I wrote a tutorial on how to set up a deviantArt-like art gallery on a neocities (or other static site) come check it out:
It was a lot of work to put my art gallery together and get it working, but because I didn't see literally anything on creating such a gallery (other than ready-made templates) I decided to write up a tutorial hoping it will help others who want to code a more robust art gallery that goes beyond just using a simple slideshow/lightbox. Each image is its own post, like how deviantArt works.
This is a draft of the page where I copied my existing posts just to fill up the gallery and see how it fits:
"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.
we as a society have GOT to accept that it is okay if we get blocked. you do not have the right to interact with every single person on the internet. "but then i can't interact with their content" yes that is the point "but i didn't do anything" no one owes you an explanation and you don't have to have "done something" to be blocked. let it go
I block people every day for things as simple as "she tagged this post black lipstick and now I can't find black women in this black woman search" Like. It is very easy to be blocked for not much and I am a mean bitch. I get blocked ALL THE TIME. It should be something that you embrace. Whatever I got blocked for, they didn't want me there, and I don't want to be anywhere that I'm unwanted. Embrace not being where you are unwanted.
many people ask 'how do i know my art is good enough to start a comic'. this is a very common mistake. you do not make a comic to make good art you make comics because its fun and looked yummy
I think what really bothers me about video game difficulty discourse is the way that it equates "inaccessibility" with "artistic choices that may alienate certain disabled players."
like, okay, speaking as a musician and an autistic woman: there are certain sounds that I am simply not going to enjoy, right? I don't like music that's too heavy on the high end, because it sounds shrill. I've listened to music that had so much Stuff Going On at once that is literally made me feel sick from overstimulation. But that doesn't mean that music shouldn't exist, or that the creators should make a hypothetical pared-down remix just so I specifically can enjoy it. There's other music out there which I like! It's fine! I'll listen to that instead!!
and, idk, it bothers me because there are a lot of legitimate accessibility features that I think every game should have. there's no reason for a puzzle game to be inaccessible to colorblind people. there's no reason that an execution-heavy game shouldn't allow you to set up alternate control schemes. but the solution is not "make the puzzles easier" or "make the bosses do less damage" any more than the "solution" to a complicated piece of writing is "create a version where everything is written using simpler language." idk! it just feels like a refusal to engage with art as art and not Product.
That last bit about writing is particularly on-point right now, because this is take is going around:
So yeah there are people who genuinely believe that "accessibility" means only making things that are unchallenging. This is incorrect in any form of art, whether it's popular media or something more traditional. Accessibility in writing means printing in larger text, use of readable fonts and formatting, translation into Braille, and recording in clear audio. Accessibility in gaming should mean colorblindness filters, toggles to deactivate strobing in cutscenes and environments, scalable text, custom keymapping, and the ability to modify graphical settings including framerates, motion blur, fixed versus free camera, and so on.
To truly engage with any form of art, one must at least be willing to be challenged. To claim that challenge is by its nature inaccessibility is at best ignorance to the purpose of accessibility, and at worst a gross infantilization of people like me who actually have disability-related struggles that could be mitigated with some fairly basic control of settings.
hey young artists: you are not "losing money" by not monetizing your hobby. just because someone keeps suggesting you monetize doesn't mean they (or you) understand what goes into running a business. unless you have a clear demand for your work and a gameplan to take advantage of that, the only thing you are wasting is your time by trying to cater to an algorithm or a market that simply doesn't exist. you cannot reverse-engineer success as an artist. just make your art. just make your art. your audience will come to you eventually.
now that i have more time to elaborate: i'm bringing this up again because every day on reddit i see what are very obviously teenagers pleading in borderline distress for help on how to "get noticed", typically with the intent of getting commissions. you are not only damning yourself to a lack of artistic identity by developing your work based on what you think will sell, you are also damning yourself to the very real possibility of resentment toward your own hobby when people aren't as enthusiastic as you about the results.
it's completely normal to want positive reactions and attention when you are a creative person. "create for yourself" can also mean "create things you know will make people happy, because you like making people happy". what i want to emphasize is that introducing the element of money can pollute that exchange, and if you find yourself at any point distressed because you're struggling to get a business off the ground... examine yourself with honesty and ask if part of the problem is not that you think the only worthwhile support your audience can offer is becoming a customer.
probably the worst attitude tumblr unintentionally cultivates is "the world out there is completely dangerous for you and no one can possibly understand you, so you should isolate yourself from it and avoid interacting with it as much as possible"
i DO believe that a good writer can make mischaracterization work. oh there's a character who doesn't normally cry? figure it out!! disect the character. make the situation cryable for them. make that character cry ugly tears even if it goes against their very nature. YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK!!!
dailybridgerton
2087
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
izzy806
