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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@turkeycalamitybff
Tony: Who told Steve that kms means keep myself safe?
Peter: Listen, I panicked and accidentally said the wrong thing.
Steve, texting in the avengers group: I don't need backup for the mission! I'll kms.
helloo! Recently made a TikTok account for editing, check it out if you wish to! xoxo
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
This is humanity
Happy Birthday, Curiousity.
Happy birthday, Curiosity.
Happy birthday, Curiosity.
Happy birthday, Curiosity!
Happy birthday, Curiosity!💕
Happy Birthday, Curiosity
happy birthday, curiosity
happy birthday, Curiosity
Happy birthday, curiosity!
Happy birthday, Curiosity
Reblog to give prev the power to write their fanfiction
Reblog to give prev the TIME to write their fanfiction
Reblog to give prev the hocus focus to write their fanfiction.
Reblog to give prev the energy to write their fanfiction
Reblog to give prev the executive function to write their fanfiction
We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing
say more pls
Yeah sure why not.
So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.
So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.
There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.
Anyway I just think it’s fun or funny, Sephiroth doing paper work and Sawada Tsunayoshi doing paper work and this just in, Tony Stark is doing paperwork. Sorry, Phoenix Wright can’t play right now. Yeah, it’s paperwork.
A very non-exhaustive list of actual paperwork they could be completing/reviewing/approving, in no particular order:
Timesheets
Expense reports
Requisition requests
Budget justifications
Payroll
Performance evaluations
Incident reports
After action reviews / post-mortem analyses
Incident Action Plans
Contracts
Contract proposals / grant applications
Reports / briefings
Your Royalty or Nobles in your feudal society should be doing this constantly unless you want to show how they're losing the kingdom and about to be usurped or overthrown.
petitions, speech-writing, complaints, requests, assignations, disputes, judiciary forms, declarations that need signing off on, matters requiring the Royal seal, matters requiring a royal endorsement, pardons, judgments, invitations, rebuttals, census data, crop yields projected or actual, livestock records, water rights, Sumptuary laws, taxes taxes taxes...
solid point there!
even when the royalty look like they're just fucking off to have fun, they're doing Socially Mandated Fuck-Off and Have Fun Time
Tournaments? Gotta show you're manly and virile through sport, or the nobles will supplant you. Feasts? Gotta show you're wealthy through conspicuous consumption, or the nobles will supplant you. Patronizing the arts? Gotta show you're cultured and erudite, or the nobles will laugh at you behind your back and probably supplant you.
Lawyer here. Here’s some more mundane/modern ones for you:
Invoices.
Intake sheets (information about new clients. The one for my firm is 13 pages and requires an hour long meeting. Then you have to do something with the info gathered)
Data entry for invoices and intake sheets.
Billing. (More involved than timesheets because you’re justifying to clients why you’re getting paid so much).
Form letters.
Taxes. Including 1099s for any contracted work.
Bank statements/accounting spreadsheets. Gotta track how expenses are trending.
Insurance documents.
General messages. Lots of office still use a paper system for missed calls and “important” stuff because it just works better than emails and chats for some people.
Memos. Big enough office to have at least one attorney on payroll? You’re getting memos about every legal question and concern and contract. It’s how we’re trained to communicate in formal settings.
And if you want to get into modern military, the forms are numbered, and people will refer to them by either their actual name, or the number. (Have you filled out the 4187 for this? Yes, I filled out the personnel action form.)
The military has so many forms.
If you want to add a rage level, there’s the Regular Paperwork and then the special hell of Fuckup Paperwork.
Cause there’s the invoice, and the follow up invoice and the we are about to have a problem follow-up invoice.
There’s the incident report and then the I swear I yelled at that worker about this don’t be mad at me if they do it again second warning documentation
The requisition form and the it has been six months now get me the fucking thing or you’re gonna hear from Cindy escalations form.
Paperwork has layers and protocols and backups.
i need this hold on a minute
Notes from meetings.
You're taking notes in a meeting. You're organizing the notes. You're summarizing the notes. You're sending the notes to people. You're creating action plans from the meeting notes.
Before the meetings, of course, there's a meeting agenda, compiling the documents for the meeting like briefs or reports.
If it's a Big Important Meeting, like a meeting of the Board or the Committee or the Managers, those meeting notes are called "minutes" and they might be legally required and they have to be polished
I deal with so many minutes
andrew feeling guilty bc he caught himself trusting that he could read neil's his body language and gave him a kiss without asking "yes or no". not bc he was wrong that neil wanted it. bc everything went fine.
it's just that he just has rigid morality and feels like it's bad that he expects a "yes or no?" from neil every time but didn't hold himself to the same standard
You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.
By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.
I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?
it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it
but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.
Reblog if your ask box is open.
Ask box always open bay bee
I will always reblog this
still remember how revolutionary this ad felt 10 years ago
excuse me but it still feels revolutionary
Keep reblogging until it feels normal everywhere.
For context: this came out in 2011 in Australia. Same-sex marriage would not be legalized until December 2017.
It was only legalized in 8 US states (the 8th only a few months before), and wouldn’t be legalized nation-wide until 2015.
It was only legal in TEN COUNTRIES in 2011. We wouldn’t hit 20 countries until 2017. (Australia was 23rd)
As of today (April 14, 2026), I believe only 38 countries have fully legalized same-sex marriage. Out of somewhere around 200 countries in the world. That’s only ~19% of countries.
This is still revolutionary.
“I was on a strict diet during Episode VIII, and she was like, ‘Kid, get into that fridge and take some chocolate bars. I have many there.’ And I did,” he recalls. “I failed my diet because Carrie Fisher told me to. And it [felt] great.”
-John Boyega on Carrie Fisher
This is the Carrie Fisher post of body positivity reblog for a chocolate bar from her fridge
This is Money Snake. She only appears every 312 years.
If you reblog her picture within the next twenty-five seconds you will have good luck and fortune for the rest of your life.
I reblogged her late last year and my 2024 has been very satisfying work-wise and (secure enough to not stress out) money-wise so far. Money Snake is wise and good.
always reblog money snake
what if elves teeth get destroyed after 100 years of living so they replace their teeth with crystals and sophie doesnt know this because they use white crystals and no one ever thought to tell her this. elwin checks sophies teeth and see they got destroyed by human food or whatever and hes like oh yeah its time for the crystal teeth procedure and shes like the what.
never seen so much imagination ever
Tom Holland does Rihanna’s “Umbrella” on Lip Sync Battle
I’m literally zendaya reacting like he didn’t have to go that hard and yet..
if this comes up on my dash and i don’t reblog it - just assume im dead
The burning question: When she has her hands on either side of her face, right at the start, is this the moment she realized, “I’m gonna have to marry this guy” ?
So, I’ve been pulled over a few times in my life. Not many, but a few. And I’ve also been in a couple of cars that got pulled over. And let me tell you, if you were actually doing something wrong, the officer doesn’t make any small talk, just straight into “I clocked you doing 70 in a 55.” The only time I’ve ever gotten the “do you know why I pulled you over?” was the time when I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I got let go even though he insisted to the end that I was doing 87 in a 70 (white privilege at work).
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.
But there’s another trap, that I’ve heard of but haven’t yet experienced. It’s “do you know how fast you were going?” With that one, they’re hoping you’ll say no, because then they can name whatever speed they want – you just said you didn’t know how fast you were going, if you deny the speed they name then you’re lying to them.
Oh, I’ve had that one. Go with “yes.” Don’t give them a number, just say “Yes.” Then they still have to offer a number and you can deny it without contradicting yourself. They could just ask you, at that point, but that’s suspiciously similar to saying they don’t know, and they tend to avoid doing that.
Reblog to save a life
if you scroll past this just because it doesn’t affect you personally, i see you.
Also, you can always go to court and contest a ticket, and a lot of times you’ll win. Or if the cop thinks you’ll win they won’t even show up and you’ll win by default.
They like to target out of state plates because anyone who would be majorly inconvenienced by a court date two months away is a lot more likely to just pay it.
i saw you and your male friend across the bar and noticed you're extremely weird about each other in various platonic and/or romantic ways Mind if i obsereve
my little lucy
Spin the wheel. That's who's trying to kill you.
Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.
(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)
Are you safe?
Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.
I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.
I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.
A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.
The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.
I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.
…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.
(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)
“but what if you abort the baby who’ll cure cancer?!” sir the baby who will cure cancer is an organic chemistry major who works at a Home Depot because you use AI to go through your resumes
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
"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.
