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@charasregrets
Hello there!
This blog is mainly a undertale ask/story blog but I talk about a bit of everything so my door Is always open for both asks and pm's.
I'm Mirren and I'm from the uk (Scotland).
You can refer to me as genuinely however you feel, I'm open to nicknames.
Endlessly diabolical how you can't say words like rape and suicide uncensored without either being criticised by idiots or punished by conglomerates.
It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.
And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.
I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.
Use the real words. Words have power, and they matter.
as someone who just had a first aid training course i'd like to ask anyone who has prescriptions/medications to have a list of them somewhere be it on your phone, purse/wallet or on a board at your home. Or tell someone that you trust.
you never know what can happen and if you need help and knowing what medications people are on can save vital time that could save your life!
Take care out there people!
He has to try.
"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 “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 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 “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
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 assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” 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 Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — 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 Japan’s 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 “kept losing track” 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 “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — 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 “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” 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 “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s 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 student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” 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 K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” 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 “finding the main idea” 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 “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” 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 “deep work” 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 source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” 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.
I’m afraid I don’t 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? K–12 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 “students will adapt.” 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 students’ sentences before they’ve 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."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Man the idea of the gaming console war might as well be a joke when these company's are too busy destroying themselves to care about others.
PSN:
XBOX:
Nintendo is probably up to something too but I'm not currently seeing it.
Man I've loved playing on xbox and definitely miss the ambassador system, can't say I was active or social within it but I miss the idea of it, the purpose it gave to helping others without simply not being a dick.
But the last year/year and a half has tired me immensely and the move to pc is the right decision for me, I'll keep my xbox I didn't play it for 10+ years just to abandon it but I'm done with buying games and new consoles for it.
With the incoming social media bans/restrictions for 16/17 year olds remember to write to your local MP/MSP about how this is affecting you and those around you.
No one should have to give they're identity or government ID just to access social media/use the internet nor should "Kids" that are legally allowed to vote, join the army, drive (with a provisional for 16) and have they're own kids be curfewed on the internet.
The next general election will be a bloodbath and the young voters will be the answer, that and if they're is a massive data breach involving ID's the public inquiry will br really funny to see.
Millions of under-16s have had accounts deleted but others just lie about their age. As Britain considers a ban, have Aussie families really
Glad to see evidence of both this plan not working and it's unjust use against disabled and introverted people
With the incoming social media bans/restrictions for 16/17 year olds remember to write to your local MP/MSP about how this is affecting you and those around you.
No one should have to give they're identity or government ID just to access social media/use the internet nor should "Kids" that are legally allowed to vote, join the army, drive (with a provisional for 16) and have they're own kids be curfewed on the internet.
The next general election will be a bloodbath and the young voters will be the answer, that and if they're is a massive data breach involving ID's the public inquiry will br really funny to see.
I’ve had tumblr for 4 years but some of you bitches have had it for a decade. It’s time to seek penance
wait I’m curious now . Reblog this with how long u’ve been on tumblr for. Dating back to ur oldest blog ever !!!
my first liked post was on 28 of February 2018, so 8 years now
i remember making it at past midnight on a whim half thinking it was Pinterest and half because why not.
still don't know what i'm doing but this blog and as such i am still here, for better or worse.
Gonna rate that summer gsmes fest a solid 7/10
aome games look interesting, some i genuinely couldn't care for...
can you give your best guess why N didn't apologize to uzi in mass destruction?
Busy trying not to die? trying to stop the world from being cyn's dinner plate?
the apology would have been nice but they're where more important things to do.
Llive through the nightmare, then apologise sounds like a good motto
2023 wips I never finished- IGNORE THE NUMBERS I DIDN'T NOTICED THAT LOL
Uzi and V are 100% why they are there...
do you think uzi would have believed N in mass destruction when he said he will not hurt her?
I mean yes? That's why she was so shocked when he didn't, when someone who can easly kill you and has shown themselves to be kind suddenly hesitates on a question like that it's gonna cause both panic and probably trust issues.
Like 90% of the characters in the series need therapy in one way or another.
would you prefer the ending to mass destruction if uzi and N escape cyn and fly out of cabin fever lab without uzi sacrificing herself? or do you like how it played out?
No, uzi's sacrifice is is great and a good parallel to both V's sacrifice earlier and uzi's transformation from wanting to kill all murder drones to "dying" for one.
Poor N though, almost lost both of his squad mates in one day.
"In this place not long ago, I fought the world so that I could call it home"
I feel like this fits undertale more than I know.
have you ever wanted to get a tree in the uk?
Have you ever had someone chop down your tree or one outside your house that you enjoyed?
Do you want some petty revenge?
Introducing the Wellingtonia tree because why replace what they cut down when you can stick a gigantic redwood of a fuck you to the people that did so.
Wellingtonia (sequoiadendron giganteum) - This is a very tall, evergreen, densely foliaged, coniferous tree. It can reach 90m in height when
how did V know lizzy was in danger in cabin fever?
Probably they're phones.
