hey hi hello! im rain, and this is my blog. im an adult; minors can interact at their own discretion. i mostly reblog shitposts and art from several different fandoms, but i do make the occasional original post too
i reblog all my art to @callisto-makes-art, and i take art requests over there, too! (theyre free... for a price. the price being zero dollars)
here's my tutorial on switching to a youtube frontend: Tumblr post | Neocities page
current blog header is from SPLIT DANCE
if tumblr goes completely stupid and forces age verification on everyone, you can find my writing and art on my neocities site, and ill probably start a blog there too if it comes down to it
this post is actually really long so theres a cut now :J
tags i use a lot:
#rain speaks - all my original posts
#rain draws - stuff ive drawn (see also: @callisto-makes-art for easier viewing and sorting)
#rain writes - stuff ive written (/me talking about writing)
#rains projects - any days-long creative endeavor that i end up liveblogging
#rain's creatures - photos of my cats and dog (subtags - #cat: sasha, #cat: stormie, #cat: nyx, #cat: pixel, #cat: walker, #dog: daisy)
#deltarune - posts about deltarune (see also: #liveblogging deltarune 3&4 and #liveblogging deltarune 5 for posts ive made while playing)
#undertale - posts about undertale
#pokemon - posts about pokemon
#mcyt - any content involving minecraft youtubers, whether the post is about minecraft or not (tho im kinda wishy-washy about who exactly counts as an mcyter)
#minecraft - posts about minecraft (the game itself, no mcyters)
#loz - posts about the legend of zelda (not including tears of the kingdom or echoes of wisdom)
#totk - posts about tears of the kingdom
#eow - posts about echoes of wisdom (see also: #liveblogging eow for posts i made throughout my first playthrough)
#lu - posts about linked universe (lu posts won't appear under #loz)
#fnaf - posts about five nights at freddy's
#stp - posts about slay the princess
#phm - posts about project hail mary
#iron lung - posts about iron lung
#toh - posts about the owl house
#ml - posts about miraculous ladybug
#mlp - posts about my little pony
#dungeon meshi - posts about dungeon meshi/delicious in dungeon
#bnha - posts about my hero academia
#atla - posts about avatar: the last airbender (and possibly the legend of korra)
#danny phantom - posts about danny phantom/the phandom
#tcw - posts about the crane wives, the full band and its members
my ao3 page is dead_in_a_damn_ditch and i post fics there that i dont post here, so check that out if youre interested!
Whenever I think about students using AI, I think about an essay I did in high school. Now see, we were reading The Grapes of Wrath, and I just couldn't do it. I got 25 pages in and my brain refused to read any more. I hated it. And its not like I hate the classics, I loved English class and I loved reading. I had even enjoyed Of Mice and Men, which I had read for fun. For some reason though, I absolutely could NOT read The Grapes of Wrath.
And it turned out I also couldn't watch the movie. I fell asleep in class both days we were watching it.
This, of course, meant I had to cheat on my essay.
And I got an A.
The essay was to compare the book and the movie and discuss the changes and how that affected the story.
Well it turned out Sparknotes had an entire section devoted to comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. Using that, and flipping to pages mentioned in Sparknotes to read sections of the book, I was able to bullshit an A paper.
But see the thing is, that this kind of 'cheating' still takes skills, you still learn things.
I had to know how to find the information I needed, I needed to be able to comprehend what sparknotes was saying and the analysis they did, I needed to know how to USE the information I read there to write an essay, I needed to know how to make sure none of it was marked as plagerized. I had to form an opinion on the sparknotes analysis so I could express my own opinions in the essay.
Was it cheating? Yeah, I didn't read the book or watch the movie. I used Sparknotes. It was a lot less work than if I had read the book and watched the movie and done it all myself.
The thing is though, I still had to use my fucking brain. Being able to bullshit an essay like that is a skill in and of itself that is useful. I exercised important skills, and even if it wasnt the intended way I still learned.
ChatGTP and other AI do not give that experience to people, people have to do nothing and gain nothing from it.
Using AI is absolutely different from other ways students have cheated in the past, and I stand by my opinion that its making students dumber, more helpless, and less capable.
However you feel about higher education, I think its undeniable that students using chatgtp is to their detriment. And by extension a detriment to anyone they work with or anyone who has to rely on them for something.
I can remember being in computer class right before history and someone in the last ten minutes mentioned the class presentations we had next period and I was like.. fuck man I fully forgot
So I had a passing knowledge of ww2, as much as anyone, so i figured that I could bluff the context around Churchill and just get some of his details down and I'd be fine.
So I pulled his Wikipedia up and read it. Didn't have time to write a speech, this was gonna be adlib. Then I jumped on google images and pulled a picture that reflected one thing from each of his Wikipedia sections (like, early life (picture of a train set) education (Churchill graduating) early war (you get the idea).
Bunged the pictures into a powerpoint and read the Wikipedia again with the powerpoint alongside, adding subheadings to jog my memory. Pulled a couple links from the bottom of the wiki for the bibliography, opened and skimmed to make sure they weren't wild, and saved the damn thing
We were lining up outside class for history and the guys in the class are telling some classmates about how I'd just smashed out my whole presentation. I asked everyone to let me go first since the knowledge wasn't gonna last long, I was going off having just read Churchill's wiki lol
They all agreed (champions) and one of the girls said she'd read up on Churchill a bit on her presentation about the Queen, so she promised to nod or shake her head if I was completely wrong.
I presented. I know I spent a minute on each slide and spoke relevantly. I remember at one point saying Churchill excelled in school, saw my classmate was shaking her head, and pivoted to say he didn't do well with formal education but got into some of the extracurricular activities that'd benefit him come war time. She nodded. I continued lol. One of the lads complimented me on that one afterwards
I don't think I learnt much about Churchill with this study. But I absolutely learnt about public speaking. I was using skills in research and apply my contextual knowledge. I also learnt to rely on classmates, even tho we weren't friends at all she had my back because it was easy and kind and cost her nothing
I got a B+ and a comment about being one of the more engaging and charismatic presenters (that would've been the adrenaline, and my classmates were watching fascinated to see if I could pull it off lol).
The main perk of my presentation was the energy, which wouldn't've been there if I'd ai'd a script to read. And I wouldn't have this fun memory
I remember getting in a philosophy class in college (one I just took for fun), and realized that there was a paper due that day that I had 100% forgotten about writing. I lied and told the professor that I had forgotten to print it, but I had my laptop with me for note taking, so if he'd give me 5 minutes after class I would run down to the computer lab and print it off and bring it up. He said that was fine, presumably because I couldn't write a coherent paper in 5 minutes.
But I COULD write a coherent paper in 45 minutes, which is about the time it took me to slap together a dirty outline and fill it in, the way I had been taught to do in high school in my writing class. It wasn't gonna win any awards but it meant a B+ instead of a zero, and it meant I had an opportunity to work under pressure and practice skills I had learned. Skills I STILL use to this day, skills I have taught to others. Skills I use to help others edit papers. Skills I would not have and certainly wouldn't have been able to hone if chatGPT was doing it poorly instead.
That's MY B+ bullshit essay. I earned it fair and square, along with the bragging rights to having written it under my professor's nose.
I learned how to be a First Draft Wonder for most of my school papers. I knew the formula to make a decent paper, because it was drilled into me in High school taking AP lit and having 'essay quizzes' where we would spend a class period writing a short essay (BY HAND LE GASP) about our topic.
I am so good at papers, I know how to find the relevant information, I know what a reliable source looks like, and in college, I could lock myself in a study room and knock out a several page paper (with references) in just a couple hours.
ALL WITHOUT AI. I used my brain, the skills of information gathering I was taught, and my ability to use books and bibliographies to my advantage. Today, I can write up something tidy for work in a little bit of focus time.
I may not be able to influence the Youth. But I will beg all of you students to not become overly reliant on having some machine do that thinking for you so you can scroll Tiktok longer. Your brain is meant to be exercised, lets use it.
Yeah, that all tracks. You wanna know how I wrote an entire nonfiction book? I used the exact same skills I learned in school for writing essays--come up with a topic, research what you don't already know, make an outline, use the outline to structure the piece of writing, fill it in. It's just that this time I wrote 70,000 words instead of, say, 500-1000.
I think my first essay was....third grade? Maybe second? And I wrote hundreds of them just through high school, to say nothing of all I wrote in getting my Bachelor's and Master's degrees. Some of the essays in primary and secondary school were, quite honestly, bullshitting, because they were on topics that didn't interest me and I hadn't yet learned to use my then-undiagnosed anxiety, autism, and ADHD to trick myself into putting real effort into something I found boring. Even the low-effort essays still got me great grades, and they still helped me hone my writing skills. And they did eventually give me the tools to get me to focus on less-fun necessities.
Would I have been able to do that if I had had access to genAI and decided to use it? Doubtful. Would I have been able to write an entire book that was published by one of the Big 5 U.S. publishers? Nope. Because even if i had managed to trick them into thinking an AI-generated manuscript was my work, I wouldn't have survived the editing process without blowing my cover, and I certainly wouldn't have been able to show my expertise in the subject matter.
Even if you never do any work as a professional writer, writing teaches you ways to use and exercise your brain. It helps you to examine material critically and communicate it to others. You are cheating yourself of so much if you just wimp out and use CGPT.
I have a high reading rate and a high comprehension rate. In grad school they told us the the profs would each assign reading as if that was your only class it was on purpose. There was literally no way to read everything for classes on top of all the papers and thesis work. For me, can't read everything was about 80-85 percent of the material which was above average.
One of the tricks for articles is read the summary, introductory paragraph, and conclusion and speak early in discussion to show you know what the article is abut.
Another trick is divide articles up with friend(s) and brief each other.
Both in my upper division Medieval History undergraduate classes and in my graduate classes, we'd periodically get assigned the same book for a different class, which was helpful. I could skim my old notes and not reread it or just pick out certain chapters. (Not textbooks, but medieval lit type things. This would happen with classics, philosophy, theology texts, across different under graduate and graduate degrees. It happens).
Usually if I had to skip something important, I'd take notes on the class discussion and it was fine. I was an active class participants, my papers were generally early and heavily well resourced. This can buy you a lot of slack in college when you need it.
One time I got assigned "Little Flowers of St. Francis" and I didn't have time that weekend, so I skipped it. I listened in class, I made good notes. (Paraphrasing things makes them stick in your head the way just reading or listening won't. ChatGP can't stick things in your head the way writing things in your own words will.)
I truly intended to read it, but the back half of semester is busy and I also had two language classes in a full course load and papers and...
I actually used it in an essay question on an exam. Brother Juniper reminded me of the holy Fool archetype from Buddhist writings. I could easily remember a bunch of illustrative stories from class discussion I could use as evidence. I got a perfect score. She could not tell I hadn't read it.
I meant to read it over break, I really did, but there was a bunch of more interesting reading to do and breaks are always too short.
Over the ourse of the last wo under grad years and my medieval Masters program, it was a bout 50/50 it'd get assigned in whole or in part for one class or another, across multiple proffs.
The second time, i didn't even try to read it, but my hand was up in class with relevant comments and opinions. I'd casually reference something in a paper or essay here appropriate. A year went by and then another.
Eventually about a decade after it was first assigned i sold my copy away having never cracked it open.
I am convinced none of the people who assigned this book ever had a clue i hadn't read it.
I am not convinced this was cheating. I knew the information. The information was correct and i was using it correctly with my own spin.
My quality notetaking, my skill at chunking information with other disparate information, my skills at writing essays and papers, all of that was mine from long practice.
My brain doing the work.
LLM stuff slides right through you like olestra. It doesn't give you skills and it's such a passive way to do anything. Active note taking, active thinking, active writing, that builds skills.
One of my colleagues can say to me, I need a basic understanding of the research on [topic] for a meeting later today, help? and I can have them a one-page brief with a list of references inside of an hour. On one memorable occasion a colleague had to take over for someone else unexpectedly without context 10 minutes before a meeting and by the time she logged on to Zoom I had her a bulleted list of recent findings in the field and a short summary of the historical context.
Sure, ChatGPT would be faster, but the difference is, I'm right and ChatGPT is frequently not.
a dude came into the library stoned out of his mind and was like, “do I need a library card to look at books?” And I said, “to take books home, yes. To look at them, no” and he looked so relieved. bro was staring at a fish encyclopedia for like an hour and then just left.
Hey, just in case nobody's ever told you, you can just live with your friends. I don't mean as a temporary roommate situation until you get a better job or a romantic partner; you can do it forever if you want to. Like, I know my view is a little scewed here because I'm aroace, but you can't convince me that most people's lives wouldn't be vastly improved by living with a tight-knit group of people that all love and care about and support each other. You don't have to live alone! You don't have to live alone with your partner either! If the only thing stopping you is societal convention, then fuck it!! Break free of your chains!!! Do whatever you want forever!!!!
raising my son on a strict media diet of Portal, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Mythbusters in an attempt to resurrect the extinct species Pre-Gamergate Smug Nerd Boy
growing up people will tell you that you need to eat vegetables and drink water and sleep 8 hours a night. and you might think "ugh, thats lame." and then you hit your 20s and your body feels Bad and you realise you need to eat vegetables and drink water and sleep 8 hours a night. and maybe youll have kids one day, and you'll tell your kids they need to eat vegetables and drink water and sleep 8 hours a night. and they might think "ugh, thats lame." and you realise the cycle continues, and has likely been continuing for generations. and i think thats beautiful.
whoa…it’s crazy, i was under the impression that the cat has been fed every day for the past 19 years. but he’s informing me right now that’s never happened? not once in his life?
The American worship of The Dog as a sort of animal god, complete with a taboo against depictions of violence, even fictional, against them, is one of the most harrowing things about this nation’s culture.
USAmericans often view other cultures as barbaric and evil, if they view dogs as food, but think it's okay to eat cattle...and pigs...and chickens...I can never wrap my head around that one.
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
“chocolate guy” is currently shilling for harry potter so i better not see yall post his shit anymore. anyone who engages with that shit especially for money is scorched earth as far as i’m concerned.
because of the new tv show. and it’s only going to get worse as we get closer to the show’s release. take notice of it — who’s advertising, who’s talking about it, who’s encouraging you to watch it. it’s going to keep happening. there’s going to be more chocolate guys, more nicholas hoults, more kiera knightleys.
take no shit. give rowling an inch and she’ll take a mile. i don’t care how much you like or don’t like someone — if you see them interacting with harry potter positively in ANY way, drop them. unfollow, block, pretend they don’t exist. scorched fucking earth.
and most importantly, be loud about your support for transfems. be transfeminists. be mean about it. fight with people about it. block liberally. download shinigami eyes. read transfeminist theory. provide material and monetary support for dolls who need it, especially the trans women of color in your communities. show them that they’re loved. don’t look away.
ID: Two screenshots. The first is of a screenshot of a Tiktok post by Amaury Guichon. It shows Amaury Guichon, a smiling white man, wearing all white, holding two pieces of chocolate. Over it is text reading: "My first chocolate creation inspired by the magical world of Harry Potter! ⚡🪄
I brought Dobby to life, life-size and crafted 100% out of chocolate! 🍫✨ Surrounded by floating candles made from vanilla caramel, vanilla sable and a soft vanilla cremeux inside.🕯️
Should I create more pieces inspired by the world of Harry Potter? 👀🪄"
The second screenshot is of tumblr tags reading: "man come on why is everything shilling for hp right now"
