#extradirty
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Kiana Khansmith
ojovivo
almost home
Mike Driver
todays bird
Today's Document
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ellievsbear
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Love Begins
Cosmic Funnies
h
Sweet Seals For You, Always
pixel skylines
shark vs the universe
Origami Around
Noah Kahan
The Stonewall Inn
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@rocjawcypher
Pulitzer Prize type shit
Why's this dude built like crash bandicoot
Everything about this damn post is so funny to me. The lighting of the arm from the flash. The posing of the arm like a dramatic death from a novella. The fact the photo somehow got taken still and looks this good. The subreddit name. The fact this guy really is built like crash bandicoot
we're for real gonna be telling stories about this man for centuries
yall I feel like I'm floating right now
i think we are long overdue for a game that does the reverse of 90s first person shooters and actively makes fun of the player for picking the hard difficulty
heres kinda what i mean
nobody ever mentions this but Soviet jazz is really good
No clue what I would look up but Ill try and find some
> oh it cant be THAT good
> what in the everloving mother of god
Not specifically Jazz, but this channel has a wonderful treasure trove of obscure Retro Soviet (and also other places) tunes, including this absolute banger.
let me. innnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
Don't let these prices hold you back! This fiendish kitty now coming in for only $6.89!
“why is the among us show actually good” “oh why is the among us show funny” “oh i can’t believe this cartoon is good and not just shitty references” “i thought this show was going to be trash”
i’m so disappointed in y’all. did infinity train teach you nothing? of course it was going to be good??? it’s owen dennis????? and they let him do whatever he & his crew wanted????? it was always going to be good what happened to supporting animation??????
among us is about the exploitation of poor laborers under capitalism and the way corporations deliberately keep workers at odds with one another to avoid accountability and cut costs. and it is also clearly being a lancing criticism of the animation industry (with themes referencing HBO’s treatment of animated shows, movies, and the creators they threw under the bus and deleted works of, particularly in the Warner bros merger and beyond. one of which being owen dennis’s pervious show infinity train)
and uses its creative freedom given to it by funding backing an existing IP (silly video game) in order to explore these themes in a very not-ironic plot and writing style about little space blobs and also STILL has some of the best animated expression work i’ve ever seen.
plus every character is nonbinary. everyone should give it a watch. it’s really funny
I PROMISE IM NOT ACTUALLY MAD ABOUT THE SPACE BLOB APP SHOW I JUST LIKE ANIMATION A LOT
oh god, and i didn’t even mention how the show wrapped and then got stuck in corporate limbo for about 2 years before it was unceremoniously dumped onto streaming with not a sniff of warning or advertising to the point where the artists and actors who worked on it didn’t even know it was out. 👍 NO BIGGIE‼️
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵💫
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
People love simple, extremely practical things. I hope you win!
I don't think I've made a post of my own in years, and I don't think anyone except for my partner follows me, but I am extremely pleased with how this Chaos Dwarf I painted has turned out. He still needs a shield (that's why there's a weird nub on his hand) and to get glued to a base. But I couldn't be happier with how it's turned out so far. He's the first one I painted as a test so I'm hopeful they'll only get better as I go along.
CRIMINAL MINDS 2.21 — "Open Season"
Yes yes yes this scene thank you for the tag, heehehehe
It’s funny because this scene must be based on the memoir Special Agent by Candis DeLong. In it she describes being out looking at clothes at a department store on lunch break with another female agent and overhearing a conversation between a man and a woman in which he says he’s an FBI agent. They peer around some clothes racks thinking that they’re going to see one of their fellow agents trying to get a date, and when they don’t recognize the guy they go over and pretend to be interested in the big strong FBI agent themselves and ask to see his badge. The guy actually pulled out a fake badge, whereupon they said “Huh, that doesn’t look anything like ours…”, produced their own badges and arrested him for impersonating an FBI agent. (I remember this bit from a 25 year old book because I actually stole it myself for a fic)
Exquisite. Glorious. 10/10 thank you for sharing.
This guy's illusions are great
Unfortunately, I think this might be AI. While I was willing to think it was just clever editing, on a rewatch I that noticed his leg clips through the jail cell’s toilet.
It's a CGI/editing failure, not AI. That's a human mistake. This guy has been doing this since 2008.
Sorry but it's not complete without...
I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.
I Am Not Okay
You have to understand. I watched the movies maybe once as a kid when they came out twenty years ago. I've somehow avoided learning like anything about these books my entire life. Literally everything about these books was a complete unknown and surprise to me. Totally blank slate going on. I barely even knew how it ended.
Holy shit.
Frodo didn't complete his task. Sam literally carried him up Mount Doom. And when he got to the end, he couldn't throw the Ring away.
But for Gollum biting it off with his finger, it wouldn't have been destroyed.
So Frodo's journey saved the world nonetheless.
And it broke him.
It was too much for him to bear. He could no longer live in the Shire or live in Middle-Earth. He wasn't of the world anymore. He had to go to the Undying Lands.
He took on the task that no one else would. He saved the world. Everyone got a happy ending. Aragorn became King, Sam rebuilt the Shire, Merry and Pippin became heroes. They all lived in renown.
But Frodo had the hardest task of all. No one else would do it. A simple hobbit who came by the Ring by chance. Not a King, not an immortal. Not a wizard. No power save his will and his friends. And he did it and saved everyone.
And he never got to rest. He never got to remain in peace. The task destroyed him. It was too much.
But there was no other way. Nobody but a simple hobbit could bear the ring all the way to Mount Doom and resist its power so long. Not a man, not an elf, not a wizard; they would have succumbed. Gandalf knew this, which was why he chose the hobbits in all his designs.
It's amazing that one of the precedent setting works in the fantasy genre holds up so well because it subverts what ultimately became the genre's core tropes. The hero was not the King, or a chosen one. In fact, the hero not being the King was a key point that allowed Aragorn to distract Sauron and allow the task in the first place. The hero was someone unassuming but courageous, who did the thing because no one else would, even though it was just by chance he came upon it.
But Frodo couldn't resist the Ring completely. He wasn't superior to anyone else in that way. And in the end it left him broken. The burden crushed him. No one else could do it, and in the end, he couldn't either. He wasn't so special that he was invulnerable.
I'm not okay. Holy fuck you guys.
It's been a week and I'm still not over this, I'll never get over this.
Something that I've been thinking about, as I struggle with depression and anxiety and *another vague gesture at everything* is that LOTR does not criticize Frodo for being broken. It does not shame him or deny him what he needs.
The task was too much and it broke him and that's okay. His friends nonetheless take care of him and let him go with understanding. The book doesn't treat it as a bad thing.
This seems to be a theme throughout the books. The characters rest and heal. They spend time recovering in Rivendell, Fangorn, Lorien, Ithilien. It's treated as good and necessary. They don't heroically endure endless torment from the second they set out until they're done.
And in Gondor's march from Minas Tirith to Mordor, Aragorn recognizes that some of the very few men he's taking with him don't have the heart to go to battle against the Enemy. And he says that's okay. He gives them other tasks the they can do. They hold other strategic points. They aren't shamed for not going all the way, or kicked out, or told that they aren't manly or whatever. Their limitations are recognized and respected. The task was too big and it was okay that they couldn't do it.
I don't know man. I've held on through some absolutely crazy shit. White knuckled through mental health crises when my doctors were begging me to take a break, to go to the hospital before I hurt myself. My therapist has tried to slow me down and tell me that I've been going through it and it's understandable that I am feeling some kind of way. Even one of my colleagues remarked that I've had an absolutely fucking wild career and that I've seen more as a lawyer of seven years than she has as a lawyer of forty. But I've gotten it into my head that I have to be strong, I have to be independent.
Fuck me, man, I'm currently white knuckling through life and hanging on by a fucking thread. A few weeks ago I was about an hour away from checking myself in to a mental health facility until my best friends swooped in to help me. And then I went right back to work.
And then I read this book. This fucking brilliant and beautiful book written by a man who had seen the horrors of war and spilled it all over the page. And I read it for the first time as an adult with full understanding and experience of what it all means. And it hits me like a fucking truck.
And it says that you can't endure everything. That at some point you need to rest and heal. That if you take on too much you will break. And that all of that is okay.
How am I supposed to move on with my life after reading this?
Certainly there are many messages within Lord of the Rings, but you have to think that Tolkien would have been happy that this message in particular was still being conveyed all these years later.
"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 worst types of cookbook:
The Ottolenghi - it is vital that you use 1g of this very expensive ingredient. It comes from a 500g bag with a one-week shelf life.
The time machine - 15-minute recipe! First, leave to marinate overnight...
The dishwasher - one-pot recipe! Now decant your ingredients and wipe out your pot. And again. And again. And again.
The optimist - cook the onions until caramelised (2 minutes).
The kindergarten teacher - get one nommable little tree of broccoli and bosh that into boiling water. Delish!
The brand names only - ingredients: Ritz crackers, Philadelphia cheese, Cool Whip, orange Jell-o...
The 1950s palate - use one (1) clove of garlic and a small pinch of chili flakes (omit if preferred).
The why bother with a cookbook - to make beans on toast, gently heat a tin of beans and put on top of freshly buttered toast.
This is why I get meal kits. Do I need them? No. Can I easily make them myself? For way cheaper? Yes. WILL I??? No.
Other tips: if you are going to buy things that aren’t pre-taxed, you need to make a habit of always doing the prep AS SOON AS YOU GET HOME. it will NEVER HAPPEN if you don’t.
Get the bulk pack of steaks! But you are never gonna eat them before they go bad. If you freeze them in individual ziplocks as soon as you unpack you probably will?
Get the celery, but you need to cut it ALL UP and store it in the fridge in water or it will rot.
And don’t do all tgese at once, get like, one or two prep things a trip. You aren’t gonna get it started if it’s a huge task.
Don’t pass by these tips because you don’t have ADHD!
These are valid points for the busy parent, the overstressed college student, and the person working the “wrong” shift.
Real story - I have thrown away SO MUCH meat and produce in my time. Frozen veggies can even be better than fresh, since they are picked when ripe and frozen rather than picked early and expected to ripen in shipping. My local grocer will sometimes pre-chop less-than-desirable veggies and sell them in the discount cooler - a chopped onion is more useful than a whole one! Meat in bulk packs is WAY cheaper, but you have to make breaking up that huge pack part of putting away the groceries. Also, having a place to put the groceries away helps make the process easier. It’s taken me more than one decade of life to figure these things out.
It’s not lazy if it is efficient. Professionals call it “time management.”
Not ADHD, just incredibly busy and tired all the time, and this is VERY helpful.
I am ADHD and I started using these techniques myself 2 years ago. Life changing. My budget is way better now than it was before.
Haven’t had a chance to watch the tutorial yet, but I’m seriously considering making this for my gf’s niece
