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"came back wrong" but it's food that you heated up in the microwave

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Wave in Backlight - Peter Witt

German , b. 1966 -

Oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm.

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The Entirety of Tumblr from Tumblr has been Chucked in to the ocean! You're all wet now.

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i saw a license plate this morning that said ‘drgn slr’ which probably means ‘dragon slayer’ but ‘dragon slur’ is funnier. dragon faggot. draggot if you will.

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it's such a sadness to me that kids eventually lose that 'no filter' thing when they grow up. my niece asked what 9/11 is and someone explained it to her and her unfiltered conclusion was "bro. is that it"

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i worked at a park with a famous cliff people do indeed keep falling off and one day someone said, "why don't you just close off the trail?" and i said, "we can't make people make good decisions. we also can't close the Outside."

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it’s too early for this

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I know I couldn't handle having kids but if I was left in charge of some, I'd take them to the park to feed ducks. Not bread though, you shouldn't feed that to ducks. We're feeding them lettuce. Let the ducks going apeshit over lettuce show the kids that lettuce is actually awesome. When they go home, their parents are baffled by the fact that the kids are now willingly eating salad. In the most horribly animalistic fucked up way possible.

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there are great, lumbering things in the dark. shapes indistinct with terrible potential. but they could be gay as fuck

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One of the most personal, saddest things about living in America is the summertime.

There is 0 reason for American adults not to have a summer break. I can only say this with a full throat so loud, but other countries have policies and laws that give adults summertime.

It is not a joke to say France is kind of shutdown for August. There are over a dozen countries that have enough mandatory, legally required leave available to take an entire month off, or more. PLUS mandatory PAID holidays.

It's Brazil and Russia (ooh scary BRIC countries outgrowing the US and coming for us). India AND China give up to 2 weeks mandatory vacation leave, plus sick leave on top.

It's Afghanistan (20 days). It's Angola (22). It's Argentina(25) and Armenia (25) and Australia (20). It's Cambodia (technically unlimited; you can eventually get 15 or 17 days per month vacation).

That us on top of mandatory PAID public holidays. Cambodia can somehow manage 27 mandatory paid holidays plus upwards of 18 vacation days per year and going up from there, and we in the US can't even manage mandatory paid holidays.

We don't even get paid on Christmas and Memorial Day. And even trying to convince some people, let alone politicians, that everyone should get paid on Christmas is unfair to compare to pulling teeth.

Please. Please. I want to have a better life. I want you to have a better life.

I want you to not miss Summer Break. Because France and Cambodia don't.

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I hate having to post political posts like this nut he we are again. Anybody from the UK wanna sign this. Folks from outside the UK maybe share it?

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How did ancient Chinese tombs set up mechanisms to deter tomb robbers? (This is just a basic demonstration - in reality, it was far more complex. The mausoleums of Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE) and Empress Wu Zetian (624-705 CE) remain unexcavated to this day because current technology cannot safely handle them.) Cnetizen say "No excavation needed - mercury level testing suffices. The Records of the Grand Historian documents that the First Emperor's underground palace used mercury to simulate rivers and seas. Being highly volatile, the mercury would have largely dissipated over time - not just since Xiang Yu's era 2,200 years ago, but even if Huang Chao's rebels had breached it 1,000 years later. Yet modern instruments detect severely elevated mercury levels at the site!" This confirms the mausoleum has never been substantially breached. While we cannot rule out that a few tomb raiders ('touching gold captains') may have entered, none could have survived - the instant mercury vapor exposure would have been fatal." Qin Shi Huang is revered as the 'Ancestral Dragon' in China, so people never joke about him - it’s believed to bring bad luck (a superstition tied to disrespecting the 'Dragon Emperor'). This might also explain why no one has dared to open his mausoleum to this day.

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fell for the oldest trick in the book

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Took my tiny child with me to the Halloween store. Walked in and immediately realized it would be a terrible mistake.

They had those jumpscare machine things everywhere, lots of spooky noise machines, scary looking animatronic things, crazy decorations, just the whole 9 yards and then some. I immediately went to turn around and leave when I heard a noise coming from my arms.

My one year old child who gets scared if we cough…. was laughing.

She makes this precious “eee!” sound and starts vibrating when she sees something she really likes, usually an animal or a balloon, and she points right at the big zombie thing by the door and does that. I carry her in past a huge 10 ft tall Pennywise inflatable, and she smacks me to tell me to stop so she can look. She ponders him for a moment, and his glowing light-up eyes, then points at his hand and shouts “BEEM!” Which is her word for “balloon.” She made us stand there under Pennywise for at least 3 minutes, which is a really long time for a one-year-old.

Then, she begs to get down, so I let her loose and she just books it all over the store. Finds the creepy demonic looking babies and shouts “BABY!” then gets this confused look on her face and tries to wipe the “dirt” off their faces. Decides it’s not worth it, goes and picks up a severed hand decoration, hands it to me and says “hand.” Yes, my dear, it is a hand. And yes, that severed foot has “toes,” you’re very right.

Finds the wigs, runs down the aisle shouting “hair! hair!” and grabbing her own sparse little headfuzz so hard I think she’s going to rip it all out. Then she found the speaker in the wall that was blaring Monster Mash and she demanded I pick her up so we could “DANSSSE”. But she got distracted by the big spider decorations, which she christened as dogs by running toward them and barking.

She ran up and down the aisles of costumes touching the fabric and making her little “tss tss tss” giggle that she does when she’s having Much Too Good a Time. Every so often she’d stop, look back to make sure I was there, and point at something and vibrate with her aggressive “EEEE!”

A man turned a corner wearing one of the creepy latex masks. He immediately started apologizing to me, saying “I’m so sorry, I’m looking for my friend, I don’t want to scare her.” Meanwhile my child is standing there looking up at him with the most confused look on her face. Not scared, just confused, like he is so dumb and she can’t figure out why he would want to make that stupid face for so long. But he rounds another corner all hunched over, she flaps her arms and sighs, and takes off to go scream at the creepy lawn decorations.

When it was time to go, nothing could convince her to come to me willingly, so I had to promise her one last look at the balloon man while I picked her up against her will. Pennywise placated her, and we left the store with a smile on her chubby little cheeks. She demanded we wait and watch the big inflatable-flailing-arm-tube-man out front, the one that was bright orange and had a jack-o-lantern face, and she bounced and wiggled and danced in my arms despite its fan being louder than the loud motorcycles that scare her on our walks. She waved bye-bye to it as we left for the car.

Basically, that was the cutest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, and it’s so crazy how so many things are culturally taught and kids are just… immune to that. All she saw was bright colors and things she recognized and could name, in a place she could explore and touch. She has no concept of clowns being scary or zombies being A Thing or what constitutes “creepy” and “spooky” and “gross.” To her, a severed arm with gore hanging out the end doesn’t represent pain or violence, it’s just “arm,” and it’s got some weird stuff on the end that’s funny colors. They’re just things, there’s no context for it.

The world is weird and beautiful and it’s so cool to see it through the eyes of someone who is so New to this planet and hasn’t been influenced by society and culture yet.

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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.

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Can you IMAGINE getting your ass beat by this annoying child? I would simply give up the supervillain game rather than let baby Dick Grayson be this annoying about defeating me, I would rather die than have to admit this obnoxious chaos gremlin could win against me.