Hi there, VK here, I'll be randomly posting about art, life and anything else that happens to catch my fancy. And a lot of Magic Knight Rayearth. So sit back and enjoy the ride. ~
Ask me anything!
so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god
okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
i need all the help i can get for finals
Hey so
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
So you know.
This might be the real one, y’all.
Y'know what, why not? I’ll reblog because I can lmao.
I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I’d forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I’d forgotten to read.
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.
Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.
For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.
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.
The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.
I wrote this in anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours as the final paper for my Philosophy 101 class probably 6 or 7 years ago. I submitted it with maybe a few minutes to spare. I did not make a draft, I did not brainstorm, I just typed. It’s a 1500 word essay on the shortfalls of classic epistemology (the study of knowledge). I got a B+, iirc. I may not have done much bullshitting, but this was absolutely stream of consciousness for the most part.
Feel free to actually read it btw, whomever wants to. It should be readable to anyone who clicks the link.
I got an A+ on a three-page in-class blue book essay about Twelfth Night because we were allowed to have our copies of the play with us and I’d bookmarked the passages I expected we’d be asked about.
Incidentally, that three pages was on the phrase “nor this is not my nose neither.” And I did it all from my notes and the play itself. Forget ChatGPT–I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE THE INTERNET.
Knowing how to do this is important. Not only because knowing how to bullshit is important, but because knowing how to use what you know is also important.
In high school, one of our biggest grades senior year was a research paper, 20 pages double-spaced, not counting a works cited page, on a social issue. I chose fuel alternatives for gasoline. I did the research, typed the paper in MLA format, and turned it in by the due date (I don’t think I actually made the argument whether I was for or against the use of fuel alternatives, but I did delve into several options and pointed out that gas companies typically bought and then quashed the research). In college, I reused that paper 2 or 3 times, sometimes updating sources (I wrote it fall semester of 2007; I graduated college in 2012, so sometimes i needed updated research). I also used the skills I’d learned writing that paper to write several, shorter, research papers in college. My favorite was a comparison of 2 Flannery O'Connor stories that was optional but probably saved my GPA that semester because I barely squeezed by in Bio II. Point being, I didn’t have the option to use genAI, and if I had, my paper wouldn’t have been as useful to me for the next 4 years as it ended up being, nor would I have the transferable skills to write other similar research papers, some in APA format, that I’d learned writing that first paper.
a good way to inspire yourself to do more is to see yourself as the wacky sitcom B plot character in your friends lives, “wouldnt it be funny to tell the friends in my phone about it.” has gotten me to do anything from going to a festival (excelent) to wild camping (it went badly) (coastguard called) to trying to get the train to stonehenge (stonehenge costs money so i ended up just getting lunch in sailsbury, it was okay.) i bought a bicycle today and 20% of my reasoning was “itd be funny to surprise my roommate by coming home with a whole bike.” . life is for living. and baby i live for the bit.
