monster blogging in the monster bog @monsterblogging - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
monster blogging in the monster bog
@monsterblogging
I am an enjoyer of monsters, gay scientists, and such things. I'm a queer adult old enough to remember when Beakman's World was on TV. I don't have all the answers, but I know we shouldn't drop bombs on people or grab them off the streets.
You might know me from kaijuposting (a sideblog)
I'm into stuff like Pacific Rim (mostly the first movie and its tie-in texts, because Uprising and The Black are not good), Final Fantasy 7, and other works with similar vibes. I'm a big fan of subtext, allegory, rich worldbuilding, and funky monsters.
(I'm a Newmann shipper but I'm also Vanessa Gottlieb's number one defender. I've debunked the conspiracy theories about her being a trophy wife made up to no-homo Newmann over here.)
I lean toward looking at media from a holistic, "what's the narrative saying?" point of view. I'm not a fan of approaching issues/possible issues in a story like an Evangelical pastor doing Bible apologetics in this context. Headcanons/mind caulk are wonderful for personal media enjoyment and transformative works, but terrible for meaningful media analysis.
I'm not a fan of reading every text as if it's written as a moral tract where we're supposed to agree with the protagonist or an obvious figure of authority. Some media is written like that. A lot of media isn't. Determining what a text is saying is more about examining the conclusions validated by the narratives than what the characters say and do.
Also if you project western Christian dualism onto stories written without that perspective (for example, the works of Guillermo del Toro or the Final Fantasy series), you're going to come away with a wonky reading, just saying.
Why I don't like Pacific Rim: Uprising or Pacific Rim: The Black (warning: very angry rants)
Pacific Rim Uprising Is Bad, And This Is Why
Pacific Rim: The Black Is Bad, And This Is Why
Toys, goodies, & resources for you
Startracks Solo RPG Engine & Writing Assistant
Free Oracle Systems For Solo Roleplaying
Archive of lore developed during the production of the first Pacific Rim film (there's so much cool stuff in here, you have no idea)
Pacific Rim themed generator tables
Generator tables for wacky wizard adventures
How to leave the Harry Potter fandom (or any fandom) when you're really attached to it
Everything in the #critical thinking tag
Everything in the #redemption tag
How to write that thing you don't know how to write
Research!!! See this page on how to research and see this page on how to evaluate sources.
Pro tip: Make a habit of listening to free online lectures and deep dives so you already have the information you need before you want to write about it!
How to quickly improve your media analysis skills:
Read Improve Your Media Literacy: Sometimes It's Unrealistic On Purpose.
Read my list of literary analysis questions.
Go to DuckDuckGo and search for "literary analysis questions."
Watch these videos:
The Ideology of Apocalypse (feat. Mad Max, Fallout New Vegas, Gurren Lagann & more)
The Christmas Shoes: The Fever Dream of Capitalism
Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs?
Media Literacy is DEAD: Attack on Titan is Still F*scist
Why Are There So Many Confederate Vampires?
Monsters 101: Monstrosity vs. Humanity
Please don't only watch these videos! There are many more good videos like this and the more you watch, the better your skills will get!
we actually need to be making a bigger stink about jkr's latest temper tantrum than we are. jkr taking a stand for hate speech and against an international human rights org cannot go unpunished
hogwarts legacy is still on xbox game pass. we need to make "microsoft is against amnesty international" trend. their actions need to have consequences. "microsoft stands against human rights" or something
people don't give enough of a shit about trans people for it to have worked in the past, but now she's harming countless people worldwide out of spite. jkr and anyone who supports her stand against an organization that fights for women's rights globally, cis or otherwise. migrants' and workers' rights too. she can no longer use "women's rights" as a shield when she's trying to ruin one of the biggest organizations that's doing the thing she claims to be doing for fucking PR Points. people won't believe that she gives a fuck about women if we can make enough noise saying that she's actively harming vulnerable women. she's trying to shut down women's shelters, for fucks sake. she's against free speech
we need this can of worms to be open and spilling everywhere if we want to have a chance to shut her the fuck up
I know some anti-JKR people would like it if nobody ever posted anything about JK Rowling again, but this really is a "politics is going to do you regardless" situation.
"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
I think the most annoying thing about the "they put horny chemicals in the quarantine room" headcanon is that it erases the fact that Lucy MacLean wants sex and isn't afraid to pursue it. Like, that was literally established in the first episode. Pretty misogynist to pretend Lucy isn't sexually proactive, tbh.
"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.
“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.”
Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.
Earlier this week I mentioned putting pickle juice in my water to replenish electrolytes. I work outside in a very hot and humid area, so it was very necessary.
Since then, a LOT of people have chimed in with their favorite hot weather drinks. I want to try... all of them. I've only had a few. Many of them are similar, but I still think its cool how many variations there are for 'its fucking hot out here and I don't want to die.'
So here is the incomplete list.
ORS (oral rehydration solution) (link has several recipes)
Shrub (sharaab)
Agua de pepino
Switchel
Posca
Ayran
Straight up drinking pickle juice (small doses)
Agua fresca
Sekanjabin
Pickle lemonade
Lebanese lemonade
Salted watermelon
Jamaica/hibiscus tea
Lebu pani
Ayuvedic gatorade
Soda chanh muôi
Suero
Aam paan
Sharbat
-
These ones were given to me without names, and were just lists of ingredients, to taste:
- water and umezu
- diluted apple juice with lemon and salt
-watermelon, lime juice, mint
- sparkling water, mint leaves, lemon or lime juice, cucumber
-coconut water, lime juice, salt
-salt, lemon juice, water
-orange juice, salt, sugar, water, lime or lemon juice
I think when you're developing space aliens and intend to make them ignorant about something, you should stop and ask yourself, "Hey, is it that likely they could have made it all the way into space and still not know that?"
Like the thing about Going To Space is that it 1. requires a lot of prerequisite scientific discoveries, and 2. any people who have figured out how to Go To Space have almost certainly figured out a bunch of other stuff in the meantime, too. And they've probably also spent generations speculating on what life on other worlds might be like!
They are not going to be shocked by your spicy peppers. They will know exactly what radiation is. They aren't going to be a bunch of babies cluelessly zooming around in little tin cans. They're going to be people who have spent a long, long time wondering, discovering, and imagining.
Having a comprehensive understanding of basic details of many branches of science is fundamental to getting far enough up the tech tree to achieve Space Flight. It is entirely reasonable for an Alien Society to, for example, have no idea about things like “Color Theory” but will absolutely look at humans and ask “wait, it took you how long to work out Capitalism is Bad?”
Of course, while having aliens who lack specific areas of knowledge is entirely fine and a good jumping off point for exploring cultures, environments, and histories, having Aliens who possess knowledge they absolutely SHOULD NOT HAVE is a great gag.
Nonsenseolean: “And here we are, our Lord and Savior, our King of Kings, Elvis Presley.”
Human: “Oh, I see that the radio broadcasts of Elvis reached your planet.”
Nonsenseolean: “Nope.”
Human: “…No? Then, how do you know about Elvis? He’s a Human.”
Nonsenseolean: “Yes, you had your Elvis. We had our Elvis four centuries ago.”
Human: “Your Elvis? You… wait… there are more Elvis’?”
Nonsenseolean: “Yes, Elvis is a Galactic Constant. The Elvi Phenomenon is well known across the cosmos.”
Gaggite: “Yes, our Elvis was six centuries ago.”
Human: “A galactic constant? Like… Elvis has been everywhere?”
Nonsenseolean: “The Humoricons’ Elvis is still alive.”
Human: “I need to get to the Humoricon Homeworld RIGHT NOW.”
I think when you're developing space aliens and intend to make them ignorant about something, you should stop and ask yourself, "Hey, is it that likely they could have made it all the way into space and still not know that?"
Like the thing about Going To Space is that it 1. requires a lot of prerequisite scientific discoveries, and 2. any people who have figured out how to Go To Space have almost certainly figured out a bunch of other stuff in the meantime, too. And they've probably also spent generations speculating on what life on other worlds might be like!
They are not going to be shocked by your spicy peppers. They will know exactly what radiation is. They aren't going to be a bunch of babies cluelessly zooming around in little tin cans. They're going to be people who have spent a long, long time wondering, discovering, and imagining.
I am not a huge fan of the sci-fi trope of humans as boring or special, which can be troublesome sometimes. Mostly I’d like if there was more of a pendulum effect instead of aliens being flabbergasted by us all the time or being condescending.
Sure, it’s fun when a tasty human snack is something very poisonous to aliens, but I wanna take that gag about species differences further! Rather than “har har, the Nonsensoleans can’t eat spicy peppers like us,” and leave it at that, show me the Nonsensoleans being aghast at the things humans eat willingly, but also the humans who found that amusing doing a double take when the Nonsensoleans find the ship’s extremely toxic cleaning supplies, remark on humans keeping “the spices” in weird places, and having a good old fashioned Nonsensolean barbecue, which is so poisonous smelling it is dangerous.
Aliens that are surprised and impressed by the temperature differences humans not only can withstand but willingly subject themselves to, but find subjecting themselves to levels of sensory deprivation humans would consider torture a useful mental exercise.
The “your species is so weird (admiring, slightly worried)” is so much better when it cuts every which way. Galactic community is full of freaks and nobody is 100% sure what everyone else can do.
part 2 of the ffvii transfem hcs!! once again, as a disclaimer, i in no way intend for my readings to be thought of as canonical. these are my personal headcanons first and foremost, and other users absolutely have a right to a different interpretation, or to agree with some parts of what i've written while disagreeing with others. who knows how my own feelings may change over time. and besides, my readings only take into account the original '97 game, crisis core, and advent children. nevertheless, please be respectful when engaging <3
here it is! as a disclaimer, i in no way intend for my readings to be thought of as canonical. these are my personal headcanons first and foremost, and other users absolutely have a right to a different interpretation, or to agree with some parts of what i've written while disagreeing with others. who knows how my own feelings may change over time. and besides, my readings only take into account the original '97 game, crisis core, and advent children. nevertheless, please be respectful when engaging <3
It's wild how much the Star Trek franchise did to promote inclusion and diversity, but for some inexplicable reason kept getting weird about Irish people
If you are one of the many people in fandom using the word 'delusional' in the likes of "Blorbo will come back I promise I promise (<me being delusional)", or "[spinning an outlandish and barely-sourced theory on why a certain ship is canon] and that's why this ship will be canon 😌 (<delusional)", or "[character in no way experiencing or believing a delusion] he's so delusional 🥴 I want him" or perhaps "I love the fanart you do of this ship 🥺🥺🥺 you are feeding my delusional", or any other variant, I am putting my hand gently on your shoulder here. You don't need to say that
