DEAR READER
Cosmic Funnies
Claire Keane
Mike Driver
we're not kids anymore.
⁂
Game of Thrones Daily
taylor price
YOU ARE THE REASON
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Discoholic 🪩
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Not today Justin
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AnasAbdin
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shark vs the universe
JVL
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@alittleoutofit
The kid next door (talking toddler age) is playing outside and just wiped out in his Fisher Price car, and I just heard the babysitter say, “oh no, your insurance premium is definitely going to go up!” And the kid who had only been mildly sniffling before made the most confused, but startled sound you’ve ever heard.
Just very clearly an attempt at saying, “my what?”
He straight up forgot about his scraped knee and is now worried about whatever the fuck an insurance premium is.
I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF
This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.
Then bring me luck
the day after I posted this last time I was notified that I was selected for a really cool mentorship gig and got an unrelated glowing review at work
Hey Potato, cure my -ing cold so I can have a good time while away.
Here's the potato. Make what use of it you will. :)
God I need this so bad for my Midterm so please let this work again for me.
Tsundere this, yandere that. I'm a wandere. You took your eyes off me for two seconds and I've already fucked off. Saw something cool glint on the other side of the continent and I'm on my way to check it out.
We stan for a morally gray queen 👏 Gertrude Robinson nobody will ever make me hate you
if i can impart any one piece of wisdom to y’all, it’s to, whenever possible, assume good intentions
assume people are trying their best, want to be good and treat others well, and that when their behavior doesn’t align with those goals, it’s because of outside factors that are pushing them to their limit
it’s hard to do, it doesn’t always come naturally, but it’s worth it
before anyone jumps in with an “op has clearly never worked in the service industry,” i work in a public facing library job
i have a patron who is mean as a snake. won’t respond when you greet her, barks orders at you, and is generally nasty
i couldn’t stand her & dreaded the moment she walked in the door, until i stopped one day & went “wow, to walk around feeling unhappy enough to treat people so horribly every day. what a difficult way to live.”
and so my tactics changed. i made a point to be extra kind & friendly to her. she changed her hair color one day & when i complimented her on it, she was very caught off guard & said “oh, thank you. my whole life i’ve thought i was ugly.”
now we’re at the point where she shows me pictures of watercolor paintings she made & says hi when she walks in the door. she’s not my favorite patron, but she’s perfectly okay. most unpleasant people aren’t inherently rotten, they’re just unhappy & coping with it poorly
assume people are always doing their best, even if their best happens to fall a bit short. assume good intentions
So it's come my attention that there are a lot of students, particularly in humanities and social sciences disciplines, who need to hear this, so here goes:
Do the readings.
Oh my God, just do the readings. I promise, it gets easier once you get into the habit of it.
What makes a good student? Doing the readings. Literally just doing the readings is enough to make you a good student.
The readings *are* the course. The lectures are just priming you for the readings. The tutorials and seminars are just how we collectively process the readings. If the readings were intended to be optional, they would have been listed under the "optional readings" heading.
"Oh but I hate this reading! The author's an idiot, they're wrong about everything" Good. Do the reading and then tear it apart in class. This isn't high school, you're not expected to mindlessly absorb things anymore
If you're in physics, do the derivations. Don't believe that any equation given to you is true. Derive it. Convince yourself that it must be true, and understand the limitations of its truth.
The very first lecture I give my students emphasizes that they do not have to accept the readings as truth from on high. They don't even have to like them! Critical reading is perhaps the most important skill I hope they take away from my course, and you can't develop it if you're not doing the fucking readings!
#the number of ENGLISH MAJORS who refuse to read and then complain about not understanding the class discussions#I'm begging y'all. the information is in the words
Also - the amount of grad students I have witnessed using ChatGPT to do the literature review for them, and not bothering to read any paper is frankly concerning.
Do people realise this is the basis of research? Learning about other people's work and getting ideas that are yours?? Sometimes even just a sentence can change your entire perception about a topic!
If you want to have a quick idea about the content of a paper to see if it is relevant for you, do as god fucking intended - read the abstract, the introduction and the conclusion for fuck's sake
Why would you even keep studying - at any level - if you are not curious about a topic? If you take just the lazy road without developing and applying critical thinking skills?
big fat emphasis on previous/last reply/comment!!
(however, really depends on the course, field, and program of study)
Second half is even better
#okay now join the IWW and train to be a Salter 🤞🏽🤞🏽🥺🥺
Nah besties, don’t keep this one in the tags, how many people on this hellsite even know what a salter is?
So taking a spot from someone genuinely looking for a job just for fun is considered activism now?
The employers will argue that by salting, unions are being “deceitful”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employers are always spying on their workers (even to the point of hiring specialists to pose as difficult “customers” in order to “test” a worker’s “loyalty” to the company, or encouraging favoritism by having one worker spy on another). Because the employing class has a well documented history of using deceitful tactics (including lies and intimidation) to undermine (legally protected) union organizing efforts by workers, salting is how workers can fight back against repressive and often illegal union busting tactics.
So taking a spot from someone genuinely looking for a job just for fun is considered activism now?
I think you have completely misread what OP is doing, because the whole point is that they are not taking the job. What, do you think the employer’s going to have the salter come in and decline the job and go “well, guess we’re not going to hire someone for that position after all”? No. If they’re interviewing for the position, it’s not a bogus position, it’s one they actually need to hire someone for. Someone is still going to get that job. It might take another round of interviews, but that job will be filled by someone who is genuinely looking for a job.
but when that person gets hired, they will have a better chance of successfully negotiating for a good salary.
That’s what the salting is about. It’s about making the boss or HR person or whoever think “gee, if we want a good candidate, we might have to bump up our salary expectations.” It doesn’t guarantee that they’ll do it, but it does raise the odds of it.
John Oliver gets it, as usual. AI Slop is one of the best episodes of Last Week Tonight I've seen so far. Gen AI is theft. Those who use it are not authors or artists, they're grifters profiting from real creatives.
Pusheen is married?!?
PUSHEEN HAS BABIES?!?!?
Queen Of Keeping Personal And Professional Lives Seperate
SINCE WHEN IS PUSHEEN A GIRL
an absolute queen. her birthday is febuary 18th
she's Irish
everyone say happy birthday pusheen
A little Google history lesson 🍵
It's 2004. Google has just announced an exciting new venture: Google Print. With the blessing of five major libraries, Google sets out to digitalize the world's print material. Its search function, which will allow people to read and review print books digitally, is set to revolutionize information forever.
There was only one, teeny tiny problem... they didn't ask permission.
None.
At all.
Authors were gobsmacked. Nothing like this had ever happened before. What right had Google to scan, copy, and save copyrighted books to its databases... and at this scale? Lawsuits mounted. Google backpedaled, then talked of settling. Eventually, Ursula Le Guin spilled the tea. It was a whole thing.
Back then, the point many authors (including Le Guin) were making wasn't directed against the digitization of print books as such (widening access to the world's knowledge? Who doesn't want that?)...
No, authors were concerned with how Google went about it, and the threat it posed for intellectual property. Google's actions tossed aside the custom, long enshrined in law, that writers and publishers should have control over how their material is used and distributed—a tradition that many believe... exists for good reason.
(We'll get to it.)
What Le Guin and others realized is that Google's message of "democratizing the internet" (a platitude often used by techno-libertarians and broligarchs who, it turns out, aren't so keen on the whole "democracy" thing...) masked a sinister intention: to wrangle the world's commons under its own private control.
From where we're standing now (🥲), the scandal and ensuing lawsuit have a little too much familiarity: Google learned what they could get away with and how.
Then they kept doing that.
Move fast; break copyright; settle later (if ever).
The point is: the Print drama wasn't your average copyright scandal—it was the world's first ever mass data-harvesting event.
The training of Google Gemini began 22 years ago, on the day Google started claiming the world's knowledge for itself.
To understand our present predicaments, we have to know our history. Google Print was virgin soil. What followed—the scale of the data theft, the absolute skeeviness/grift of it all—felt unprecedented at the time.
But apparently, you had to be a writer to see it. 🤷♂️
Surprise !
"The Stranglehold of English Lit." by Malawian poet and scholar Felix Mnthali
Family
It's so funny to me that Mary Shelley, her husband, John Polidori, and Lord Byron had a competition to see who could write the best horror story and she wrote fucking Frankenstein. Imagine losing a competition that badly. Imagine just doing a silly little competition with your friend and she basically invents a new genre and creates one of the most famous characters in fiction. Imagine being proud of your little story and then she shares one that people will still read every day in 200 years. Imagine doing a writing competition with your wife and she becomes so recognizable that you'll always be known as Mary Shelley's husband
😩 so true !!
😭😭😭
i think because of the whole "writers write for themselves" notion that's becoming increasingly popularized, people forget that we still thrive off interaction and kindness. i write for myself but kudos and comments and bookmarks and really any sort of interaction with my fics genuinely motivates me to keep writing and keep sharing my works.
