rel's bullshit

YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME

FUCK HARD

FUCK FAST

FUCK BADLY

NEVER USE GENERATIVE AI

CREATE JOY

MUSIC ALWAYS

PSPSPSPS AT KITTIES ON THE STREET

YUMMY SOUP

go see the doctor about that thing

BE TRANSGENDER

KISS YOUR FRIENDS

EAT CHEESE

NEVER KILL YOURSELF

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

He refers to everybody, regardless of whether he has known them for years or is meeting them for the first time in his life, as "Smoke." The first time he addressed me as such, I thought he had me confused with someone else. But, no, as it turns out, I am Smoke. My classmates are Smoke. The other faculty members are Smoke. His wife is probably Smoke, too.

He seems to have code words for everything, and refers to various classroom objects as "the dude." ("Take the dude, Smoke." Translation: "Take the hall pass, [insert name].")

He also randomly substitutes words for letters of the alphabet, but...it's not the actual phonetic alphabet. I came in to take a test early while he was lecturing to another class and randomly heard, "So, we have buffalo hide over two equals donkey."

In a similar vein, I was completely lost during my first lecture because he exclusively called one hundred eighty degrees "buck eighty." (I'm aware of this now, but it threw me off at first.)

Most confusing of all, he repeatedly refers to something as "the juice," but I have yet to ascertain what. All I have gathered so far is that it appears to be a more abstract noun than "the dude."