The name is Blow Pop. Nice to meet you. My blog is very NSFW. Please don't follow me unless you are of legal age for your country. I'm queer, autistic, ADHD, and go by they/them pronouns. I stream on twitch, play video games, and read a lot of books while obsessing over the NHL, Tolkien, and Star Wars. The Anaheim Ducks will forever be my team.
I'm BlowP0p. Pop or BP if you need to shorten it. Twitch streamer, Chaos enby gremlin. They/them pronouns, 1980s born, queer, disabled, mentally ill, and chronically ill. Avid book lover, lover of Star Wars and the NHL (been a fan of the Anaheim Ducks for 31 years at this point), Tolkien lover, tattooed, and pierced. I reside in the ace spectrum and have AuDHD.Very avid video game player and I will occasionally mix my book reading (audiobooks) with my video game playing.
Huge supporter of libraries and people having basic civil liberties and being treated like human beings.I believe in being kind and non violent until I have no other choice.
I can be found many places online.
Bluesky
Threads
Instagram
Twitch
Storygraph
Goodreads
Steam
Tiktok
*note about stuff like steam, I don't add friends that I don't know.
I do have a ko-fi if people want to donate because I am unemployed and job hunting while looking for a new doctor so I can get the diagnosis and help I need. So if you'd like to donate to helping me live and survive...or you can have my twitch streams up and lurk so I get ad revenue.
I don't answer asks about mutual aid nor do I post them on here and if you tag me in them I *WILL* block you. I use threads and bluesky to spread those since I have a bigger circle there.
This whole obsession with wheelchair users struggling on foot down the aisle at their wedding or across the stage for graduation is 100% powered by ableism.
āThe heartwarming story of how one woman worked for 8 months straight so she could escape the horror that is being in wheelchair for a few short minutes to struggle slowly and painfully down the aisle on her special day.ā
āDespite being permanently paralyzed, her one goal since her accident has been to walk across the stage for graduation. The whole crowd gave her a standing ovation and broke into tears when she dragged her paralyzed legs across the stage with the help of leg braces and a walker to collect her diploma, after which she immediately sat back down in her wheelchair, which she will use to move around for the rest of her life.ā
How the hell is this an inspirational story? This person needs better goals. And a therapist.
Theyāre toxic in an even greater way because as a disabled person, I didnāt realise till I was reading this how much I had internalised that. I genuinely have had feelings of fear and shame about using a chair or a walker if I get married. And why? Because Iām constantly seeing āheartwarmingā stories about disabled people who shed their mobility aids for that moment. Why the hell am I afraid of using them to get married? Anyone who marries me or attends the wedding will know I need them and love me regardless.
Bless this post for making me realise Iād internalised that shit.
These types of stories teach people, both abled and disabled, that using mobility aids, especially wheelchairs, is inferior.
here are some beautiful brides in chairs with dresses they ROCK. I know a lot of disabled ppl with internalized ableism think they āwonāt look goodā if they use their chair, but hereās some literally gorgeous gals for ur consideration
(that last ones cute as fuck and i teared up at it)
I made my addition to this post in June 2019. Its now January 2020 and I no longer feel guilty about the idea of going down the aisle one day with mobility aids.
God bless the disabled community, y'all saved me from some internalised bullshit
This post floated by a few months ago, and I remember something to effect of thereās a difference between recovery and refusal. That is, like, I have a friend that suffered an incomplete spinal cord injury. He can walk again now, and I donāt think Iāve seen him use his chair in a few years. When he walked at his graduation, it was to show off his recovery. That he wasnāt quite ready to go through a full day upright, but he could walk across a stage, unassisted, and soon he would be able to do that every day. Thereās also a difference in someone like me choosing to not use a mobility aid. My mobility is intensely fluid, especially seasonally. So, I would plan a summer wedding. And while I love my cane it can also be the biggest pain in my ass, so Iād want to just go unassisted. But thatās normal for me, at least right now. I can walk without an aid during about half of the year. Itās reasonable to assume I can make it through one day without it. All of that is different than someone that is fully and permanently paralyzed, that will never walk again, dragging themselves along because they feel thatās somehow better. Overall though, my biggest takeaway is fuck the media. Because disabled people should be able to make whatever decision they want without the media turning it into this grand inspirational story.
Taking the opportunity to add these photos of Jessica Kellgren-Fozard and her wife Claudia, from this twitter post. JessicaĀ also has a youtube channel thatās primarily about disability and chronic illness and LGBT stuff (itās amazing!)Ā
I would also like to personally share, Annika Victoria who ALSO has a youtube channel. This photo was taken from her instagram - she made her wedding dress dress herself, BY HAND. Her youtube channel is mostly DIY fashion and sewing tutorials. I love her so much, sheās so unapologetically herself and informative
My first thought was "RIP to all the 1988 babies who innocently made their e-mail address [email protected] or user name ________88" realising people have been thinking *maybe this is a Nazi?*... Then I realised it was about the scroll wheel to find year of birth, so yeah, also that.
there's this weird thing people fall into online a lot, where people assume that if the [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged then people will, naturally, do [perceived-to-be-superior] version of [activity] instead. When really it's just as (or more) likely that if [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged people just won't do it at all.
audiobook listeners are not necessarily people who would otherwise do a lot of traditional reading if audiobooks did not exist, many are people who simply would experience zero books. Booktok romance readers would not necessarily be reading the classics if booktok did not exist, many of them would simply not read. Fanfiction writers would not necessarily be novelists if fanfic wasn't an option, many would just be people who didn't write. You know?
the best way i can think to describe the experience of reading moby dick is youāre in line at the dmv and this guy behind you very loudly saysĀ āwell who HASNāT had a gay experienceā and then proceeds to tell you every detail about his life in between anecdotes about how great sperm is and how ropes work and sometimes heāll say the most poetic shit youāve ever heard in your life and them jump RIGHT back into explaining how a whale is a fish because 1) it swims in water and youāre still only like halfway through the dmv line
There once was a fic reading saint
Who left comments without self-restraint
On fics large and small.
They left love on them all!
And the author's were so pleased, they'd faint.
There once was an author's fave muse
Who left the poor author confused.
Should they stay fine as fuck?
Or get hit by a truck,
And end up all bloody and bruised?
There was a poor fandom creator
Who put off creating til later.
The later it got,
The more they felt fraught,
But they researched a lot about freighters!
There once was an Archive of fics
That let us all write about dicks.
We could write cute or scary
Or leave doves unburied
And still filter out all our squicks
I know this is meant to be funny but it actually makes such a good point about how ADHD and executive dysfunction can impact people in really major ways, including financially
Of course they denied all those claims. It made them more money, and it wasnāt illegal. Corporations are amoral by nature, and healthcare is not an exception.
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatās a big deal! Iāve never thought about it before but now that I have, itās ridiculous to me that thatās not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donāt we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itās July 20th. Thatās the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iām ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iām going to have a goddamn potluck. Youāre all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
I scheduled this in 2025 to give you all a week to make Moon Day Monday preparations! I think I will order a little rocket cake or bake some moon phase cookies!
Chat, is it considered āabusive roommate behaviorā to release a raccoon into the living space after you have asked your roommate for months to please clean up their messes (they do not pay any of the mortgage)
For context, when I used to live alone I would do something called āPrincess Timeā where I would do an initial sweep (to remove any significant hazards) and then I would release a raccoon into the living area and clean. This helped because I would 1) feel like a princess and 2) the raccoon would bring attention to things my ADHD brain had decided to ignore and Iād quickly clean that stuff up.
So like, if Iām expected to clean the house now, I will be doing it in the way that is most effective for me. And anything that has not been cleaned up after months of having sit-down talks and sending reminders and being promised things will change, might be deemed ātrashā by the trash panda and thrown away.
We havenāt done since we moved into the house, because I didnāt want to cause my roommate or their cats destress or have their things destroyed by a raccoon
I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.
I wanna make things very clear that underneath all the whimsy, I am a trained professional.
Hey everyone, looks like the ācat summoned for jury dutyā was ai generated - even has the ai symbol at the top. Thanks for the heads up, @cannot-all-throw-inkpots . My apologies- I did not realize when I shared it.
Some positive news: There really WAS a cat summoned for jury duty back in 2010. Turns out the error was quickly corrected and the cat did NOT actually have to travel to the courthouse. But at least we can enjoy the fact that a papereork glitch did once try to give a cat jury duty XD
"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.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
