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Xie Lian, having just learned that San Lang is in fact Hua Cheng, the supreme ghost king who defeated 33 heavenly officials seemingly on a whim and who just crushed an entire army in the sinner's pit in a blink, the man of the legends, the greatest fear of the heavens himself: anyway. dinner at my place?

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I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.

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The live action sanitization of John Lewis' legacy is also driving me up a wall. "Create good trouble" that man was being attacked with dogs, water hoses and racist cops with bayonets and guns while creating that good trouble. Do NOT act like his good trouble was "playing by the rules but being snarky about it". Y'all gone stop bastardizing the legacy of Black civil rights activists for lesser means I'm over it.

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Is anyone else just... exhausted?

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Every episode of Supernatural they ask, "How will we defeat this new and unique monster?" and the answer is "shoot them with guns," mostly.

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shit ton of people are repeating the thing about hayao miyazaki saying AI art is an "insult to life itself" and just as a reminder he was talking about the zombies that team made that were intended to be scary in how much they shook, but instead reminded him of his disabled friend. the insult to life itself was referring to the team trying to make scary real symptoms that people live with.

it was a quote about ableism. if he has said other things about AI type stuff, that is a different thing. but that specific quote was about ableism.

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Or water fountains, public washrooms, outdoors tables, etc, etc

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maybe dont post photos of the moon and venus unless you're okay with doxxing

the placement is different depending where you live.

umm ok.

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Hua Cheng is in sass mode. 💁

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eleanor shellstrop one of the protagonists of all time honestly. woman who sucks so much who gets put in a situation specifically made to make her worse and instead she gets better. filled with love for other people but replaced it with malice for as long as she could because love got her nothing. went from being selfish for survival to selfless for survival and in the end she lands on being selfless for selflessness's sake. she even has mommy issues. she's even bisexual.

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Hey you all know about that fungus that possesses ants to make them climb on the tip of grass blades in hopes of getting eaten by a cow, so that the fungus can continue its life cycle in the cow's guts? Because I think that's the kind of thing that's wrong with cave divers.

We don't know what's down there. We don't know what's gotten into their heads that makes them so determined to physically, personally go down there to find out. But I wouldn't entirely dismiss the possibility that whatever has gotten into them is very invested in getting eaten by whatever is down there.

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Things that work in fiction but not real life

torture getting reliable information out of people

knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour

jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact

calling the police to deescalate a situation

rafting your way off a desert island

correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes

effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else

ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences

heterosexual cowboy

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My dad is a kroger manager and sent me this (repost without personal info)

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statement from mahmoud khalil shared by the center for constitutional rights

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Started using phone time to read library ebooks instead of scrolling and it’s made me back into the crazy voracious reader I was at age 12. i’ve been averaging a book a day this week. everyone delete your social media and get your ass on libby