a silly person

This blog has no purpose other than personal selfdestruction. minors DNI. Icon was a generous gift. He/Him 33.

[maswartz]

[fractally]

This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.

[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!

[animentality]

[weaselle]

Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.

[partywithponies]

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

[partywithponies]

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

[partywithponies]

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

[dizzyghoast]

i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.

I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case

[zoesupreme]

boy she didn't hold anything back

[creekfiend]

there are a NUMBER of folktale Woman-Creatures like selkies who exist to make the inherently coercive nature of heterosexual marriage explicit and to externalize male anxiety about how if your wife had actual autonomy she very well might disappear and you might never fucking hear from her again

which is a FASCINATING category of Woman-Creature imo

[creekfiend]

someone said it's also a cautionary tale about mistreating your wife and I think that's spot on especially for other related types of stories e.g. the crane wife. like I think these stories are very much Husband Anxiety Stories. the Woman-Creatures are black boxes whose interior experience it is impossible to know and who have strange and often seemingly arbitrary rules that you must follow or else they will disappear. idk. like. that's why I think that any empowering-to-women-ness qualities of these stories is incidental. I think they're externalized anxiety about coercive societal heterosexuality and the inability to truly Know one's wife in such circumstances.

[whetstonefires]

you also see a variant of this formula a lot (generally at the more literary end of the fairy tale space) where it's not a creature you capture, but a magical lady who picks you for seemingly arbitrary reasons, bettering your fortune enormously with her magic and wealth and second-hand status.

and then, for reasons usually at least slightly less arbitrary, fucks off again.

the husbandly anxiety here is more about not having access to coercion as an option.

[creekfiend]

oooo yes absolutely!

[creekfiend]

was just talking to Story about this and he told me about one folktale where a guy meets a beautiful woman at a lake and she brings a bountiful dowry of like one million fat cows and such and she is of course a fairy so she's like "my one requirement in our bargain is that if you strike me three times I will leave" and in many versions of the story the husband doesn't ""actually"" strike her -- each time it's something like, one 'strike' involves her forgetting her gloves inside and he walks out and taps her on the shoulder with her gloves, but she tells him that counts as striking her. this sort of thing. which is TRANSPARENTLY like "whoa wouldn't it be fucked up if your wife could enforce consequences for behavior she said was harmful, even if according to your cultural norms it was fine, and you didn't see it as a big deal?" like... lol. what if women could actually be the ones who decided whether or not any given action their husbands took against them was harmful? IMAGINE... PREDEY SCARY....

[themisally]

This is very interesting as a parallel to the genre of stories that are about Wife Anxiety, which are very often “what if your husband was a monster/beast” and very often end in “if you act in the correct way you can transform him so he isn’t a monster.”

Lots of this style ASSUMES that there is no way to enforce consequences (because of magic) but if you follow the rules and are a good wife he will not be a monster anymore. This also somewhat often has a man who is a monster because of another woman/witch. So it’s an interesting way to try to soothe both Wife Anxiety (marriage is going to be okay, trust us) and Husband Anxiety (it’s not really your fault you’re a monster - even if you did make that witch mad, she overreacted and a good woman could fix it).

[guccifloralsuits]

If THE modern translator of the OG Odyssey text wrote this about my film adaptation I’d kill myself

Emily Wilson you’re goated

[insomniac-arrest]

This felt so good to read.

[croaksac]

HUGE developments in the big silly baby wearing fluffy pajamas fandom:

Oregon Zoo 05/30/26: This flouf is one of 15 healthy California condor chicks to hatch at our conservation center this season. A new record! #Condorable #KeepCalmAndCarrion

[aspirationalbrand]

amazing things happening in late series columbo episodes

[kondor-with-a-k]

Facsimile. Huh. What a world

[eldritchbauble]

You're just a mammal. Let yourself act like it. Your brain needs enrichment. Your body needs rest. You feel hunger and grow hair. You need to pack bond with other sentient things so you don't become unsocialized and neurotic. You are biologically inclined to seek dopamine and become sick when chronically stressed. Outrage about hedonism is made up to place moral value on taking pleasure in sensory experiences. I am telling you that if you don't let yourself be a fucking mammal, as you were made, you will suffer and go insane. No grindset no diets no trying to be above your drive for connection. Pursue what makes you feel good and practice radical rejection of the constructs meant to turn you into a machine. You're a mammal.

[swanprincex]

i hope you dont mind, i was posessed by these words until i drew this little zine and i just thought id put it here

[galileosballs]

Also, please do not listen to how people talk about cover letters on this site. Cover letters are important, and in many industries you can be damn sure they'll be read. And no, they're not 'fanfic about working in your office', or just re-stating the resume contents in a fancier guise. If you treat them like that, then of course they're not doing much for you. That makes you sound like a syncophantic windbag, and it's not doing anything else to help.

I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.

The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.

This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.

And the other mistake? Everyone writes cover letters that are too long. One page is fine. Two is the absolute maximum, and that's if you have a lot of specific things to say. It's a waste of your time and theirs to pad it out with fluff. Of my two most recent successful cover letters (i.e. jobs for which I was interviewed) one was 390 words and the other was 550. That's the length of this post. How long did it take me to write this post? About 15 minutes to write, 5 to proof and edit. That's how long you should be spending on a cover letter, maximum.

[stjohnstarling]

The social forces that prevent you from being able to admit to your own desires in the safety of your own mind are far more evil than any desire you could have.

[stjohnstarling]

Unacted desires are fundamentally neutral, and you can't decide what to do about the things you want unless you can admit to yourself what they are in the first place. Everyone has desires that would hurt other people if they acted on them, but most people would not actually go out and do anything they know would cause harm. Far more harm is done in this world by people who are trying to pretend they can't possibly want anything they think is bad than people running around going "ehehehe I love hurting people!"

[stjohnstarling]

Providing people with a way of exploring the dark parts of ourselves in a way that cannot hurt anyone is one of the purposes of both fiction and kink.

[stjohnstarling]

All of us have a hungry, horny, angry, scared animal inside ourselves. You do not need to excuse or justify what that animal wants, it simply is. You cannot escape it. Lying to yourself about the animal that you are will only give you less control over it, not more.

[unthinkablearchives]

Delphine Lecompte, Belgian poet

[elli-incarnate]

Hear me out: the funniest way to read the Emperor's Hand is as Darth Sidious accidentally honoring the traditions of his homeworld.

Because obviously TTT, Mara Jade, and the Emperor's Hand as a concept predate both the PT and Palpatine being from Naboo, but they're all perfectly backwards compatible.

And the Naboo handmaiden system is objectively insane.

I love it! It rules!

It is ALSO insane.

George Lucas was, as always, operating primarily on vibes and mythic imagery rather than asking uncomfortable sociological questions, but if you stop and think about the institution for more than a solid minute, it immediately starts raising eyebrows.

What kind of society elects a teenage queen and then surrounds her with a cadre of teenage noblewomen trained to impersonate her, carry weapons, participate in security operations, keep state secrets, and potentially DIE in her place?? That's not even a hypothetical, that's Cordé.

That's a state security apparatus specifically created from child soldiers wearing silk and makeup.

My favorite headcanon is that the answer lies buried in the institution itself!

Once upon a time, someone kept trying to kill the Queen.

Maybe it was rival houses. Maybe succession disputes. Maybe civil war. Doesn't really matter, the point is that Naboo's history was far uglier than its idyllic image suggests.

Eventually some desperate monarch, cornered by enemies and running out of options, came up with a brilliant solution: every major noble family would send a daughter to court. They would be honored guests publicly ... functionally they would also be hostages. They would be trained to fight, trained to serve, trained to imitate the Queen's speech and mannerisms so thoroughly that no assassin could ever be entirely certain who they were killing.

Viewed through that lens, the institution suddenly starts making a little more sense. What noble is going to sponsor a plot against the throne when the young woman wearing the crown might actually be his own daughter? Every major family now has a personal stake in the monarch's survival. The knives are still there, but now everyone has to think twice before drawing them.

Over centuries, the original purpose becomes obscured. The hostages become companions. The companions become handmaidens. The coercion gets wrapped in honor.

Which is exactly how cultural institutions survive.

And if you accept that premise, Naboo becomes a much more interesting place. Beneath the fountains and beautiful architecture is a society that normalized masks, doubles, hidden identities and carefully managed appearances.

The Queen pretends to be a handmaiden.

The handmaiden pretends to be the Queen.

Political survival depends on controlling appearances.

Which is EXACTLY THE CULTURE that should produce a Sith Lord in the exact flavor of Darth Sidious.

For most Naboo, the culture of masks and doubles becomes a defensive adaptation; for Palpatine, it becomes a worldview. The future Emperor spends decades pretending to be a kindly public servant while secretly engineering galactic catastrophe. He presents himself as a grandfatherly statesman while running the largest conspiracy in galactic history. He doesn't reject Naboo's political culture; he internalizes it and weaponizes it. Which is extremely Sith.

And then we get to the handmaidens themselves.

Because I am convinced that Senator Palpatine watched the events of TPM unfold and took notes.

Imagine him sitting there watching a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls with blasters repeatedly interfere with his plans.

Not just the Jedi or elite soldiers or master spies.

Handmaidens.

Loyal. Adaptable. Good at disguises. Comfortable with deception. Willing to risk their lives for the person they serve. Every time one of Padmé's girls successfully pulls off another switcheroo or security operation, Palpatine's reaction isn't just annoyance but professional admiration.

Somewhere in the back of his mind there has to be a moment of: I want one.

Not a handmaiden, exactly. That's too obviously Naboo. But the concept? The concept is excellent.

Fast forward a few decades!

Palpatine is Emperor now. He takes the idea apart and rebuilds it according to Sith principles.

He keeps the loyalty. He keeps the secrecy. He keeps the personal service and the ability to operate independently. He keeps the willingness to sacrifice everything for the person at the center of the system. Then he strips away the humanity and replaces it with possession. He adds espionage, assassination, manipulation, and dark side conditioning.

Hmm, needs less sisterhood and more murder.

The result of course is Mara Jade.

At some point he absolutely had to workshop the title.

"Emperor's Handmaiden?"

No. Too obvious.

"Emperor's Hand."

Perfect, print it.

Everything gets scaled up, militarized, stripped of its humanity, and rebuilt in obsidian.

Which feels phenomenally appropriate for the dark side. Sith don't invent things from whole cloth. They corrupt, distort, and take something that already exists and twist it into a more selfish, controlling form.

And that's exactly what Palpatine does with Naboo. For all his claims of transcending ordinary beings, for all his efforts to become something greater than human, he never really stops being a product of his homeworld.

He just takes every institution he inherited and asks himself what the most evil possible version would look like.

The final irony is Mara herself.

Because in this reading she's the dark reflection of a Naboo handmaiden. She is the culmination of Palpatine's attempt to recreate and weaponize one of the defining institutions of his youth.

She's like the cultural fusion of Naboo and Sith cultures. Culturally orange chicken.

And after all that effort, after decades of planning and conditioning and control, she eventually defects, marries Luke Skywalker, and gets absorbed into the very family that destroys everything Palpatine built.

That's Star Wars AF.

[redstonedust]

its actually easy to de-enshittify your digital experience all you need to do is install this browser extension and this browser extension and this browser extension and input this custom script into the advanced box and go into your system settings and reconfigure all these options you didnt know existed and change your entire workflow and switch to this alternative operating system and this alternative web browser and this alternative chat client and this alternative word processor and this alternative- sorry that one turned out to be malware delete that one okay now double check your task manager for unwanted background processes and element block these ads and invest in a good VPN and append all your searches with AI blocking keywords and wait a few years until everything you just did becomes shitty too so you can do it all over again okay kitten. its literally that easy.

[chipdabesta]

[foxehrobot]

You Have More Power Than You Think You Do: A Case Study In Getting Shit Done

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

We have to save us.

[i-will-recover-tomorrow]