Bea St. Germain

via Seattle Times:

Local Ballard raccoon has been spotted thriving in a remarkably unique and charming body

(One Birmingham, AL newspaper reporting on the contest said that, "New York has her Father Knickerbocker, Philadelphia her William Penn" and suggested that Chicago have a woman with windblown hair and webbed feet. However, they also wrote that "[Birmingham should have] a handsome young woman with a constitution of iron, hair of the blackest of coal, and eyes with the fiery glow of the furnaces," so I think the takeaway here is that throughout all of history, people without Hetalia will invent it.)

Anyway, the newspaper received hundreds of entries, and they chose as their winner a woman standing with feet apart and one hand on her hip, a mason’s square in the other hand, crowned with a phoenix rising from the ashes to reference the Great Chicago Fire. Most importantly, she had "I WILL" emblazoned on her cuirass.

The New York Times called this "a badly proportioned design and a swaggering pose" but Chicago didn't care (and maybe liked the swagger, thanks very much). The Columbian Exhibition moved ahead, and a lady crowned with a bird and flames, "I WILL" somewhere on her person, became as close to an official symbol for the fair as you could get---so much so that they brought her back for the 1933 Fair too.

(that 'Y' you see on either side of her was also the result of a newspaper competition around the same time, and is still found throughout the city.)

This... kind of has two answers: Before ChatGPT and After ChatGPT.

Before ChatGPT, there were always one or two per class. I only ever taught/TA'ed for big lecture-hall gen ed courses, and a solid 50% of the students thought it was a pointless or at least unimportant checkbox they had to fill out and wanted to do as little work as possible to get it. But few intentionally plagiarized. Sure, there were some people who turned in essays they downloaded off the internet or got from their fraternity brothers, and they were easy to catch with plagiarism checkers. There was one girl who, memorably, noticed that for weeks no one was checking their weekly writing responses other than to see if they did them, so she just started turning in pure copy-pasted chunks of the assigned readings. These are people who were taking the class because they felt they were required to, who did not want to be here and don't want to do the work because if it's outside their major they feel it's a waste of their time. I think this is a very sad way to view gen ed classes, but it is a very common one.

The more interesting cases were, there were always a handful of students who genuinely didn't know what plagiarism was. Or rather, they knew that downloading an essay off the internet, slapping your name on it, and turning it in as your own was wrong, and they'd never do that... but they genuinely didn't know that copy-pasting lines from the textbook or Wikipedia uncited, or changing a few words to synonyms, counted as plagiarism. They didn't understand why you were supposed to "say things in your own words" if the original source said it better, and they didn't know that just changing a few words around wasn't sufficient. They were taught that plagiarism was wrong, but never why. These are the students who benefit most from the hbomberguy video: because he explains not only what plagiarism is, but why it's wrong, and what you should do instead, in a thorough and accessible way.

Post-ChatGPT, tons of students are using LLMs to write their essays. Tons. It's bleak. There was an assignment where students would write an essay first draft, I would give them feedback, and they would incorporate the feedback into their second draft. Fully half of students very, very obviously plugged my feedback into ChatGPT and had it rewrite their essay for them. It was genuinely crushing. I put in a lot of effort to give every student personalized feedback on how to improve their essay and they slapped it into the slop machine and called it done.

I don't know if they just don't want to do it and don't care, or if they truly think that ChatGPT is better at writing than them and they want to turn in the best essay they can. Probably some of both. And the most frustrating part is I know it, but unless they do something really dumb like cite fake sources (something I have in fact gotten before), I can't prove it to any standard of reasonable proof. So I just have to act like I believe they wrote it. It's bad out there.

Although one unifying theme is:

I would've thought in comparison to high school people would be more interested in building their skills to get their money's worth

There is a significant percentage who are not. They see the degree as a product to be gotten, the grades as a means to get it, and any method of getting those grades is worth doing. Learning and skill development is not what they are here for, Getting The Degree is. That's what they feel they are paying for. Unfortunately, that's what the system incentivizes. It's a whole system of perverse incentives where learning is a fun bonus if you want to engage in it, on the way to Getting The Degree.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

"Spider-Man New York Stories: The Fashion Consultant" ✨️ A funny and lighthearted Spider-Man and The Nanny crossover story, by yours truly✨️

A story for the 90's people! In case you don't know, The Nanny was a 90s TV show, starring Fran Drescher, which took place in New York! So... of course I had to write this.

I started this story almost a year ago 😭✨️ I need to be faster when making comics HAHAHAAHHS

Penny Rose: Babbles in Baby

All of tumblr collectively at my husband:

Husband: you don’t even have to understand taxes yet! I can explain them but you’ve got several years before that’s relevant!

Penny Rose: wide eyes, staring at her father, almost intrigued

THE MAN THE MYTH THE LEGEND

Husband: Now Penny there is a lot of misinformation out there in the world and I hate to tell you this but the moon is in fact not made of cheese. That is a conspiracy theory pushed by Big Dairy.

1) Did you participate in baby talk to make up for your husband's deficit, or did you also opt to speak to the Deals Warlock like a very tiny adult from babyhood?

Something funny that has happened is that while she formally calls me Mama when she's answering me in passing she does call me "My Darling Love" and I don't know for sure but I think it's because I call her and her father "my loves" and her father calls me and her "darlings" and she's created a mash up 😂

Penny Rose is now 5 years old and she

1. Starts talking the moment she opens her eyes to the moment she passes out at night

2. Asks, and I am not exaggerating I counted, an average of 892 questions a day

3. Does not accept "I don't know" as an answer to said questions, will usually have a follow up question as to why you don't know OR a suggestion on how we can find out together