a-study-in-darkness

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In hindsight it's very insulting to be told that flunking out of college due to adhd is actually "quite common"

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when sherlock said “taking your own life. interesting expression, taking it from who? once it's over, it's not you who'll miss it. your own death is something that happens to everyone else. your life is not your own, keep your hands off it.” i almost cried

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Something I don't think we talk enough about in discussions surrounding AI is the loss of perseverance.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Idk I'm just really worried about kids having to grow up in a world where (for a variety of reasons beyond just AI) they're not given the chance to struggle through new and challenging things like we used to.

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(Sound on.) We’re all doomed.

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New school year, new start. Coming up this semester is German 101, Forensic Anthropology, Anth Pop Culture and Consumerism, and Cultural Resource Management. Excited about each one for different reasons. It all starts tomorrow. I'm not completely unpacked yet after moving into my dorm room. I really like this one, though. I only have a single room and two suite mates. The room is definitely larger than the one I was in last year and isn't dirty like that one was. It's off to a good start for now.

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Until recently, most human evolution experts thought humans only started speaking around 200,000 years ago. Professor Mithen’s new research, published this month, suggests that rudimentary human language is at least eight times older. His analysis is based on a detailed study of all the available archaeological, paleo-anatomical, genetic, neurological and linguistic evidence.

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My opinion of Indiana Jones movies:

1. Lost Arc, it was pretty good- I see why it got popular. Tweed suits are really 😍 Marion is mad when she sees him, and talks about them having had a relationship when she was his student 🚩

2. Temple of Doom, Short-Round 😬 dumb blonde and it’s banned in India for being SO racist i mean it’s pretty awful

3. Last Crusade, this is actually my favorite one. It’s super slept on good origin story father son dynamic super sweet

4. Crystal Skull, a big ole pile of 💩 -I mean what the actual f- I hate this movie so much.

5. Dial of Destiny, I think this is actually what IJ is supposed to be about. They captured it. History buff sees history, fights nazi’s- steals history from nazi’s that’s his WHOLE THING it always was. End it off with a lil family reunion and it’s pretty cute too

P.s- the reason temple of doom and crystal skull are not only bad but just absolute intolerable disgraces is because Indiana Jones as a product had so much capacity for good! An anthropology professor who is an archaeologist that steals stolen artifacts from nazi’s can teach people SO MUCH about history and culture! It could have done so much to help stop the spread of racism and looting and misinformation

…- and instead it spread propaganda

It did no research on Indian culture, it pushed the concept of them being savages and in alignment with the American Christian Devil -pushing Americans to hate the Middle East without knowing a fact about them. This movie could have taught real information, it could have taught about genuine Indian culture to help bridge the gap between what Americans think and reality.

My personal rebuke of this film is Shia LaBeouf playing a teenager? That was weird. I’m not from the fifties so I don’t get it I guess but the relationships were cringe and felt forced. -but an entirely more important issue is wtf with all the aliens?! First of all Russian spies, surviving a nuclear blast- I mean some times the plot can be a bit meandering but this is just pulling things from a hat. This is insane, nothing correlates, nothing means anything. El Dorado was made up by colonizers to give them more reason to loot things from Aztec and Mayan cultures (that’s why it’s a Spanish word). When we give credit for great feats away to fictional creatures we are stealing the credit owed to the people who actually made it. Saying aliens built temples and pyramids is racist.

Indiana Jones was a tool that could have accomplished so much good, and instead it did evil

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“Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

— Fredrik Backman

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Franz Kafka

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The website of the Columbia Law Review, one of the oldest and most prestigious legal journals in the country, has been down since Monday. At the time of this broadcast, ColumbiaLawReview.org shows a static homepage informing visitors that the site is “under maintenance.” Well, that’s not exactly true. In a stunning move, the board of directors of the Columbia Law Review decided to take down the website after the publication’s student editors refused the board’s request to halt the publication of an academic article written by Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt publication of the piece. They refused the request and published the piece online Monday morning. In response, the board, which is made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school, shut down the law review’s website. After the website was taken down, student editors uploaded the article to a publicly accessible website, where it’s gone viral. The article begins, “The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination. This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension,” unquote. The article is written by Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights lawyer completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. Last November, the Harvard Law Review refused to publish a similar, shorter article it had solicited from Rabea, even after it was initially accepted, fully edited and fact-checked. In both cases, the article would have been the first time that either the Harvard Law Review or the Columbia Law Review had ever published a Palestinian legal scholar.

The video interview with Eghbariah, a transcript of the interview, and a full copy of the censored article, can be found on Democracy Now (5th of June, 2024).

Here's also a direct link to Eghbariah's article:

“Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept”

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hey sorry your boyfriend said that russian classics are about that life is bleak. yeah he meant dostoyevsky and tolstoy. no, he didn't look beyond any of the lowest lows of the stories. he didn't even see the overarching themes of beauty and hope and connection. frankly we have all been laughing about him and we're gonna beat him up now. sorry

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very few of us are what we seem

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“I’m afraid of getting cancer from the cadmium in my painting supplies” I’m not 😌 I love you cadmium yellow. I love you vermillion red. I love you uranium orange, haven’t worked with you but I love you nevertheless. Most of all I love you arsenic green.

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Mary Shelley’s Mathilda

summer semester art project, acrylic on canvas

more pictures and text under the cut

Short novelette Mathilda written by Mary Shelley, the mother of Frankenstein herself, touched me in a certain way since the very moment I read it. Is it the authors writing style? The autobiographical elements snuck into it? The book not being shy portraying taboo elements and feminist ideas, unlike great majority of other books written in the early 19th century? Perhaps all of it.

I really wanted to pay homage to this piece of literature, moments in the plot that struck with me, and to Mary Shelley herself. Correct me if i’m mistaken, but to this day I don’t think there’s any collection of illustrations nor paintings inspired by this written piece, and I’m very proud and honoured to be the first one!

Here! Despite disagreements on my vision between me and my art professors, initial frustration with the poses (incredible thanks to my friend @the-gay-sailor for helping and mental support), months of work when i felt like what I’m doing is pointless, I am ready and satisfied with the result.

I hope you enjoy it as equally as I do :]

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I've been so frustrated with my executive dysfunction lately. This last semester very nearly had me giving up on college. So I have goals for this summer while I'm back home.

* eat healthier

* exercise for body and mind

* reasses my medications

* work on creative projects

* practice ADHD control techniques