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ojovivo
macklin celebrini has autism
wallacepolsom
#extradirty
One Nice Bug Per Day
tannertan36
Keni
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
🪼
@theartofmadeline
we're not kids anymore.
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Noah Kahan
Cosimo Galluzzi
occasionally subtle
seen from Italy
seen from Malaysia
seen from Bulgaria
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from India
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@lanaserra
When AI stole your job, your friends are all either presumed dead or not taking your calls, you peaked in your twenties, and you only shaved today because you knew company was coming (to kill you).
-frame redraw from Gundam Wing episode 34
Honestly, the way AI is being shoved into fucking everything at the moment, it's making me want to go and take over the earthsphere too.
Feeling normal.
对不起，老是去掀五飞的伤疤，但我真的好喜欢欺负他（<————你他妈的！
Oh my God! 😭 You dropped this queen 👑
To think I thought I knew what ethereal beauty was before now. Laughable.
she’s so beautiful i had to include a few more photos
Her instagram is @queennyakimofficial !
Support Black Women!!! Support Black Womens Art!!! Support Dark Skinned Black Women!!! Support Dark Skinned Black Womens Art!!!
🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤
I’ve reblogged her before, but really, you can’t have too many dark-skinned Black queens on your dash.
My art for zaun dads zine☕️
The Dragon and the Knight of Rose - R.Wesley Nipper 2025
Because I am a madman, I have rendered into verse the duel(s) between Wufei and Treize, with a medieval twist. Tallgeese II has likewise been transformed into a destrier of draft-horse size, complete with Gundam Barding. While the poem was done last year by Christmas, the illustration took me, appropriately, one year and a day to finish. I promised myself I would get it done by New Year's, and here at 8pm on December 31st, I have kept that promise by the skin of my teeth. My rendition was inspired by the original 14th century poem, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", but it owes its modernized ballad format solely to Peter Pringle's incredible musical rendition of the Green Knight, which reads a lot easier for those of us who are less familiar with Middle English alliterative bob-and-wheel verse. Tallgeese is known for two things: being ludicrously fast and ludicrously huge. Unfortunately, horses are sort of constrained to being one or the other, so I picked Hugeness over speed to represent its main features. Some other influence included in the poem are Twa Corbies ("his hawk and his hound and his lady faire"-- which in this case I'm interpreting as Zechs and Lady Une), and a touch of The Highway Man ("Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat"), which I confess has always reminded me of Treize. Notes: • "The fifth of five" is doubly relevant, as Gawain is known for having a pentacle, or five pointed star, on his shield, and Wufei of course is 05. •"A lion Or" on a field of azure is heraldic terminology, indicating a golden lion on a blue background. (aka. The OZ logo.) •Wufei's sword has what I hope are the correct characters for "Shenlong", or "rising dragon". • My favorite part of the Pearl poet's Green Knight is all the trashtalking. • "Bob-and-Wheel" is the form of the original poem, which is the only consistent use of a recognizable metric scheme used. I'm using a bastardized version that ends the relevant verse in a four syllable line followed by a two syllable line. No authors were beheaded in the making of this poem.
Good news! You can find the text of the poem over at AO3! :)
--And now some extras:
Earlier draft of the Tallhorse II, complete with details that you cannot see in the final--
In some versions, Tallgeese has an eagle on its shield, which this one is modeled after; it has two heads for the same reason that the saddle is red and white-- because my headcanon is that Treize is as Austrian as Rilke and Mozartkugeln. The eagle is also wearing a crown because by the time TGII is introduced, Treize has taken over from Relena as Queen of the Earth Sphere. I'm very sad she didn't give him the tiara. Wirklich eine große Schande. u_u
Tallhorse sans barding: Look at that carriage-drawing ass. Mobile suit technician voice: "We know it would have to be this big to maintain its power!"
Close up shots: because Tumblr insists on compressing the hell out of my jpgs:
His Excellency, with his uniform modified to be kinda-sorta in the ballpark of period appropriate.
And here are the very earliest sketches of this project from 1/1/2025.... God, it really was a solid year....
Poor Wufei didn't make it into the final! Maybe he'll show up if I'll do something with the rest of the Green Knight story-- this time without the horse. *Definitely* without the horse.
jesus that first draft was a hot mess.
This horse went through so, so, so many iterations... and there are still some things I'd change about the details and composition, but you know what? In the end, I'm really happy with how it came out. :)
this is amazing 🐈 ♥️♥️
im blowing up this is adorable
I love the part in mdzs so much where wwx is like "hehe jiang cheng hates being unfavourably compared so bad I bet I can make him mad a cut sleeve doesn't want him" and you're like that's ridiculous nobody is that insecure and then it WORKS
this and also the only difference between fanfic writers and writers who sell their own original works as careers is that fanfics aren’t monetized. that’s all.
being a “professional” writer doesn’t mean your works are inherently better than fanfics. I’ve read so many fics that are more professionally written than some published books.
whether or not a piece of writing is monetized has nothing to do with its quality.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY XIE LIAN ❤️
An important tweet
This is such a "common sense" way of putting it. Everybody memorize this for spitting it back out whenever needed.
Never thought I'd have the opportunity to say this again: Reducing women and girls to their vaginas and then forcing them to show those vaginas to strangers is not a feminist ideal.
especially when multiple state governments are trying to track women and girls who *might* have abortions. like we are rapidly approaching Handmaids Tale levels of dystopia, all in the name of a fake “radical feminism”
is this information that your government should have?
When schools ask student athletes about their menstrual cycles, they may be infringing on anti-discrimination and privacy laws.
"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!
my favorite thing about louis is he's a business major in a world of theater kids. everyone's playing psychological games with each other through theater and rock music and the fractured art of storytelling and he's like "but what are the margins on my vampire hotel"
It’s so fucking bananas that the last straw for Lestat in that meeting was finding out that Louis was getting 45% of merch profits on his tour. What kind of joker ass motherfucker becomes an investor in their ex’s crash out??? Louis Du Pointe Du Lac no one ever did it like you
Ilya trying to outplay his demons
this means more to me than it should
