The Worst Thing Ever? Motivation For Life.

I'd estimate that I am hungry and cold 80% of the time but that still sounds better than hungry and hot.

[aropride]

please god let chatgpt die out like nfts did. With a fast and graceless fall into irrelevancy

[bladespark]

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

[eurodynamic]

[kanagenwrites]

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

[eldritchamy]

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

This is also a good string on this topic.

[liberalsarecool]

We no longer have safe food. So much winning.

Conservatives don't see the value in prevention. They only value what harm can be inflicted.

[ink-the-artist]

"Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak."

[moniquill]

[die-or-ride-ig]

Most

I see her most reliably when I lean into the mirror to put in my contacts

Wild hair, blurry vision, bared freckles, twinned.

And then I blink and see only myself, happy and sad, curled and rounded with a cheek freckle,

not her straightened hair, straight nose, lip freckle.

I see her most beautifully in the shape of my sister

Arms that held us, the nice brand names that don’t quite skim the skin, and the sheer effort of self-sacrifice.

Then she looks away and I see my sister, happy and sad, scrubbed and urgent, nursing,

not her in the classroom, knelt down, teaching.

I see her most lovingly in the enthusiasm of my brother,

Blue eyes sparking, needing discussing and agreeing, wanting.

Then he pauses and I see my brother, happy and sad, the parts of our dad she loved and more she never knew, searching.

not her adoration of him and him, finding.

I see her most surprisingly in her own family.

In her mother’s efforts and grace

In her brother’s avoidance and generosity

In her father’s Kindle and stubbornness.

But none of her rebelliousness, or nerdiness, or curls.

I see her most (un)comfortably in her closest friends.

Her humor in my ‘other family’, dirty jokes and good times that I didn’t get that are now faded away.

Her loyalty in her ‘first best friend’, reduced to quarterly updates and funerary visits without the companionship.

And so much more that I never saw and can only miss in theory.

[shadyplantsgardensludge]

Grieving is such a weird experience. Like you're having a good day and then all of a sudden your brain is like "hey, remember what your mom looked like at her funeral?". Like...yea, thanks brain.

[spider-mann]

Andrew Garfield talks to Elmo about grief and the passing of his mother

[katiebuttercup]

Todays is my mum’s funeral, so, yeah, needed this today

[anxietyproblem]

[lemonsuponlemons]

A violent man calling me a good girl would fix me

[vidalinav]

I like to think that Nesta and Cassian’s bond makes them more susceptible to understanding when the other is upset or happy or sad. They’re wide open books and even though they’re generally very good at reading each other, they feel the other’s emotion for themselves now.

However, that means that Cassian literally realizes how bad Nesta feels all the time. She gets lonely, feels left out, is always guilty. And mostly she gets anxious out of nowhere. When they’re at family dinners, out of to town, sometimes even when she’s at the library. He feels her strength too that stubbornness. But he’s never realizes how anxious Nesta has been all this time. So Cassian starts setting up little routines to keep her at ease. He purposefully makes sure that music is everywhere she’s going to be. He brings one of her books with him at all times. He checks in with her in terms of affection like randomly combing his fingers through her hair or wrapping his arms around her waist. He squeezes her hand, brings it to his lips, and kisses at her palm. He starts giving her compliments too. He has to practice it of course because he’s never been good with his words. But he tries so hard to say he’s proud and she’s strong and she’s so so so good. Good to him. To others. To her friends and her family. He’s proud that she’s his mate. Because she’s so self conscious and she feels so much shame, and he wants her entire being to know that he’s there and she’s safe. That he has never in his life been happier than the moment she entered his life and stayed.

[anxietyproblem]

[mobydyke]

being an adult is just dragging urself kicking and screaming to things that you will enjoy and that will be good for you

[kikoblowyourmind]

[daenerysbeauty]

I love harwin strong cause every time he comes across rhaenyra no matter what shit she’s pulling he’s just like “good for her”

[die-or-ride-ig]

looooove being at events w your friends and there is no sitting area and you are having such a bad time rn you cannot stand that long so you have to sit outside while they all enjoy it

+ being too scared of getting injured in a mosh pit to be able to participate

[sparring-spirals]

Putting the Bell's and the Verdict into a heist simultaneously feels kind of like. Hosting a race with professionally trained greyhounds vs an assortment of angry city pigeons, college campus squirrels, angry city rats, a chihuaha or two, a really grumpy cat, and a roomba with a buzzsaw attached to it.