Honestly feel this… Will say for how much being a teenaged girl sucked I did learn the power of gaslighting and peer pressure which helped a lot. My dad and mom were always brawling with my sister and after it got used on me by my peers I realized since my dad was a momma’s boy I could always threaten to tell my grandma, my mom was a religious nut so I could always bring up the devil and as long as I rearranged their arguments as “you’re the crazy person” they couldn’t figure out how to say shit back and would go away. I mean…still got bullied in winterguard, but weirdly helped my home life.

(If you want to know my sister unfortunately died at 30 of natural causes, I’m practically NC with my dad and my mom found a religious cult who helped her with anger management so we’re mostly cool now + she’s no longer in the cult cause one of them claimed to curse her with a demon so worked out somehow…)

Yep and CR10 when you’re level 7 and decided to fuck around is also a proverbial dildo

Just from DMing perspective I feel this when my players decide to fight a NPC they weren’t supposed to fight at a level I don’t have a block for lol. “Well your options are cr3 and cr10 and you’re level 7 so…10 it is and imma just shave some stuff off while hoping for the best” lol. Shout-out to every time my party says they’re looking for shady people to circumvent the legal way to do something then balk when the pricetag isn’t a handshake and an IOU their reputation proceeds them will never be collected.

Being that person providing a better method halfway through a process. A cave person standing on top of another to cave art the ceiling? Halfway through I go “…You know you coulda just grabbed the log from outside, leaned it against the wall and climbed it”. Someone halfway through whittling a bowl? “Oh, yeah, I saw some coconuts on the beach they’d be perfect”.

I have the great hobby of Looking At Random Things, but the bad habit of assuming everyone else saw those things too so they must be doing what they’re doing for a reason lol. That all said I’m sure I’d be dead from dysentery within a week or smtg, they wouldn’t have to suffer me long.

Thank you! I’m apparently just blind AF lol. Really appreciate though swapped two days ago and still finding my sea legs :')

Honestly feels like their only mistake was not making it roomba sized with an outer mini railing that would keep the roomba from falling off AND they could hang decorations from it. Really didn’t think about how they could multipurpose this.

ETA I retract somewhat, they could be total mavericks and get a long extension for their vacuum and then tape it to an RC car. Is it a lot of extra work? Yes. Would it be amazingly fun? Also yes. Especially if you hook up catnip spreader basket on the back (though maybe that’s unsafe, probably don’t encourage your cat to weed and balance beam).

Asking into the void is there a way to do this on Voyager? Swapped from sync cause (far as I could tell) there’s still no mod features and the amount of “glide couldn’t grab this image” was frustrating, but haven’t found a way yet to hide posts you’ve seen. Like I know some links are going to be reposted multiple times, but much as I love tenforward I’ve been scrolling past the same gowron eyes memes the last few days on my feed (they’re great memes, but I can only see them so many times lol).

Gonna be honest and maybe not a popular take, but reading the article I feel like the author is taking the wrong vent here. (Idk Boston Globe so could just be like another commenter said they’re trying to piss on teachers, but I’m going to take good faith here as dumb as that probably is). This reads like someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about teaching and is an avid reader doing the Principle Skinner no it’s the children who are wrong meme.

Going to cover a couple thoughts, I apologize if I don’t have them ordered well. First off there’s always been “tell me what the text is saying so I don’t have to read it”. Sparknotes was the go-to when I was in school for example. You can decry AI, but all that shit was there with sparknotes too. I did try using it once or twice for books I hated cause all my classmates were and holy fuck did it miss the mark, I didn’t even find it useful for the tests cause they’d be about the writing itself and sparknotes was just about what happened and some prominent metaphors. To give an example one class we read The Scarlet Letter in highschool, I hated the fuck out of this book. I only read a few chapters and then synopsed the rest on wikipedia, majority of my classmates did sparknotes entirely. I scored higher than them on tests cause I read enough to understand the writing style and all they could say was what happened and not the whys or hows of it or why specific descriptions were given and what those descriptions meant besides “innocence” or “guilt”, they really could not discuss the book at all. So this isn’t an AI thing. Like we’d go over a chapter we’d supposed to have read and I didn’t even read it cause I only read the first few and we’d get asked why the priest guy was whipping himself and my sparknotes classmates would say guilt. Me who only heard for the first time he whipped himself in this chapter was able to say religious guilt and sin, that he is failing in the eyes of society and his god and can never make up for what he’s done and has to whip these bad thoughts in the eyes of both out of himself, oppress himself to conform, etc etc like they actually read more about the chapter than me, but only got a “what happened and here’s the theme” with no critical thinking. So AI is just the latest version with just about as much vetting (I feel really confident it’s just cannibalizing sparknotes too lol). (Please don’t debate my The Scarlet Letter accuracy with me if I don’t have this entirely right it’s been 20 years and damn did I hate this book lol it’s just an example)

Secondly I don’t feel this covers how outdated the curriculum can be. I did Shakespeare in highschool and holy fuck it was horrible. I had read a lot of 1700/1800s originally published books at that point (not personal interest, just class divide in my town where I got placed in the “poor” school and that was the library lol) so it was not a struggle for me. But we spent a whole semester on a book with word and syntax notes for Romeo and Juliet cause it’s obviously not modern English and the rest of the class was just translating. We basically spent every class translating 1-2 pages at best. To me this is a holdover from Shakespeare’s own time where it ACTUALLY had a point. Like Elizabeth II translating Cicero from Latin was a) to teach her Latin and b) his discourse (as I understand, not his actual politics, but his lawyer technique, kind of like a light debate class). This was not what we were doing. It was just reading a “classic” for tradition and the teacher had to spend a shitload of time translating the class through it. The reason given was to learn his poetry structures, but while I’m not a poetry person I have to believe there are more modern language poets who use/d it that don’t require a whole semester spent on straight translation just so the class can understand the words, how they’re pronounced to fit into the structure and the general syntax for the time. Shakespeare absolutely deserves to be taught, but when you’re that far removed from modern language K-12 is not the place because you can’t engage in the point of learning what he has to teach in a timely manner, you’re basically teaching half a language. My English class in high school had way more discussions about Cyrano de Bergerac and its themes because everyone could follow the language (and honestly this was great cause a lot of people had dating experiences to compare being teenagers whereas Romeo and Juliet we spent so much time to translate we didn’t get that discussion). The amount of people who have English as a second language aside, it’s not helping anyone to have to learn a new form of English in a semester when your purpose is something else entirely.

Thirdly SAT (and ACT? Dunno didn’t take that one and been a while since I was in k-12, but think that’s the other one) has a reading comprehension test, not a “did you understand the art of writing here” test. Which I do think is kind of fair cause work wise the amount of times I’ve been asked to identify a metaphor or simile is 0 lol (I know there’s jobs where that’s important, but my experience is they’re the minority). But everything is informed by those tests so if the course focus is going to be on comprehension over writing style I don’t agree with this article’s take. We are in a system to teach to the test (I may be wrong, but I feel like this would be generally everywhere cause the test is what matters, like in school for healthcare even though I had patient care techniques from work for how to discuss with the patient in an understandable and accessible manner, I couldn’t use them because the test required I use confusing technical terms I would never ACTUALLY use with a patient to show my knowledge like I’m not going to say ambulate to a patient when they would understand walk better). So you may say here yeah comprehension and the test is what matters or you may say the point is to teach the art of writing in which case the test should be reworked (idk I might be forgetting and SAT did have a poetry section, but fill in the blank Y is like X is is a whole world different from read this and what is the theme, what was the motifs, etc; if I’m totally misremembering or it’s changed and there is some in-depth writing style testing I apologize lol would still stand by k-12 stick to modern language cause teachers only have so much time with students).

I am not an educational professional so idk might be way off the mark here, but as a reader who did have to walk my classmates through a lot of shit (absolutely no fault of theirs, they read too, they just had money for Harry Potter and I didn’t lol) this article just rankles me.

If I read something my brain stores keywords/phrases to it anywhere from 30min to years. Sounds super normal (I think, least for 30min), but this has served me really well in two areas.

1. Tests. As long as it’s a knowledge test and not a skill test I can skim read right before (even if it’s like 100 pages and I didn’t learn any of it before) and pass (for multiple choice grade is usually in the 90s, write-in is more 80s). Only professional place I use this outside of school is the bullshit PowerPoint “training” at work that makes you take a test at the end… (I don’t work an office job, idk might be more useful there)
2. Online message chats. Great for looking stuff up like birthdays or preferences or someone told me something specific a year ago and now wants to talk about it in-depth and I have to go refresh on the exact health conditions of their dog while they’re grieving to me (I mean I could ask for a refresher, but when a friend is needing a comforting ear I’d rather just search it up quick while they type instead of making them back track their narrative which when you feel upset feels really alone someone can’t be right there in the moment with you off the bat, just a small way to care for my friends). Mainly though I do text DND and it’s amazing there lol. Had an unintentional tpk and offered a restart with memories (deus exmachina literally time rewind) which my group was into. I’m like shit we’ve been running this campaign for years, how am I going to remember the exact fight setups, initial NPC reactions, etc. I had a very specific search phrase for every event memory logged and made the whole thing a breeze to re-do literal years of content. And tbh I think I enjoyed it even more than my players cause I’d go back and reread their early murderhobo days and then get to freshly compare it to their evolved anarchist present (…I mean they were still murderhobos, but brought a tear to my eye to compare they’d learned some principles and loyalty lol).

Got it a little confused, Jefferson is the one who was obsessed with owning his half-sister-in-law. For Washington I’m talking about [https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/ona-judge](http://www.ona.com/ Judge) who Washington was particularly insistent on reclaiming up until he died. He may have said he abhorred slavery, but he didn’t seem to particularly practice or actually believe that.

Didn’t Washington stalk and harass his half-sister-in-law (who was a slave who escaped him) till his deathbed… Ig tbf coulda just been gender slavery rather than race slavery, but idk I’d say he was against people as property.

LOL bad potion to roll the unidentified potions roulette :')

I allowed smashing cause player was doing an anarchist punk (mohawk, leather vest, enough piercings I think I would have had to tell them heat metal cast on them was an instant KO lol) and was adamant that was how they’d administer first aid… The compromise was they’d stop calling every NPC who wasn’t poor a capitalist pig while the party was trying to negotiate. Think no one in the party had above 9 charisma and they all insisted on playing like a mafia, they didn’t need the help to tank their negotiations lmao.

This is why I don’t give my party in DND unidentified potions anymore after one decided to make a Molotov cocktail out of a potion of superior healing lmao (I tried to dissuade, they insisted, we had a standing rule potions could work by smashing, also at this player’s insistence lol).

My cat is in this picture and the only thing missing is the top of a flight of stairs lmao

Was the most weirdly aggressively Pepsi only area I’ve ever been in haha now I try to make sure we grab him a six pack when we go anywhere new juuuust in case. Haven’t run into the situation a second time fortunately lol

Lol my brother is a coke guy. Took him out for his birthday and he’s in the bathroom when server came over for drink orders. My brother usually interrogates them if it’s real coke which seems kind of over the top so I just said “do you have actual coke?” and got a yes so ordered it for him. He sits down and I’m like I made sure it was coke for you! He takes a sip— it’s Pepsi lmao.

Still not as funny as the time we were on vacation in a Pepsi area. Couldn’t even find coke in the gas stations. We visit a ye olde touristy shopping center done up like the 1950s. Coke paraphernalia everywhere. I’m like great we can finally get you a coke! Go in a store, all the coolers are coke aesthetic, he’s excited. —It’s all Pepsi.

It’s hard up out there lmao. (I understand the frustration though, did once have a meltdown after a lot of driving because I couldn’t get tea anywhere that wasn’t a cheap grocery store teabag at best lol just want good tea before doing another 8hrs straight driving. Ended up angrily making my own in the parking lot like a madwoman lmfao)

I see you’ve seen my Stardew Valley games lmao thanks for the laughs this was great!

Honestly never occurred to me lol I was 17 and that was Work’s Potato, it needed to go home to Work.

I have definitely wondered the same myself lol I am also pretty shit with time management…

Once put one of those plastic wrapped potatoes in my uniform apron to put back in produce at my first retail job (got abandoned in the mac and cheese section). I then completely forgot and took it home. Took it out of my apron and put it on my desk next to my car keys because “I’ll remember to take it back”. I did not. Lived with me for a week or something when I finally put it in my apron again because I wasn’t remembering. I took it to work. I completely forgot about it and never returned it. It made this trip several times. I put it back on my desk because this wasn’t working out, surely I’ll remember if I see it.

Then I forgot about it for like three months. One day I look over at my desk and it’s a shriveled potato with a new potato growing from its own husk…

In essence, potatoes are amazing and horrifying. Just like my short term memory lol.