Hello beautiful!

If I weld a joint, and the CWI comes up behind me with a radiographic test for it and finds that I just laid hot metal on cold metal or it looks like a sponge inside, you know what’s gonna happen? You think they’re gonna give me a low score and tell me to move on? Fuck no. They’re gonna hand me a grinder and tell me to take it out and put it in right.

When there’s actual work to be done, we don’t leave it at the first attempt if that attempt was shit. We don’t leave a trail of “what’s done is done.” If it takes you four attempts, that’s what it takes, and next time it’ll take fewer because you learned how to do it right after the third time.

School, as it’s set up, with unforgiving deadlines and single attempt high stakes tests are building a shitty work ethic. It says “I tried once, and that’s all you’re getting.” It sets you up to leave a trail of cut losses and barely or unfinished projects as you scramble to get something, anything, turned in before the deadline.

Replacing a HDD with an SSD

Adding RAM

Graphics cards if you're nasty

Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)

Customizing what runs on startup for your computer

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin

adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading

Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.

Correcting disk utilization errors

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Clearing cache and cookies on your browser

Restarting the computer

Changing your screen resolution

Uninstalling unused browser extensions

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

Deleting files

Registry cleaners

Defragging your drive

Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.

As I explained in a previous comment that you could’ve easily read:

Smoking, specifically two characters smoking together, was a common way to show that characters had sex when sex on tv/movies was not acceptable to show but smoking was. It’s symbolism. It isn’t exact and isn’t the only thing that smoking can symbolize.

This symbolism became common in early tv/film bc smoking together was a common post-sex activity around that time. The masses watching those type of scenes would easy understand what just happened without it being shown. This isn’t the case now (in America at least, there are other countries where this practice is still fairly common) so the original intended meaning behind those scenes have been forgotten with time.

The symbolism of smoking cigarettes has evolved and expanded over the years to reflect public opinion. Nowadays, it’s much more common for smoking to indicate a villain than than it is to indicate sex, largely bc sex is more socially acceptable now than smoking is. However, that doesn’t mean this has gone away. If you’re looking for it, you can find this symbolism in many shows and movies today - largely ones marketed to an older audience.

Also, have you ever seen a kids show/cartoon? There’s sexual references all over the place.

These are great items because they’re fun for the herbivores to each, the carnivores to tear apart, and everybody to roll and throw around. They’re tactile, olfactory, and edible enrichment all in one! 

And that’s the thing. A lot of these zoomers are mentally stuck in high school and think teachers aren’t people and have no lives of their own outside the classroom, so they should have to bend over backwards to accommodate students who feel like they have no obligation to meet the requirements of courses they signed up for. It’s the same thing when students are outraged that they face penalties for missing deadlines (when they don’t have accommodations from the university for a disability, of course), but teachers don’t make deadlines because they hate students, it’s because they have deadlines, too, and need to have the assignments turned in to give students grades! You don’t have deadlines because your teacher is a bitch, you have deadlines because that’s how the adult world works, and it doesn’t revolve around you.

Some of these zoomers even lie to get out of their responsibilities, too. Recently, again, a student emailed my mom like “oh I’m late to your class every day because I have a class before that, which ends in the first 5 minutes of your class, and my professor won’t let me leave early :(” And my mom was like, “….The university’s computer system literally would not let you register for a class with a scheduling conflict like that. I double-checked this with the head of the department.” And then the student got real quiet 🤡

Some people are just dicks, of course, but my mom thinks the increase in this behavior is from the pandemic. Her colleagues have been lamenting similar behavior in their classes, too, like students refusing to turn on their cameras for virtual classes and just not doing in-class activities online. They really just sit there with no microphone or camera all class, do nothing all senester, and expect to get full participation points or whatever.

@5-5-k​ No you’re right, I don’t think students should be disrespectful in high school, either. I just think that high school students tend to face fewer consequences for their behavior because people usually cut younger folks some more slack, they can get their parents to call up and complain to the teacher for them (whereas college professors are never obligated to talk to parents), and high school teachers tend to be more overwhelmed and have fewer resources than college professors, so they’re more likely to say “ugh, it’s not even worth it” and let shit slide. You know what I mean? Especially during the pandemic, I’ve heard from high school teachers irl and online admitting to letting misbehavior slide because times were so hard.

But yeah, high school teachers don’t deserve rude students, either. It reminds me of how the youth outreach program at my work recently had to deal with a high school student who started yelling and cursing out a teacher just because he wanted to talk to him after class about his chronic lateness. They had to confront the student about his behavior like, “we know you’re going through stuff, but you cannot treat teachers like that or else you’re going to get kicked out of the school. You’re not a little kid anymore and we can’t help you with your education if you get kicked out for cursing at teachers like that.”