the book is better

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

About a year ago, teaching an online World Lit course in summer session. First writing assignment is a short paper requiring one (1) outside source; half the class turns in papers with “AI-hallucinated” quotations & citations because they’re just savvy enough to fiddle with the text and get past Canvas’s built-in & very-unreliable “AI detector” but not savvy enough to actually double-check what the computer is telling them. I send out emails to the tune of “if you want credit on the assignment you have to prove this source you quoted actually exists.”

One student apparently clicks the link in their bibliography for the first time, and is presumably surprised to find the same thing I found: working URL, but the page it goes to is not the article they cited (which 100% does not exist; I checked). Student goes into Inspect Page Source, changes the title of the page to display as the title of the hallucinated article, then sends me an email saying they can’t give me a URL because something something VPN but here’s a photo of their laptop displaying the article in question with the URL bar conveniently cropped out of frame.

They didn’t change the body text of the website, so it was pretty clear what they’d done. And what I’d actually asked them to send me was a PDF, since they were claiming this was an article from an academic journal, and it was a real journal we had institutional access to, so the involvement of a regular website at all was actually a screw-up on the “AI”’s part anyway. I eventually went back at the end of the course & gave them partial credit on that assignment (just enough to bump their final grade from a C to a B-minus) for being the only student all summer to put actual mental effort into lying to me — everyone else just took the “nuh-uh” approach.

the lines on the bottom say do not microwave but i have been microwaving it for 7 years now. i put it away wet and it must have slid off the counter. it broke into 6 pieces. my girlfriend says this is proof a ghost that lives in my house; particularly because it is a black mug with a ouija board design. i think it is proof that i should dry things before i put them away.

i had superglue from an abandoned art project. it took me four days. inspired by kintsugi, i painted the seams golden. it is my first time doing anything like this, and it was more error than trial. i do not have any fancy materials. there is a thick band of gold across the no, so it reads like a diphthong now, N\O. a part of it broke in an almost-perfect peace sign, oddly round.

it will not be watertight anymore, it cannot be a mug. i'll reuse it as a flower pot. it will go on my back porch. it is kind of ugly, really. i didn't do an excellent job.

i spent every minute of this repair thinking about how often i had used it. how many little rituals it has been a part of. it is a big mug, but not a soup mug, which i loathe. it is perfect for two hands to hold. i have used it almost daily, so often that many of the details have worn off. my own skin did that - almost a decade of shared warmth.

none of the times i have told this story has a single person said what do you mean you have a favorite mug. not a single person who has seen the resulting half-maimed piece has said why would you put that back together? not a single person has said this is a waste of time. not a single person has told me what's the point of this? if you want to find a new mug, just use AI.

somewhere someone is probably using AI to draw an image or write a poem, i know that is true. but i think it is also probably true that most of us are going to write and read and draw and dance just because. that the process of doing so is not for a goal or a specific benefit, but because for thousands of years now - when a piece of pottery breaks, we try to fix it. for thousands of years - long before capitalism had any say in it - humans have been doing things just for the experience of it. for the fuck of it. for the love of the game.

ai is not going to win because i cut my thumb while i did it. ai is not going to win because i kept thinking about my all friends who do ceramics, how they're always asking me if i want to join them for a lesson. i was thinking about every person i've ever shared a coffee with. i was thinking about who i was when i bought this mug (graduate student. could barely afford the off-season thing on clearance). i was thinking about how many hands have held this, how many people i've been since.

ai is not going to win because i didn't do a perfect job of it.

my sister-in-law and i recently had a conversation about how one of her coworkers uses Chat instead of reading self-help books. and we both looked at each other about that, the stunned silence of rabbits. "can you imagine?" we said. what's even the point to it.

This tumblr sexyman is your son!

Along the Promenade - Saffron Monks-Smith , 2026.

British , b. 1996 -

Sedona

Mixed media on 4x6" cold press paper, 2026

Prints: https://www.inprnt.com/artist/print/sedona/

Original for sale: https://ko-fi.com/s/43400d363c

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see, you wouldn't necessarily pick up on this, but beluga skulls (and most cetacean skulls in general) are pretty much

flat...

so what's going on up there? well, most of the beluga's head is taken up by soft tissue and a large organ called the melon, which is basically a big ol waterballoon of semiliquid fat!

(boob. it's a head boob.)

this organ is found in every toothed whale and dolphin species on the planet and it's INCREDIBLY important, because the melon is what lets them echolocate!

the actual sound-producing organ is inside their nasal passage of all places, which sits up behind there, but the melon is what's actually used to fine-tune the soundwaves into the laser-accurate pinpoints that dolphins and toothed whales are so famous for.