naeshira

[naeshira]

so Bobby has a shirt of the girls but consider the girls having a Bobby shirt ✨

[naeshira]

I understand the value of artistic liberties but what exactly is Yugio's haircut supposed to be. I've wondered this since childhood

[naeshira]

Thinking about something

[naeshira]

“average Doctor is really really cool” factoid actually just statistical error. average Doctor is very uncool. The ninth doctor who wore a leather jacket 24/7 and told a dalek to kill himself is an outlier and should not have been counted

[naeshira]

[naeshira]

TINY BOOKSHOP demo (2024) dev. Neoludic Games

[naeshira]

Éowyn (credit kolleander on Insta)

[naeshira]

I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

[naeshira]

i love discovering new music. but there's actually nothing like rediscovering old music. like, hello me from 5, 10, 15 years ago. so good to see you. same heart, i see. god, i love you.

[naeshira]

a lot of things get on my nerves. im constantly annoyed. and i also have a deep love of humanity and the world but everything is really annoying

[naeshira]

[naeshira]

Never gonna be normal about I-Spy books <3

[naeshira]

i hear a good lyric and start mentally holding up blorbos like im in the home depot paint aisle comparing swatches

[naeshira]

Doggust Day 9: Reading. Taking a quick detour to work on some bookmarks for Illo Mart next month! If I ever stop accidentally reading until the sun rises, I won't know who I am anymore.

[naeshira]

Generally in favor of coyotes. Wolves, as well. Bobcats. That sort of thing.

[naeshira]

I feel like Robert Pattinson was born to be a strange old man actor. Like he's already great but he's really gonna hit his peak when he's around 70