almost home
The Stonewall Inn
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tannertan36
art blog(derogatory)
h
YOU ARE THE REASON
izzy's playlists!
macklin celebrini has autism
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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taylor price
Claire Keane
oozey mess
Today's Document
icyghini twinkie
Show & Tell
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@sonofcoulson
It's All Connected
Index below the cut.
The motivation behind It's All Connected lies in Avengers: Endgame.
I was so annoyed with the way events on Vormir turned out I started to rethink the scene. Then I started to rethink other scenes. Then I started to think about how they originally said the whole MCU would be connected, even the TV shows. And then about how that proved to be untrue. But what if...it was all connected? All of it...what changes would you need to make?
Sims 4 Avengers Tower photodump
Clint and Natasha take target practice. Nick practices his big speech (it must have worked because he got promoted (he's a spy obvs)). Hulk talks to himself in the third person when he sees his reflection in the window. Hank and Steve go for a run. The boys watch the cooking channel. Natasha talks with Hulk by the pool which ended with a little flirting.
Not pictured: Natasha followed up this conversation the next day. She tried flirting again and Hulk felt awkward and then got angry (i made him a hot-head). That tanked their budding romance.
Sam, Bucky and Tony came for a visit and played cards with Steve.
Thor is playing with the Armageddon mod and rescued several citizens, warned off serial killers and won several battles.
I think next time I'll move Hank back in with the X-Men and have Tony move back from his place with Pepper and Rhodey.
Sims 4 X-Men photo dump.
I obviously can't fit all the X-Men in one house so they are split into separate households. This one is the X-Mansion, but they invited some of their mutant pals over.
Then they went out to a bar and Magneto, Toad and Destiny showed up. I tried to get Logan to start an argument, but it was taking too much effort. I guess he wasn't grumpy enough. First time for everything...
The Thing, Ghost, Nebula, Iron Man, Fitz and Hawkeye turned up too. Then I forgot to feed a hungry Kurt and he starved to death. Cue much faffing and looking up of cheats. Sorry Kurt.
Hiw could you do that to meye boy
I love to make massive households but then struggle to juggle everybody's needs. Sorry again Kurt. I managed to bring him back to life and he's fine now.
gang customer service is a fucking experience
some more highlights
can't forget this guy
a highlight from today
first customer of the day
gang it was a weird weekend
Salt of the Earth (1954), dir. Herbert J. Biberman
Damn, son.
EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH SALT OF THE EARTH
Salt of the Earth actually has a crazy interesting history- OP already said it was made in 1954, but that was in the middle of the Red Scare (communism scary cold war hysteria)
Congress’s anti-communism target fell hard on Hollywood, and those in the industry who were suspected of communism at all were blacklisted from all jobs, because studio’s didn’t want to face backlash from Congress
Salt of the Earth was made nearly 100% with blacklisted crew members from Hollywood, and had such difficulty finding actors that they hired local citizens and miners from the actual strike the plot is based on. There were only 5 trained actors involved, and one of them (Rosaura Revueltas, the woman in the gif) was deported to Mexico before they finished filming on accusations of communism, with no proof and no substance. The filming was plagued with police harassment and threats (according to my professor they were shot at more than once), and the local union hall was burned down.
The movie itself not only covers a real 1950′s labor strike demanding safer and more equal labor conditions for Mexican-American employees, but after the miners were facing arrest, their wives and children took up the strike in their place. The movie’s combination of blacklisted crew, civil rights and feminist message, and pro-union plot (during the red scare) got the movie blacklisted and only 12 theaters in the entire United States would show the movie- it was successful in Europe, but didn’t actually achieve viewership in the US until the 60′s
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/10/salt-of-the-earth-labour-workers-blacklisted-filmmakers
It is available on YouTube for free
The U.S. is Actively Starving a Country Who is Trying to Cure Cancer
"There is a particular kind of irony reserved for history’s most stubborn contradictions. Global superpowers pour trillions into weapons systems designed to reduce each other to rubble, while a tiny, blockade-choked Caribbean island quietly engineers one of the most elegant anti-cancer therapies the world has ever seen."
this is what my suggestion can do
We really are never going to stop stripping this land bare
those mountains are older than Saturn's rings and they want to blow them up and hollow them out for cell phone batteries
i don't know if folks outside these mountains understand what a state these communities are left in after being ravaged by the coal and steel industries. they endured well over 100 years of paternalistic brutality to provide the resources that built america with nothing in return and that very much informs the culture and collective psyche. force fed opiates to undermine labor movements and hard-won unions after decades of horrific abuse at isolated company towns. living there you can feel how we're all just one giant open wound that can't heal.
if bringing in corporations to mine raw materials from the appalachian mountains was good for the community, appalachia would be known for how happy, healthy, and wealthy the people are.
"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.
You wake up as the protagonist of This Anime. How fucked are you? https://wheelofnames.com/qef-dsg
You have become the protagonist of this anime!
How fucked are you?
this is amazing actually!
This is good!
Eh it's okay
BAD.
SO BAD IM SO FUCKED.
I'm not the one who's getting fucked ;)
Results/other
Sims 4 X-Men photo dump.
I obviously can't fit all the X-Men in one house so they are split into separate households. This one is the X-Mansion, but they invited some of their mutant pals over.
Then they went out to a bar and Magneto, Toad and Destiny showed up. I tried to get Logan to start an argument, but it was taking too much effort. I guess he wasn't grumpy enough. First time for everything...
The Thing, Ghost, Nebula, Iron Man, Fitz and Hawkeye turned up too. Then I forgot to feed a hungry Kurt and he starved to death. Cue much faffing and looking up of cheats. Sorry Kurt.
What kind of NPC are you?
You have activated my unskippable cut scene
Oh hi! Couldn’t help but overhear you need directions
Excuse me, can you help me with The Task?
Stop smashing my pots!!
Error, cannot interact with this NPC
Well those are allllmost done
question. why do you have 7 featureless grey monoliths in your driveway
There's eight actually but the last one is still in the garage
question. why do you have eight featureless grey monoliths
They're actually a really dark purple
question. why do you have seven featureless really dark purple monoliths in your driveway and an eighth in the garage
Some of them do have features though. There's holes and hinges and stuff, so I can put secrets in em
question. why do you have 8 really dark purple occasionally featureful monoliths
The heart wants what the heart wants
this reads like a muppet sketch
see? See!??!
You're not wrong
This post is less than six months old.
Sometimes posts just, have olde tumblr post energy. And ya gotta live wit dat.
Ant family photdump for Sims 4
Outside the Sanctum Sanctorum, Vision, Groot and Janet turn up to welcome Stephen and co to the neighbourhood, but they were all out.
Then a hero challenge started, but i didn't get there in time and they died. Hank (hidden by grim), Rocket, Alexei and James Sr. also turn up to mourn the stranger.
Strange, Wong and Clea in and around the Sanctum Sanctorum. Also (not pictured) Vision, Wasp and Groot turned up to welcome them to the neighbourhood.
