A Fool Writing Songs For The Moon @m1sery-m3d - Tumblr Blog

Victor Frankenstein after achieving the impossible and building a fucking person from scraps of the dead: Oh god, ew, ew it's ugly! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew! Ew! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew!

koiagain

whentherewerebicycles

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

this is making me panic how do we raise children in this educational & tech environment

whentherewerebicycles

“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.”

also I have been banging this particular drum to friends for a while now… the rich kids are going to get low-tech educations that prioritize critical thinking and deep engagement. the poorer kids are going to get “career readiness” training that urges them to use AI for everything and to give up on the hard work of sustained engagement with ideas

spaceshipsandpurpledrank

bodhi-devotee

“you’re such a ray of sunshine!” thanks! one day i chose to act happy and then i kept choosing it over and over and over and over until the neurological pathways formed like desire paths in the thicket. i dug and clawed my nails into the grooves of my brain and carved out joy. i retouch it every day.

sometiktoksarevalid

bodhrancomedy

May I introduce you to my favourite Calvin and Hobbes strip which only got funnier when I got hearing aids.

mayhemchicken

wait actually i gotta reblog this again i just remembered an additional fun fact. sunday funnies pages were not created equal; some allotted less space than others. to make space? they would literally chop off parts of the comics. this is why many sunday strips have a Big Title Bar at the top, bc that was usually the part that got cut off. comic artists essentially had to account for that a big chunk of their strip was Optional Bonus Material that couldn't be relevant to the plot or punchline of the strip.

bill watterson? HATED this. he was in a constant battle with the presses to keep his strips intact. he eventually won this battle, forcing any paper that wanted to run calvin & hobbes to print the full strip. but in the meantime, you would get protest strips, where the top bar is essential for the comic to make any sense at all.

this? is almost definitely one of those. please picture with me living in a town with one of the newspapers that cuts off the top bar. imagine seeing this comic WITHOUT the top panel.

apocryphics

oh ok

gorps

exeuntstormtroopers

“Why would you stop in hell?” has changed my brain chemistry

what-even-is-thiss

I know that lesbian is also a word that can refer to someone from the island of lesbos and when Herodotus says that a king “sent his lesbians” to do something he’s referring to soldiers from lesbos

but I can’t get the image out of my head of a king or general pointing at a city and yelling “go, my lesbians!” and then a bunch of gay women running in to burn it down

minyicho

starting a collection of my favourite AO3 author’s notes

honourable mentions

carbomcoco

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

carbomcoco

they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.

petefoxshend-deactivated2018062

“Big Pharma” okay are we talking about how privatization and monetization has deeply corrupted the field of medicine or are you talking about how you think chemicals in the water are making the frogs gay

greyramblings

“GMOs”? Are we talking seeds that grow sterile plants and patenting genetic modifications then destroying any competition no matter how small they are? Or are we talking life saving rice with vitamin a to make sure kids don’t go blind in regions not suited for other high vit a veg? … or are we talking about your chidoodle?

postmodernmulticoloredcloak

Conversely, “alternative medicines”? Are we talking the traditional practices of non-Western societies which have an ancient history of being the cultural tools that allowed communities to take care of the health of their members and are nowadays rigorously studied within these communities to adapt them to the needs of the contemporary life, and can offer important prompts to modern medicine? Or are we talking about a white woman who traveled to India twice, followed a five-hour seminar and knows everything about inner energies now

memewhore

56kilobits

thinking about a long article I read a while back talking about the history of “ultra-processed foods” and how they related to american/western health issues. my main takeaway was a short paragraph buried in the middle of the article, where the guy who came up with the term just says outright “technically by these processing metrics tofu and sourdough fall into the same category as doritos and we’re not really sure how to square that circle” and the article just. moves right past that.