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Personal blog. Expect opinions. You can call me Fálki, pronouns are he/him. I am not a minor but will tag nsfw content if I ever feel the need to reblog it. Icon by madbrake

[pengosolvent]

Edit: the title for this comic is “Puzzle Rat” this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

(it’s completely unrelated to any of my songs that have to do with “puzzleboy”) Patreon: www.patreon.com/PengoSolvent

[leontocephagaina]

"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"

Opinion | My Students Can’t Read

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

[bowditch]

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!

[beardedmrbean]

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.

[cookingwithroxy]

I want you to understand this. I NEED you to understand this. My mother read me the hobbit as bedtime story, and I started pushing myself to read before pre-school so I could in fact read the hobbit for myself instead of having to wait for bedtime.

I didn't do so right away but jesus wept I PUSHED myself to learn to read SPECIFICALLY so I could read The Hobbit! It is, in fact, a children's story! And children only see page count as 'there is a lot of this fun story to read!'

[antlered-vixen]

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

[free-my-mindd]

[kingbedlam]

[afemalesebastian]

"Sewing is a gateway drug to thinking through complex problems. It seems really simple; culturally, we make it women's work. Let me tell you: real sewing at any kind of level of proficiency is a bloody magic trick. Sewing, like mold making, involves mental frames that require one to think inside out and backwards. It requires one to work on an order of operations that is often taking into account the reverse. It's a really, really important skill, and if you learn how to sew, you're mostly on your way to carpentry and welding and sheet metal work. I'm not kidding: these are planar forms meeting under rules and conditions. And if you can make a sleeve work, I swear to God, you could build a house."

--Adam Savage

[laserbobcat]

Also, don't be afraid to "Be bad at sewing" check like ONE video on the basics for a good seam, go into any clothing store, check THEIR seam quality and quickly realize that you can do way better even as a complete noob. Sewing isn't wizardry, it's logic and patience and fun and practicality for all levels.

[ariaste]

For people who are scared about "being bad at sewing" here are a couple concrete ways you can be "bad" at it (and what the consequences of that is). I still sometimes make these mistakes and i've been sewing since i was seven. ***Forgetting to add seam allowance. *** For some projects this is not a big deal and it'll just turn out a bit smaller than you intended. For other things, you will be crying and kicking yourself about expensive wasted fabric. Beginner Advice: Just don't start out making things that use expensive fabric. Make some cheap shit first to practice, like a muslin pillowcase. Beginner Reassurance: Even if you fuck this up, and you cry and kick yourself a bit, it might not the end of the world. You can always add an extra panel of fabric to make up the difference -- the real trick is figuring out how to do that in a way that looks like Intentional Design so no one else ever notices you were covering up a mistake. (This is something that even really experienced sewists do all the time -- you might have a piece of fabric in your stash that you bought years ago without a project in mind, and now you've figured out what you want to use it for, you discover that you don't have QUITE enough. So you adapt. Easy.)

***Not sewing in a smooth, intentional line*** For some projects this is not a big deal. For projects where it is a big deal, with most fabrics you can always remove the stitches with a seam ripper and try again as many times as it takes until you're happy. (The fabrics that don't tolerate this are ones with a coating, like pleather or leather, where if you poke a hole then it stays forever. Some really delicate fabrics like satins and fine silks (and sometimes knit fabrics as well) also don't like to be sewn multiple times, but you can usually rub the surface gently or dip it in water and flatten it to dry to get the holes to ALMOST close up. Beginner Reassurance: Woven cotton loves you and forgives you and wants you to succeed. Cotton is friend. Friend cotton. Smooch it. Beginner advice: Trust me, you don't want to sew on that tricky shit anyway. Satin is for masochists who don't take their own advice. Love yourself, stick to woven cottons until you feel confident. Also! Pins will help you sew in a straight line because they'll hold the fabric neatly together. Also, you can use a washable fabric marker to draw the seam lines on with a ruler. If you're VERY VERY VERY new to sewing, I would suggest getting a piece of trash fabric (if you can find a ratty old bedsheet at a thrift store, that's a GREAT thing to practice on), cutting a piece about a foot square, drawing a loooong wobbly meandering line on it with marker or pencil, lots of curves and sharp corners. Then sew along that line with your machine, aiming to get the needle perfectly through the line. This will help you practice manipulating the fabric around curves and corners. Further Advice: Keep your hands flat on top of your fabric on the "table" part of the sewing machine, rather than picking up your fabric with your fingers and moving it around. Just shift it gently with your palms. ***Fabric shifted while sewing and left a gap where the needle didn't go through both layers of fabric*** Hey! What did I tell you about using satin! Put it down and walk away! It is too treacherous for you, traveller! Friend cotton generally doesn't do this to you. Beginner advice: Use pins or fabric clips and this won't happen Beginner reassurance: You can always seam-rip the fucked up bit and try again. <3

***Thread keeps fucking up and getting tangled and snarled on the back of the piece (machine-sewing edition)*** Don't panic, this is not a you problem. You haven't done anything wrong. This happens because every sewing machine has the devil in it. Super normal and happens to everyone. Beginner advice: Remove the thread from your machine and re-thread it, both the top thread and the bobbin. Test it on a bit of scrap fabric to see if that fixed it. If it didn't fix it, try re-threading again and pay close attention to make sure you're doing it right (don't put the bobbin into the bobbin holder backwards, for example). Test again. If that didn't fix it, twiddle the tension knob a bit. If that didn't fix it, open up the part of the machine where the bobbin goes and try blowing the dust and lint out. If THAT still didn't fix it, turn the machine off and go have a cup of tea or a nap. If that STIIIIIIIIILL didn't fix it, replace your needle, it is old and blunt. Beginner Reassurance: I'm holding your hands while I tell you that this is the exact process of troubleshooting you will be using for the rest of your sewing hobby no matter how good you get. Professionals also do this. ***Thread keeps fucking up and getting tangled and snarled (handsewing)*** Also not a you problem. The thread just has too much twist in it. Beginner advice: Just hold up your project and drop your needle so it hangs free on the thread. Run your fingers down the length of it to loosen the twist, the same thing you'd do with the cord of your hair dryer or the vacuum cleaner when it gets twisty. Some people use a little beeswax to coat the thread to help it behave. I've never used that, because just letting it hang and untwist in the air works fine for me. Beginner reassurance: This is normal, just one of those things. You're not bad at sewing.

***Sewed things together with wrong-sides together instead of right-sides together*** Happens to the best of us, especially if you are sewing while tired and bleary. Just undo the seam with a seam ripper and try again. Beginner advice: If you immediately make exactly the same mistake a second time, this is not your fault. This is just a sign from the gods that it's time for a break (all sewists know about this sign, it's a very normal omen). Go to bed, or go eat something. Further advice: If you're making this mistake while well-rested and well fed, maybe your pattern or your fabric is just weird. Try sewing it with a very wide basting stitch, check your work, then sew again with a proper seam. It will at least save you time on ripping it out if it didn't work right again. Beginner reassurance: You're working with friend cotton, right? Then you're fine, you have basically as many chances as you want. :)

***Seam looks bad when I'm looking at the piece inside-out*** Does it look okay from the outside when you turn it right-side-out? Then you have succeeded. Beginner advice: You don't even have to fix this unless you want to. If it's a functional seam, who cares what it looks like inside out? (If you really care, your next step will be to watch some youtube videos about SEAM FINISHING, which is one additional step to make the seams look nice and tidy even inside-out.) ALSO, ironing helps. Iron your seams flat with the right sides of the piece still together just the same way you sewed it, and then fold the two sides apart and iron the seam open, gently pulling the fabric apart as you go so it gets REALLY nice and flat. On curves this is going to take some practice. Just don't do things with curves for your first couple of projects. Make a pillowcase.) Beginner reassurance: It's ok to have an ugly seam, especially as a beginner. No one's going to check the inside unless they're a sewing nerd, whereupon you should bashfully tell them, "This is the first thing I ever made," and they will explode in adoration and praise. Sewing people are like this because we are all a little bit crazy. Every sewist i've ever met remembers VIVIDLY the mistakes they've made while they were learning and the radical self-forgiveness it took to continue learning. A very good sewist is one of the nicest people you will ever meet, because they have made Ten Thousand Mistakes, processed their upset, and kept persevering. They WILL praise your ugliest nastiest most fucked up cotton pillowcase, and they will tell you that you should be really proud of yourself. They will tell you some of the mistakes they've made. They will probably say, "No this is so good, this is way better than the first thing I made when I started!"

***I made a thing but it doesn't fit right.*** Too big? pinch it closed and sew another line. Too small? Rip the seam and add a panel. Beginner advice: Measure twice, cut once. Further advice: Oh, and before you do any cutting or sewing, be sure to pre-wash your fabric on HOT (if you're using cotton; you're using cotton, right? Other fabrics might need something else) so that it can do all the shrinking it's going to do. Beginner reassurance: There's ways to fix every problem, you're not bad at sewing because it doesn't fit right. If you only knew the number of times I made a thing and it didn't fit right.... Ho hum, try again! There are of course other ways to fuck up, but you have to be AMBITIOUS to hit those, and really those are more like... subcategories or more specific flavors of these general ones?

Anyway yeah. Go play with some cotton, fuck around, make a pillowcase. Pay attention to what you're doing and check your work vigilantly at every step. You will be fine. <3

[caspercryptid]

I feel like not enough people realize that people under enormous strain act really really fucking Weird

[withoutideas]

There was a parenting-kids-with-trauma book I remember running into around 2010 (I was not and am still not a parent, but I am an older sibling) that had a lovely little slogan I like to quote all the time:

“It’s not about the Cheerios.”

This was in reference to a story about a kid flipping the HELL out into a full-blown panic about running out of their favorite cereal. Not a tantrum, not a whine-fest, but an all-hands-on-deck, code-red, world-is-ending blowup.

The kid had originally come from a very unstable situation and experienced food deprivation. The new adoptive parents were stumped, because look at all the other food! You’re safe! We can get the Cheerios tomorrow!

But it wasn’t really about the Cheerios, it was about that first flicker of unease triggering all the old trauma. From the outside, it looked ridiculous. To the trauma-trained reaction of the kid’s brain, it made perfect sense.

Human brains are weird, and we’re all out here trying to survive. Sometimes our brains do this in socially acceptable, convenient ways. But not often.

(The book was titled “Beyond Logic, Consequences or Control” I think, I’ll look it up and edit this in a bit.)

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[cherrispryte]

Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.

[mikkeneko]

Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.

[grison-in-space]

As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.

[bodhimcbodeface]

I need a Thank u Mr Terry tag

[spiffybug]

#thank you mr terry#thinking something isn't doing it and doing is all people see#and deep down it means that when the ugly thought reared its head to be realized#you stood up in front of that ugly hurtful thought and said 'sit down'

Pardon me, but I needed to read your tags tonight.

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[cjsnaake]

I fuck with this

[hypokeimena]

[image description: screenshot of writing formatted as a question and answer exchange. headline of piece is: The Proposal to Raise Every Boy as a Girl. (author not listed)

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

/end description]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill." + "Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." + "I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." ~ Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction author (7 Jul 1907-1988) 

[Thanks Ian Sanders]

[driftnotes]

Mangrove forests are healing after decades of human destruction

Swampy mangrove forests are staging a surprise comeback - which is good news for coastal communities and the climate.

Always good to start the week off with some good news! This is impressive recovery by any standards and good news not just for people living in these coastal areas, but for all of us. We already know mangroves store up to five times as much carbon as land forests, create and sustain the livelihoods of communities that live in their borders, and are home to an incredible variety of biodiversity. We rely on them much more than we realize.

Here's a direct link to the study if you want to dig further into the study itself.

[enki2]

[thebdelliumlady]

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

[chapscher]

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).

[lesbiamlycenterforsocialanalysis]

Perhaps I’m being dramatic, but it almost feels as though the original phrasing (that I see being reflected quite heavily in the comments) focuses on Cheng’s inspiration from AI-generated breakup texts. The article goes much further than that; Cheng and her team clearly spent time acquiring data and then processing it to tell the story of how AI-dependence is fundamentally shifting how people interact with others. This change in human interactions didn’t happen overnight. We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how we interact with other people and a simultaneous diminishing of how long people will spend on any given task. Focusing in on the more click-worthy problem of breakup texts overlooks the underlying issue that, after being discovered, can actually influence policy change as Cheng discusses

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

You know how wealthy people turn into stupid arseholes by surrounding themselves with vapid yes-men? ChatGPT is vapid yes-men on tap. Now you, too, can subject yourself to the phenomenon that we've all long known turns people into giant toddlers who are impossible to deal with.

[dragongirlbunny]

the ruler is hosting festivities in the capital while the nation collapses, and heretics have caused a schism in the catholic church. i love living in the middle ages.

[dragongirlbunny]

we even have a The Plague

[fidelcostco]

here's a trick for getting this stain out. did you know you can make that dish in batches and it freezes great? that's actually really easy to fix, you only need a screwdriver and a replacement hinge. I can show you if you want. I can't buy you a new one, but maybe this will help. maybe the info will serve you one day. most people don't realize you can ask for a discount on those types of purchases, did you know? here's how I would try. maybe this will save you a little money. I don't have anything else to offer you. I hope it's enough. it's not much, but this'll balance the flavor and make cheap taste fantastic, it's crazy right? I wish I had more to give you. I've heard of that before, here's what someone I know tried. maybe that'll save you some time and worry. you can buy that part and do it yourself, let me take a look. here's what I would do. let's give it a shot. it's ugly, but it works. I hope that fixes it. I hope I made things easier for you.

[fidelcostco]

can you hear the "I love you" between every sentence? if you listen closely, it's repeating over and over and over, every time you keep trying, owing your life a thousand times over to the ones who came before, to the ones surviving alongside you. keep trying, I love you, I hope this helps, I love you, we'll find a way, i love you. in the heartbeats of silence, I love you. there's nothing else I can give you, I love you. this is all I have. I love you.

[cam1lla]

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

[moonshinemagpie]

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

[cam1lla]

Thank you for this addition!

[ollieofthebeholder]

I did a report on book banning once.

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!

You don't have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you're advocating for banning them entirely, you're functionally a conservative.

[respectissexy]

Having experienced a lot of it in my 20s, I think some of the worst, pettiest, most straight up this-is-just-bullying-you're-passing-off-as-praxis incidences of Queer Infighting endemic to young people can be best understood as attempts to exercise power by people with very little power.

Like you're 22, you're queer, you've just become a Marxist, the scope of World Suck is overwhelming and you have $30 in your bank account. What can you do to feel like you have any power? Well, you can try to get your frenemy cancelled for cosplaying a character from a problematic show. You can write a public callout post over someone's obviously friendly use of a slur you don't think they technically have the right to reclaim. Doing this stuff can make you feel like you have power and your actions have an impact. Unfortunately the impact in question is a negative impact on other marginalized people. But that often takes some maturity and self-reflection to notice.

[drtanner]

I'm reminded of this post from 2017. To paraphrase, OP took part in community service via their university and part of that was cleaning the bathrooms at the local homeless community centre, which would frequently get trashed, not because the homeless people using them disrespected the work of the people cleaning them but because they had so little control over other things that happened in their lives, and the bathroom was something they could affect.

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

It's not worth it. Don't trash your community bathrooms.