My girlfriend convinced me to get back on here now I live-text her my tumblr post drafts about my sociological observations (I am totally not(TM) conducting an experiment on my classmates) 28 - (they/them)
Jokeās on the government. My anxiety meds are comboās well enough that their emergency alert for āGRASS DRY. FIRE MAYBE?ā didnāt even faze me.
I miss when ads were a single click and then theyāre gone. Now every ad has a minimum of three phases where you watch a video, exit the still frame of fake gameplay, and then exit the app download. That doesnāt even touch on the ones that forcibly take you to another app after opening a tab in safari without you ever touching the screen.
I hate advertising. I hate that you canāt do anything without companies jumping down your throat with mostly bullshit ads. I hate that billboards exist. I hate that every company unanimously decided to make their ads longer and longer. I hate that ad blockers try to charge you money and there are in app purchases to remove ads. I hate that my attention has become commodified. I hate that thereās nothing I can do about it.
As you know, counting sheeps is perfect for sleep. Sheeps take that job very seriously. But some are still learning. Itās fine, I donāt think Wolf Hunter minds. ššš
The media blackout on Palestine coinciding with new bomb types dropped in a ceasefire tells its own story.
Nothing says "ceasefire" like a Thermobaric bomb. I guess "ceasefire" means something else down there than here... What pigs. They saw it as too hot and the temperature is too high, so they bombard us with heat generators. Damn them.
Finally bought some dye and have been having so much fun with optical color mixing. I decided to start with cmyk primaries to get some vibrant color options.
So far I've only mixed up the main batch of colors, but I'll split them up and create a palatte of tints and shades once I have access to a scale again.
I don't have any fancy tools and have been blending the fiber by hand, so it's probably best I have a forced break for the sake of my fingers. Once I'm done I should have a very useful set of 57 2g swatches to play with! (Plus 5 more for a set of grayscale swatches)
If I'm still up for it, I might repeat the whole thing with my classic red, yellow, blue primary dye set. For a truly massive set of heather swatches.
I'll create a comprehensive guide to all the color mixes and my process once I'm done, but in the meantime here's a mixing guide for the colors I've already done!
The ratios are presented in the same order as the wool swatches in the photo above it. I didn't simplify any of the ratios so you'll have to deal with 2:2s instead of 1:1s, oops.
For anyone curious, I used brilliant yellow, deep magenta, and caribbean blue from Dharma dyes on their corriedale wool for my base colors.
i donāt often post such closely detailed speedpaints of my work so here is a rare speedpaint (very unfinished, obviously) of the lady of imladris ie celebrĆan my beloved, a classical portrait that iām currently working on, where you can watch paint dry to royalty free music. it genuinely is quite boring feel free to watch it sped up ā ļø
anyway, nobody asked but i will now be treating you to a long post of my thoughts about why i made it a point to not normally post speedpaints, and why it has to do with the annoying āAI witch huntā on this site and beyond, and the speedpaint-or-fraud culture that's developed from it. which imo has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with paranoia eating itself, and is actively detrimental to art.
from below, tldr: the state of being continuously suspected of fraud fundamentally and negatively changes how you work as an artist, whether you want it to or not. full scale timelapses are a privilege, not a right.
this was inspired by a few things recently but mostly how when i was scrolling on one of the reddit art forums i caught a discussion where someone was saying something about how they have been āforcedā by the advent of ai art to expect that all artists āshouldā be posting regular speedpaints unless they want to be openly called out and asked why they donāt, another person being like actually speedpaints arenāt enough and, i am paraphrasing here but, if iām actually paying an artist i would want them to do a video showing their desk setup and hands while they paint digitally in case they have an ai reference printed out next to them on their desk. and a ton of people replying to the comment like āomg yes this is such a good ideaā and āiām going to start doing this tooā. which reminded me of two things in particular.
those really annoying posts from college lecturers being like āgod my student is crying in my office because theyāre getting deported after their parents sold land to get them to the usa for college and i suspected with my big brain they used ai because their english sounds too formal in it so i failed them on the spot and now their visa is cancelled. this is how ai is making my life difficult. tell me i did the right thing. tell me i chose right, and that i was right to assumeā
that meme where itās like āten stupid bitches sitting in a room nodding at each other and going exactlyyyyyyyā
anyway i have nothing against speedpaints. i think they are incredibly useful. in fact the majority of my digital art learning curve was straightened out thanks to spending hours sat on my ass watching people draw how i wanted to draw. i used to just mix my colours on the corner of the page like iām six years old but i learned from a stream that thereās literally a box in clip studio pro where you can do that away from the canvas and just keep a āwet palletteā. i just think theyāre so fun to watch as well! especially in styles that i donāt draw in myself, because itās always so interesting to see how people approach a work, what they do first, whether they paint with brushes or other tools, etc. i am not anti speedpaint, i am pro speedpaint.
my favourite thing about them, or what they used to be, is the fact that it was the artist sharing something voluntarily with the community. either as a tutorial or instruction, or simply to share their art process, entirely willingly. for some artists i followed, it became part of the creatorās ābrandā to post a speedpaint or timelapse idk like once a month, and iād eagerly wait for it, because it was pretty much just an artistās connection with their followers or at worst a product plug or something. nothing anxious or obligatory. trite social media lingo yes but i just mean it was just like posting any other content ygm.
in another world i would be shoving speedpaints down your throat. because i sadly have an enormous head. probably not every single one bc obv most of my work is commissioned but like. quite a lot at least. in this world, however, i see how people are repeatedly commenting on random artists profiles to post speedpaints, or posting stupid shit on reddit basically like āthis teenage artist is not sharing full unedited timelapses of every single piece even though i keep commenting asking for them, so they clearly own shares in chatgpt, can i tell them to go kill themselves?ā and when people do share speedpaints, say itās not actually proof because the speedpaints themselves could be ai generated š
or really trite ācallout postsā on here where you accuse some rando of using ai for the crime of not drawing fingernails correctly or, idk, shipping morgoth/billy ray cyrus. where the callout ends with nonsense like āpost a speedpaint in 24 hours or else everyone will hate youā. like itās a fucking hostage situation. fellow artists are not immune either, and several absolutely do lean into it and snark on artists who donāt post every single brushstroke, as if theyāre in some way less legitimate. or really pointedly asking for them to be posted repeatedly, and coyly implying that an artist who didnāt post stuff like that regularly (eg me) might have āsecret processesā. i know who you are! youāre not slick! š
anyway the whole ai witchhunt culture that began 2-3 years ago having developed into this āspeedpaint or bustā attitude lays bare the actual energy behind this paranoia. imo these demands for extremely detailed timelapse, ie something that was once offered freely and voluntarily, are often framed as your hand being in some way forced due to the sheer existence of ai art. and like, outright unedited ai art is pretty easy to recognise if you have seen enough actual. hell the online ādetectorsā donāt work at all but the main generators have those built in id things where it can sometimes tell you based on watermarks if that particular software generated it. but again, fully ai pieces arenāt really hard to distinguish.
what the timelapse demand aims to ācatchā is evidence of tracing, or reference images off pinterest that may or may not be ai generated (literally 80% of pinterest is ai generated atm, their filters donāt even work that well, so if you send me a ref from there iād normally just assume itās generated), and whatever the demander deems a āshortcutā right. so not evidence of quality or even of āeffortā but rather evidence of process, and specifically a process that looks legible from the outside, to someone who might have no fucking clue about your art process. because āshortcutsā were not exactly invented with ai art, shortcuts have always been a thing in art. for eg, they donāt really work with my style, but i know that with a lot of 2D cartoons etc, colouring is done with layering āgradient mapsā instead of painting with brushes.
or patterns! clip studio literally has a library of tens of thousands of patterns to be used for clothing or what not, because hand drawing every line of brocade is simply too time consuming if youāre working to deadline. or, idk, photobashes or whatever, or using one of those 3D models to model poses. these are all things i have recently seen people flag as being ānot real artā and ālaziness caused by aiā. ie red flag signs for artists.
which is wild considering, say, projection methods have been used by traditional artists for centuries! animators today trace their initial drawings in order to animate and yet i am seeing ChucklefuckCephalopod826 on reddit calling some anime artist doing that as a āself plagiaristā. the whole āare shortcuts cheatingā and āgive me proof you didnāt draw this circle with a compassā discourse has happened every ten minutes in the art world for centuries. the usual response, historically speaking, to this kind of pedantic shitstirring, has been to tell people to go fuck themselves. until now.
essentially, the demand for āproof that your work is not aiā has very little to do with the finished work. like the timelapse doesn't tell you whether the painting is good or appealing to you. it doesn't tell you whether the artist made interesting decisions, or whether the composition is working, or what their inspirations were or whether the colour choices are something you enjoy. it tells you that some person moved a pen around a graphics pad for a certain number of hours, ie is the most minimal possible definition of "a human made this" and yet it's become the evidentiary standard that settles the question. the demand is for an alibi, not authenticity.
which of course, as alibis do, tends to place the burden of proof entirely on the artist while giving the accuser essentially nothing to demonstrate. you don't have to show that you do know how to read a painting, that you do know how to do due diligence properly before hiring an artist, or that you have any basis for your suspicion beyond your little green antenna, or that your eye for ai tells is calibrated against anything other than your own prior assumptions, even as someone who might know fuckall about the particular art style youāre querying.
it has come to a point where all you have to do is ask for a speedpaint. and if the artist doesn't have one, because they didn't record their session (csp doesnāt record it automatically!), or work across multiple apps (say, a drawing software and then adobe photoshop) that doesn't lend itself to easy timelapsing, or because they've been making art for twenty years and never felt the need to document themselves doing every second of it, that is apparently proof of āguiltā. and this burden of proof is entirely asymmetric.
and i have of late found myself giving a lot of thought about whom that asymmetry is comfortable for, and whom it excludes. like i mentioned above, speedpaints or timelapses used to be something artists shared with their followers as a sort of āinteractionā in itself. which means the artists most likely to habitually record their process are the ones already oriented toward content creation, already thinking of their practice partly in terms of its documentation and legibility to an audience. the artists least likely to have a timelapse are the ones whose relationship to their work is more private or process-oriented, or are newer artists figuring out their style and experimenting, or, simply, are just not confident enough to share their process because thereās so much erasing or changes or āugly stagesā.
hell iāve been drawing portraits for forever and have a relatively successful commissions side gig of, again, portraits, but even i decided to record the speedpaint for this piece in particular, ie one in a very traditionalist classical style that iām very familiar with, because i just feel self conscious about how much i erase and redraw when it comes to stuff iām not so good with (like, idk, dogs). making a speedpaint into the sole āproofā of non generated art privileges a certain approach to and relationship with making, and this approach is mediated thru self-documentation and audience awareness, and instead of encouraging newer or smaller artists, treats an existing and considered relationship to āaudienceā as equivalent to artistic legitimacy. you are encouraging online-influencer culture around art in the guise of āanti ai activismā.
(and i am not too up myself for self-crit: the only reason i clocked that above point so fast is because i recognised myself as someone who, especially in my earlier days in fandom but still find myself slipping into, did consider āthe audience relationshipā reflexively, extensively documents their writing, and has to actively train themselves out of being fucking insufferable sometimes. not with art, since i made a conscious choice to not do that with my art and let my work speak for itself, especially since iām actually selling it and donāt want to sell āmyselfāā¦ but due in part to my irl writing and soapboxing background pre fandom involving selling myself as an āactivism productā, i sometimes still find it hard to break out from that mindset when it comes to my writing)
and what pisses me off most is how all this performative paranoid witchhunting is framed as being āpro real artā or āin defence of artistsā, even when some of the people doing this shit are artists too, when it in fact does no service to art whatsoever and is in fact actively detrimental to art. the state of being continuously suspected of fraud fundamentally and negatively changes how you work as an artist, whether you want it to or not. once the timelapse or speedpaint becomes an evidentiary standard, the artist who doesn't use up god knows how many gigabytes recording videos and posting their process is taking on a risk they didn't previously have to carry. and the rational response to that risk, to many artists (and i spent months considering doing the same!), will be to just play by the new rules and start recording and posting everything. often out of anxiety and fear of social ostracisation, not out of a desire to share skills and connect with people. not because it helps you make better work, but because it protects you from accusations that have nothing to do with the quality of your work.
and so a layer of self-surveillance gets added to the making process, whose existence leads to a constantly paranoid running awareness of how the process looks from outside, how it might be received by some fucking rat on the internet who, idk, doesnāt know what a Blender pose model is and assumes elon musk gave birth to it. and this is the kind of awareness most corrosive to the absorbed, unselfconscious attention that good art tends to ask of you. you are now partly making the painting and partly making a certificate that proves you made the painting. you are now constantly conscious about your ābrandā as an artist. balancing all these things alongside your art makes it harder for you to make art. and man thatās why i fucking hate this performative āanti ai activismā. it would be mildly irritating if it just created a paranoid atmosphere around finished work. but it doesnāt just do that! it reaches back into the studio and changes what happens there as well!
like man this shit is making it hard to be a normal person with a normal outlook to things without immediately getting accused of bearing chatgptās babies. though it isnāt for any of the inane reasons tossed around on this website and has fuckall to do with fandom, i do genuinely think AI image generation is a material problem for working artists. but what this ridiculous surveillance centric approach has generally failed to deal with is the fact that reading art and literature for āqualityā and āauthenticityā are separate skills that need to be developed, not a little green antenna sprouting from your skull. ādoing your due diligence before buying commissions or hiring artistsā has always been another skill that one had to develop in order to reduce the risk of losing your money, like it is with literally any product you pay for.
(like. if you suspect johnny mcfeeās hentai spitroasting comic might be ai generated, then do what you might do when you come across a rubix cube made of asshole hair. donāt buy it. go buy something else. of course youād just go buy something else. you wouldnāt make the poor hawker stand there for hours assembling the pube cube for you to decide whether or not you want to buy it. why the fuck would you do that. thatās freak behaviour. how the fuck have you ended up as more of a freak than the guy making rubix cubes out of asshole hair? reflect. look inwards. do a rubix cube.)
most people doing ai chest-thumping online don't have these skills, and are clearly now very happy they donāt have to put in the effort to learn them. of course they donāt! the tells people cite, ie hands, background blur, lighting issues, are common across ai, but they're also things that often appear in human work, and the scale of and frequency with which they appear in said human work is not something most of accusers have actually calibrated against.
what tends to happen instead is that some specific aesthetic gets associated with ai, usually something hyperrendered and commercially polished, because those are the most commonly generated things (selfpub book covers, linkedin pfps), and then anything with that aesthetic gets red-flagged, regardless of whether it was generated. i repeat. ten stupid bitches sitting in a room nodding at each other and going exactlyyyyyyy while pretending theyāre saving the world.
anyway this just means the artists most likely to be falsely accused are the ones whose human style happens to overlap with what the AI was trained on, which is in itself a product of what got rewarded by the same commercial and algorithmic systems that produced the AI in the first place!!! itās the commonwealth lit prize all over again! the performativeness and witch hunting actually ends up targeting a symptom of the same cultural machinery that created the problem! sure you may not be deliberately sucking capitalismās dick, but you are accidentally getting whacked on the head with it while trying to tie its shoelaces together. which is somehow more pathetic.
i just think treating AI detection as a community enforcement project makes it so that the art space is now treated as one whose main function is the amateur verification of authenticity rather than the encounter with an artistic work. once that frame is in place, it's very hard to dislodge, thanks to the very same reason it started up in the first place. because it gives everyone a role that feels active and protective and righteous. spotting fakes feels like doing something. sending hate is justified. in a way, it āatonesā you for having fallen for āslopā, saves you the anxiety of interrogating your own tastes and visual practice. this is literally the opposite of building a culture where good work gets seen and artists feel able to take risks and make things that don't already justify themselves. and in this contest, the witch-hunt culture is currently winning, and the cost is being paid not by the AI generators, who are mostly mega corporations largely indifferent to online art community norms anyway, but by other human artists who now have to do what they love inside an atmosphere of suspicion they did not themselves create.
anyway this is the reason i donāt post detailed speedpaints like this on my blog, aside from super simple sketches etc. even though honestly i want to post them, i want to share. i just want to be able to share it on my terms, the artistās terms, not made to feel itās an obligation or alibi. and while i know that itās not actually a ācapitulationā my brain keeps telling me it is (ie for me personally, not saying that people who like to share speedpaints shouldnāt do it!!! my issue is the expectation, not the existence!)
because the last time i posted a relatively detailed speed sketch, another artist literally commented on it like āwhy do you always post sketches but never your painting process? š¤ā. because the unchecked rise of this ridiculous culture means no one will ever be satisfied. theyāre already moving on to greater invasiveness! see: the reddit commenter and all the freaks agreeing with him that ādemanding a livestream of your hands doing the workā isnāt a fucking deranged thing to ask. if i agree to it once, iām just paranoid that it would never stop.
and for the same reason, literally never will i offer it as a default or āstandardā for commissions. at the end of the day youāre paying me Ā£60 a pop for a simple portrait, or closer to Ā£125 for something like what you see here (in its finished form lmao). like these are not exactly expensive. my turnaround times are 4-5 months aka a very long time. i work across weeks on end for multiple single pieces at once. recording at that scale would take up terabytes of storage and processing power and, if you use a program that doesnāt auto record, you will have to edit and splice screen recordings etc. which is to say i would honestly just tell you to spend your money elsewhere if you want to watch my paint dry, or if youāre really interested in my popup notifications then at the very least iād make you pay for it ā ļø
hell, to be honest the only reason i even posted this one today and recorded it from sketch to detailing, isnāt even because i particularly wanted to share it! itās honestly quite a basic and generic composition, and iād have probably picked something more interesting and less detailed if i did want to share out of my own will. i literally only did it because i knew that this entire writeup would simply be treated as āhmm, methinks balls doth protest too muchā if i didnāt provide one. so like. case in fucking point.
anyway, if you are asking what you can do aside from running around prying into peopleās lives in pursuit of activism or whatever. what you can do instead of pretending youāre spiderman and going to stop a home invasion, and then deciding to hole yourself up in someoneās bedroom and trying on all their underwear instead.
short and long answer is: look!!! look at work!!! actually look at it, and look actively. ask what it's doing, whether you can see how it's making decisions and if not, then why not? is there something in it that couldn't have been arrived at by optimising for machine-led approval? develop your eye by looking at a lot of human work rather than by memorising AI tells, which change every six months anyway, because thatās the whole point of these models. and if you're still not sure, then make peace with not knowing, because taking public and drastic actions based on an uncertain instinct is what caused the problem in the first place.
please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.
you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.
first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.
now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:
in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.
and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.
and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.
it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:
ā¢ infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.
ā¢ youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.
ā¢ only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.
ā¢ manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.
ā¢ journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.
ā¢ even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.
and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.
what i'm asking:
if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.
if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.
india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.
i am trying to make some pants. many people #online are losing their gourd over how easy this pattern is and i'm contrarianfully a little peeved about the assumption of serger ownership, 3/8th topstitching that fails to enclose 1/2" turned over raw edges, general expected minor failure cases of a pattern you buy on etsy
BUT i got it all cut out from leftovers without buying any new fabric so that's my win
Overall review: it makes sense this patternmaker has been operating on Etsy for 2.5 years, this seems like a 2.5 years of operation quality pattern to me. It's very cleanly presented and produces a end result that I'm jazzed about! But it also seems incurious about seam finishes/attention to detail, and I feel that beginner sewists attempting this pattern might not know what they're missing out on.
What I like
Easy breezy fit with no fit mods (except turning the cuffs up 1.5" vs 1") - big fan of gusset and knee dart
Mega comfortable fabric choices using stash only (undyed slightly stretchy twill from Fabrics R Us, Rifle Paper Co Camont - Poppy Fields - Natural Unbleached Canvas off someone on etsy I don't have customer loyalty to)
Pleasant embedded links to Youtube tutorial
Really big fan of the carabiner loop
Cute!!!
What I changed
Hopelessly reliant on crayola washable markers + gluesticks for holding turned-over edges in place. Also got into banging on bulky seams with a hammer. PRO TIP: use oxyclean to guarantee washable markers wash out.
Oh my god the pattern doesn't recommend a denim needle for the many layers of midweight fabric? Denim needle was a huge QOL improvement.
Did not buy topstictching thread. Used regular thread.
To squeeze this out of limited fabric: shortened knee patches ~1", cut pocket facings off grain, bound edge of weird back pocket with selvedge instead of cutting out this shape of piece
Also extended the trapezoid with floral fabric to create a hidden lining for the pocket that layers on top of it (another fabric-saving measure)
Added a patch pocket for my phone on front right, inspired by the Jones Trousers
Skipped hammer loop (despite using a hammer while making this pattern)
Flat felled inside leg seams, butt curve. The instructions simply say "finish" for all seams btw :(. The gusset to inside leg seam join proved impossible to flat fell so I just zigzagged it right to hell.
Added a baste together and try on step while installing gusset before all the flat felling
Bias bound outside leg seams, tacked flat at points along leg. Kind of a Hong Kong seam attempt.
Reinforced outside leg seams at very thick joining points... otherwise pressing open as recommended means you will see daylight through your pants
Used a shorter zipper (the actual length of the fly) (already on hand). This nerfed me on the mandatory-pull-zipper-head-out-of-the-way-so-your-machine-foot-fits step
Hand basted down the waistband before machine sewing. God I hate waistbands.
Made a wretched buttonhole with my zigzag stitch. Could be worse! It's holding the button!
What I would do next time
Check front and back pocket dimensions against each other before sewing to pants; mark with washable marker to ensure topstitching lines up
Trim pocket foldover so it's fully encased in topstitching (it's fraying now in an annoying way)
Extra line of topstitching to completely secure down pocket facing
Either use a longer zipper or a different fly construction method that allows better checking on functionality as I go. I am not jazzed about trimming down a metal zipper (pattern doesn't mention what tools to use for that!) so probably the latter
Shorten legs/add contrast cuffs
Maybe add little darts in the back
Try to figure out a way to do the waistband that I hate less. Sew inside seam first?
Fix weird little gapping at top of zipper/grade in at waist a little?
The knee panel is bait for quilters and I might fall for it
I also don't think this is gender neutral unless you grade the bejesus out of it, as the pattern assumes a 10" waist-hip difference.
Girl this is not a tip. This is just something you have to do for the pattern to work.
socks are the primary producers of the laundry biome. they typically mate for life and come in a wide variety of patterns, thoughāunlike shoes, which many theorize to be a symbiotic speciesāthey lack sexual dimorphism. juvenile socks resemble their parents, but have yet to develop the long necks that distinguish socks from other species of the extremity family, such as mittens
the lint trap is a fascinating example of a decomposer. it relies on the environment to bring food in the form of detritus, which it then breaks down into lint. lint traps have relatively long lives in comparison with other species (especially given the recent downward trends in lifespan, which are likely caused by a combination of genetic bottlenecks and poor nutrition). the lint trap has an unusual relationship with fireāsome theorize that it uses fire as a tool to increase resource availability, while others believe that its frequent proximity to fire is due to environmental factors
the apex predator of the laundry biome is, of course, the dreaded duvet cover. duvet covers lead solitary lives, and are rarely seen socializing with one another. its preferred prey is socks, although it is an opportunistic eater and will prey upon much larger targets, such as t-shirts, leggings, and even sheets. aside from its large territory and antisocial nature, its behaviors are poorly known and highly controversial. one major theory is that the duvet cover is an ambush predator, lying in wait for its prey. another is that the duvet cover seeks out prey, using its superior size and large mouth to overwhelm its victims in a matter of seconds. a third, less popular supposition is that the duvet cover lures its victims to it by mimicking the laundry bag, a preferred shelter for many residents of the laundry biome. more research on this topic is necessary
Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Taylor Swift will go after fans who sing covers of her song son YouTube, artists who make AMVs with her music, and early shops that make merch using her lyrics.
She will go after young artists like Olivia Rodrigo for merely being inspired by her.
She will send a hateful hoard of fans towards actresses whose roles demanded they make a joke about her in-script.
But now Donald Trump has used her music TWICE on TikTok to promote his own dictatorship (the newest in which he declares the USA is an empire that belongs to him), and Taylor has nothing to say.
This isnāt just cowardice, itās support. Because we know by now that Taylor does not tolerate her music being used in any capacity that she doesnāt approve of.
If anyone has been on the fence about her recent actions, please let this be your wake-up call. Itās time to leave her behind. Separate yourself from this fascist regime that sheās funneling millions of dollars into, do it once and for all. This woman is complicit with MAGA.
āIāve never heard silence quite this loud.ā And I donāt even mean Taylor at this point. I mean you.
On Saturday I said to my partner, as I have said for months, "A ten thousand dollar a year raise would solve so many of my problems."
As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.
As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.
I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.
May all of you get the $10K raise your soul has yearned for. And whatever level of sex you can be satisfied with for $200.
gummygunk
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dailybridgerton
ellievsbear
