Mihas

personal blog she/her

[mihaser]

Made a thing!

!Spoilers!

[bimbinis]

you know a joke that never EVER gets old is when a character says smth like “I will NOT go to [place] and that is FINAL” and then it cuts to them in that place I eat that shit up every single time

[robylovi]

I love it especially when it cuts to them like this:

[justmescreamingboutbooks]

I genuinely love the fact that “Beyond Evil” wasn’t fast paced. It gave every character enough time to bring out their flaws and desperation. It was interesting how Lee Dong Shik handled the case. He was cunning in this. I mean, he wasn’t vocal about anything and was letting everyone think whatever they wanted. And I absolutely lived for Han Juwon’s character arc.

The slow burn was worth every minute. Honestly, this is my very first drama where I didn't skip any parts and eagerly sat through everything. It may not be for everyone, but this one is definitely one of the best series I have ever watched.

It depicted the flaws and corruption in the system and how bigger things are turned into “small mistakes” with money and manipulation. The twisted element brought it out so well. You can feel it in the bones how every one of those power-hungry people wanted to have everything under their shoe.

The cast was immaculate. The characters and the actors just blended in. The expressions were so thorough and gave a way for multiple questions. With each passing episode, I was on the edge of my seat. The second half, they made it very easy to find out who the real culprits were but the motive behind every action and all the dirty secrets… oh dear. LOVED IT.

Can I also take a moment and appreciate Yeo JinGoo’s microexpressions? The twitch in his eyes, cheeks and conflicting eyes… I'm genuinely swept. His character’s NEED to bring justice was played so freaking well. So admirable.

Watching Shin Ha-kyun was so satisfying. You could really tell that he was in pain throughout and his warmth towards the people he loved.

I love it. I'm glad I watched “Beyond Evil”.

[mihaser]

what i also love is that the writers intended manyang to be alive. they referred to it as if to another character because they wanted it to feel real and like home. and they succeeded and its just so good on so many levels because you can watch the show ten times and notice something new every round because it is hidden and it all works on your subconsious perception. every single person on that team put everything they had into this story.

[release-the-sheep]

just witnessed something devastating

guy on the subway with one ear pierced, little gold hoop. other guy on the subway very quickly and subtly googling "which one is the gay ear". it is not the gay ear. visible disappointment on his face as he puts his phone away.

[mihaser]

pov was packing my suircase and there is space left and now i feel guilty and scared bc of it

l dont even know mayve i think i forgot smth or maybe i think there is smth i should pack byt didnt on purpose and now feel bad

[mihaser]

You can disagree but i think Hailou easily gets jealous and it is most of the time manifested through something more childish like suddenly talking too loud over the potential predator or faking being in pain to get Haixia's attention or posessively wrapping his hand around shrimpie's shoulders/waist while maintaining his nonchalant clown facade. Depends on how much jealous he is. Although it rarely happens because Haixia doesn't really want to interact with anyone besides Haiyang. Well he himself on the other hand doesn't get mad over small things but it still happens more often because Hailou just keeps being nice to everyone. And you do not want to be at his mercy. He will still act politely and smile but when no one else is looking he will let you know that one more mistake and you are done. Or he will simply not even show it but secretly cook up a plan to dispose of you. No vicious murders this time, of course. And he also gets mad at Hailou coming up with various small punishments for him, like making him go through the archives or counting seeds in a barrel. Haiyang whines so much that halfway through the punishment shrimpie usually just gives up and lets the salt be.

[shadowkokushibo]

We don't do it like this either🤭btw alot of people commented the same thing gosh i love the comments on rednote🤣🤣

[mihaser]

LMAO i can actually use it to prove a point...

best source is chinese people themselves

[mihaser]

Guess what

I smh got logged out of my acc and of course my ass forgot the pass and the email and it took me X weeks to go "yeaaaah, guess I'll make a new one" which is typical

This is cat in the box chaos

Id proof: ik u lived on south-west station last month and were going to Dagestan at some point (did u go?). And I never sent ya the chinese pics cause idk how to make them work

LMAAAAOOOO OMFG HOW DID YOU END UP LIKE THIS 😭😭😭😭😭😭 this is so funny

i thought you were on another vacation 😭

[ooppo]

A PORN BOT UNFOLLOWED ME?

[ooppo]

not that i care

[ooppo]

[esarity11]

how daniel molloy feels after trying to conduct an accurate interview about vampires, but his subjects are louis de pointe du lack of information, lestat de lyingcourt, armanipulator, and claudead.

[mihaser]

Hope we all agree that yanxia are canon and live together forever raising kids and saving the world.

The showmakers said that if they get approved by the production company then there will be either two seasons one about their upbringing and work in those 7 years and one avout saving Haixia or just one season that combines these two storylines. Also in the original novel the author also hinted at Haixia coming back. So it happens in canon, we just may not be able to see this. If they say it out loud then it is what happens in their universe regardless of whether it gets filmed or not. They have a house and disciples and possibly more that a hundred years to spend together.

[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!

[mihaser]

this is so funny i can't even get mad

[kat]

i had a dream last night that the entire world used a currency (?) called angrypennies which as the name implies are obtained by experiencing anger. the stronger and more intense your anger was, the more angrypennies you'd gain. an all-consuming rage would earn you more than a slight irritation, etc. so people were always searching for ways to fuel their anger and purposefully keeping themselves angry all the time because they wanted to earn angrypennies. unclear if angrypennies could be exchanged for goods and services, or if they were just a collectible.

anyway, as if this wasn't heavy-handed enough, at one point british comedian greg davies appeared and explained that angrypennies couldn't be worth feeling angry all the time. this was a real revelation to dream-me and i was finally able to break free of the angrypenny grind and allow myself to experience emotions other than anger.

[kat]

it goes without saying that i will be using the word angrypenny as if it was part of the common vernacular instead of a term that my dreaming brain conjured up i.e. "he's all about the angrypennies" (derogatory way to refer to a guy who searches for reasons to be angry and possibly lacks introspection)

[reticent-vampire]

Armand and Daniel on their beheading date

[wwxnana]

watch me become the archives of deleted scenes edited into the series lmao 😭🫡

[mihaser]

people who claim Haixia and Hailou aren't in love and just brothers i know yall have never had siblings

[mihaser]

why does my period have to start on my graduation ffs. im super angry and irritable and every single sound is pkaying on my nerves i look bloated as if i was binging for weeks and i have a pimple on my forehead

this is a disaster. and someone stole my umbrella.