The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.

Source:

Geez I felt that in my bones... I'm SO glad my days of undiagnosed ADHD and assignments are long and gone, but your story stirred up some anxiety responses, from the sediment of my mind. Yuck! And well done! 95/100 ✔️

Best story I read this week, as in, so well put together. I bet you get this a lot, but you really have a way with words!

That means that you understood it yourself though, no? I have worked til the wee hours on many a paper at a prestigious school and it always worked out for me because I was paying attention the whole time, so it didn't matter that I only started the paper the night before. Essays fill me with dread so the deadline has to rear its ugly head before I can start. TL;DR same

Very crunchy… Totally works though.

Ope, I had a few of those projects. Typically for me they were group projects where I was the only competent person in the group at writing in English or at doing our major. I always told people that I could do any one part of the project, got given the engineering portion, then wound up having to do the whole thing last minute. And thus a night without sleep where everyone bailed when they either decided they couldn't really help or had to fly home.

But hey, at least my senior capstone wasn't like that, it took two of us barely sleeping for a month to get it done on time despite making decent progress all year prior…

Hey, we got a typewriter at some point, it didn't help much with having to start the whole page over every time you made a mistake, but it did get the teachers off my back about my terrible handwriting so that was nice.

I never liked that. It felt like only 20% of my mental bandwidth went into words, sentences and ideas. The rest went into printing characters on the paper by using the slowest method possible. No wonder why the text sucked every time. Using a computer improved text quality and output rate significantly.

A few years ago, I found some college notes from 1906 next to a dumpster. They were hand written in beautiful cursive and bound as books, hundreds of pages for each subject. i couldn’t find a single mistake or smudge or anything. This was from a time where the main source of information were lectures where you were expected to write everything down, then use that as your textbook. It was hard to comprehend that at the time students had to make such an effort just to obtain the materials needed to complete a course. Too bad they were so mouldy would’ve loved to keep them.

People were doing that after computers as well. See exams.

Ah… I remember these days, being in a somewhat nervous caffeine induced psychosis, typing in an haughty fervor and writing 20+ pages with unmerited arrogance and barely an ounce of fear. Printing it out before it’s due and feeling like I pulled off an Ocean’s theft after managing a 93%.

You guys had Adderall?

We just ate spoonfulls of instant coffee and ground our teeth into little bumps.

Not every one is like that! Some of us start on the very day they get the assignment, work on it for a good hour, then without a fail every week stress about it for a whole afternoon until finishing the paper on the due day.

Believe it or not, I still do my best work under the gun. In my current job, sometimes people pay me extra to expedite my turnaround, and I thrive under the pressure. Perhaps it's the promise of extra money, but I just feel so much more focused knowing my hard deadline is fast approaching.

I always just got it done early and slacked off after the fact without the stress lol. I still half assed most of the pointless stuff and only tried hard when it was stuff I cared about or actually for my field.

There was a time before when we just had coffee.

i was doing that with multiple papers with 1 week(the professor allowed you to turn in previous terms paper late in the semester, this made everyone, including me just cram within it out withina few days. also because the exact same essay prompt/ subject was online it was eaiser to write the paper and not have to fully sit down and think about it. he wasnt like most other english professors, as he allowed you more time to write essay. most of them are very strict on the writing style, grammer, or "convincing arguments" of your essay. for A CC course.

Editing in the common room or whatever the fuck it was called with a flash drive ready to transfer it to the college printer's computer and get a piping hot copy ten minutes before class started

I had this friend in high school where one day he pushed the envelope and the teacher showed us his 10 page essay.

He used like size 64 font and quadruple spaced it. The teacher was showing it to the class like "there should be more than 12 words per page".

Only people fucked in the head don't use punctuation, no matter the circumstance.

The hardest papers were the ones where the professor gave you content expectations and then a page limit. I def learned to be concise and how to avoid fluff

I took a crack at Infinite Jest maybe 10-12 years ago and found it extremely tedious to get through the first few hundred pages before I put it down. I'm weirdly edified that LLMs have taken the wind out of this sort of literary masturbation.

I'd argue that Infinite Jest is more relevant than ever. Perhaps its boring how much his prescient world resembles our own, with its everlasting entertainment feeds, overwhelming sponsorship of every aspect of life, nuclear proliferation, quiet desperation, and quieter hope.

The out-of-order telling definitely obscures the plot(s), but they are there. And like many of the author's choices, this structure stands in stark contrast to an LLM's output. While an LLM always outputs the most likely next token, Infinite Jest refuses to be predictable. While a slop feeder just slurps whatever shows up in the trough, a Jest reader cannot idly consume, but must actively interact to receive any fulfillment.

Far from wankish performatism, the book deals with heavy themes including depression, drug addiction/recovery, and suicide. These were sadly demonstrated to be very personally familiar themes to the author.

And it's an interesting, colorful world with bits that just stick with you, from "cartographic rearrangement" to the game of eschaton, to those crazy French Canadians jumping tracks at the last moment (and their leader chosen because he timed his jump so perfectly he lost his legs but lived).

I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze, and wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't want to read an esoteric 1000-page tome with chapter-long endnotes-of-endnotes-of-endnotes. But those who labor to crack this pomegranate will still enjoy many a plump pip.

I finished it in my year of 52 books. I remembering having two bookmarks running to move between the footnotes references and the main novel. You need it for the 30+ page footnotes references. I think I enjoyed it?

This is me and gravitys rainbow rn

Man I fucking hated that. Here's a problem where you need to include a lot of data and graphs.

2 pages maximum.

Until my left hand become a filthy mess of pen ink or pencil carbon.

Ugh, while I'm glad I got to see the world before computers were everywhere, I don't envy people who had to handwrite all their papers, nor teachers who had to grade those reports.

Were typewriters cheap enough that most students had them, or did they have "typing rooms" the same way schools set up computer labs? Or was handwriting just the norm even after typewriters were ubiquitous? Maybe in HS it was common but surely college profs couldn't be fucked with handwriting for the most part?

Reminds me of a first year of middle school personal anecdote. At the beginning of the school year, our literature teacher asked us to do research about a subject and present the results.
It was the beginning of internet at home, so almost everyone came back with literal web pages printed, thinking they had done well. The teacher was furious about this "demonstration of laziness" and started to go through the students one by one and handling 0/20 grades for the assignment, like a gardener carefully pulling weeds one by one, savoring each wilt. Occasionally she would praise the few students that took time to manually write down their research.
I was in the back of the classroom, so analyzing the situation quickly and sweating, I started to furiously handwrite to a Seyès ruled paper the Wikipedia page I had printed (with the help of my father), cut the one picture and glue it to the paper. I managed to escape the culling with a good enough grade.
Her last name was that of a fearsome wild animal. It was her final year before retirement, and as the year went on, we realized she was actually a very conscientious and caring teacher.

It skims everything on the internet

Wikipedia?! Oh, you sweet summer child.

Oh I had a 1-1 presentation with the professor for a philosophy class and he wanted us to present one point from one author, capture the point in five minutes or less, and survive ten minutes of cross examination. This guy was a real shark too, not only was he known to be very sharp and super cutting with his critiques, he was the kind of guy who would force a class of forty people to sit a presentation in his office for twenty minutes each so he could avoid correcting term papers.

I chose Marshall McLuhan and spoke for maybe three minutes and why his assertion that "the medium is the message" is true because the invention of email made it unacceptable for a company with a branch in Toronto and one in Montreal to communicate by horseback, so the expected pace of business was irrevocably changed. Email is only "amazing" for a couple of days, then it's a fact that dictates expectations, and so, what you communicate by email is of much less consequence in the long run than the deep change in corporate culture that email causes. That was the core of McLuhan's point.

Got an A+ for that one, and was out of his office and on my way in less than ten minutes.

Marshall McLuhan's was the only work I read of all the assignments in that entire class.

The Dude abides.

Just remember everyone, C's get degrees.