put fire in deer mouth very safe for fire gasoline with deer keep safe and healthy no bad for deer all best thing fire gasoline very safe in deer mouth :)

To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.

"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.

Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.

(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)

Now I want a Big Dumb Action Movie with an exchange like:

It's a unique type of frustration when you agree that a character is deeply flawed but other people keep missing what's actually wrong with them and assigning them new flaws that they don't even have it's like free my man he did none of that. He did a bunch of other shit tho.

ursula k le guin: does a utopia with something rotten and evil at the center that spoils the whole thing seem more plausible to you and feel more real in your gut than the same utopia without that?

everyone: my ideology is good because I want to save the kid. I passed the test. I am a better person than other people. they are going to give me a medal.

I should be working, but instead I’m watching a YouTube video explaining how to kill Mario fourteen times in one combat round in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

Where’s the link OP

Link isn’t in Paper Mario.

I had to triple check to make sure this post was made before this GDQ run and you weren't specifically riffing off this: