ocie screams about fandom

One of my favorite tropes is "I'm not stuck in here with you, you're stuck in here with me" which often goes hand in hand with another favorite trope "horror movie scene from the pov of the horror"

So unsurprisingly one of my favorite scenes in PD is when Murderbot intimidates the shit out of the wannabe space pirates, locking them in their own ship and playing evidence of their crimes on their own TV

But my absolute favorite part is that it works too well and they all instantly surrender, leaving Murderbot standing there like 'um actually I was kinda planning on killing you guys but it feels weird now that you're like crying and shit'

Last week i was looking into one of my teen's homework when I noticed she was writing words she "wasn't supposed to know" in english (like "furthermore", for example. They only know very intermediary english) I got a bit mad for a second. I wear an "anti-AI" button all the time, i even told them before why i was anti-AI, yet she didn't listen to me and thought she could get away with it... But i decided to keep it cool because i didn't know why she would do this, since she never did.

Okay, one week after, this Wednesday, it was time for their class again and, when she arrived, i told her to come to my desk and asked her: "what is furthermore?" She went pale when she noticed the paper in my hands. I asked again: "darling, what is furthermore?" Then, she shuttered: "I don't know, teacher. I'm sorry, I had to ask Gemini because I had no time..." then I sat her down, she was clearly upset (she is just 13) and I asked her what happened. "I didn't have any time left because of my exams and there were too many units to go through. So I asked my mom to help me and she told me to use ChatGPT but I asked google instead." Okay. So I looked into her eyes and told her it was okay, that she didn't need to be upset, but she would have to re-do that paper and bring it back to me by the next week. I told her she didn't need google or gpt to do her work, because she got a very high score at her english exam (both at school and at the course). She got right back on her feet and we started class as normal.

this is a GREAT deep dive interview with the oc register thank you so much for trotting with me

EDIT apologies, Sanderson said in his arcanum annotations that "Jasnah is asexual, and currently heteroromantic."

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

YOU, THE READER, FROM REAL LIFE

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.