blake kathryn
Jules of Nature
roma★
Andulka
The Bowery Presents
Misplaced Lens Cap
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
titsay
oozey mess
if i look back, i am lost
One Nice Bug Per Day
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Sweet Seals For You, Always
macklin celebrini has autism
No title available
noise dept.
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
official daine visual archive
Not today Justin
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from T1
seen from France
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
seen from T1
seen from Türkiye
seen from Colombia
seen from Singapore
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
@foolsabode
New Commission Sheet, new prices! Trying hard to save up for the year to cover bills and travel costs! Dress comms changed to Artist choices outfit~ You can also give some direction in regards to preferred styles~
Also trying something new with a form for submissions~ You can DM too for questions or inquiry, but this'll hopefully be easier for ref images
And once again, if you wanna just send a little support kindness, i have a ko-fi
the amazing digital circus is a show about empathy and what it does to you if you go too long without a support system so the show starts with sympathizing with Pomni (the most empathetic person, easy), ep2 is empathizing with an NPC in a game (no flaws), ep3 is empathizing with a man who has dementia, ep4 is empathizing with someone who annoys you when they're unmasking, ep5 is asking you to empathize with an abused rich white woman and so on....
so it all works up to the empathy boss - a bush era edgelord millenial trans girl who thinks she's Max from Sam & Max and is inherently unworthy of love
and some people failed the empathy test
im realizing very fast that people do not in fact know that sometimes things in stories suck on purpose and it sucking is the point
"this story is misogynistic!!"
>looks inside
>about the pressures of societal misogyny and how its bad
Page 17: Long Night
Done for the night
letty, chen, alice, lily... ?
The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.
Like. Look. Listen. I have taught introductory quantum physics at a university level, and I need you all to incorporate this into your trans advocacy: There are situations where you need to make a decision to prioritize being comprehensible to your target audience above being The Most Unassailably Correct.
You can try to teach a toddler about germ theory or you can get them to wash their hands because "yucky"
Teaching a toddler to wash hands because yucky when the Ethics Understander crashes through the roof. "STOP RIGHT THERE," the Ethics Understander shouts at me. "The disgust response is not a legitimate substitute for a considered value judgment, and in fact, weaponizing disgust instead of grounding those judgments in a more rigorous framework is fundamental to reactionary rhetoric!"
The toddler looks at me. "You are a fascist, auntie. I have seen the light and will now go eat chewing gum from the pavement, unless you can educate me on a rigorous framework on the microbiology of pavement chewing gum this very instant."
This is a hyperbolic example but here's a more real one:
You are trying to explain the trajectory of research on trans issues, and how the informed consent model came about as a wildly successful alternative to the gatekeeping model because time and again, people with clinical experience who actually cared about their patients found that just letting trans people transition was easier and the fear that it would lead to something bad was unfounded.
The Principle Understander is shouting at you that the medicalization of trans people is inherently unjust, and even the informed consent provider is still a gatekeeper, just a more lenient one.
You are already aware of this.
You are talking to someone who, as a first priority, needs to know what the worse gatekeeping model looks like.
The person you're talking to is asking "but isn't it good to give patients more time to think before making irreversible changes?" because they didn't hear the part where you explained that asking patients about their masturbation habits has nothing to do with anyone's safety. They missed it because the Principle Understander was on a tangent about the necessity of abolishing capitalism because paying for medication is bad, which again, yes but this is really not the time or place for that.
This has the funniest name btw.
There's an Emily Dickinson poem about this:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind—
This can also be understood as "speaking their language" or "meeting them where they are." And not to sound like I'm shitposting, but you want to know one of the best examples of this that's ever been posted on tumblr.com?
"What the fuck do you think freedom MEANS, Earl?"
Earl could have gotten an earful about gendered clothing colors being a social construct or how the queer community has its own clothing subculture, and he wouldn't have heard or internalized a word of it. But for the kind of redneck who goes to tractor-pulls? Yeah, "what the fuck do you think freedom means" really only touches the most superficial layer of Mister Pink John Deere Hat, but Earl heard that. And maybe next time he sees a guy dressed like Daisy Duke chilling at a tractor-pull he'll remember it and think "isn't it great to live in a free country" and mind his business. Maybe he'll even ask where the guy got his pink hat and learn something more.
No person who ever said “my beliefs come from God” was ever moved left by “God doesn’t exist”.
Page 16: Goodnight
Bye for now
Page 15: Bs and Cam
Making Friends
this is the best tag I’ve ever gotten in my notifs actually
idk i would personally rather give up access to certain products seasonally or locally than have people enslaved to give me the ability to have any product any place any time. i think i can go without tomatoes in january.
i truly do think that most people if confronted with it and pressed on it would agree. but it's comfortable to gain privileges from someone else's suffering, especially if you don't have to see that suffering directly.
Page 15: Bs and Cam
Making Friends
I will not confirm or deny if this is canon
"Oh, how are the woods treating you this fine night?"
"Come on, I don't bite~"
"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.
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!
shorks
If anyone likes these a lot and are near Albany, NY, I an offering them as free apprentice tattoos! 👀👀👀👀
