adult | she/her I spend too much time on this website. Mostly blogging about shitposts, animals and fandoms. Sometimes I draw stuff. Feel free to cross the event horizon of this blog. Re-escape not guaranteed.
it really is annoying as hell how someone will talk about how poor people can't avoid ethically dubious products because of how being poor works and then someone with a two story house in the suburbs will take that to mean they can order harry potter books through a drone delivery from amazon and if you criticize that you're a bigot
i dunno if you've talked about this before but the entire structure of chapter 5 centering the party as the antagonists i think absolutely says volumes about what kris is feeling about their role at this point
yeah absolutely... its fascinating how much flowery seems to Dislike kris. like, kris created a darkner who knows all their sins and is actively judging them without ever quite giving the game away
the whole reason why they're so unnerving is BECAUSE there's nothing in them!! because they're unrelentingly liminal and lonely and uncomforting. there shouldn't be a monster guy in there chasing you. you should glimpse other humans (?) from a distance but they walk away before you can close the gap and then they're gone. things should run away from YOU. do u get it
"and there was a MONSTERowooowwohhhh" the monster is isolation and banal beige sameness and uncanny valley architecture. you fool. you rube. you're putting a hat on a hat and the second hat is not only unnecessary but it ruins the first hat!!!!!!! "there's a monster in there" great so now it's just another place for a monster to be. ridiculous
fine I will concede: you CAN actually put something in there while maintaining the vibes, but it should complement the location instead of just being a generic scary guy you could put literally anywhere
I really think we should stop saying "kid-friendly" and start saying "ad-friendly". We shouldn't indulge these companies and their excuses anymore. I also think that continuing to pretend that this is about "protecting the children" pushes a lot of the blame onto kids and teens, who don't have the political power to push through any of this censorship legislature. Corporations and governments are to blame.
Oh anon bestie, of course there was. Because this site can't go one minute without some kind of controversy.
I lowkey wanted to make a Tumblr post about this anyways because I know the people love Neopets drama so thank you for the excuse.
Ok, so, explanation for non-Neopets players: The Altador Cup ('AC') is a sportsball-flavored event on Neopets where people sign up for teams representing each 'land' of Neopia and then play various event-exclusive games to earn points for their team and individual points to spend in a prize shop (which was open from the beginning this year, so you could spend your points as you earned them). The team that performs the best gets first place, with second and third place also acknowledged. You don't get any special prizes if you play for the winning teams, but it's a point of pride for people.
This year was the 20th year of this event running so by all logic it should've been like, Extra Good. And to be fair, they did add some new stuff - one land (Neopia Central) finally got a team after two decades, and they added another game to play. This also brought the number of teams to an even 20, which was fitting. There was a little daily trivia a couple weeks before the event that also earned you points, and they added a few achievements (something that had only previously been a thing in Altador Cup V). This is one of the most popular yearly events on the site, and many people will come back just to play before wandering away from the site again.
The way the Cup has worked for just about every year it's been running (except the first year which was straight-up elimination and you had to pick a new team if yours lost) was a round robin where each team plays against every other team to determine standings, and it lasted a few weeks. Users could earn individual 'ranks' based on how much they played the games, with daily caps for each game. Reaching the top rank required a LOT of grinding and has been seen as a badge of honor. Your rank would be reflected on the trophy you got put on your userlookup at the end of the event, as would the team you played for.
This year they changed the entire format of the AC. For starters, the actual event would only last 9 days, with each team getting 3 'bye days' of not playing against another team but where you could still play the games to earn points for the prize shop. This meant people were only actually playing for their team for less than a week's worth of time. This was after a week of daily trivia and the 'press tour' (every day a few teams would get fun little in-universe blurbs), and then another week for people to sign up, so the lead-up to the Cup lasted longer than the actual Cup itself.
To compensate for the shorter play time, the format was changed to brackets. There would be 3 rounds, with bye days between them: The first round (1 day), teams would be randomly paired up. The winners would be in the 'Upper' bracket and the losers would be in the 'Lower' bracket. Second round (1 day), the 'Upper' teams and 'Lower' teams would be paired and the winners and losers would create 'Top', 'Upper Mid', 'Mid', and 'Lower' brackets. In the third round (5 days), each team would play every other team in their bracket plus a bye day.
As with real sports, people are dedicated to their teams and some AC teams are powerhouses, others consistently place near last, and some were middle-tier performers. With the bracket format, if a team that otherwise performs decently gets paired up with a powerhouse team in one (or both!) rounds, they get screwed into being in the lower brackets for the rest of the tournament. Obviously this is hugely demoralizing for people who really enjoy the Cup, and a lot of otherwise dedicated players gave up when their teams got placed in low brackets.
The other thing they did was get rid of individual ranks. It didn't matter how much grinding you did - none of it would reflect on the trophy you got for AC XX. For people who actually enjoyed grinding the AC (not me lmao) this sucked because you'd have nothing to show for your effort except how many prize points you got.
They also got rid of the Staff Tournament, where Neopets staff members would compete against each other and people could create teams from staff members fantasy-football style and get points based on how well their team members did. It wasn't super serious but it was still a fun part of the event with cute and silly prizes so it was sad to see it go.
Speaking of prizes... this year's prize shop sucked lmao. For starters the cheapest item was 10 points (there have ALWAYS been things in the prize shop that cost less than that). The next jump was 30, then one 50-point prize... and then 300. Then it jumped to 500, then 800. Most of the items are either kinda useless or low-value, with only a handful of collectibles or books in the top range. Usually there's at least more fun stuff like Petpets or plushies or something, but there was only a couple items in that vein this year. Also, for the first time ever, there were a few prizes that could only be redeemed by Premium members, which many people weren't thrilled with.
This brings us to our next point: this specific item in the prize shop.
This thing cost 300 points, but it was just a regular food item to feed your pet. Then, THREE HOURS before the Altador Cup ended, staff changed the rarity of the item from 101 to 100. Changing it to 100 made it eligible for scoring points for the Gourmet Club - another site feature where you earn a score for the number of qualifying food items you feed your pet. This doesn't earn you anything besides a trophy if you feed them enough gourmet foods, but some people do put a lot of effort into it. Some of these foods get very expensive, and after the rarity was adjusted the price of this item shot up to several million Neopoints. This last-minute changed pissed off a lot of people who had already spent most of their points, especially because one of the new achievements required you to buy 5 different items from the prize shop and it wasn't clear if you'd still be able to complete that particular achievement after the Cup ended.
Another smaller thing is that this year it was decided that team avatars for the Neoboards/forums - which you could get when you signed up for a team - would only be temporary and would be removed from your account after the Cup ended. Avatars are purely cosmetic and there is absolutely no discernible reason for staff to make them temporary. Apparently this change was told to community ambassadors like a month ago and they all told the staff it was a bad idea, yet they still went through with it anyway. A couple days after the Cup ended the backlash led to staff walking this back and restoring everyone's team avatars. Another weird avatar-related thing is that the AC XX avatar was locked behind getting all 5 achievements, and of course some of them were glitchy so not everyone who actually qualified was able to get them and thus got locked out of earning the avatar. Usually you just have to participate to get the year-specific avatar. There was also no commemorative stamp item, which is weird for something as big as the 20th year of a site event running.
Finally, the trophies. As mentioned before, there were no ranks this year so that didn't get reflected on the trophy you got at the end. But the team you played for also didn't show up on your trophy, unlike literally every other year of the Altador Cup. The requirements for the different trophies were also... really low. Under 250 got you a participation trophy, 250 got you Bronze, 500 got you Silver, and 1000 got you Gold. I only bothered with the Cup for the last 3 days and got 1000 points without too much trouble. This pales in comparison to the requirements for the top ranks in other years. Honestly getting a gold trophy with only a bit of grinding feels... kinda cheap.
They also once again didn't actually do anything proactive against all the cheaters/botting - Neopets staff got lucky in that the big cheating groups split themselves amongst teams that ended up placing in the mid-low end of the standings, but historically these groups throw their weight behind a team that ends up in the top 3. There's not really any transparency for how a team's standings may or may not be adjusted to account for obviously botted scores and such (and of course you can't give too much away without cheaters figuring out how to circumvent it), and it causes a lot of frustration for the playerbase when a team doesn't place where they're expected to based on the results from all the matchups that get shown each day.
There's probably things I forgot but those are what I can remember. Honestly was really hoping that last year's 'not Altador Cup' (which was just story based with no gameplay) meant that staff would do stuff like fix all the bugs in the HTML5 versions of the games and add other QoL stuff. Instead they put all that effort into... whatever this was.
Just another day playing Neopets I guess! I look forward to the inevitable Hobbydrama post about this.
tell me your writers straight-up didn't realize Luperus was intended to be a weird Lupe without telling me your writers straight-up didn't realize Luperus was intended to be a weird Lupe. you might as well have just used a Bearog.
genuinely has there every been a case where a character that looked like a neopet wasn't? are they gonna tell me ixi raider isn't an ixi because they're different from the standard ixi, even with the species in the name
or is it because they made him unable to talk, because I FUCKING HATE the implication of that
they can't be a person/neopet if they're not verbal so they must be an animal/petpet, is that it?
also petpet isn't even a synonym for animal its literally pet, there are non petpet creatures and animals so why would tav default to calling him a petpet aarrg, that's like saying someone owns bigfoot because it didn't kill them
honestly I expected them to release some butt ugly luperus petpet item to try and cover their ass instead of ever just admitting they misspoke or made a dumb choice
I ALSO THOUGHT OF THE IXI RAIDER WHEN I SAW THIS ANSWER. Genuinely I don't think there's ever been a case of 'Neopets character that looks like a member of a species of Neopet but actually isn't' outside of cases like shapeshifting entities or other magical shenanigans. I guess there's Baby Blu petpets having heads that look like Blumaroo heads, but their description has always said they were named for the resemblance - no retcons or ignoring/overlooking the canon.
I didn't think about the implications with the 'not being able to speak' part... yeah that's. A bit unfortunate, oof.
#they took him being in a cave in the haunted woods form the card but ignored the part that said he was a lupe explicitly
And to this - I discovered this on my own after making this post but yeah the site has previously specifically called him a Lupe (in the stamp item descriptions though, not the card. But the point still stands.)
Honestly I think it's a tossup whether they knew about and then deliberately chose to ignore the 'Lupe' part of these descriptions for??? contrived story reasons??? that absolutely REQUIRED a three-headed petpet, or if they didn't know about this at all and they simply got lucky that they set him in the Haunted Woods in the plot (he's already very Haunted Woods-coded, so it's not a stretch). Again ignoring that even without the stamp descriptions he is very obviously supposed to be an Unusual Lupe the way the Ixi Raider is an Unusual Ixi.
For real I would've taken a last-minute new Luperus Petpet over this 'clearly trying and utterly failing to cover their asses' answer 😔
please behold the 24 Hours of Lemons race, in which you can only spend $500 total on a car to cross country race for 24 hours
named after the legendary 24 hour Le Mans race, Lemons rallies barely legal cars in an endurance race across America. had the privilege of sharing the freeway with this race and seeing the absolute art od this event
"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.
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