raven-of-chaos-and-insanity

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The alphabetized files at my ranger station lead to some interesting mental pictures

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The Onion continues to never miss

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Character, book, and author names under the cut

Adam Parrish- The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater

Ronan Lynch- The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater

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Need to see them pop out of Lou’s joker Honda civic, clown car style

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call me a dirty communist radical but I think everyone should know if they live near toxic waste

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Well shit, the Republicans brought a certain anti-online porn bill back to the table.

The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act.

This should alarm you guys.

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this is immensely funny to me

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This regime wants to exert even more control over the news and information that the public receives – or doesn’t even receive at all. That's why it is attacking publicly funded media like NPR and PBS. But it's also part of a ploy to gut vital public services and oversight in order to clear the way for more tax cuts (and subsidies) that will predominantly go to the super-rich and powerful corporations. Know the truth. (Art work by @doodlebymeg)

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It is November of 1893. You have just killed a vampire. Exhausted and worn, you close your eyes and rest.

You wake up. It is May of 1893. You are on a train en route to Transylvania. Your diary says you have had queer dreams lately.

You try to believe it.

(An old woman puts a rosary in your hands. You accept it without question.)

You are a guest in a castle you have never been in before (you recognize every hallway and know without trying that every door is locked). Your host is a man you have never met before (you killed him you killed him you killed him he had turned to dust and there was blood on the snow).

One morning you cut yourself while shaving.

There is nobody behind you in the pocket mirror’s reflection.

You turn fast, and the razor is like a Kukri knife in your hand.

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You should make tomorrow’s Tom Scott giving the papal acceptance speech at the Vatican

what the hell, sure.

todays tom has just been elected as pope and he is now giving the papal acceptable speech at the vatican. who allowed this.

posting that image of tom scott untill jet lag the game season 13 cut for time comes out on nebula: day 7

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“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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While I am absolutely against using AI to do your homework (and I'm against using generative AI for pretty much anything because it's a language learning model, it can't analyze), and I've never used generative AI, though I have seen how useless the results are when my PI (person in charge of my lab) uses it as a search engine, I do think the reliance on AI is at least in some part a symptom of a larger problem.

The first post the problem is addictive apps like tiktok, but I don't know what to do about that.

The other problem is I think with all the technology available, not including AI, both to students and teachers, the workload expected of students has become practically impossible to do while also living a reasonable life.

I will preface this by saying until my last semester of undergrad I had a 4.0, and in highschool I never had a grade lower than an A-. I am a fantastic student, I basically never have to study, and academic subjects have always come easy to me. So I am not a failing student railing against the institution. I'm a PhD student now, I chose to do more school.

In addition, my undergrad was 2019-2023, my sophomore year was online, the rest were in person. I did not have a job during the semester. I worked in a lab my senior and part of my junior year, but that was instead of classes, I got credit instead of getting paid. I graduated just when AI started producing things people would think about turning in, but only barely.

My freshman year I could just barely get all my work done and get 7 hours of sleep a night, but only because I had no social life. There was so much work to do that was automatically graded by the computer, so no professor or TA's time was taken up by it, so they could give as much as they wanted. I spent at least 12 hours a week, if not more, doing automatically graded busywork for 1 chemistry class. Other classes expected an enormous amount of papers, projects, or presentations, because technology meant that the work could physically be done quickly, typed, and researched with some cited images from google, and no professor had to carry it around, but the work still required as much thinking as it would have if I'd pasted my posters together by hand.

After we were back in person, it got so much worse. It was impossible to get all my work done and sleep even 6 hours a night. I had classes that required a paper every week, which would have been fine if they hadn't required other work as well, and if I didn't have 5 other classes as well. I had classes where I spent hours trying to understand the computer program they wanted us to use for that project, presentation, or even busy work, rather than just doing the work. In addition, I had professors fail to give all the instructions for projects or papers until a week before, or sometimes less, because they knew you could do it all from a computer in your dorm room, so no one could complain they didn't have time to go to the library or the store.

We also no longer had snow days or even real vacations during the semester because everything was turned in online, new instructions could be given to students by email, and class could be held online if the professor couldn't make it to campus. If you had a fever, you couldn't show up to class in person, but if you couldn't prove you were actively in the hospital, you better be on the zoom call the professor set up during the class.

Also, I don't know if it was new or if it's always been this way, but the attitude towards even officially excused absences was unconscionable, especially right after COVID. I had classes, and especially labs tell us that if we had more than 2 absences, even excuse ones, we should just drop the class because we would not be able to pass if we missed more than 2 days. And this was explicitly stated in at least 5 of the labs I took in undergrad.

All in all, the rise in students cheating with AI seems to be at least in part due to universities treating students like machines.

The classes where I got the most out of the work I did were classes where we handed in a draft of a paper, had it corrected by the professor, and then rewrote it and turned it in a second time for a grade. This seems like it would also be harder to cheat on with AI, especially the rewriting it step. These classes also tended to have less work overall because they weren't treating writing an entire paper as busywork.

Generative AI has destroyed academia.

In the next few decades we’re going to have thousands of people who don’t really know anything, and can’t do any critical thinking.

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there's a secret good sequel series that lives only in brain where finn and rey are force-sensitive foils to each other and they still spend movie #2 entirely apart but it's because they're exploring parallel and at time opposite relationships with the force and their place in the universe

and in my secret good version. okay hear me out. the han-leia kid is a hot lady. okay. are we following. and she DOES abandon luke's new jedi, not by falling and murdering people, but by stealing the millennium falcon and running off to escape responsibility and swaggers around with incredible han solo "loser pretending to be cool" energy. and then. she accidentally picks up two force sensitive teens on jakku and she's like. are you KIDDING me

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ok i've been called a sex freak tranny too i get where you're coming from but like also please be more careful with extremely vague posts about Problematic Kinks

no. people's openness about what two consenting adults can do in private has no bearing on how likely they are to be child abusers or close ranks about child abusers & thinking there is some correlation is a sign that your stance on sexual abuse is mediated more by disgust reaction and aesthetic associations than by structural analysis. there is a pretty hard and obvious line between not condemming consensual sex acts between adults and being a pedophile and thinking that it's some sort of spectrum or slippery slope there imo speaks poorly to your conceptualization of why SA is a bad thing.

people love to say that X or Y kink Normalizes Abuse, but, like, actually think about communities where sexual abuse is 'normalized' in society. is the problem with the catholic church that it's too pro-kink? is the problem with US professional gymnastics that it's too pro-kink? is the problem with the amish that they're too pro-kink? was the problem with the british entertainment industry in the 1970s that it was too pro-kink? is the problem with the prison system that it's too pro-kink? &c. &c. &c.

sexual abuse doesn't happen because people are degenerate perverts and everyone is too accepting of that, sexual abuse happens because society is full of institutions that give adults structural power over children and men structural power over women. giving credence to the former, even in the form of thinking you have to be "super careful" about perverts, is a straightforwardly reactionary position.

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Cats getting caught doing crimes