clever title here

high-strung supernerd | multi-fandom | ferret mom | mfa student and college comp instructor | writer in multiple genres | you might have followed a side blog and got followed back from here

[plumdamsen]

As if I needed any more evidence that I’m having major problems with this character…

I have a book with dual protagonists (and a lot of other craft complications I haven’t quite figured out yet) that’s been kicking my ass for about 3 1/2 years now, and I decided to split up scenes by POV to see if I could see the story more clearly.

Protagonist 1: clear voice, nicely delineated scenes with few redrafts, easily placed in chronological order.

Protagonist 2: UTTER CHAOS. MULTIPLE DRAFTS OF SCENES. MULTIPLE FOLDERS OF MULTIPLE DRAFTS OF SCENES I MAY NEVER SORT OUT. LINES I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THAT MAKE NO SENSE.

Protagonist 2, if you’re so desperate to tell your story, please just fucking tell it, thank you very much.

[prokopetz]

Stephen King rightly gets a lot of shit for frequently having his characters think and speak in pop culture references that only make sense if you spent your formative years in 1970s Maine, but I feel like articulating that particular criticism on Tumblr is something of a glass-houses situation.

[jabberding0]

it's just a little bit of wind

[ailithnight]

Walking tents are always fun, but the pants are what killed me. Then, fresh off that death, GIRAFFE.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

BREAKING NEWS: screenshots from your phone not an appropriate format for submitting work in college classes.

[json-derulo]

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

probably would've been quicker and easier to just photoshop them in but no, this student took a refreshingly creative, arts-and-crafts approach to getting an academic misconduct case

[maniculum]

The only time a student sent me a photo of their laptop screen was ALSO for purposes of academic dishonesty.

About a year ago, teaching an online World Lit course in summer session. First writing assignment is a short paper requiring one (1) outside source; half the class turns in papers with “AI-hallucinated” quotations & citations because they’re just savvy enough to fiddle with the text and get past Canvas’s built-in & very-unreliable “AI detector” but not savvy enough to actually double-check what the computer is telling them. I send out emails to the tune of “if you want credit on the assignment you have to prove this source you quoted actually exists.”

One student apparently clicks the link in their bibliography for the first time, and is presumably surprised to find the same thing I found: working URL, but the page it goes to is not the article they cited (which 100% does not exist; I checked). Student goes into Inspect Page Source, changes the title of the page to display as the title of the hallucinated article, then sends me an email saying they can’t give me a URL because something something VPN but here’s a photo of their laptop displaying the article in question with the URL bar conveniently cropped out of frame.

They didn’t change the body text of the website, so it was pretty clear what they’d done. And what I’d actually asked them to send me was a PDF, since they were claiming this was an article from an academic journal, and it was a real journal we had institutional access to, so the involvement of a regular website at all was actually a screw-up on the “AI”’s part anyway. I eventually went back at the end of the course & gave them partial credit on that assignment (just enough to bump their final grade from a C to a B-minus) for being the only student all summer to put actual mental effort into lying to me — everyone else just took the “nuh-uh” approach.

So, @werewolf-transgenderism, was your laptop-photo student flummoxed by tech or trying to pull a fast one?

[werewolf-transgenderism]

they were doing an assignment (incorrectly) and instead of close reading the dialogue from a film (what they were supposed to do), they decided to just do plot summary of the film and vaguely reference visual elements with no citations or images included in the text. I required them to revise and resubmit with close readings of textual evidence to get credit, and instead of doing literally anything with the written part of the essay, they just took a bunch of photos of the movie playing on their laptop and stuck them in several additional pages at the end of the essay (still no in-text reference to them or any close reading. so it did not do well)

[cervinesatyr]

I have students use an editable group tool to submit short writing group writing assignments. Before I have them submit their project to the tool, they have to send me a copy to look over. When they're done, they're supposed to submit the finished thing to the tool (which require them to copy and paste the text and at the most do a bit of reformatting).

This time around a group just posted a screenshot into the editor and saved it. Like. It's technically readable I guess and I never said they could not do that so I left it. But one more thing to tell them they can't do next semester...

[chaotic-archaeologist]

Every year my assignment instructions get more and more specific as I have to rule out different crazy interpretations people have come up with.

[theknightlywolfe]

When the CEO of the company that didn't turn away Nazi business says "this isn't going to work" you know it's bad.

[unrelatedwaffle]

404 has been knocking it out of the park since they started. Please support their original reporting on this! If you subscribe to nothing else I highly recommend them. Their podcast is great too.

Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal

Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.

[anarchopuppy]

sometimes being a fan of something means not wanting them to make any more of it

[thepoisonroom]

people will say never make major life decisions when you're manic but it's like if this were a few centuries earlier you could accept this as a divine epiphany or whatever marie d'oignies was on about

[plumdamsen]

Cool, Amazon. Cool, cool, cool.

KDP in its ultimate wisdom has randomly decided that my bank account isn’t a “real” bank account (for many years I’ve used GreenFi, which used to be Aspiration, an environmentally friendly money management and investment service that partners with a bank and offers banking services, but is not a bank itself) and now I have to…open a new “real” bank account in order to get paid and to even keep publishing.

Like, I was going to get around to opening a separate business bank account eventually, when I had more books ready to publish, which is not yet…but I guess there’s an August 1st deadline on that now.

But most “free” bank accounts require a regular direct deposit in order to continue to be “free” and I DON’T WORK SUMMERS and won’t have a regular direct deposit again until September. So I’ll literally be paying a bank for the privilege of using them for nonexistent royalties so I can publish books when I have them ready to go.

Or I’ll have to switch over YEARS of banking services and change all my direct deposits with every single place I receive money from…and in the gig economy, baby, that’s a lot.

I really needed another aggravation/annoyance with no easy solution to fucking deal with right now. Thanks for that, Amazon.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

[thatdisasterauthor]

"Use Libre Office."

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.

[thatdisasterauthor]

:| :| :|

Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I am going to light something on fire.

[thatdisasterauthor]

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

[rabbiteclair]

auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"

[plumdamsen]

Oh gods, Brennan. Gods this is beautiful. Pass some of those tissues, y’all.

[plumdamsen]

How many of the CR fandom are of an age to have started singing oingo boingo’s “dead man’s party” about 1/3 of a second before the cast did?

[apolladay]

Pet owners, what kind of name does your pet have???

A food-item (Waffles, Peanut)

A color (Pinky, Hazel)

A real-life person (Marilyn, Paris)

A fictional character (Eevee, Simba)

A type of flora (Rosie, Willow)

Animal-like (Kitty, Gator)

A trait (Lucky, Buddy)

Something else

If you have more than one pet, choose the most applicable listed (ex: you have three pets named Cookie, Cream & Rocky, so you choose the “Food” option). Also, would be interested if you reblogged your pet’s name(s) in the tags and the reason why you chose it ^^

Pet owners, what kind of name does your pet have???

A food-item (Waffles, Peanut)

A color (Pinky, Hazel)

A real-life person (Marilyn, Paris)

A fictional character (Eevee, Simba)

A type of flora (Rosie, Willow)

Animal-like (Kitty, Gator)

A trait (Lucky, Buddy)

Something else

No pet

Voting ended onJun 11

If you have more than one pet, choose the most applicable listed (ex: you have three pets named Cookie, Cream & Rocky, so you choose the “Food” option). Also, would be interested if you reblogged your pet’s name(s) in the tags and the reason why you chose it ^^

[depsidase]

[ch4momile]

Does anyone know if we have the impending doom tomorrow?

[stealingpotatoes]

i don't know what older adults were on about when they said being a teenager was good <3

[necromancelena]

Die temu ad die

[necromancelena]

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

[chef-boy-ar-girl]

It accidentally is latin

[saanah]

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

[santapau]

Found this in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

[qqueenofhades]

This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think "temu" is identical to "timor" (infinitive, "to fear"), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as "timeo" ("I fear"). "Temu" is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate's part to turn gibberish into... something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Not to mention, it would be weird to put one "die" at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.

[nudistcat]

@theshitpostcalligrapher

[sekkitsune]

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

[qqueenofhades]

Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)

So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the "die"-s up that far, though "timeo" (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway ("die ad die timeo," "day to day I fear" if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don't super-hard quote me on this.

[sekkitsune]

I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.

But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.

[qqueenofhades]

....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

[laurenthemself]

how dare you say we error on the scribes

[jtimu]

this is what happens when you buy your latin on temu