JRPG where the teenage firebrand protagonist is taken under wing by a wise older mentor figure in their twenties, as one does, except the third party member to join is in their thirties and regards both the protagonist and the initial mentor as dumb kids; the fourth is in their forties and thinks the same of the first three; and so forth.
today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
failing Marriage perfec t size for put new baby in to n\ap! inside very Soft and Comfort pregnancy sleep soundly put baby in failing marriage. Put Baby In Failing marriage. no problems ever in failing marriage because yelling and storming out for baby listening of big baby language learning. Afailing Marriage yes a place for a baby put baby in failing marriage can trust failing marriage for giveing good love to baby. a baby will save this relationhsip
i'm rereading the murderbot diaries and murderbot's utter conviction that it and gurathin are bitter enemies is still so funny. buddy. gurathin got over this months ago. he's just a quiet guy.
one-sided antagonism is so delicious. murderbot diaries i also very much enjoy how surreal it must be for gurathin / to know that the heavily armed rogue secunit holds a grudge against him / and also know that all it will ever choose to do about this is make frowny faces and flip him the bird. / (tags via space-mouse)
the thing about fandom blowhards is that sometimes they're generally right about things, but so obnoxious that people get mad at them and disagree with them on principle.
so if you try to be a good internet citizen and just block and ignore them, at some point you will miss the memo on why everyone is really annoyed by specific headcanons. or even worse, you're a new fan of the thing and you don't know anyone's history.
like (to completely make up an example bc I don't want this to be about anything specific) maybe I like to headcanon a character as bisexual, bc as someone who is bisexual I think it's fun and sexy to be bi. and because I blocked them two years ago I don't know that Fandom Blowhard has been running around telling people they MUST headcanon character X as bisexual and anything else is WRONG because "one time she dated a man and now she dates women so she must be bisexual, it's like you didn't even watch the show oh my god people are so biphobic." and when people politely tried to tell this person why that's a shitty reason to insist a character is bisexual (comphet exists!), Fandom Blowhard wrote thousands of words doubling down and accusing everyone of having secret biphobic motives, hating character X, and being bullies.
and then either A) an old fan with a curated blocklist who has been kept blissfully unaware of sexuality discourse or B) a new fan pipes up to say "yeah I like to think of character X as bisexual!" and a bunch of people get really suspicious of them, or take what they're saying in bad faith, or outright get mad at them. which is! baffling and upsetting!
and A might be able to check in with fandom friends to figure out what the hell is going on, or just throw up their hands and leave the fandom. which is a huge shame because ideally polarization would not completely ruin the ability to talk about anything. but B is probably going to be approached by Fandom Blowhard who tells them "yeah this fandom has a HUGE biphobia problem, don't trust anyone" and then experience what is essentially a radicalization pipeline but about bi headcanons.
unfortunately as far as I know there are no effective solutions to this because it's an emergent behavior of large groups of people. there will always be Fandom Blowhards and people annoyed by fandom blowhards. the rest of us might just be stuck in the middle.
but it is why I try to approach people in good faith, personally. or avoid them if I don't think I can approach in good faith. and it's why I block/mute as much as I do, because seeing too much stuff that annoys you can fry your brain and make you lash out at people who don't deserve it.
obsessed with star trek repeatedly writing themselves into a corner by creating alien races that are supposed to be The Bad Guys when that explicitly conflicts with their previously established notion that no group of people is inherently good or evil.
first it was the klingons—they’re originally supposed to be this cruel, bloodthirsty, war-obsessed people—and then tng comes along and it’s like wait no maybe war and violence is a part of their culture and actually ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies so we have to be woke about it.
hey these are the ferengi and they’re supposed to represent everything we hate about capitalist society; they’re greedy, scheming, profit-obsessed, and they look like ugly little trolls to emphasize how much we fucking HATE capitalism. oh wait fuck here comes deep space nine and we have to recognize that they’re PEOPLE. okok what if the pursuit of profit is actually part of their culture and ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies. so we have to be woke about it.
this is the borg, they’re a hivemind race of cyborgs who have no sense of individuality and their only motivation is assimilating people into their society. they want to assimilate humanity and we are completely defenseless against them because their technology is eons ahead of our own and they’re incapable of being reasoned with. oh sweet we have a borg prisoner this is the perfect opportunity to commit genocide against them. fuck actually we can’t commit genocide we’re woke and communists and in space.
hey these are the cardassians, they’re part of a cruel and vicious empire which is supposed to be a representation of fascism and authoritarian regimes, they’re a cold, bloodthirsty people with no sense of empathy or compassion, their society literally references 1984 on multiple occasions, and they’re known for the insanely cruel and inhumane methods of torture they use against their prisoners of war. we hate the cardassians…….. except, here’s a cardassian kid who grew up on bajor, and……. fuck. he’s a person. now we actually have to consider his humanity. and being racist is actually……. bad.
this is the jem’hadar, they’re genetically engineered soldiers who have no sense of individuality and only live to defend the state. they’re all born addicted to a synthetic drug that’s manufactured by the state and administered by their masters—this is how they’re kept subservient. they’re ruthless and powerful and they’re incapable of being reasoned with because their only motivation is violence and killing. so we should kill them all, right? FUCK….. what if they’re actually people. goddamnit. now we have to consider their humanity.
hey these are the romulans. hey these are the founders. the list goes on. i just find it really interesting
do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny
in the late 90s there was an anime called initial d which was all about street racing and drifting. naturally every single drift was played for great drama and excitement.
in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.
in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."
what is a side-slip, you ask?
it's drifting.
the guy goddamn drifted his 767.
in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.
and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:
Meta-Analysis and the Intersection of Emotion and Risk Assessment
Hiiii, this is my absolute first stab at attempting to write Murderbot fic, please be gentle! :')
This work was inspired by my therapist getting me to use a feelings wheel and how INSTANTLY relaxing that was for me. A CHART! I CAN HANDLE A CHART! So I felt like Murderbot deserved that, too. It's real and it can help you pinpoint your emotions! Check it out here.
Happy disability pride month especially to disabled people who shouldn't be working full time/at all but haven't been able to access any aid to stop working, or support other ppl who also can't work. You deserve a break, proper support, and you are worth so so so much more than your productivity
"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.
Do you need affordable sewing supplies? Do you want to help cut down on waste and fast fashion?
Do yourself a favor and check out Swanson's Fabrics! The physical location is in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, USA, but the online shop will ship to you!
I can't remember who first told me about Swanson's, but they're a textile thrift shop that collects and repurposes donations of unused sewing supplies. Their physical location, The Stash House, offers community sewing resources and a studio. For non-locals (such as myself), their online shop offers fabrics, patterns, and notions. The shop restocks on Thursdays, and they have a constantly-rotating collection of items. If you like thrifting secondhand craft materials, Swanson's is for you!
Via their official "about" page:
Swanson’s Fabrics and notions are gifts from retired sewing stashes. They are the fabrics and supplies that sewers and fiber-artists naturally accumulate. I had a suspicion that the reason we all collect so much is that we didn’t have a place “good enough” to take it. So I made the place. Turns out I was right, and thanks to my community (and yours) of makers and crafters, I can resell these fine materials at a low, approachable cost.
ALL FABRICS ARE $5.00/yd, NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE MADE OF. REALLY. I MEAN IT. I KNOW. UNBELIEVABLE BUT TRUE!
As we come to grips with the climate crisis, interrupted supply lines, and our dependency on slave-labor in far away countries to produce our cotton and fiber goods, we need another way to approach the fabrics in our lives.
We have a massive resource of textile goods in our country and it is time to tap into it. Our attics, basements, thrift-store donation bins, and dumpsters are brimming with discarded fabrics. It is time to start making and trading for the things we need, and stop buying so much new stuff we don’t. We need to see ourselves as trash-rich.
Customers at Swanson’s can pay for goods and services with goods and services. I accept trade of sewing and fiber supplies/materials, and trade for help in the shop.
I hope to inspire you to make your own clothes, to mend the ones you have, to shop second-hand and alter things to your taste. There is a lot of power in dressing yourself. Custom is king, and you can’t have a revolution in your master’s clothes….
❤️💪🏻
-Kathryn
The CovidSafeCosplay blog and its admin are unaffiliated with Swanson's Fabrics, and are simply sharing the resource.
Do you have a favorite place to get your crafting supplies? Share in the comments or via a reblog! Bonus points for those that prioritize sustainability, accessibility, community, and trade.
Lots of cities / areas have stores who also sell repurposed or donated fabrics! Here’s one directory of creative reuse stores. (Though ‘creative reuse’ is usually the key search term)
I get most of mine at Scrap in Ann Arbor (they also sell some items online) and New City Sewing Center in St. Louis.
saw a post on bluesky about reimagining The Iliad as a mecha war and that idea goes unbelievably hard. achilles in his legally distinct gundam cutting through dozens of enemy suits. aggamemnon in his gold-plated mech. paris using a long range sniper rifle to exploit a design flaw in achilles' armor. the gods are all various megacorps who have a stake in the war bc it'll impact their profits.
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
annaxmalina
