love me anyway

💞 Bexx. 32. she/they. Feminist. Multifandom. Multishipper. ✨ Politics & Social Issues. Trans Rights Are Human Rights. Be kind! 💞 🔞

[rebexxka]

Disclaimer, because I've seen this on social media: I won't dare to say that I'm a good enough/popular enough writer for this to ever matter, but if I ever find out one of my readers put my fic into AI, I'm going to lose my shit. That shit is so disrespectful to actual writers. If you desperately want alternative endings/scenes of a fic you love go into the writers inbox!

You do not have my permission to feed my fic into AI!

[littlegirlinvisible]

ILYA ROZANOV WEEK: DAY FOUR FAVORITE TRAIT   ↪ HIS EMPATHY AND KINDNESS 🥺💕

“When our childhood homes are chaotic and dangerous, we learn that the way to stay safe is to always be on alert — hypervigilant. Our nervous system never calms down because it’s constantly on the lookout for the next bomb that is going to explode [...] As the show goes on, we will learn that underneath Ilya’s extremely hard shell is the heart of a squishy teddy bear wrapped in a warm blanket, but it takes YEARS for Shane to see it. When we look at Ilya through the lens of what he learned as he grew up, it makes sense why he behaves the way he does. We can even have empathy for the level of hypervigilance and fear he lives with. I like to lay things out this way because it’s usually a hell of a lot harder to give ourselves that same grace. We have an idea of who we “should” be in our heads, and when we don’t live up to that we assume it’s because we’re a failure, a useless waste of space. None of that is true: we are behaving in ways that make complete sense when we understand how our nervous system was trained to respond to our environment.” — Reading Ilya Rozanov through the lens of trauma.

[yesornopolls]

Do you habitually watch, listen to, or read the news?

Do you habitually watch, listen to, or read the news?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 4 days 12 hours

[jhoomwrites]

which do you prefer?

ebook

paperback

hardcover

audiobook

Voting ended on12h

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

Apparently some people still need to hear this so: using an 'ai checker' is still using ai. If you are feeding someone's fic to one of these checkers, you will still not be sure their fic is ai because they are not 100% accurate, but you can be 100% sure that you are using ai. For fic. Furthermore you are doing the work of an ai scraper for them. You are, personally, feeding the machine. There is no actual excuse for using an ai checker on fanfic as a hobby. YOU are the problem.

If you think a fic is ai, mute it and move on. That's it. That's all you do.

[damnnmilkovich]

[lavenderprose]

Shane also needs to interact with other gay men just to understand how truly lucky he is. He needs to hear someone go off about going on Grindr to find a top for the night and then finding out that all of the guys who have the 'Hung' tag on their profile are packing like five and a half inches at MOST and then Shane has to be like "Oh that. Yeah that sounds rough." Meanwhile he lost his anal virginity to a knockout with model looks who works out for a living and started their relationship by jerking his enormous hog at him in a communal shower which has always been one of Shane's top five fantasies. And he's literally never had to be on The Apps because he's the bottom of all time actually and the DomTop with the enormous dick imprinted on him like a fucking duckling the first time Shane came untouched under him which was, I cannot stress this enough, when he LOST HIS VIRGINITY.

Like shut the fuck up Shane Hollander how does it feel to be the chosen one. He has to confront all of this because he needs to know that he has, once again, won at life in every meaningful way. And then he can sit there like :] while that sad bottom over there bemoans the Grindr biome.

[the-witch-of-the-wandering-ways]

College AU Russian studies major Shane Hollander forgets to tell the fuckbuddy he met through his speaking tutor Svetlana Vetrova that he is fluent in Russian and that he understands phrases like "you're so fucking perfect" and "you have ruined me" and "you look like a sexy librarian you perfect slut"

[rederiswrites]

The real thing with ADHD is not "I forgot", but that forgetting is this ongoing process. I remembered! And then I forgot.

At ten this (hypothetical) morning I remembered that I have a meeting at six. And then from 11 through 3 I worked on other stuff and had zero thoughts about that meeting. Maybe even thought about what I was gonna do with my evening at home. Got attached to the idea of taking the time to make a good dinner, maybe play some video games.

And then at three I said, "Oh! Fuck!" and remembered again, hopefully long enough to set an alarm. And then I went to the bathroom and remembered that I need to clean the counter and spent twenty minutes cleaning the bathroom and went to get a snack and then at five I said, "OH! FUCK!" and had to scramble to dress like a real adult and get out the door.

It isn't one clean forgetting. It's a constant process of forgetting and then, with an exhausting adrenaline spike, remembering. And then forgetting. Baby, I can forget the same thing more times in a day than you ever forgot your parents' anniversary.

[heatherfranzen]

Happy birthday to Pepper! She is 6 years old today (3/17/25) ☘️✨

[heatherfranzen]

In other news, it’s my mom’s cat Pepper’s birthday today (she is 7!!!) and I don’t think I ever shared this newer painting I did of her!

[madebymothman]

Leo's been fucking going through it so I drew them a thing to cheer them up based off of this post 💛

[nick-nellson]

Mamma Mia! (2008) dir. Phyllida Lloyd

[darlingofdots]

people who definitely know that Hollander and/or Rozanov have A Thing With A Man (of variably certain identity):

various dentists

hotel housekeeping staff

the kid who works late shifts at the drugstore where Ilya buys condoms (often) and lube (less often)

cleaners and laundry service employees

a kid on vacation with his parents in Vegas bored out of his mind because he's 14 and not allowed in the bars or casinos at their hotel and he's really hitting the grumpy teenager phase so he's pissed at his parents because he wanted to go birdwatching in the desert and instead he's on the hotel roof at night pointing his sick-ass binoculars (which he bought himself with money he earned by mowing their neighbours' lawns for a year) at the surrounding buildings and oh look there's two people making out on that rooftop terrace—wait, isn't that the guy from the Rolex ads?

Janice at the grocery store closest to the Hollander cottages who knows damn well that "David's boy" doesn't eat Nutella

the Voyageurs' nutritionist knows Hollander is fucking someone working for the Bears because he might not log it as sex but even Hollander doesn't actually do extra cardio after a game

employee at an airport phone repair kiosk in Chicago who was checking Ilya’s battery specs when "Jane" texted him "If I win you suck my dick first"

one of the parents at Game Changers Hockey Camp who is a couple's counsellor and a bit too good at her job

Gerry (78) three doors down from the Hollanders who has lived in his house since he was born and has made it his solemn duty to know everything that goes on in his neighbourhood

the owner of the bespoke jeweller's shop once Shane Hollander purchases the second ring, which is identical to the first, and a plain gold chain

the apprentice of the bespoke jeweller's shop a week before that when he recognises the ring he watched his boss make for Shane Hollander sitting on Ilya Rozanov's bare chest in a post-game interview on TV

[vesnuszki]

ive said this before and ill say it again we are not getting a liveblog of the season 2 filming like we got for season 1 from ANYONE. people have crossed so many lines and have been so vile and have acted like any of them owe „fans” a peek into their private lives. all the filming is gonna be kept under TIGHT wraps and restraining orders are gonna get slapped left and right. and you know what?? Good. if that’s what gives them a SLIVER of peace of mind.

[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!

[pookieshane]

love is stored in the forehead touch

[padawanduck]

everyone: can that terrible old fuck senator just die already

Sen. Lindsey Graham dies at 71 after ‘brief and sudden illness’

Graham had just returned from Kyiv, Ukraine, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

everyone: I guess we should have been more specific

everyone: well, anyway