#Robots To Grade Essays

[ponysoprano]

Mighty Gunvolt Burst is so cute and fun wtf

[sea-buns]

The more time that passes as I write little one-paragraph theory posts, or get so carried away on a meta/analysis that it becomes a mini essay, the more I loathe those 4-5 paragraph essay structures that were so strictly imposed on us in school. I'm out here having the time of my life ending paragraphs whenever the hell I want. Everything I've written since, even if I end up hating it, has still come out better than any argumentative/opinion piece they ever had me write.

It has been so lovely to just flow in my thoughts without pulling my hair out over adhering to the "at least 5-6 sentences per paragraph" rule or the "your 3 reasons and counter argument MUST come in this order" rubric. Lest I be dropped a whole letter grade and burned in the town square.

[humanpeoplefanblog]

[uweinei-02]

how they make you feel loved (HEADCANONS) ft. tsukishima kei, sugawara koushi, and daichi sawamura

AUTHORS NOTE: felt like writing something, even through i haven't written anything other than essays since 2021. so criticism is welcomed! also i only JUST started getting back into haikyuu so mischaracterization might be apparent, my deepest apologies for that! this is lowercase intended! ˗ˏˋ꒰ 🍒 ꒱

TSUKISHIMA KEI

100% would make a playlist for you, probably would label it ask a nickname he calls you (99% chance it'd be called "1diot" cause you're the only idiot for him, would probably be his exact words when you ask why too). the playlist would include all the songs that remind him of you and also songs you like, also it's definitely over 48 hours long (what can i say he really loves you, also 80% of those songs are ones that make him think of you)!!! "a playlist?" you asked him as he opened the link he sent you earlier on in the day. he told you to wait to open it until he finished practice as he said he would stop by. you shifted on your bed, leaning your head onto his shoulder as he gave you a hum in response. "one-diot... what?" "are you stupid?" he asked and you could only roll your eyes and grumble at his words before he let out a sigh. "because you're the only idiot for me." and by god, you fell in love with him again.

SUGAWARA KOUSHI

makes you lunch everyday for school, would deliver it to you and it could either be the exact same thing as he has or completely different depending on dietary restrictions. oh, he would also write a note in there to motivate you and make sure you keep going (on a banana, because he thinks it's cute. did i mention he would eat with you AND your friends?????). "[name]!!" he called out in front of your classroom door with a grin and a box full of your lunch, causing you to greet him with a wave and a smile as he makes his way to the table you're seated at. once he's seated you thank him for the food after he places both his and your lunch containers on the table. you remove the lid of your box, and as per usual, there's a banana with a note. "you're amazing love, i love you <3" you can't help but smile at the banana.

DAICHI SAWAMURA

messages you motivating things to keep giving you energy throughout the day, messages would probably be sent in every hour, not a minute late either (sometimes you end up wondering if it's actually him or if it's a robot, but you always smile at the messages, so you're not complaining)! you let out a groan, leaning further into your chair as you continue to attempt the math problem you've been struggling on for the past 30 minutes, you were falling behind and your grades were really showing it, and you seriously needed to catch up, fast. just as you were about to go back to your work, your phone dings causing you to check it. "you're not going to get anything done if you overwork yourself, make sure you take a break!" you let out a sigh and smile, thanking him as you then shut your phone off followed by you eating a snack nearby.

[thealogie]

my new pet theory after reading American/British cinematographer blurbs about all the previously mentioned examples is that it actually isn't one specific thing, it's the general commitment to allow imperfection and give an image a soul instead of following all the purely technical cinematography "rules" to a t.

like sure, you want something to be sharp, well lit, you want to have contrast instead of flatness, you want to compose something along thirds so it looks balanced to the human eye, you don't want everything to be super grainy etc etc but the thing is we've gotten to a technical point where it's very easy to do all of these things and when you do all of them at the same time it just looks soulless and terrible.

So what you can do to avoid that is:

Shoot on film (challengers)

Use vintage/exotic lenses (challengers, civil war)

Allow actors faces to go into darkness, allow imperfectly exposed images, allow black, crank up the ISO of the camera and use tiny amounts of light only (better call Saul)

Color grade in a genius way (add noise, grain, do things with saturation and contrast that aren't the technical standard)

Play with framing and what we're used to seeing as a balanced image (Mr robot)

Play with movement in unexpected ways, for example zooming or moving very rigidly (Wes Anderson). When handheld first became more of a mainstream thing it was so new and exciting as well!

Play with formats, colors (black and white), weird view angles (fish eye) and more.

If you're interested in cinematography even a little bit watch poor things. It does many of these things at the same time, incredibly well and in a way that actually supports the story too.

There's a cinematographer who says once he's done setting up a shot, having framed and lit it and thinking it is perfect, he always turns off one light. Or he kicks the camera a bit so the framing changes in an unexpected way. He says otherwise the perfection will suffocate the image. I think that might be what we're seeing with good omens.

I think franchises are more likely to fall into this rut of delivering a technically perfect product. Especially when there's a lot of vfx and post production down the pipeline there are so many factors a dp can easily get scared to not deliver what is needed in the next step. When something aggressively has to be sold to & by a streaming service like Amazon there is often pressure to take no risks. Comedy as a genre also has less examples of a wide range of different good cinematography styles. When I think of the word comedy the term "high-key" (aka well lit) comes up as we were taught in film school, according to the sit com standard. And modern day fantasy/magical realism comedy? I think is hard to pull off in a way that actually resonates and creates something new (not to say it couldn't have been done better sgdjdjs. looking at Gavin Finney's filmography I don't see anything particularly significant so...)

That's my two (three... five) cents. Thanks for the research rabbit hole on this Sunday evening 🫡

I love that this inspired a whole very nuanced and well researched essay on a Sunday. Thank you!!!

[fitzs-space]

friend I remember you from Instagram tell me about your robot game pleaseeeeee

My robot game!!

Scrapped was originally something I made for some art history kinda class (not the game history class, but we did look at games and other media in it. But was the same teacher as the game history. She’s a prick)

The final project was to make just. Anything based on one of the topics we discussed in class. So I decided to make a loose game concept based around general overconsumption, and the weird need in capitalism to constantly buy the newest products that normally lose their quality and break faster an faster.

So for the first concept sketches made, two versions of the same robot were made, the boxy lookin thing that’s got an assortment of mixed parts. Then the sleek round robot, with all the uniform parts you’d expect to see on every other version of its model. Think Wall-e and Eve The "box robots", B0N-1X // B0N-X1 [Bonix // Bonxi]

The idea was that the player would be offered two paths of either scrambling around for loose scrap they’d find in the environment or would get by breaking down the glunk bots (small npc bots), and trading the scrap in for cash in order to buy whichever upgrades needed when a part broke.

Or to take the path where the player can level up their skills and learn to just fix themselves when damaged, being able to level up through fixing up the same glunk bots that you could destroy for a quick coin.

(I ended up just making an essay for that history class, cause as I said the teacher was a prick and I just wanted a decent grade then making another game I actively enjoyed and worked hard on just to get another C on. Still bitter about that)

The only other character in that original group of sketches was Veldrin, who was just “the shopkeeper robot who teaches the player how to fix things” for the longest time. (Wanted to make big ol burly robot with the animated dad moustache) I also gave him a cat cause it’s kinda fun to have this big gruff ol guy and to give them the tinniest lil pet. As said, the cats name is Rob, and Veldri n named the shop after her (Robo n Robs Bits n Bobs). Hes honestly the character I’ve developed the most out of everyone.

that's most of the beginning stuff I made for this game. I've since developed more characters and story behind them. Gave Bonix a proper reason to their character, and why you're able to upgrade them as easily as you can as the player.

Largely because of how my classes were structured last year, a good chunk of recent development was focused on the environment of the game and more with world building. [most of my classes were environment illustration, this year is character design though, so we'll see what happens.]

took my time to reaspond to this, but it lined up with being posted for robot week! and I call that a win.

[physalian]

I think the other thing that bothers me with the flood of AI into everything is how grandiose the companies marketing it make it seem. A Meta AI ad (when every Meta commercial is equally pretentious, ngl) treats it as the next great thing to bring the world together, an inspiration to us all, making our lives easier, yada yada.

The part of that commercial that stuck with me was this lady on a train, looked like a student, asking the Robot to summarize something for her. Looked like a page of notes. And like… lady you aren’t learning a damn thing if the Robot takes your notes and then summarizes them. Yes we’ve always had the means to cheat and no attempts to defend against it will ever work so long as cheaters lack the desire to learn, or suffer under too much pressure to get a good grade over an actual education.

Pretending you didn’t manufacture the problem your new product exists to create is nothing new. Tech is just like that. Capitalism is just like that. But I see people, smart people, buying into this bullshit and not seeing the forest for the trees. AI as a concept isn’t the problem, I know this. “AI” is such a broad term that lumping extremely useful tools in with art theft doesn’t help either side of the argument.

I don’t think for a second that any of the companies pushing it feel an ounce of guilt or had a shred of forethought before unleashing their utopian tools onto the market beyond the profits they could make. I don’t think the people who first made it did so maliciously. I’m just sick of the argument that “it’ll make lives easier and that’s worth the side effects”.

I was a student who rarely had to study for things—if I didn’t learn it in class during lecture, staring at my notes and cramming the night before the test wouldn’t fix anything. I had a very good retention of knowledge and a mental block to the concept of studying.

But when I really needed to make sure I didn’t wing it on a test, shocker, studying actually helped. I���d completely skipped over a concept on the study guide when reviewing, and that was the only question I got wrong on that test.

So seeing that actress on the train, pretending like the Robot summarizing her notes, while she’s on a train and has nothing better to do with her time anyway, as if it will in any way help her in the long run, is bullshit.

Nobody’s saying that artificial intelligence in medicine or forensics or computer science is a bad thing. It’s supposed to make the hard jobs, the menial jobs, the jobs that human error cannot compete with, easier. It’s not supposed to remove any sense of ambition, of trial and error, of failure and learning from it.

I can’t say these people had no idea what the world would do with these tools. Did you not think someone would use ChatGPT to cheat and do their homework and write their essays for them? Did you not think freelance writers and graphic designers would get fired en masse by cheap companies who can consult a computer for free? Did you not think copyrighted art, made by artists who are already struggling, would be stolen, and that they’d be mad about it? Did you not think singers and musicians might have something to say about their voices, wholly unique to them, and their lyrical and songwriting ability, being generated by a machine for free? Did you not think about the rampant misinformation that would abound by a robot that cannot have integrity, common sense, or think critically? Did you not think about how easy it is now to forge political images and speeches, to incite violence in gullible people who can’t spot a fake? Did you not think about how those images can start wars and cause catastrophe?

If you thought people would only use it for Instagram filters and generating surrealist nonsense at parties, you're criminally naive.

Piracy has always existed. Cheating has always existed. Ripping off someone else's book or script or speech or art style has always existed. The thing is though, that piracy comes with a risk of viruses and malware if you don't know what you're doing. Cheating takes finesse and risk if you get caught, especially now. Ripping off another's work still takes the time and effort to replicate it by hand. AI didn't invent any of this, AI just removed the barrier of entry and asked, why not?

I’ve quoted this movie before in my argument but goddamn, nothing fits better:

"Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're trying to do here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet has ever seen but you wield it like a kid who's found his dad's gun.... I'll tell you the problem with your scientific power that you're using. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself, so you don't take any responsibility for it. "You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and you packaged it, and you slapped it on a plastic lunch box and now you're selling it. You're selling it. "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

--Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park

[mosneakers]

Coni: You know he doesn't get off work for one hour and seventeen minutes. Checking the time every two seconds won't bring him back any faster.

Coraleye: I know I know, but I can't help it! I haven't seen him in so long and maybe I'm just procrastinating because I know I should be focusing on my university assignment, but I just miss him so bad, Coni. Coni: Wait, assignment? Over your Spring Break? What's wrong with you?

Coraleye: What? [Shrugs] I don't want to spend the little bit of time I have away from university doing more work, trust me. After my last holiday break with the family, which was kind of a... bummer, to say the least, I really wanted to devote this time to love and romance and... [sighs and smiles slightly] Tycho... But, this assignment is a huge chunk of my grade, unfortunately.

Coni: [Rolls eyes] You're way too pretty to have to do stupid assignments over your break. Use what you've got, Coraleye. I love you but I swear sometimes you're just a beautiful idiot. Coraleye: ...Thank you?

Coni: [Sighs] Anyway, what's the assignment?

Coraleye: Well, I'm supposed to write an essay on where I see my life in ten years. I think for my career, I can manage that much, but for the other details, well... there's so many... things... left up in the air for me right now. I'm at kind of a crossroads and I'm afraid of being stuck here. Coni closes her eyes. It's clear she wants to speak, but she only remains quiet. Coraleye: ...Well? Nothing to say to that? I suppose you already have the next ten years of your life planned out? Coni: Of course I do.

Coraleye grins and leans back into the lounge chair, while putting her sunglasses back on. Coraleye: Well that must be nice, to have a love life so uncomplicated. Do you think you'll still be living here in Strangerville, with my brother, in Old Penelope?

Coni: Are you joking? This musty-ass, dingy robot factory of a bunker is no place to raise kids. Especially not our Darling babies!

Coraleye: Well, I need inspiration and we have an hour and fourteen minutes to spare. What is your ten year plan? Coni: I'll tell you exactly what my ten year plan is.

[nyaskitten]

The concept of using ai for schoolwork actually pisses me off. I'm not a strickler for all the rules, I HAVE cheated before, EVERYONE has fucking cheated before, but there's a difference between like cheating on a quiz/test vs. cheating with an essay. When you cheat on an essay with ai, you're just saying "computer write an essay on this idea," and the computer does it, but in the WORST fucking way imaginable.

The essay you produce is nothing of importance, a robot wrote that for you, you are not benefitting yourself in any way. Why the fuck would you wanna do that to yourself? I get it, you don't wanna put in the effort, but I'd rather take a shit grade on something I wrote than something I asked my computer to write for me.

[deep-space-lines]

re. your tags on that amazing gabriel/v1 comic: i'm not a biblical scholar but i AM a religious studies scholar and let me tell you that all your interpretations & the questions you bring up are super bangin. i love this so much. i wish i could send this to my 40 yr old thesis advisor (who IS a biblical scholar and also loves video games) but i would have to explain the gay sex game to him so . maybe not. anyway rest assured that there are biblical scholars in the world who would eat this shit up

oh ok so this is probably one of the coolest things anyone's ever said about my art ever. reading this brought back the joy of getting a graded essay back with a gold star sticker on it thank you

this is super validating honestly, & just the overall positive feedback on that comic-- not to get Personal but it's so much harder for me to post anything i put a lot of genuine thought/effort into as opposed to silly doodles because of the little voice in my head that says "what if everyone thinks this thing you poured a part of your soul into is stupid and bad forever". for me that gets amplified like tenfold with writing or anything where i'm actively trying to communicate something more complex. drawing something pretty is easy, but creating something that'll make an idea resonate with other people the same way it resonated with me when i'm not even sure it makes sense is HARD and i'm really glad i apparently managed to pull it off this time

so yeah thank you very much. i absolutely could not have predicted that buying the silly robot game a month ago would lead to someone saying "there are biblical scholars in the world who would eat that shit up" about something i drew but i'm not complaining. its scary but... maybe i'll start posting some writing on here sometimes <3

[asocial-skye]

This is like, the weirdest headcanon ever, but I think that the Jedi would be like, terrible in regards to STEM. Like, if you wanted to go into STEM, you'd best be going to Coruscant University or space Community College because you ain't getting classes at the Jedi Temple. Qui-Gon believes that midichondrians impregnated Anakin's mom with like zero evidence other than a vague answer of "there was no father."

Everything about the Jedi screams "philosophy, humanities, ethnic and gender studies." This is like, humanities school paradise. No grades, no rigid structures. The Jedi teach their kids in beanbag shares and have weekly circles where everyone shares out their interpretation of space Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. The Jedi have reading lists of literature throughout the galaxy in time (the Jedi Library definitely had the largest collection of books in the galaxy, which pisses me off that its not a public archive) and have a set amount of books you need to read by the end of the year. The Jedi write on-demand essays every other day in class alongside laser sword training, and have three essays due per week.

Don't get me wrong, humanities is great. It's excellent, and I do think that if Anakin paid a little more attention in Ethics or AP Galactic Government, his political views might have been developed a bit more beyond, "Jedi Council but on a larger, evilier scale", but fuck, I would never want to go to Jedi school. I like creative writing sure, but oh Lord would I die if I had to spend every day analyzing books, and doing philosophical shit.

It makes perfect sense that Anakin "I built a robot at nine and enjoy doing the calculus necessary to refit warships" Skywalker would chafe in the Jedi Order. You put a STEM child in a humanities-oriented school.

[kalasangan]

Thoughts after a year of grading papers written with AI

The first thing I should say is that I don't have an outright ban on artificial intelligence use in the work I assign my students. That's mainly because I've accepted I can't control whether they use it. Instead, I simply ask for honesty: that my students tell me what AI tools they used on the assignment and explain how they did so.

I also tell them I'm aware the tools used to detect AI assistance in their work sometimes flag false positives. Turnitin, the plagiarism and AI writing detection software we use at my institution (let's just call it The Uni), includes the chance for error in its reports. It also warns against making decisions about students' work without some subjective assessment, regardless of whether it says 20% or 80% of the work might have been AI-generated. So, no matter how much a student assignment lights up in blue for AI writing and lavender for word-spinning, I always try to read for substance first.

Usually, in an assignment where a student hasn't really done the work, there isn't much of it.

In the best-case scenario, it's an actual false positive. The student just needs to keep developing their own voice as a writer. They need to stop using boilerplate. (I hope I never read a reference to "today's fast-paced, technologically advanced, networked society" again.) They need to sound, well, less like a robot. If I can still sense that they've made an effort to express their understanding of the topic, that they've tried to make sense of their data from their own point of view, or that the ideas that Quillbot or Grammarly cleaned up are still fundamentally their own, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In the worst cases I've seen, the student hasn't even bothered to understand the course material, much less the assignment instructions or what the question is really asking. They just hope that whatever generic oatmeal slurry they pull out of their GPT of choice will do the job.

It usually doesn't. The writing-based assessments I give, whether they're essay questions in my ethics class, stories in my journalism class, or research papers in my methods classes, usually require the student to pull from actual experience, observations, or data. They require an awareness of specific contexts that I wouldn't expect the AI to have.

In my research classes, my students are supposed to propose their own research questions, gather actual data, and, in their final papers, present answers to their RQs based on that data. And I encourage them to research in a context they actually like or care about.

The least that a student could do is throw some raisins or chocolate chips into the oatmeal — edit their AI-generated text so that it actually applies to the context from which they're writing. Often, they don't bother. I could copy-paste the conclusion into just about any paper, and it would sound appropriately research-y, regardless of whether the paper was about barista life or an animal welfare org or beauty standards in local media*. It wouldn't actually say anything meaningful re: what the students learned about the population they studied, the hypothesis they wanted to test, the people they interviewed, the culture/community they spent time with, etc.

One pattern I've learned to recognize over the past year is overparaphrasing: paragraphs or even pages of text all restating the same idea. A common issue is when large portions of text are redundant, presenting a single thought in a different way. Several paragraphs or sections expressing essentially the same notions fill sections of a report.

If that paragraph felt weird or wrong to you, you now know what I'm talking about. It's gotten to the point that I can hear it in oral reports, too.

I thought the worst cases I'd ever seen were the ones who said the inability to make generalizations was a weakness of their qualitative data. In their qualitative research papers. For the qualitative methods course. Where I said many, many, many times that generalizations are not really the point of qualitative research. Where non-generalization for the sake of depth and diversity is a fucking strength.

This term, however, I saw some new lows.

AI, I hope my students have learned, can't do your field work for you.

Field observation is one of the most immersive and subjective methods. The data is recorded through field notes, which are basically a very detailed research diary. You want to write rich descriptions of interactions you observed, activities you participated in, and so on. You want to capture the phenomenon so that reading your notes again weeks or months down the line, you're taken back to how hot or cold it was, how noisy or quiet it was, and how exciting or dull or nerve-wracking it was to watch it all unfold. You definitely need to note your own point of view, your position in the scene. I tell my students to treat the field note assignment as a nonfiction storytelling exercise, and to show, not tell.

For the first time in my classes, students submitted field notes written by AI. The descriptions were flat. They told without showing. The student's point of view was missing. There was generic stuff about field observation as a research method, without any effort to connect it to the actual field site they (supposedly) visited or their actual experience of attempting the method.

One student submitted a dubious interview transcript. The transcript was too clean and didn't read like a real conversation. One of the supposed responses used a conceptual phrase that the student had used in previous submissions, which suggested to me that the interview was coached or scripted at best and AI-generated at worst. I don't know for sure because I didn't actually turn Turnitin on for that assignment. I trusted my students would actually do the interviews, so why would I check for plagiarism or AI use in interviews? Silly me, I guess. (As additional backup/proof, everyone was supposed to submit an audio or video recording of the interview for support; this student's file was less than three minutes of silence.)

I called a whole group in to talk about how they'd turned in multiple assignments with AI flags and without the disclosure. Their explanations on the spot didn't make sense with what was in their assignments. I warned them about doing better and being transparent on the next paper.

The next paper included parts that were just copy-pasted from one of their earlier flagged papers. No attempt to change the content at all.

This post has gotten much longer than I thought it would be, so I'm not even gonna go into what happened with the final essays in my ethics class. But seriously. Ethics. Class.

I teach communication students, so it's really important to me and, I would hope, to them also that they actually become good communicators by the end of their time at The Uni. These are students who want to work in creative fields and so should be testing, stretching, exercising their creativity. They're not getting that exercise if they're outsourcing work to the AI. The projects I give them are supposed to be treadmills for their own thinking, not conveyor belts for whatever they ask AI to assemble.

I want to remain open to — but I'm still not convinced of — the idea that my students might find AI a useful tool, without necessarily giving up their independent, critical, and artistic thinking. So far, it's just been a shortcut off a cliff over a field of Fs and zeroes.

--

*These are examples of actual topics my students have pursued, but not necessarily of work where they tried to pass off AI-generated text as their own writing.

Also, just to CMA, these are my own thoughts and opinions. They don't necessarily reflect those of my employers or The Uni where I work.

[sshbpodcast]

Character Spotlight: Spock

By Ames

Last week we highlighted (and lowlighted) James T. Kirk here in our new blog collection, going character by character where no one has gone before. It’s going to be a bit of a trek in and of itself, so join us here on A Star the Steer Her By to learn what we think of all your Starfleet favorites: when are they at their most naughty and most nice. This week, we’re moving on to the best first officer in the fleet and one of our favorite Vulcans, the ever logical Mister Spock!

For the franchise’s first major alien character, he succeeded in teaching humanity to audiences throughout his far-reaching tenure, and that wasn’t always his human half! Credit to Leonard Nimoy for giving us such a well-rounded character even though he couldn’t display emotions in the same fashion as the others (but boy did he find a way!). Follow along below for our thoughts on Spock’s best and worst scenes, and listen to some bonus chatter over on this week’s podcast episode (discussion at 1:05:00). Fascinating.

[Images © CBS/Paramount

Best Moments

Checkmate, Finney It’s been a minute since I released my blogpost about how bad I am at 3D chess (and all chess for that matter), but Spock’s so great at it that he uses his logic and big Vulcan brain to figure out the chess program is busted in “Court Martial” and save the day, which might be the Spockiest thing I’ve ever heard.

Pain! Pain! Spock mind melds a lot of critters throughout the shows and movies, but one of our favorites is when he connects with the Horta in “The Devil in the Dark.” Like in our Kirk spotlight when the captain defended the old girl, we’ve gotta credit Spock with communicating with her and treating her like a sentient being. And Nimoy’s acting in this scene! Mwah!

A man of integrity in both universes The Spock in “Mirror, Mirror” isn’t exactly our normal Spock, as his circumstances in the mirror universe have made him a different person in a lot of ways (mostly in the facial hair region). But in even more ways, he’s just like our Spock: someone who sees the illogical nature of the Terran Empire and who will take steps to make it better.

I love you but I hate you I don’t know why, but I’m just thoroughly tickled when Spock outwits the androids in “I, Mudd” with a logical paradox that breaks their computer brains. Sure, he tries a neck pinch first (he is Spock, after all!), but it’s telling the Alice robots, identical in every way, that he loves one but hates the other that causes them to malfunction all over the place.

Trademark Vulcan sass If Vulcans are allowed to express one emotion throughout all of Star Trek, it’s sass, and Leonard Nimoy can deadpan with the best of straightmen. In “The Trouble with Tribbles,” McCoy remarks that tribbles are “nice, they're soft, they're furry, and they make a pleasant sound,” to which Spock quips, “So would an ermine violin, Doctor, yet I see no advantage to having one.” Grade-A Vulcan sass right there.

Gladiatorial mind games “Bread and Circuses” may not be a good episode, but it gets the Spock-McCoy dynamic right. Not only does Spock save McCoy in battle, but that scene in the prison cell… I could write essays about that scene as they’re both so vulnerable and desperate to connect, but Spock, ever the Vulcan, represses that emotion… just barely. And when Spock tells McCoy that they share concern over Kirk’s safety without actually telling him, it’s perfect.

Vulcans are incapable of lying, he lied While we found Kirk’s behavior in “The Enterprise Incident” utterly baffling, Spock’s is thoroughly intriguing. He spends most of the episode seamlessly deceiving the Romulan Commander who’s thirsting after him so hard, and she plays right into his Vulcan-saluting hands because she didn’t anticipate so many loopholes allowing Vulcans to be duplicitous!

The wonders of the universe Am I mostly bringing up Spock mind melding a giant cloud in “One of Our Planets Is Missing” so that I can bring up my TOS fanfiction “Sentient Life”? A little bit.

I have been and always shall be your friend This list would not be complete without the beautiful sacrifice scene in The Wrath of Khan. The needs of the many do indeed outweigh the needs of the few in this perfectly poignant and amazingly acted character death. I can’t think of a better main character death in all of Star Trek and Nimoy crushed it.

Rock out with your Spock out We’ve also got to give credit to Leonard Nimoy for the Vulcan neck pinch, a nonviolent, nonfatal deescalation tactic that is perfectly in character. It is a great inclusion for such a logical people to manage violent conflict in a mostly harmless way, and one of our favorites is neck pinching the punk on the bus since it’s also one of many great comedic moments in The Voyage Home.

They are not the hell your whales Speaking of The Voyage Home, we’ve got more good Spock moments to choose from in that movie! It is such a smorgasbord of quippy, fun moments for our resident Vulcan because so much of the movie is that fish-out-of-water kind of humor, but everything Spock has to do with the whales, George and Gracie, is especially excellent.

Cowboy diplomacy We even get to see a little Spock action in The Next Generation when his plan to reunite Vulcan and Romulus gets revealed in “Unification.” It is such a noble goal from our logical friend (perhaps spurred by his encounter with the Romulan Commander in “The Enterprise Incident”? Nudge nudge!) and we loved seeing his resolve and commitment to helping his square-shouldered cousins.

—

Worst Moments

Beep twice for “NO!” I get that the studio wanted to save time and money by using the footage from “The Cage” in “The Menagerie,” but they had Spock acting fully out of character to make it happen. He kidnaps his disabled old captain against his will, he conspires to steal the ship, he puts the lives of everyone on the Enterprise in danger, he nearly gets Kirk killed in a shuttle, he creates an illusion of a flag officer! It’s a full-on mutiny that sees no consequences!

Life-or-death decisions, but mostly death “Strange. Step by step, I've made the correct and logical decisions – and yet two men have died,” says Spock in “The Galileo Seven.” Somehow, every time we see Spock in charge, everyone has a really bad day. The show would make you believe it’s because Vulcans only act on logic with no emotion or intuition, but they really need to stop leaving the ship in his hands!

Not even a grandfather paradox – just a father paradox Temporal shenanigans abound in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” when the Enterprise is forced to beam up Captain Christopher. Spock assures everyone that the displaced pilot will have no bearing on history, until he is forced to eat those words because this science officer neglected to check if Christopher’s son would be influential. Since when is Spock so careless?

A need-to-know basis We joked throughout The Original Series that Vulcans seemed to attain a new superpower each week. And since Spock just doesn’t seem to tell people things they need to know until they really need to know it, we don’t learn about his inner eyelids until “Operation: Annihilate!”, his parents being onboard until “Journey to Babel,” or his having a half brother until Star Trek V!

This has pon farr enough I’m frankly sick of everything about pon farr, and am dreading revisiting it in Enterprise. It’s yet another one of those Vulcan aspects they won’t tell you about until too late, and in “Amok Time,” it’s way too late. The whole biological circumstance is weird enough, but if Vulcans has told us any of their rituals ahead of time, Spock wouldn’t have had to kill his best friend in the kal-if-fee like a chump.

Heil Spock While it’s mostly a gag on the podcast that Spock loves Nazis, there’s definitely a reason why we think that. In “Patterns of Force,” Spock agrees with Gill when he calls Nazi Germany the most efficient state Earth ever knew, saying: “Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.” Does that make Spock a Nazi? Not entirely, but it would explain some things, like how quick to wanting to kill Mitchell he was in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

What a tangled web he weaves Like in “The Galileo Seven,” Spock ends up in command again when Kirk is presumed dead in “The Tholian Web,” and he borks it. The whole episode is about him and McCoy snipping at each other because of the effects of the area of space, but they’re both extremely out of character even without it, with Spock ignoring Doc’s warning about getting stuck in the web, making awful decisions, and generally being terrible at leading a crew.

If only I could forget We found it weirdly nonconsensual when Spock decides to make Kirk forget about his romance with Rayna (and who knows what else?) in “Requiem for Methuselah.” McCoy jabs at Spock that he’ll never understand, and then Spock seems to act just naively when he takes Kirk’s memory in his sleep, as if Spock were taking him literally when Kirk said he’d rather forget.

Behind every good woman… is Spock taking credit We’ll surely bring up “The Lorelei Signal” when we talk about Uhura’s best moments because it’s a rare moment for the women to get the spotlight, but there’s a moment in this episode in which, despite the lady crewmembers having already figured out the ploy themselves, they’ve hatched their plan “in accordance with Mister Spock’s request” and I vomit in my mouth a little.

You have not achieved kolinahr It’s pretty clear that the production team didn’t know they’d have Leonard Nimoy back for The Motion Picture until late in the writing process because his motivation is spotty at best. Since he has not achieved kolinahr, he rather makes his presence in the movie about himself, and to make matters worse, he yeets off to mind meld with V’ger without telling anyone!

I hear he's nutty as a fruitcake As beautiful as the death scene in The Wrath of Khan is, it’s also pretty messed up for Spock to cram his katra into McCoy with no warning and with dire effects. Think about it: none of the humans knew before The Search for Spock that katras were even a thing, and Bones could have gone insane just for the sake of bringing the character back to life, negating that great sacrifice!

They flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines We love a good mind meld on Star Trek, but Spock just plain crosses a line in The Undiscovered Country when he mind rapes Valeris to expose her as the saboteur. Considering the mind meld was first created in order to give Spock an alternative to violent action to combat assailants, using it in a way that’s so violating is the most uncomfortable moment we could think of.

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Keep your medical tricorders scanning here as we continue along through all the main characters from The Original Series! Next week, we’re scanning for Dr. Bones McCoy here on the blog, as well as continuing our watchthrough of Enterprise over on the podcast. You can also send a message over subspace on Facebook and Twitter, and keep your damn katra to yourself. Live long and prosper!

[kvetcher2]

i detest AI so much. I truly think if it goes unchecked, it will lead to societal ruin. not because of some evil robot takeover BS but because it will make reading comprehension, writing skills, research skills, creativity, knowledge, and the ability to think critically “unnecessary.” and of course we know these things are necessary. I’ve seen so many kids in grade school posting shit like “how did anyone write essays before chatgpt!” and teachers being unable to figure out if essays are even written by their students or not. kids are going through school without actually developing any skills. and teachers are basically not allowed to fail kids or hold them back anymore (this is because of many factors, including the Bush-era no child left behind policy and the increasing power parents of students are being given over teachers). and these kids will enter the workforce and become doctors and teachers and presidents and lawyers. hell we’re already seeing what a complete lack of critical thinking skills, combined with social media addictions, is doing to people. and with every technological “advancement” that does our researching and our writing and our thinking for us, the worse this is going to get.

[orgyporgy]

Grading final essays this year is honestly less about grading essays and more about grading who did the best job camouflaging the AI and making it seem like their own work. Literally if they fucked with it enough that I’m less than 50% sure they copied it off a robot I’m giving them a B idc

[smartgirl1970]

Digital Essay on my Technology Literacy (Class Assignment)

Digital Essay on my Technology Literacy (Class Assignment)

In 1981 the IBM Personal Computer model 5150 was released. My parents bought one for my 11th birthday, thinking it would be a great asset for school. I used it as a glorified typewriter. You had to essentially add the programs yourself, and that was not easy to do. I was too young to understand what all the bells and whistles did, and there were not many. The World Wide Web, or WWW, was not introduced until 1989, my freshman year in college (the first go-round).

My first video gaming system was Atari. This came out in 1977. However, I didn’t get one until I was about 10 years old. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t a big gamer. I skipped right over the Nintendo era. My cousins and friends had one, but other than Leapfrog and the first Mario Brothers game, it wasn’t my thing. I wasn’t good at Pac-Man either.

I bought my first cellphone in 1992. It was a Nokia. The first phone bill came in at $289. You got something for 1000 minutes free and were charged .30 cents a minute over that. I understand that in 2023, that may not sound like a lot of money, but in 1992, it took an entire paycheck to pay it. I made $7 an hour, and that was a decent salary working at Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street in New York.

My son was born in 1996, and the world of technology opened new doors for me. I bought him a LeapPad to be used as a learning tool for reading and math. He graduated to every gaming system created from an Xbox to Nintendo. I was introduced to the World Wide Web through social media when Facebook became a thing because I had to monitor his use of this platform. By 2008, my son was in the 7th grade, and I allowed him to interact with his friends on Facebook, but his time was limited, and it was conditional upon him accepting my friend request. My acquired sons (I dislike the word step) were older than him, and they kept me in the loop about how social media worked. Facebook was great for me because it was a link to communicating with my family in New York without having to call all the time. It was great for sharing pictures. Social media has taken a turn, and in some ways its great for activism, in other ways, people are very comfortable being contrary and saying things they would say publicly.

My concern with the development of AI is how easily things can be manipulated. AI’s voice generator can create words that do not come out of someone’s mouth. I see the dangers in that with a political leader’s voice. Manipulating photos can be fun. However, it can also be used to lie about where someone is, what they are doing, and who they are doing it with. Technology is changing rapidly. There isn’t much a robot can’t do. From driving a car without human intervention to soon enough, flying an airplane. My question would be, will there be a time when life imitates art, and we are faced with an iRobot catastrophe.

My technical literacy is almost nonexistent beyond the day-to-day life of social media and basic content creation. As a creative writer, storyteller, and activist, I took this class with the hopes that I will be able to better understand the basics of web design and create more enticing visual content when I use TikTok and other platforms to display my work. I am a Global student, so my entire degree has been online. I graduate in May of 2024!

Over the last year, I have learned to use social media sites like LinkedIn to further my writing presence and create an outlet to network with like-minded people. I am a self-published author on Amazon, and I had to learn how to utilize Canva when creating my book "Journal and Manifest with Your Ancestors." So I consider that to be an incredible success since I created this journal completely on my own. I followed someone on YouTube to learn the ins and outs of utilizing KDP Amazon and Canva.