owlet's nest

Nick Barlow, Clusterfuck/Keep It Together, 2022

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

Currently, it's marking season for us in the UK. I have an exam board in four hours, in fact, which is where we all go over every profile of every student on our courses, see what results they've achieved, and work out their "decision" - if all is well, the decision is to let them continue the course, or the final degree grade calculated if they're in final year. If it hasn't gone well, the decision is about whether they get to rework the pieces that failed, resit exams, repeat the whole year, or be required to withdraw.

And, as has been the case for the last two years, the profiles are now littered with plagiarism investigations. Every one of those - every single one - will have come in as an assignment that the lecturer received, and started reading, and then with a sinking feeling thought "This isn't your work." Every one had to go to an academic misconduct hearing. Every one is an enormous draw on time and resources, including the emotional reserves of the lecturer.

And I know that's not the main issue! I know in the grand scheme of things, our feelings aren't the most important part of this equation! But as we're talking about rudeness, let me explain:

Firstly, the work itself. You begin reading, you see it's AI. Contractually, we have to read it anyway, and give feedback on why it's shit, and what makes it bad, and that is absolutely fucking soul destroying. Most students who use AI are doing so because they've managed to train their brains to find reading something boring abhorrent, and they want to skip that part; but a ChatGPT-generated report is bland, vague, and utterly devoid of any passion, insight or personality. In short, it's boring. You simply passed your boredom on to us.

Secondly, regardless of your personal feelings about the assignment, it at least had a purpose. It was there to stretch you, and make you think about the topic so you could learn about it, and to test that learning so we can all make sure you have actually learned what you need to. But the slop you handed in, that I now have to mark? What's the point? Literally what is the fucking point of me marking it? You didn't even write it. None of the feedback I'm obligated to give means anything to you. I'm marking ChatGPT, and it can't read.

Which means, not only is it fucking boring, it's actively pointless. Ask anyone in the world what a boring but pointless obligatory task does to your mood. Imagine that.

Thirdly, the misconduct hearing. Because listen, again, the lecturer's feelings here are, once again, not the main point. Students who cheat like this aren't doing so because life is hunky dory. They're stressed and overwhelmed and struggling, and they think they've found a magic way out, and so being pulled into a misconduct hearing - where the best they can hope for is to have to redo the whole piece for a capped mark, on top of all the rest of the work they have (functionally, a bonus assignment), and the worst is expulsion - is a mental breakdown-inducing experience. That, obviously, is the biggest issue.

But, the lecturers know all that, which means we know what we're triggering if we do report it. I cannot tell you how upsetting it is to receive a slop assignment, realise what it is, and then have to make the call to report it. I know damn well how upsetting that's going to be for you. I know how stressful and painful that's going to be. I know this might mean you're going to be thrown out of university. In some cases, I know it means you will be.

I know I could look the other way to spare you that

And oh, that gets tempting. When things are really bad for you, and I see you struggling, and this is your third strike; fuck me but it's tempting to pretend that I can't tell.

I cannot do that.

Which brings me to number four: the soul-bleachingly fucking horrible ordeal that is the misconduct hearing itself. Most people are non-confrontational; I'm no exception. I also simply do not enjoy a sobbing, panicking student sitting in front of me, telling me about how stressed and scared they are and how they're terrified they're going to fail. But that's how these things go.

Our most recent example is an international Masters student. I don't know the particulars for him; but I do know it's not uncommon in his part of the world for families to go into obscene debt, often to loan sharks, to send their kids to UK universities. Failure means more than just academia for him. Having to sit through him turning white and quietly begging us to give him another chance before he left in tears he tried to hide from us was, obviously, much worse for him than us; but it was honestly traumatic. Even now, two weeks later, I can't get it out of my head. There's nothing we can do; but, I feel guilty anyway. I could have looked the other way.

(It wouldn't have passed anyway. It was terrible. But at least he'd probably be allowed a resit - we're still waiting on the outcome of this one, but he may well be withdrawn)

To bring this back to the point of the post:

I spent several minutes just staring at them (and trying to convince them to bite my fingers.) When my sister’s violin lesson ended, her teacher came out to the yard and explained that these goldfish were the same small creatures that were often unfortunately sold in plastic bags at state fairs. They were only about two inches long apiece, when she bought them and put them in the new, empty pond. In essence, they were like every goldfish I had seen before, but they had been given a much larger, much richer environment in which to flourish. As a result, they had grown into some of the most remarkable, vibrant creatures my twelve-year-old self had ever met with. All because of a pond. 

Yes, it’s often hard to say things for sure about history. The farther back you go the harder it is to be confident about what happened; the more recent an event, meanwhile, the more politically fraught the interpretations are. All history is interpretation, drawing inferences, trying to construct narratives about who and what and why based on the information we have. Original sources (letters, diary entries, newspaper reports) are biased. Archaeological discoveries are interpreted by archaeologists. Multiple interpretations for certain people and events are very common. A lot of the time, the best we can say is “this was PROBABLY that” or “these were PROBABLY NOT used for this.” However, qualifications and details like this for every fact that needs one are hard to reduce and are the reason history books exist. So like, was Louisa May Alcott trans? I do not think the evidence supports it. Was James Barry trans? I do think the evidence supports it. Those are interpretations, yeah. And this is the eternal complexity of history, that historians don’t always agree with each other about what historical evidence means, and that is often informed by their biases, but it also does not mean they don’t actually know anything and that your complete lack of studying any of this creates just as valid an interpretation.

And this is something where I ENCOURAGE you to do your own research! Read the historical sources! Learn about who was writing them and why! Read about the social context of the time and place! Read the people’s own words, or read the archaeological reports! I will gladly help you get your hands on any I can! Doing your own research should mean doing research, though. Not just assuming you know better by virtue of being queer or a leftist.

And not quite as egregious but still an example of historians not questioning what was written before them: Entire generations of historians claimed that Ancient Roman ladies wore wigs because they could not imagine that the hairstyles found on statuary were real. One dude claimed this about a century ago, and everyone just copied what he wrote and took it as fact. Until Janet Stephens looked at the written sources mentioning needles and sewing in connection to hair and figured it out.

One of the big problems is that there is a huge disconnect between the actual science and what gets communicated to the public - I bet there are school teachers even today who teach that the Great Pyramids were built by slaves, even though this was disproven decades ago. That goddamn documentary about the Belt of Orion thing is still on TV. As is that one about Ancient Roman tech that manages not to mention the word "slave" even once.

It happens during the whole vampire questline. It's not related to vampires. I may misremember details so forgive me for that. But you have to go through old dwemer ruins and you meet the last living snow elf in Skyrim. You know, the snow elves. Who were enslaved by the dwemer and went blind and feral and still live in the ruins long after the dwemer are gone. The falmer is what they're called now. Here's the last one who's in their original form.

And oh hey, to get to where you need to go you have to take a path that's an old snow elf coming of age rite of passage. And he's going to take you through it and you're going to learn about this dead culture, this culture that was killed.

And now you've got what you came for and there's one way out. Now that you've learned what the falmer used to be, where they came from, what was lost because of the dwemer enslaving them, you have to go through a falmer village.

It's a narrow canyon lined with huts. There's no way to avoid it, in order to get through you have to kill them. They attack you because that's what they do to people invading their territory. You're invading their village. You have to kill them or they'll kill you. It's the only way out. You feel terrible.

If you stop to loot one of the huts on your way out you'll find a book full of unreadable text. Take it to the winterhold college and give it to the librarian and he'll tell you that it's a remarkable find because it's evidence that falmer have retained intelligence. They're not just mindless feral monsters. They have this book, they've kept this book even though they can't see. They have a culture. Maybe they still remember what happened to them. Maybe that's why they're so mad.

You just killed so many of them. You're going to have to kill many more.

Anyway.

It's a game about a dying world with its ecosystem in active collapse, where your colony ship, initially bound for a desert planet, has ended up by mistake. Your task is to ensure that the 40k colonists, asleep in the quartz storage of the wreckage of the ship, will have a planet that is capable of sustaining human life, even if that life requires adaptation on the side of the humans.

The planet has a lot of lifeforms, some of them cute, some of them dangerous.

You know what some people are howling about? That they don't get to kill the predator species. The devs outright said that they are not planning on implementing the ability to kill hostile mobs in Subnautica 2. From an in-universe perspective, it would make all kinds of sense not to. To try to keep your impact on the ecosystem as small as possible.

Feel awkward about people maybe thinking you’re queer but still want to clearly signal “queers are okay with me”? SURE. LOVE IT. HERE’S YOUR WEIRD FLAG.

Don’t fucking at me about allies right now, they are ALSO actually getting fucking killed over us. Take your puri-gay shitty tent somewhere else mine is great with people’s cishet friends and relatives showing up to have our backs.