Hi, I'm Sarnakh! he/him, adult. I write things, I paint things, and I very very occasionally Do A Draw. Shameless Julzia (Julian/Jadzia) shipper. Warhammer, Star Trek, Honor Harrington, The Expanse, and more. @SarnakhTheSunderer on AO3.
@hopecomesbacktolife asked for Star Trek/drworm recs, so I’ve finally gone and put one together
- @icepixie‘s the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart series, in which Jadzia finally says yes
- Scientific Collaborations and what we pretend to be, also by icepixie, the latter of which is a phenomenal fake-relationship-to-real-relationship fic predicated on typical Star Trek ‘oh no we’re stuck together’ shenangians. The former is just the two of them being nerds in love, which is my favorite flavor of drworm
You Can Have My Heart, written by SkullFeather3063 for their One-Shot Rare Pair Palooza a couple of years ago. Jadzia gets hurt, and Julian takes care of her. Established relationship
put a sock in it! by anonymous. Technically the only J/J in this fic is fantasizing, but I’ve always liked it. Rated Explicit.
No Strings Attached by @starpriseentership (if I’ve correctly linked Ao3 and tumblr), rated M.
Dark Dreams by kronette, a vampire AU fic. I haven’t read it in a while but it’s very good. Vampirism begets horror elements, so keep that in mind as you read.
Aristeia by @mylittleredgirl , a phenomenal oneshot following the events of Profit Motive
and finally to wrap the Julian/Jadzia fic recs up specifically, we have the Greensleves AU on fanfiction.net by ScopesMonkey, with some sequels slash associated works on the author’s profile, and I think the longest J/J fic/series I’ve ever read.
My own Julian/Jadzia fics number three currently (not counting an Evil Author Day fic from a couple of years ago that’s just scraps/unfinished ficlets):
Beaches of Chi’tar, AKA Julian meets the Idaris Family for Trill Thanksgiving. 9k oneshot that got wildly out of hand
Various drabbles in my Star Trek drabble collection
And We Are Dax, an AU where the Trill symbiotes behave like the Venom Symbiotes and at the moment is just a rewrite of Tears of the Prophets (and of the readers) with some minor J/J elements I intend to expand on eventually.
I’ll put some very old J/J fics I haven’t seen anywhere else in a reblog, as well as some more generic ds9 fic recs, but I wanted to have this as its own separate post so I can throw this at people later if convert more frens :D
Two older CamGriddleHark pieces I made that I felt like posting now too. Tumblr will flag and take down even censored pieces, so this is all I can post here now...
=> Uncropped: My Site / Pillowfort / Bluesky / Twitter
=> Uncensored via Patreon
"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.
Hey everyone, looks like the “cat summoned for jury duty” was ai generated - even has the ai symbol at the top. Thanks for the heads up, @cannot-all-throw-inkpots . My apologies- I did not realize when I shared it.
Some positive news: There really WAS a cat summoned for jury duty back in 2010. Turns out the error was quickly corrected and the cat did NOT actually have to travel to the courthouse. But at least we can enjoy the fact that a papereork glitch did once try to give a cat jury duty XD
I love learning new things from fanfics. Mostly things based on more regional differences.
I'm reading a undertale fanfic, math homework needs to be done, whatever, i think I know my middle school math. SO TELL ME WHAT THE HELL PEMDAS IS?
APPARENTLY IT'S BEDMAS?? And now I'm learning that a lot of places are different with their order of operations math??? What's BODMAS and what did you do to my babygirl BEDMAS?
Usually I try to avoid posting about BIDMAS/PEDMAS whatever you want to call it but since this one isn't about those engagement bait things I think it's fine.
P or B is used for the first letter depending on whether people call them parentheses or brackets respectively. E, O or I is used for the second letter depending on whether people call them exponents, orders or indices respectively.
The interesting thing that happens is actually the order of division and multiplication or addition and subtraction doesn't technically matter depending on how you write things. Division is secretly just multiplication and subtraction is secretly just addition. However you have to be careful how you write these things and this is one of the pitfalls of the whole BIDMAS system. This is never actually an issue for mathematicians and other people who use maths a lot because along the way you become more fluent with the grammar and it becomes second nature. The problem is teaching BIDMAS and only BIDMAS leaves out the other more subtle things and that's what leads to confusion.
It's also surprising how many things are solved by binning the symbol ÷ and writing division with the long bar thing (I know it has a fancy name but it's escaped me). I haven't used it for at least 7 years
1. Lots of people have one but you don't really think about it until they start talking about making waffles and you're like "oh shit they have a waffle maker"
2. Messy as fuck and you know what as far as I see it why even bother when you have pancakes, you don't need to bother with all those fluids and crevices with pancakes
3. WHY DOES EVERYONE AT THE WEDDING THINK YOU NEED ONE
4. Theoretically implied fun with whipped cream until it melts and starts soaking into shit
5. If you don't prep ur surfaces ur gonna have a bad time
6. It's fun in the kitchen but only on like special occasions cause again it's a pain in the ass to clean
Office comedy where the pilot episode newbie is being walked around to meet all their colleagues and they get introduced to the pair of coworkers who are snappy, electric, flirty, filling each other's coffee orders, finishing each other's sentences, desk leaning, bedroom eyes, feet kicking
And when the newbie asks someone "Are those two uh, you know?" the seasoned coworker goes "Aha yeah. Divorced 🙂"
And this isn't a broken-up couple on the rebound. They've absolutely always been like this with each other save for the 11 months they were married, during which time every single day was a murder-suicide risk.
one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they'd have jobs throughout the show's entire run... but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.
and none of these people wanted to walk away from a guaranteed job, so very few of them ever quit. they just kept doing the same show eight nights a week... for twenty or thirty years... and by the time it finally closed last year most of these musicians (who had been working together for DECADES) hated each other and really really fucking loathed phantom. I can't stop thinking about it. it's indescribably hellish to imagine but also the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.
[ID: excerpt from an article reading: One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has every played in a band crazy-- there’s this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She’s convinced he plays half a note4 flat on every note he’s every played. He denies this. /]
an important thing to know about Count Binface is that he was previously Lord Buckethead, pictured here with Theresa May in 2017.
Lord Buckethead previously ran against Margaret Thatcher in 1987 and against John Major in 1992. Lord Buckethead ran for the Gremloids party.
Officially all Lord Bucketheads are the same Lord Buckethead who went away for a while and returned; however, it has come to light that Lord Buckethead (1987, 1992) and Lord Buckethead (2017) were two different guys under the bucket.
Following the 2017 general election the original creator of Lord Buckethead (not either of the guys who had worn the costume) asserted his legal rights over the character and 2017 Lord Buckethead acquiesced. and so, Count Binface came into being.
In the 2019 general election Lord Buckethead and Count Binface both ran against Boris Johnson, Binface as an indepent and Buckethead having joined the Monster Raving Looney Party. (NB this Lord Buckethead was a third different guy, not 87/92 Buckethead)
Lord Buckethead won the race (ie, got marginally more votes than Count Binface) but has not stood in an election since whereas Count Binface has been very prolific, running in two mayoral elections, two by-elections, and one further general election in 2024:
you literally cannot look at anything online anymore without the company hunting you down in an email or notification being like "you forgot to buy this. you left this in your cart btw. did you want anything else? something similar or entirely random and different? we have options but to see them you have come back and buy stuff thanks"
The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.
The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.
Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.
Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.
So you know how monster smut is trending these days, well 500 years from now the trend is Spartan smut. People write smutty romance novels about Spartans. Except that very few people have ever met a Spartan, or know anything about them other than rumors and what you hear on the news, so these novels are...inaccurate.
Without going into too much detail, Kelly discovers this and spends a few hours watching various book reviews and reading said books and snorting about how this is NOT how it works. Fred rolls his eyes at her and tells her to get off TikTok or whatever they call it by then.
She doesn't listen. A few days later there's a new BookTok account with a cryptic username and no face but sounds suspiciously like a certain Kelly-087, methodically taking apart every Spartan smut book and setting the record straight about how it really works.
