That thing that happened, that one time

That's not what we do. That's never what we do.

[enchantedbook]

'The Wild Swans' illustrated by Elenore Plaisted Abbott, 1922

[theinsaneum]

https://www.patreon.com/TheInsaneum

[waitingforthecat]

video description: looping animated art in an art nouveau inspired style. It shows a nude woman standing in a keyhole shaped frame. Behind their head is a large snowflake. The woman bends down and picks up snow like a piece of cloth, while raising she turns, so now she is with her back to the viewer, then turns again with the cloth around her shoulders. The cloth is almost transparent and floor long. The wind picks up and blows her hair and the cloth forward, then the cloth seems to disintegrate and turn into snow flakes starting at the bottom till she is again completly nude. end video description

[moveslikekeithrichards]

huge fan of when cats reach out and touch each other with disrespectful intent

[telekitnetic-art]

🐉🎇

Custom fullbody formline design + painting for bunsen on TG!! The physical painted version was made with a thrifted wooden cutting board and acrylic posca markers!!

A physical painted add-on for formline commissions is something I've been considering for a little while now; I'm working out pricing details for that at the moment! I might make it a "charge per hour" plus materials kind of thing.

[crossstitchworld]

One of my absolute favorite pieces! ❤️ by fernandaffp on reddit

[geniusbee]

these are getting weird

[valtsv]

i'm like a fujoshi but for dead people

[valtsv]

if you could see the thread i'm hanging on by you would not say these things to me

[zooophagous]

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

[qonphuceingey]

I’m really starting to think you people don’t understand what university is for. You’re buying the accreditation that you can do these things. It doesn’t matter how you do them.

[zooophagous]

I can assure you if you're going to school to be an xray tech or a surgical assistant it does very much matter how you do the stuff your accreditation says you can do. We aren't all business majors.

[qonphuceingey]

Yes, but you actually can’t do an X-ray without an X-ray machine and you can’t do surgery without scalpels. We already rely on technology for everything. Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more. If you can do your job with chatgpt, but can’t without, you can still do your job. I’m sure you would find university much much harder without access to google or the internet too.

[zooophagous]

Do you think scalpels are magic and do a little song and dance and perform the surgery themselves like Beauty and the Beast characters and the surgeon is there to conduct the background music

[darlingofdots]

What do you think will happen when your employer, who hired you because they saw you have a certificate to say that you have specific skills and knowledge, starts expecting you to have and use those skills and knowledge and you can't because you think a university degree is just a piece of paper that you buy

[ariaste]

"Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more"

When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.

Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.

And if your response as a college student is "Ugh i'm already good at this though, i don't need the practice" -- sweetie, you have no idea how good at it you could be though. If you're good at it now but you keep working on it, you're going to ASTONISH yourself in a couple years with how good at it you can get. I was a good writer when I was in college; I am an ASTRONOMICALLY better writer now, because I put in the work. But you have to lift the weights and build your muscles to get there, even when it's tedious. There aren't any shortcuts for this. You can be content with your own mediocrity, or you can believe that you're capable of growing towards brilliance. Which one will you choose, mediocrity or brilliance? You get to pick right now.

[skodasforge]

I’m a Surgical Assistant and that ChatGPT stan pissed me off so I’ll use my job as an example. 90% of our job as surgical assists comes down to memorizing the names and usages of the thousands of unique instruments and equipment and sutures involved in surgery as well as having the critical thinking skills to anticipate the needs and expectations of the surgeons we work with. That’s a “cognitive load” that cannot be pawned off on a computer. If I relied on ChatGPT to tell me what instruments to have ready for a case, it would create a composite of what the most likely instruments to be used in a given surgery and assuming that it’s even accurate, it would be effectively useless if my surgeon didn’t use any of those because each doctor is different. Surgeons get pissed off if you give them the wrong diameter size suture, so why would I rely on a soulless algorithm to tell me what my surgeon wants? And if I’m not figuring out for myself what they may need based off my own learning and not machine learning then why am I even there? There’s a reason robotic surgery still requires a surgical assistant and a surgeon to operate the robot, technology is an easement not a replacement for human labor and in college learning is the labor you should be doing.

A common thread with ChatGPT simps seems to be that they truly believe all labor is as easy as their cushy middle management jobs in the tech industry. “Buying an accreditation” might work there but can you imagine someone in the medical field not actually knowing the subject they’re licensed or accredited to know? I’ll give you a hint: the word we typically use is malpractice.

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

I would also like to add as somone who did a one degree about 10 years ago when academia was just startingto make the switch from fully physical to full online, it is entirely possible to do a degree without really using the Internet or Google. You turn up to lectures, you collect the reading list, you go to the library, you find the book you need on the shelf, you take it and several others back to whatever desk you're working at and the you read them and make notes (I made notes on a PC but plenty of people in my group used paper notes pads), you critically evaluate the information amd decide whether or not to include it in your assessments. No Google required, it's not that fucking hard.

[selwyngrimm]

Let me introduce you all to the building trades concept of "buying your book."

A "book" is (a slightly outdated beyond this specific topic) term for your union card, which states that you're a member in good standing of your local/union and ostensibly means that you have the coinciding skills that go with the title of journeyworker or apprentice or whatever. Typically, to become a journeyman, you serve an apprenticeship (usually 5 years) and then have to take a test of some sort to prove you've acquired all the necessary skills to earn the qualification. The card/book is the proof that you have a basic level of competency.

Sometimes though certain locals, usually in the South or other places where right-to-work or similar attitudes are stronger, will "sell books," which is to say they will allow people who either haven't served an apprenticeship or passed a skills test to buy their card so that they may work on union jobs.

There's a myriad of reasons and reasonings on why a local might do this, but on the ground, it means that if I'm on a big job, anyone from areas or locals that have a reputation for selling books is automatically assumed to be under-qualified. This sucks, because I've known plenty of badass hands from Southern Locals, but because they come from book-selling locals, they had to overcome that stigma. To an extent, this whole thing is self-regulating because if you bought a book and can't hack it, you only come to a travel job once before they will never invite you back, but it is a constant source of sand in the gears for the whole labour management process.

Anyway, learning is important and faking learning WILL bite you in the ass if you have any desire to exist in the world in a meaningful way.

[hollowedskin]

Also, just so you know, real life professional shit isn't like school. You don't get endless chances to get it right when you fuck it up . If you are found to have fraudulently acquired a qualification that you have no idea how to use, you not only get fired, but you get blacklisted in your inustry if not legally charged with fraud.

That will follow you for the rest of your life. That will completely lock you out of your chosen field and all it's related feilds forever.

What are you going to do when you're still paying off a degree that you can't use because you've been flagged in the system? What are you going to do when your future employers run a police check and find that you've been charged with occupational fraud? Do you think they're going to hire you anywhere when that comes up? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a job with an unrelated criminal charge, let alone one directly tied to your job?

Come on guys. You don't get do-overs with this shit. Don't fuck your life up because you didn't want to pay attention at uni. There are real world consequences for this shit.

[dailycatsblog]

[the-quasar-hero]

Very generally speaking, when you see a black man in a piece of media, be it tv show, movie, video game, etc. there’s something you often see a lot of writers do. To go against the stereotype of black men (and black people in general) being dumb and lazy, you’ll see this black male character being smart and an achiever. 

The Black Nerd. A common character type, the nerd will always be very interested in all things nerdy: science, video games, mathematics, etc. In an continued effort to combat stereotypes, the Black Nerd will be lack athleticism, probably being asthmatic (the nerdiest of conditions). The Black Nerd will dress smartly, suspenders and bow ties. They’ll always talk smart too, using proper English with complex words.

Now, I don’t have a problem with a black character being a nerd, indeed black people are a people; we aren’t all the same and we all have varying personalities. The problem I have is that too often we see a distinct disconnect between Blackness and the Black Nerd. The Black Nerd doesn’t listen to hip hop or rap, only classical music. The Black Nerd only has white friends, the only other black characters are into not nerdy stuff. The Black Nerd never ever uses AAVE at any time in any context.

And again I must say that Black people, not being a monolith, there are no hard fast rules to being Black. I’m more than sure there are Black people like what I’ve described above, I’m not saying it’s impossible; what I’m getting at is that the only Black Nerd we see. There are Black Nerds that play basketball, that bump Kendrick Lamar, and use AAVE since it’s an ever changing dialect. I’m just saying there’s no one way of being a nerd and no one way of being Black.

[the-quasar-hero]

Well @dumbey, seems we’re in similar boats

[the-quasar-hero]

This ain’t about him, this is about Black/Asian solidarity. Focus.

[marinella-ela]

[failfemme]

how is he real

[nightmaresyrup]

I compressed and minified a Gryphon. Marvel at how tiny it is! (Around the size of a corgi)

[tj-crochets]

I saw this and had to try to sew one, it’s such a cute gryphon!!

[faeberrywine]

User credit: wellmadebykiley on insta

(please like, reblog and give proper credit if you use any of my gifs!)

[maryoliveoil]

[afloweroutofstone]

My favorite category of government program to run across is "program you've never heard of doing extremely important work to solve a major problem which you have also never heard of." On that note, the US drops millions of pounds of sterile bugs over Panama each week in order to prevent a parasite infestation from moving into North America. Everyone say thank you to the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle Borer Worm (COPEG)

[afloweroutofstone]

This program had its funding cut during the DOGE cuts last year and now the parasitic worm they were trying to slow the spread of has officially arrived in the United States.

[helicalsymmetry]

@illuminesce i will be honest with you, i spent several years getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of scientific accuracy in yaoi before realizing that perhaps i would be happier reading and writing scientific papers.

[retronator]

Clouds practice #3

I did two studies of clouds all the way back in March and April 2018. Now that I've been looking at all the amazing skies during sunsets in Tahiti, I had to get back to it.

This time it's painted from my own reference with colors mostly picked plein air at a different sunset with similar conditions (Atari 2600 palette, as always).