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9:14am on Friday, 21st March, 2025:
Anecdote
The CE317 assignment I gave my students involves writing a story. The students like to describe their protagonist (although they're not obliged to — I actually ask for a plot, not a story), which often entails stating that character's age.
I'ver been running this assignment for maybe twenty years. For the first fifteen of these, the characters were usually aged 16. This was so common that in my list of cut-and-paste frequent comments, I had one reading "Why are they always 16?".
Around five years ago, they stopped being 16 and started being 17. A year later, they were 18. They remained 18 for the next two years. This year, I had to modify my cut-and-paste comment to read "Why are they always 19?".
I don't know why this has happened. Maybe COVID-19 is to blame. Maybe social media is, or society in general, or large language models.
On the plus side, at least the protagonists are no longer habitually orphans.
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