Titled

Not really sure what I'm doing with this blog. I'm having fun though!

[elveny]

If your business can only be reached and all info about it only be accessed via Facebook or Instagram, know that it isn’t reachable or accessible AT ALL.

The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.

Get a fucking WEBSITE. It can be just a static landing page with the relevant information. But get off the metaverse!

[the-eccentric-eclectic]

Not to derail the post but the student nationa at my university are all run through facebook, which apparently is still a popular website in sweden. There is a separate website for activities across all nations (when and which one) and they have their own websites but those are poorly maintained. If you want any kind of participation with your student nation you need a facebook account and join their facebook group. But the activity groups, such as art, yoga, photography to name some, are separate groups on facebook that you need to join. And some you need to get permission to join, which you don't get until you've participated. Also, it's really hard to check out some activities without immediately having to participate or get an idea of what the activity schedule of the nation is because gods forbid they place an actual schedule of the nation's activities for the week or sth and I cant make one based on the information from all the separate groups (and not all of them affiliated with the nation are linked to the nation's facebook page) and I am going insane. I went to join the painting hour once last year and next year I'm not joining because it's just about impossible and I am pissed off. It should not be made this hard to access social life.

[injuries-in-dust]

Good news to get through July 2026

[venusangelite]

first zine for zinefest 2026 - how to make your own booze

[reportsofagrandfuture]

[leontocephagaina]

"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

Opinion | My Students Can’t Read

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

[depsidase]

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Nervous System Regulation

Future ADHD

[lanaflowerz]

Two-Spirit

Two-Spirit is a term created by Indigenous peoples of North America in 1990 to bring together the diverse gender identities and sexualities that exist within their cultures.

It is not a single gender. Each nation has its own traditions, names, and ways of understanding these experiences.

For many communities, Two-Spirit people held important social, cultural, and spiritual roles before European colonization.

The term should not be used by non-Indigenous people, as it is specifically connected to the cultures and experiences of the Indigenous peoples of North America.

Irawhiti (Māori)

Irawhiti is a Māori-language term used by some people to describe transgender or gender-diverse experiences.

The term is part of the contemporary revitalization of Māori language and culture, allowing Indigenous people to describe their identities through their own cultural frameworks.

Although it may be translated as "transgender" in some contexts, Irawhiti carries meanings connected to Māori cultural realities and should not be understood simply as a copy of Western gender categories. ( Flag design by Irauí on Tumblr. ) @irawhiti

takatāpui (Māori)

Takatāpui is a Māori term used by Indigenous LGBTQIA+ people in New Zealand.

Historically, the word referred to an intimate relationship between people of the same sex.

Today, many Māori people use the term to express both their Indigenous identity and their gender or sexual diversity.

More than a specific sexual orientation or gender identity, Takatāpui connects a person to their culture, ancestry, and community.

The term is part of the Māori cultural revitalization movement and demonstrates that gender and sexual diversity can be understood through Indigenous perspectives, not only through Western categories. ( Flag design by Irauí on Tumblr. ) @irawhiti

Māhū (Kanaka Maōli)

Māhū is a traditional Hawaiian cultural identity associated with people who embody both masculine and feminine qualities.

Historically, māhū people held important roles as educators, keepers of knowledge, healers, and transmitters of cultural traditions.

The arrival of colonization and Christian missions attempted to erase these identities, but many Native Hawaiians continue to preserve and revitalize the māhū identity today.

Māhū is not simply the Hawaiian equivalent of "transgender" or "nonbinary." It is a distinct cultural identity deeply connected to Hawaiian history, culture, and spirituality.

Tibira/ Tybyra

Tibira is a historical figure documented during the colonial period.

According to interpretations by Indigenous researchers and collectives, Tibira may be understood as a man who had relationships with other men, or as a person who lived with a feminine gender identity or expression, challenging the norms imposed by colonizers.

Their story is remembered as an example that gender and sexual diversity already existed among Indigenous peoples long before colonization. ( Made by me )

Çacoaimbeguira

Accounts of the Tupinambá people mention the çacoaimbeguiras.

According to interpretations by Indigenous researchers and collectives, they may be understood as women who had relationships with other women, or as people who lived with a masculine gender identity or expression outside the norms imposed by colonization.

Their existence shows that diverse ways of experiencing gender and sexuality were already part of Indigenous societies long before the imposition of European models. ( Made by me )

[injuries-in-dust]

Good news from June 2026.

[the-eccentric-eclectic]

It's happened, I got myself angry enough, so get ready for an exposition on why I hate cars and think the current system of private cars is irredeemable. Most of this is from a paper I did a few years ago, but the findings hold up. It's a very long post so it's under a read more.

First of all, the physical health issues. Cars with combustion engines exhaust a great deal of fumes, all of which are bad for an individual’s health out- and inside the car (poisons from car exhaust also get inside cars, poisoning the driver and their passengers, the levels of which are often higher inside the car than in areas near big roads (Douglas et al., 2011)), but electric cars are not much better. Because a driver is sitting in the same position over long periods of time, the physical inactivity can cause all sorts of health problems. I have taken the liberty of compiling a comprehensive list of the health issues caused by exhaust fumes and physical inactivity: cardiovascular diseases (Douglas et al., 2011; Riediker et al., 2004, Wallace-Wells, 2021; Woodcock & Aldred, 2008), respiratory diseases (Douglas et al., 2011; Wallace-Wells, 2021), inhibited cognitive development (Wallace-Wells, 2021), cancer (Douglas et al., 2011; Wallace-Wells, 2021), diabetes (Douglas et al., 2011; Woodcock & Aldred, 2008), osteoporosis (Douglas et al., 2011), danger to unborn children (Wallace-Wells, 2021), and obesity (Douglas et al., 2011; although it's important to note that weight has been disproven as a factor in health issues, not counting medical neglect by health care professionals). Cars also produce large amounts of tire dust, thus introducing significant quantities of microplastics into their surroundings. Ding et al. (2014) have also discovered a causative effect between driving and higher odds for smoking and short sleep.

The mental health effects are not much better. Wallace-Wells (2021) tells us that air pollution causes Alzheimers and dementia, and many forms of mental illness. Douglas et al. (2011) support that by noting that driving increases the risk of depression. They also state that adults who don’t drive live longer. The way an area is developed can also have an impact on mental health, but I will discuss that in the fourth paragraph. The noise produced by roads causes additional sleep disturbance, hypertension, higher blood pressure, and minor psychiatric illnesses (Douglas et al., 2011).

Publicly, car crashes are a big issue, causing delays, hospital stays, deaths, and road/vehicle damage (Douglas et al., 2011). Most traffic victims, regardless of their mode of transportation, are due to drivers (almost half of car crashes in the Netherlands are with other motorised vehicles, the other half is with statutory objects (CBS, 2023; CBS, n.d.), and of all lethal bicycle traffic victims in the Netherlands in 2023, four out of ten were killed by cars (CBS)). And this makes sense. Inside a car, a driver is less connected to their surroundings and their fellow road-users, and being boxed in like that makes it harder for other road users to communicate with drivers – they can’t see what the person inside the car is doing or thinking, and that makes it nearly impossible to anticipate. It is very telling that pedestrians and cyclists in large volumes by themselves are safer than in situations where cars, at any quantity, are introduced into the mix. Motorised violence is also at issue here: honking or revving an engine at other road users can make them feel unsafe, creating an unpleasant atmosphere on roads. Motorised violence has been normalised to the point where drivers injuring or even murdering their fellow road users is minimally punished, written off as ‘accidents’ instead of indicating a larger structural issue (Woodcock & Aldred, 2008). The way cars are marketed does not improve the situation. Cars are often marketed as protection against hostile environments, and as dominating nature and cities as well as speed and control over their surroundings. This creates fear of the social environments drivers find themselves in, feeding their aggression and thus motorised violence and stress. On top of that, cars kill a lot of animals (about 27.000 per day or 10 million per year in the Netherlands; Autoblog, n.d.), and traffic jams can make areas unmanoeuvrable for essential road users such as first responders. Furthermore, there is a causative link between high particular concentrations from exhaust and crime rates (Wallace-Wells, 2021), and the noise large roads produce can make life extremely unpleasant (Douglas et al., 2021). And finally, cars cause community severance. The more cars in a neighbourhood, the less trust and social interactions and participation that neighbourhood experiences (Douglas et al., 2011; Woodcock & Aldred, 2008).

Then the environmental impacts of cars – all cars, not just the ones with combustion engines. While electric cars do not exhaust toxic gasses into the atmosphere, their construction does produce a lot of greenhouse gasses and require a lot of energy better spent otherwise, thus driving climate change and all its effects. In the Netherlands, where I grew up, climate change is mostly felt through heatwaves and large amounts of rain in short periods of time. Cars and their infrastructure make this worse; Cars are mostly made of medal, which, during heatwaves, absorb that heat and increase their surrounding temperature. This is known as a heat island. Their re-emission of heat can raise the temperature in an area from uncomfortably warm to hot. Roads and parking lots, largely constructed of stone and asphalt, does the same. The fewer roads and cars we have, the better our cities are prepared for global warming and the lower the death toll from heatwaves are. Roads also make it harder for the ground to absorb water. With Dutch autumns getting wetter and wetter, if we have a lot of paved surface, our cities won’t be able to drain the water into the ground, increasing the risk of flooding (Woodcock & Aldred, 2008). And finally, cars take up an unholy amount of space. Cars in theory need at least two parking spaces at all times, meaning that a lot of space will always have to be wasted on parking lots if our society remains car centric, space better used for greenery or recreational areas. And of course, with fewer cars on the road, it will be easier for the necessary vehicles (buses, emergency services, disabled people who can drive who need personal vehicles to get around) to get from A to B. This is further achieved as less cars means that the need to create distance in order to push the ‘need’ for cars, as cars are generally seen as something that makes long distances traversable, decreases (Woodcock & Aldred, 2008), which encourages walkability and cyclability.

Finally, the industry that lobbies for cars is the same one that used to lobby for tobacco. Car ads are employed very similarly to cigarette ads used to be. Smoking is framed as an individual choice, and as aspirational, as is driving, one that the government should stay out of, rather than the societally pushed structural issue that harms the user and their social and physical environment. On top of the advertisements, Big Auto, like the tobacco industry, use lobbyists to represent them both (as in both companies at the same time), who then go on to campaign against measures aimed to improve the general health of the public in order for their companies to be able to keep pushing their unhealthy product. Ads contribute to this brainwashing of the public.

What I am not saying here is that all cars are bad. What I am saying is that privatising cars is one of the bigger mistakes society in general has made. I am not saying to do away wil every car. I am saying sating that infrastructure needs to be fixed so that people can get around with public transportation, bikes, or by foot (or roller skating or whatever you're into). I am saying that public transportation needs to be free and properly connecting between villages, cities, and capitol cities. I am saying that freedom from cars gives more freedom as you're not constantly lugging several tons of metal around that costs an arm and a leg. I am saying that, in the rare event that a trip cannot be completed without a car, there should be cars available for rent (my parents were members of Greenwheels), and that cars that are necessary for jobs should be parked at the job. I am saying that the space currently wasted on cars can be used for pollinator gardens, sensory gardens, community gardens, recreational areas, solar farms, or parks.

Finally I want to get ahead of the disability argument that some car proponents use as a gotcha to anti car arguments: some disabled people cannot drive, some cannot afford a car, driving without the congestion caused by unnecessary traffic is a lot easier, and, according to the study my father did to stay up to date for his job, most disabled people aren't the ones making this argument. The accessibility these car proponents are making us insincere and faulty. I do not have a source for this section because it's one in the morning so I'm not looking up a paper for it and I prefer to avoid talking to my father when I can help it but you're welcome to do your own. Just try to avoid googling it, use an actual search engine please.

Bibliography

Autoblog. (2016). Goed Nieuws: We Rijden Meer Dieren Dood! Retrieved from: https://www.autoblog.nl/nieuws/goed-nieuws-we-rijden-meer-dieren-dood-84481 (Translation: Good news: cars increasingly kill animals).

Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. (2023). Meer Verkeersdoden in 2022, Vooral Fietsende 75-plussers Vaker Slachtoffer. Retrieved from: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2023/16/meer-verkeersdoden-in-2022-vooral-fietsende-75-plussers-vaker-slachtoffer (Translation: more traffic deaths in 2022 mostly people over 75 victim)

Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (n.d.). Hoeveel Mensen Komen om in het Verkeer? Retrieved from: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/verkeer/hoeveel-mensen-komen-om-in-het-verkeer- (Translation: How many people die in traffic).

Ding, D., Gebel, K., Phongsavan, P., Bauman, A., & Merom, D. (2014). Driving: A Road to Unhealthy Lifestyles and Poor Health Outcomes. National Library of Medicine, 9(6). Doi: 10.1374/journal.pone.0094602

Douglas, M.J., Watkins, S.J., Gorman, D.R., & Higgins, M. (2011). Are Cars the New Tobacco? Journal of Public Health, 33(2), pp. 160-169. https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdr032

Riediker, M., Cascio, W.E., Griggs, T.R., Herbst, M.C., Bromberg, P.A., Neas, L., Williams, R.W., & Devlin, R.B. (2004). Particulate Matter Exposure in Cars Is Associated with Cardiovascular Effects in Healthy Young Men. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 169(8). https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.200310-1463OC

Wallace-Wells, D. (2021). Ten million a year. London Review of Books, 43, 23.

Woodcock, J. & Aldred, R. (2008). Cars, Corporations, and Commodities: Consequences of the Social Determinants of Health. Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-7622-5-4

And just for fun: some cartoons that highlight the issue well I think.

[libraford]

An incomplete list of

Potions of Hydration!

Earlier this week I mentioned putting pickle juice in my water to replenish electrolytes. I work outside in a very hot and humid area, so it was very necessary.

Since then, a LOT of people have chimed in with their favorite hot weather drinks. I want to try... all of them. I've only had a few. Many of them are similar, but I still think its cool how many variations there are for 'its fucking hot out here and I don't want to die.'

So here is the incomplete list.

ORS (oral rehydration solution) (link has several recipes)

Shrub (sharaab)

Agua de pepino

Switchel

Posca

Ayran

Straight up drinking pickle juice (small doses)

Agua fresca

Sekanjabin

Pickle lemonade

Lebanese lemonade

Salted watermelon

Jamaica/hibiscus tea

Lebu pani

Ayuvedic gatorade

Soda chanh muôi

Suero

Aam paan

Sharbat

-

These ones were given to me without names, and were just lists of ingredients, to taste:

- water and umezu

- diluted apple juice with lemon and salt

-watermelon, lime juice, mint

- sparkling water, mint leaves, lemon or lime juice, cucumber

-coconut water, lime juice, salt

-salt, lemon juice, water

-orange juice, salt, sugar, water, lime or lemon juice

-elderflower syrup and lime juice in water.

There are probably more! Hydrate or die straight!

[tainbocuailnge]

genuinely people should be getting arrested for this heat. oil ceos should be getting dragged out onto the streets and kicked to death over this.

[tater-tot-pot-dish]

For my neurodivergents who think theyre too much to be loved;

There is a series of books "loving someone with *insert mental illness*"

My husband read "loving someone with bi-polar disorder" and "loving someone with adhd" when we got serious. It really helped set the stage for our relationship because it gave him the understanding & tools needed to live with & love someone like me.

So what im saying is, youre not "too much." There are tools available & the right person will take the time to use them.

[the-eccentric-eclectic]

Sweden is about to join in the heatwave cooking the rest of Europe so I need some climate optimism. It's not a question of whether we will beat climate change, it's a question of when (if you're in doubt, just check @reasonsforhope or @wachinyeya or @hope-for-the-planet or any of the other incredible blogs focused on success stories and optimism and solar punk. So we're going to do something different: we're going to make a game out of it; we're going to guess when the planet will stop heating up.

Place your bets. When do you think the warming of the planet will reach its apex (as in when will it be at its highest and brought to a halt before starting to cool down again)? I'm placing my bet at an optimistic 2042.

Just for fun, not necessary to add to your guess, but I think we will stay just under 2°C total increase.

[the-eccentric-eclectic]

On Cycling

As some of you may have surmised, I am Dutch. We never had need for a car so I have cycled a lot in my life. Recently, however, I moved abroad to a university city with a big international student population. It is supposed to be bike friendly, I find it more bike tolerant, but that is another discussion. The reason I made this post is because I noticed very few people know how to properly ride a bike. So here are some pro tips.

Put the ball of your foot on the pedal. That is the part of your foot that your toes are attached to. It gives you the most economy of motion as it allows your calves to get involved with the pedaling motion as well. Try it, feel the difference.

Power comes from your butt. Proper cycling is like a proper squatting form. If most of your power comes from your knees you are doing it wrong.

Economy of motion also means keeping your upper body still. Do not move it side to side (if you cannot reach the pedals when they are at their lowest point your saddle is too high. Good news: this can be lowered), do not move front to back, and definitely do not stand. All you are doing is wasting energy. If you are going up against a lot of wind or up a steep hill it sometimes helps to lean forward, but moving your upper body does nothing to make you bike better or easier.

When taking a sharp turn, it can help to move the pedal on the inside of the turn to the top. This helps prevent contact between it and the ground when you make a sharp turn. This is due to the next point:

Steer with your hips first. When cycling, shifting your weight in the direction you are going in makes it easier to control your turn and make it smoother, but it is good to practice it. This does mean that your bike will be at an angle when turning, hence turning your pedal up.

Finally, cycling is like any other exercise. You need to build stamina in it, and other kinds of stamina (like walking) don't necessarily translate. Oh, and plastic coats are wind-resistant. They make cycling harder when there's even a little bit of wind, as they let the wind blow you back. Like a sail. If you're struggling a lot and don't know why, this might be the reason.

Additional tips for autists:

I like to listen to music while cycling. The wind tends to interfere with this, so I wear cloth over my ears. I crocheted a bandana last year that had closed fabric over the ears part for warm weather, and the rest of the year I wear a Buff (brand name), which is a tube-shaped piece of fabric that can be folded to fit over the ears like a sort of headband.

I also wear sunglasses a lot. It helps with sun, wind, and bugs. There are also special neutral glasses (not uv-filtering or with any kind of strength like the ones for people with bad eyes) that merely protect your eyes.

Happy biking!

[ihernglass]

[pbh3]

First time experiencing the rain.

[wardrobespierre]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THAT’S THE CUTEST THING OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY FUCKING GOD LOOK HOW FUCKIN STOKED SHE IS ABOUT THE RAIN LIKE “THERE’S WATER FALLING OUT OF THE GODDAMN SKY RIGHT NOW IS THIS THE REAL LIFE HOLY SHIT THIS IS A W E S O M E” I CAN’T EVEN DEAL WITH THIS ADORABLE MAGICAL CHILD’S HAPPINESS BULLSHIT BYE

[robotslenderman]

The recent hot VS cold polls have made me realise that a lot of people have no idea how to cool down.

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

Also keep in mind that the skinnier you are, the faster these will work. More fat means more insulation, means more heat, so you may need to be more patient with some of these or use them in combination.

[robotslenderman]

Bringing this back for my dying mutuals