Akutagawa becoming a killer to protect his sister and friends while in the slums only to then join the Port Mafia and lose that side of him completely until a certain weretiger sees him for who he is and gives him a promise to keep.
we're overdue for a reactive wave of anti-cozy games. animal crossing but office workers. restaurant management but applebee's. farming sim but all spreadsheets. never see an ear of corn the whole game
A while back one of you asked me to look into how the Heart works and how it chooses which lines to play at what time. As a result I got quite comfortable with the Heart dialogue tree architecture and first just put together a spreadsheet for my own purposes - but then I decided I should go all out and make this information accessible to everybody.
So here is now my recreation of the entire Heart dialogue tree, which the game goes down the moment you use the Heart to decide what line it should whisper to you.
To sum it up, first it checks if you're targeting a specific unique NPC, a generic NPC, or not targeting any NPC at all, and then it checks which NPC you're targeting or what location/mission you're in, and then it figures out which of the relevant lines it should give you depending on which lines it has already played previously. I hope the way I have structured and phrased the text in my drop-downs and some of the info text at the top of the page combine to successfully show you exactly how each branch of decisions works.
If you're interested in, for example, modding specific branches or extracting specific voice lines, "expert mode" will show you all the game object names instead of the descriptive names I've given the events. if you want to see all the lines a character gets at once, "List view mode" will show you all of them once you've reached a relevant point in a branch instead of displaying them voice line by voice line.
This was so so much work as it was my very first time working with JavaScript, and it was fun, frustrating and incredibly educational. I really hope this resource is helpful to someone somewhere, or that you at least find it interesting and that it can teach you a bit more about how the Heart works under its Empress-flesh-and-Void-metal hood. <3
"many social and conversational expectations are not explicitly stated, so people who do not find them intuitive may benefit from having them laid out in simple terms, as this will help them better understand interactions they have had and are having" is one thing
"I'm autistic and I learned to compensate/mask my perceived social deficits in this specific way, and some of y'all don't do this, and it makes me annoyed and kinda pissed because *I* worked hard to learn it which now means it's hyper-noticable to me in others" is another
i think its important to know which one you are coming from when writing a how-to post about stuff that's considered 'manners'
"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.
The last book I read: Just finished rereading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke! As gorgeous as I remembered it. Non-reread: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 by Bill Bryson. Haven't been finishing much books recently... (<-reading manga and fics and webnovels)
A book I'd recommend: Moby Dick by Herman Melville... It's fun!! Don't be intimidated!! (Thinking of reading Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation too, since it popped up when I was looking for books similar to Piranesi)
A book I couldn't put down: Riyria Revelations by Michael J. Sullivan as well. I adore Going Postal from Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series too <3
A book I've read twice or more: I've read The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch three times I think. And thinking of a third read of The Bone Ships by RJ Barker! Incredibly fun world to get lost in.
A book on my TBR: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao, and The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. Also the rest of Discworld...
A book I've put down: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde... I'm too much of a hopeless romantic to avoid getting overwhelmed but one day I'll finish it before it murders me 👍
A book on my wish list: Dante's Divine Comedy and Homer's The Odyssey... I want to understand references...
A favourite book from childhood: I was besotted with Alex Rider ^///^ Cute boy doing cool stuff has always been my favourite genre(?) (<-shounen anime enjoyer) A lot of the books I read as a kid was from the school library so I might have forgotten some of them, but I was really invested in Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife
A book I'd give to a friend: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke as well. Also Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None because I need everyone I like to experience reading it for the first time
A book of poetry or lyrics that I own: I don't own any,,
A non-fiction book that I own: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 as mentioned above, and the History and Literature books in the Big Ideas Simply Explained series.
What I'm currently reading: Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer and The City Stained Red by Sam Sykes
What I'm planning on reading next: I'm halfway through too many books to be thinking about that but maybe Annihilation (The Bone Ships is a really fun fantasy about pirates and dragons; I've only read the first book but I think there's political intrigue in here too)
tagging: @aliceinhell @fujouppy @batking-lich @blinkeasy @hestzhyen no pressure <3
Real thing that changed how i write: I started asking "what does this character think is wrong with them" and separately "what is actually wrong with them." Those two things are almost never the same. She thinks she's too much. She's actually terrified of being too little. He thinks he's bad at commitment. He's actually just never met someone he trusted enough. The gap between their diagnosis of themselves and the real thing, that's your character arc right there. you don't have to explain it. just write both.
