Getting fucked in the ass by the labs in ECE344 (Operating Systems) is how I finally (spiritually) lost my virginity. While I initially took this course in a vain attempt to increase my employability, it’s clear that the only real benefit gained was a front-row seat in understanding the Discord kitten phenomenon present in this class’s official discord server.
Instead of facilitating communication primarily through Quercus, email, or Piazza, the teaching team for this kernel ECE course decided it was a good idea to do it over the same platform used for gaming, e-sex, and political extremists leaking government documents.
Naturally, being dumped into a Discord channel with a guy you almost hooked up with during F!rosh Week on top of ESP notes, Instructor-Endorsed-Answerers-On-Piazza refugees, and socially stunted TAs is not condusive to learning.
It seems like the only way to get help debugging C code (with a free Nitro subscription added in) is to present femininely and acquire simps (aka, become a Discord kitten). I shared this insight with my ex-lab partner’s ex-lab partner (my former metamour of sorts), and he was quick to discredit my insight.
“You can acquire the same debugging help by using print statements and an address sanitizer, properly commenting your code and tracing it, attending office hours, or… you know… reading the textbook,” the Dean’s List brat told me.
Here at the Toike, we don’t believe that a 3.9781 cGPA earns you the right to the only opinion. So I searched for more perspectives.
I ran into who I assumed to be the class’s course coordinator, Professor Tritium, at Kennedy GO station on the 7:31am Stouffville line train to Union Station (Editor’s note: We’re not entirely sure who our columnist spoke to, as Tritium denies taking the Stouffville line train, preferring the cheaper fare on Line 2).
“Discord? I don’t use it,” he said flatly. “That’s why we have TAs. We allocated 7.46 minutes a week for them to answer questions so I can pretend the server is a place of learning.”
When asked if he minded the Discord kitten culture, he sighed, “As long as they’re submitting assignments on time and not trying to fork() each other’s processes, it’s fine, whatever. Leave me alone.”
Through some creative networking, I found myself added to the TA’s private moderation channel. I asked them what they thought of Discord kittens on the ECE344 server, and several TAs with anime profile pictures were eager to respond.
A TA with a profile pic of Misa Amane said that Discord kittens were a minor distraction. “Simps have flooded the #labs channel,” he said. “We have taken to shitposting in #memes to communicate important deadlines to students.”
When asked for final thoughts, one TA simply posted a GIF of a dumpster fire captioned “ECE344 Lab 4.”
In the end, it seems that Discord kittens, professors, and TAs are all trapped in the same operating system. Each runs their own buggy process and hopes for a clean exit status.
Maybe the real debugging help was the friends we @everyone’d along the way.
P.S.
If anyone knows a cute girl taking ECE344, send her my way. I’m willing to trade Nitro for cuddles.
