ojovivo
One Nice Bug Per Day
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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Three Goblin Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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Fai_Ryy
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Mike Driver
hello vonnie
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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Today's Document
ellievsbear
almost home
Not today Justin
KIROKAZE
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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seen from Russia
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seen from Liberia
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seen from Pakistan
seen from Germany
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seen from Venezuela
seen from United States
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@gay-galactic-wave
Soooo I got bored and decided to spend a month making a Rise!Caseytello fan-kid. I got so attached to her and I think I'm definitely drawing more of her and her dads in the future,but for now have her and an OC sheet I made
Fun fact: She's named after Mae C. Jemison and Miwae Yamazaki because Donnie and CJ are both nerds
jesus was kinda danganronpa executed since he was a carpenter who was nailed to a board
hmm must've been the wind
We all agree, right?
AI to write your novel is wrong
A bargain with a demon to write your novel is okay
Only if you specify in the contract that the demon can't use chat-GPT
I've been thinking about this - and why asking the demon is also a bad idea
Tartini was a composer and violin teacher and no one respected him, he was generally broke, and he started having weird dreams in which the devil asked him to teach him violin
despite being catholic tartini agreed - although everything told him this was a bad idea
so he taught the devil violin in his dreams and when he had taught him everything he knew the devil offered him payment, he played an original composition in his dream
Tartini woke up weeping and struggled to write it down
we have a historical version of "couldn't remember the greatest song in the world, this is just its tribute", and the song he wrote down made him "Sonata in G Minor, aka the devil's trill" it's usually played by 2 violinists because it's evil difficult,
now imagine you make a deal with the devil to write your novel, he writes it but only lets you read it in a dream and you have to transcribe it from memory the next day.... 150k of the best prose and plot you've ever seen in your life and you have to remember it
chatgpt is evil, but that's just mean
This brings a whole new element to my understanding of Devil Went Down to Georgia
See ever since i was a child i noticed how different people expect women to act compared to men and i hated that. Not for feminist reasons, but bcs women are expected to clean up after everyone and be well groomed and stuff and i have always been Super Lazy and a slob so ive became the female son in my family.
(in case no one has said this to you in a while) i am proud of you for continuing to exist when it feels impossible
where are you going
Emotional Catharsis Through Anime
Today, I was catching up on anime-related news and found a really fun response column to a topic that I never thought would be discussed 20 years ago - anime being found everywhere in the public eye after years of being shunned by mainstream culture.
From sports to fashion to films, anime and manga culture has seeped into the spotlight that has many Western media outlets/properties wondering what's going on. Anime News Network's Answerman tackles the subject by providing four examples of how anime fandom has become a huge part of people's lives. Sports and fashion alongside people using anime/manga's narrative structure (i.e. guy is throwing through his "villain arc") were discussed, but the last point the column addresses got my attention the most. It brings up the emotional register. I'll quote the paragraph.
"The one I find genuinely moving, if I can be unfashionably sincere for a paragraph, is how anime's specific emotional grammar, unguarded, unironic, full-volume sincerity about grief, ambition, loneliness, and connection, has become acceptable in Western media in ways that would have gotten laughed out of a writers' room fifteen years ago. Western drama had to learn, via anime, that you're allowed to let a character cry for an uncomfortably long time, or deliver a speech about friendship with zero ironic distance, and audiences will not just tolerate it, they'll clip it and post it with a crying emoji. That shift in permission, the idea that big, sincere feeling isn't automatically cringe, didn't come from prestige TV. It came from thousands of hours of shonen finales normalizing catharsis without a safety net of sarcasm."
I think about the times when I watched Dragon Ball Z and screamed like Vegeta whenever I got mad or wanted to pump myself up. But back then, I was laughed at or shunned. A decade ago, I tried to be more like Gintoki from Gintama and make my point with long conversations on what's important in life. Some people found it cool, but I never felt appreciated for saying how I honestly felt.
Even today, I still act like a shonen anime/manga character at times despite being a middle-age adult. For starters, I actually do cry a lot whenever I feel emotionally distressed at times. I do try to make speeches to keep my connections alive without any irony at all. I tell my friends that I love them all and show gratitude towards them without shame.
I honestly this is one the best things that have come from mainstream anime/manga culture - the ability to express all kinds of emotions without being shamed for it. Western culture still thinks some feelings are better than others when every feeling is valid, even the bad ones. Even though individualism might suggest that every one is free to express emotions, it's dictated by norms that tell people which emotions are fine to express (usually not ones that are "negative). Relationships aren't also super-important to address compared to collectivist cultures, where relationships are emphasized as a major part of one's life.
Anime and manga remind us that we're all human beings that are interdependent on one another. We thrive and suffer because of one another. What we do is based on the relationships we have with the world around us. Maybe that's why I love two-page art spreads of characters looking/being at the area around them. They're able to be there and find themselves because of those who make the environments livable for them.
While there might be some concerns about anime's mainstream status going forward, I'm just glad that more people are using anime and manga to express themselves in genuine ways that build bonds and community with one another. It's the best kind of mental health therapy. Friendship, hard work, and victory - who would have thought that this is the medicine that actually works and we need?
Daily affirmation: one day i'll have a beautiful vagina and i'll wake up to a beautiful woman hungrily eating me out while i lay on the bed, with the sun warming up my naked body
one day...
"senator lindsey graham dies at 71 after 'brief and sudden illness'" 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
in absence of any other details i'm gonna go ahead and state definitively and for the record that lindsey graham died because his ditzy fairy ass forgot the rule about not taking poppers on viagra and had what is known to medical science as a "Faggot's Stroke" and if his estate wants to correct that information so i can giggle about the real reason then they're welcome to call my office
Ok there is an actual funnier option
i didn't know that about poppers and viagra thats really important information
oh yeah no poppers + viagra can cause fatal fluctuations in blood pressure, stay safe girls
Glad the murderous bastard's dead. Could do without the homophobia, tho.
yeah a trans woman using the word faggot in a context like this is really punching down on all the bisexual he/hims of the world. how can i repent
"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!
Disney is doing crazy things in the japanese mobile game sphere rn
you may be familiar with disney twisted wonderland, the gacha game in which various disney villains are used as direct inspiration for handsome anime boys. well that game was so successful that disney is trying to do it again but this time they're just animeboyifying whatever
here's mickey, goofy, donald, and chip & dale. yeah they turned mickey & friends into anime boys. they're an idol unit or something. they're technically not anime boy versions of the source characters, they have different names. mickey's guy is "Neo Michel". not michael, michel, like he's french. chip & dale are "Ruska Moncrief" and "Ranka Monk", they have different last names, they're not brothers anymore so that they can be yaoibait instead, anyways this post isn't actually about these guys I'm just setting the stage for the actual humanizations I wanted to show you
They also did monsters inc. And. Well it's obvious from the designs who mike and sully are. but you will also notice. the blonde one on the left. with glasses. monsters inc is kind of famously about just the two guys so they didn't really have a lot of other non-villain characters to take anime boys inspiration from, I guess, so, well,
Yeah it's her. they made an anime boy version of the mean receptionist slug. her name is roz btw, as all of boygachagame twitter has become extremely aware of in the past 3 days as we speculated prior to the release of the full image who tf the third guy was. the anime boy's name is "noah slugger". at this point no parody of the types of things gacha games will make gijinkas of will ever be able to live up to what disney is officially spending their own real money on designing
So I watched hamilton again...
in grade 12 we were reading romeo and juliet and we were at the romantic-ass balcony scene and this hot girl in the class volunteered to read juliet’s parts and i put up my hand to volunteer for another part and the teacher goes ‘oh do you want to be the nurse, amanda?’ and i was like ‘no i wanna be romeo’ and the hot girl swiveled around in her seat to give me a Look™
she and i later ended up making out at a bunch of parties in university lmfao
in retrospect this moment was absolutely pivotal to my butch awakening but it was also just a lesbian power move
I too got a girlfriend over this play. In grade 10, I was reading the balcony scene to study with two other people (one guy and one beautiful girl) and I insisted point blank I had to read as romeo, because he had the most lines and I’m a dramatic little shit.
So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.
We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.
And then I look up.
And holy shit.
There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”
And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.
Juliet and I have also been together for more than 4 years now. She’s every bit as spectacular as she was when I was a lovestruck teenage Romeo, kneeling on the yellowed linoleum floor of second block english.
🚨Safety Alert Australia
If you rely on a hidden phone for your safety, be aware that Australia’s new emergency warning system, AusAlert, can send alerts that override silent and “Do Not Disturb” settings.
If safe to do so, turn off any hidden device before the scheduled test and only switch it back on after the test period has ended.
A national test alert will be sent at 2pm (AEST) on 27 July 2026.
studying history is like. here's to another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be. thank you women who fight for abortion and contraception and independance from men for another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be
My children are 8 and 10 now and the other day I was thinking, 200 years ago I'd probably have like 4-5 more kids. Or at least 4-5 more pregnancies, who knows how many would have lived. I had two pregnancies and I figured that was enough and I just got to stop. What a beautiful day of being able to have the kids I wanted and then stopping.
I have 2 kids. 200 years ago, I'd be dead with no kids because my first pregnancy failed and would have killed me if not for the medically necessary operation (read: a version of an abortion). What a beautiful day to have survived, have the kids I wanted, and then stop.
