❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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art blog(derogatory)
if i look back, i am lost
roma★
Sade Olutola
tumblr dot com
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
tannertan36
wallacepolsom
NASA
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Show & Tell
Stranger Things
One Nice Bug Per Day
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Jules of Nature
macklin celebrini has autism
trying on a metaphor
Fai_Ryy
seen from Türkiye
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@orchestrated-chaos
you have won a lifetime supply of this
How do you feel?
good!
I CAN SELL THIS AND GET RICH
im drowning in my supply help
Eh it's okay
BAD. VERY BAD
results/other
you would receive the supply once a month
the brand/type will vary so you could
you can sell the things you get/give them away but they will keep coming until you die
In Rimworld I was just contracted to hold onto some prisoners for someone for awhile, very normal circumstance. Except that the idiots decided to stage a prison break one day before it was time to return them and I had to violently subdue them. So my neighbours handed me three prisoners in perfect health and a week later I hand them back with shattered noses and poorly bandaged head and chest wounds like. No this wasn't my fault. We're good people we run a good prison.
I did make them sleep on sandstone slabs and eat nutrient goo but in fairness the rock slabs are to make me need to break their noses less often, and everyone here eats nutrient goo. We're good people we run a good prison.
How do the rock slabs function to decrease the totally passive need for totally passive nose breaking?
Prisoners have a prison break internal timer, and when it runs out they will attempt a prison break. The timer depends on things like how many prisoners there are, how healthy they are, and how many doors lead into the cells.
The timer only ticks down while a prisoner is awake -- it is paused while they sleep. So you can increase the amount of time before a prison break (and thus the amount of time before you have to crack them over the head with a mace until they stop moving) by making them sleep longer. This is done by giving them shitty beds made out of stone that reduces their sleep quality so they have to be in bed longer to rest up. Since prisoners only really need to be awake to eat and get brainwashed (I mean, chat companionably with the warden about which faction they should be working for and what they should believe, we're all friends here), there's no reason not to make their sleep as shitty as possible.
This is the kind and gentle way to keep prisoners contained and healthy btw. Mean players will often use the more direct and reliable "nugget pawn" method.
hi, what the hell is the nugget pawn method
Mental breaks and prison breaks don't matter if you amputate their arms and legs and leave them as a nugget with a head.
Some people just do legs, depending on what you want the prisoner for.
i was going to say it doesn't sound like you take good care of your prisoners but it seems it can always be worse
Rimworld is incredibly detailed in weirdly specific areas and incredibly basic and clumsy in weirdly specific areas and these mechanics clash in weird ways that make it... not impossible to Play Super Nice, but extremely limiting to do so. Unless you're specifically doing a Good Guy Run where you're deliberately avoiding most of the game options for personal challenge reasons, you kind of end up playing as a monster in some way or another.
I'm playing a pro human rights, pro individualist, technology-positive settlement, and stuff like the prison break mechanics are just. Fundamentally part of the game and almost impossible to avoid without extensive modding. (Avoiding taking prisoners at all except to medically treat and release them would be an example of a limitation in an aforementioned Good Guy Run.)
I normally just get my highest melee pawn to use their fists, rather than weapons.
Literally did not occur to me that I could use something other than a heavy metal rod
"If only my prisoners would stop trying to escape. Alas, I have no choice but to keep beating them with rebar."
It stops them from escaping
GOD today i served a family of 3 and the dad was like “i’ll have a cappuccino” and the kid, a girl of about 11, was like “PLEASE.” and he was like “uh yeah. please” and the kid goes “well you’re always telling me to remember my manners!!! you should too!!” and i was cracking up
and then she was standing there w her mum while i made their drinks and i asked if the mum wanted chocolate sprinkles and she was like “yes please” and the kid goes “well at least SOMEONE remembered their manners” and then sighed dramatically and HEELYED AWAY and honestly? not sure how to go on knowing i’ll never be as cool as this 11 year old
DOUBLET Spring/Summer RTW 2027 pls help me get out of debt donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways or dinahlance-shop.fourthwall.com
"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.
70s ICONS. Linda Ronstadt and The Gorn sing "You're No Good" on an episode of The Sonny & Cher Show in 1974.
Rainy date night
TARANTINO in 'NEXUS' U-KNOW 윤호
his wife has filled THEIR house with ANTIQUES. to AVOID DAMAGING HER VALUABLES i fuck him on the floor
#feminist retelling
“Saving it for yourself?”
the cutiest cutie for my own cutie @cordiallyfuturedwight *.❤︎₊ ⊹
+ bonus:
“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”
Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.
Me getting slammed with notifications on this post in particular:
Some classic leon for the soul
all my haters become cicaders when i enter the summer of success
asked one of my coworkers how she's doing today and she goes "could be better, could be worse," and another coworker nearby who was eavesdropping chimes in with "could be a lil bit o' alligator curse!" i have no idea what he meant by that but i do know that it has been immediately added to the lexicon.
In actually really proud of how this turned out 🥺
