screamingi

Going back to Erid and Rocky not being able to hear Grace for the first time.

Rocky who spent over 40 years in complete silence and now has a friend that physically can't stop making noise.

Rocky, who got used to always being able to hear Grace's heart, having to leave the Hail Mary to talk with the other Eridians.

Rocky who doesn't notice how much he's gotten used to it and how much comfort it brought him until its gone.

Rocky who wakes up at his and Adrian's home and isn't immediately greeted with that soft thumping noise.

Rocky who panics in the breif moment where his body is coming back online only to remember where he is.

Rocky who will then find excuses to go hang out with Grace just to listen to his heart again. To be comforted know his friend is alive.

And for the extra angst:

They see a time skip of any length and go

But with this idea I also need there to be a “stark industries households” youtube channel that is, technically, an official SI channel. But it’s not in the slightest used for marketing or anything of the sort. Tony is the only one with the password and every video uploaded is tony going through how to use that machine.

Someone can’t figure out how to empty their damn fancy vacuum and they look up the model on youtube to figure it out, and are greeted by the CEO of the company doing a WILDLY informal tutorial on how to use it and common issues and such.

The videos are often shot by DUM-E or U. Tony often looks very disheveled, and sometimes there’s unrevealed projects just sitting out in the background. Tony acts like he’s talking to an audience of five people and usually there’s five or six videos uploaded back to back, CLEARLY shot in one sitting.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

As a professor, I know when my students are using GPT. The problem is proving it beyond a doubt. So you can get away with this sort of thing in high school and college, but someday you're gonna have to write a cover letter or an email to a client. And then you'll either have to write something for the first time in your life, or you'll rely on your old friend GPT, and either way your cover letter will get thrown in the garbage.