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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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we're not kids anymore.
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@twinhearts
I go by Blue. I'm Trans Ace. Pronouns are he/they. I'm half Scottish. I'm dyslexic and autocorrect sucks so some of my spelling might be wrong.
I've decided to start some sideblogs in an attempt to not spam you all with my random sudden interests
azureblaze - anime and my hero academia(mainly just disappointment at this point)
silverfoxkiryu - video games mainly yakuza and final fantasy
badassium - superheroes mainly iron man
"Why do you need age verification on a site where everyone is 38?"
If anyone is getting smacked with this - just use deer.social or another alternate client. Bsky is just an AT Protocol Client, and your Bsk
I've been told that you can switch clients to avoid this, there are a few options other than deer.
Bluesky's age assurance sucks, here's how to work around it. - bluesky-osa.md
There's also filters you can add to uBlock.
anon hater just accused me of (among other things) "encouraging kids to install malware on their parents' computers". I don't remember ever doing that but it sounded like a fun concept for a post so here are some ideas for things to install on your parents' computers!
a custom DNS resolver that blocks access to Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets
a keylogger to capture the admin password for your router so you can disable parental controls
a VPN or a virtual machine running the Tor browser to bypass access restrictions and age verification checks
your own "parental controls" browser extension, set up to send you notifications if your parents visit websites that indicate they might be spying on you (e.g. Life360)
a userscript that adds a fake virus warning popup to the donation pages of fascist political parties
have fun! make sure to do loads of reading and learn how things work so you can break them safely and effectively!
oh, and anon, my advice to you is never stab a man who collects knives
Op what is this VPN/Tor browser method to bypass age verifs. Can we know more?
I haven't had any age verifs forced on me yet but I want to be prepared
companies are generally only doing age verification in countries where they have to, for the simple reason that it costs them money to do it.
if you can trick a website into thinking you're in a country without those requirements, you can usually bypass the verification process.
I generally use exit nodes in Iceland, which has some of the strongest digital privacy legislation in the world and as far as I know is unlikely to do this ID bullshit anytime soon.
I’m just gonna run full blast to the other side of the room. You’re good tho — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/3DW2dnE
Deregulation just means a shittier version.
everyone post your biggest hear me outs my friend just showed me two conventionally attractive white men in a row i need to teach him what a real hear me out is
.world's largest excavator- nay, world's largest vehicle- the bagger 288
.also, scale reference! just the wheel is 70 feet in diameter
'here's a real hear me out' >>posts world's most conventionally attractive piece of machinery
and only one of these gained major popularity on Tumblr, surprise surprise
"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.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
what im learning from my years of being one of the annoying woke black people on here is that a Lot of white and nonblack people really do not understand what racism is and what it has done to African Americans. like when we learn abt it in schools they dont really tell you abt the mass rape and genocide and torture of Africans by white slave owners, they dont talk abt the murder of babies and the cannibalism either. its all in The Past so we should just get over it, lol. and then when nonamerican's colonial past gets brought up they start throwing tantrums too, because antiblackness is a global thing, many countries have exploited Africa and its people. this isnt unique to one nation. its so funny how all these Smart Communists are so ignorant abt racism in america and globally, and then when black leftist/progressive tumblr users try to say anything abt their real actual Lived Experiences as Black people its met with dismissal and hatred and condescension and Um, Actually, im not from america, can you talk to me like im 5 about racism please :) and if youre anything but Nice they will call you a slur
DO NOT LET SOCIAL MEDIA TURN YOU INTO AN AMERICAN
As an American: Seriously, please don’t
ok well i don't
"Americanization" is a real phenomenon, and how non-Americans should be cautious of it is taught in different countries at school. It's taught in Greece and people from other countries told me their elementary or middle school teachers (using the American grades, to make it make sense to the majority on the site) talked to them about it.
It's common sense here, except for USians, so I'll analyze it a bit more for the dominant demographic here. In a globalized setting, the most dominant culture affects the others and sets the trends. The way our language works, how we think, our levels of politeness and intimacy, and our levels of respect. (flash news, they are going down 😂)
I don't want to imply that there is nothing good in the US. There are plenty of positives in the country. It's just that for the rest of the cultures online it's a constant daily fight to not forget our roots, with the degree US media and brands have permeated our lives. In Greece at least we watch more US American media than Greek media nowadays, and many of our shows are rip-offs of USian ones, with little adaptation to Greek reality and culture.
And to demonstrate the amount of this exposure, a 22-year-old Greek asked me the other day "if something happens we call 911, right?" This might have literally cost them their life, in a dangerous situation! Because all the movies and songs they consumed (not an unusual thing for the Greek youth) were what they knew. And I found a similar comment in this comment thread.
Lots of Americans in the notes failing to understand this post. It's not about not liking the US. It's not about you feeling ashamed or guilty for being American. It's not about you.
It's about American media drowning out native language media all over the world, and workplaces requiring the English language in your repertoire more and more. It's about proper translations and foreign language dubbing of films disappearing because "everyone speaks/should speak English anyway." All of this is leading to the deterioration of native speaker groups of languages worldwide.
In my country, Dutch language courses can't find enough people who want to study the language, while English language courses are overflowing with people who want to study the language. There is even widespread distaste for the Dutch language for being crude or sounding rough or what have you. That's our native language!!! That is our culture in its purest form!!! That is knowledge we inherit from our parents as they did from theirs!!! That is how we learned fairytales and folk stories and myths!!! That is the language that shapes our communication and our way of thinking!!! To hate your native language is to hate yourself at the deepest level.
And yet it's so normalised. Droves of foreigners living in the Netherlands will never learn a word of Dutch, because "everyone speaks English anyway." We are the world's leaders in non-native understanding of English, but it comes at a cost. A grave cost we will continue to pay.
If you're looking to support your non-American friends in any way that is not performatively shouting "I hate being an American" into the void, first of all, unlearn that hatred of yourself and your culture. You are of no help self-flagellating, and there is a difference between holding your country accountable for its issues, and denying yourself your culture because your country is doing and has done bad things.
(I am not going to get into arguments about whether or not US American culture exists. It does, and if you think differently you are welcome to change your mind.)
Secondly, learn about other countries. Learn a bit of Chinese. Take an interest in the Italian political system. Ask your friends about their countries' folklore. Watch documentaries about art from Nigeria. Absorb information that is not fed to you by American media.
And thirdly, quit expecting your non-American friends to communicate in a way that appeals to you. The French and Dutch will always seem rude to you because our way of communicating is far more direct than the way you communicate. People from other cultures may seem vague to you because their way of communicating is far more indirect, and you're not used to that either. Quit being frustrated when you don't get what we mean exactly. Quit assuming we mean the absolute worst thing you could imagine just because you didn't get what we meant the first time. Ask us to explain if you need us to, and learn to accept that we are different from you.
We are already adapting to your culture 100% of the time we are online. It's your responsibility to adapt to us, too. At least do your friends the courtesy of learning about and adapting to them.
We are already adapting to your culture 100% of the time we are online. It's your responsibility to adapt to us, too. At least do your friends the courtesy of learning about and adapting to them.
This is what I was alluding to when I discussed that the volume of name changes you have to make as a trans person highlights the ridiculous amount of documentation attached to you.
A cis women's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's right to medical care.
A cis women's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's right for safe housing.
A cis women's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's acsess to SA recovery recourses.
A queer person's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's right to take space in their community.
A queer person's right to comfort should not be more valued that a trans man's acsess to queer recourses.
A queer persons right to comfort should not be move valued than a trans man's right to hrt, srs, or medical transition.
I do not care if cis women and some other queer people are uncomfortable with "passing" trans men being at the gynecologist, at the planned parenthood, at the homeless shelter, at the SA survivor meeting, at the trans pride event, at the queer resource center, or with us just existing. Trans men's right to exist and to be treated like human beings should not be disrespected or disregarded becouse some of you think testosterone or facial hair or butchness or masculinity or phalloplasty somehow gives you cooties.
Wait, the fuck do you mean homeless shelters are seperated based on the sex of the person?
Unfortunately homeless shelters are separated into "Women's and Children's" shelters and "Men's" shelters.
Some women's shelters are "trans inclusive" or will refer to themselves as "women and nonbinary shelter's" - but often people who do not pass as "correctly feminine" are denied access to them (this includes non passing trans women, butch women, trans men, and many nonbinary and intersex people).
Men's shelters are typically not trans inclusive, are less avaliable, often privately funded by evangelical churches that require the men to attend their services, have less beds, and significantly less privacy and are not safe for transgender people (including "passing" trans men.)
More conservative women's shelter will also just flat out refuse transgender women even if they are passing and fem presenting, due to their presumed sex assigned at birth. Those shelters also do not typically accept transgender men unless we shave, detransiton, and dress fem (and even then we might still be too masculine to be considered safe!)
As a result, trans and GNC people, especially trans and GNC that present butch or masculine or don't fit the mold of white cis femininity, are denied acsess to shelters in order to ensure that cis women are not made uncomfortable by our presence. And usually it's the cis women who are volunteering or staffing the shelter that are the problem (not the homeless women that actually sleep in the shelter).
Why are we separating out trans/cis and queer?
If you're asking about the original post it's becouse not all cis women are queer and not all queer people are cis women 👍
If you're asking about why homeless shelters function that way: transphobia, queerphobia, US American protest work ethic, racism, and misogyny.
I hate cigarettes so much I hate that smoking is becoming cool again I hate that we're becoming contrarian hipsters about this disgusting habit that has literally killed so many people and destroyed so many lives I'm so serious we need to become absolute killjoys about this again it's time to go 90s scolds on cigarettes until the scourge is wiped out entirely.
It's not even that they kill you. Lots of contrarian passively suicidal people hear that they kill you and they think "oh cool. Whatever."
They make your hands cold. They give you little asshole pucker wrinkles around your mouth. They kill you so fucking slow. Make it so your lungs hurt all the time. They make every cold a chest cold that takes months to go away. They suck your money out bit by bit, every day forever. Just be a little bit more poor forever until they kill you in fifty years. They kill you for fifty years. Just a little shorter of breath, just a little colder, heart beating a little too fast. And the longer you go, the harder it is to quit.
You're depressed and nicotine is an anti-depressant as well as a stimulant. It helps ease that crushing void in your soul just a little bit. Puts a little bit of energy in your steps. Until it doesn't. Until all you can think about is when your next smoke break is. Until you're sixty five and in the hospital because you need emergency surgery on an clogged artery and you're attempting suicide by willful medical neglect because getting the surgery that will save your life will mean not smoking a cigarette for three whole days.
As much as I think it would be fun to have emotive anthropomorphic ears, I also recognize I can barely control my facial expressions. Like hell can I keep from Angry Ears-ing during meetings
This is who you’re having a meeting with, by the way.
A cis women's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's right to medical care.
A cis women's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's right for safe housing.
A cis women's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's acsess to SA recovery recourses.
A queer person's right to comfort should not be more valued then a trans man's right to take space in their community.
A queer person's right to comfort should not be more valued that a trans man's acsess to queer recourses.
A queer persons right to comfort should not be move valued than a trans man's right to hrt, srs, or medical transition.
I do not care if cis women and some other queer people are uncomfortable with "passing" trans men being at the gynecologist, at the planned parenthood, at the homeless shelter, at the SA survivor meeting, at the trans pride event, at the queer resource center, or with us just existing. Trans men's right to exist and to be treated like human beings should not be disrespected or disregarded becouse some of you think testosterone or facial hair or butchness or masculinity or phalloplasty somehow gives you cooties.
The government says destroying his own data during an airport interrogation was illegal.
In early 2025, Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick was on his way home following a trip abroad. After landing in the US, customs agents demanded access to his Pixel phone, which was running an alternative version of Android called GrapheneOS. Rather than hand over his data, Tunick used a clever feature of the software to delete everything. Now, he’s facing federal charges.
The first hearing in this case happened last week, according to The Guardian, during which government attorneys and agents claimed that Tunick was subjected to a standard secondary interrogation at an international airport. During that encounter, agents were “looking for anything that’s prohibited.” However, Tunick’s legal team alleges he was targeted for his activism.
Tunick was involved with a group called Defend the Atlanta Forest, which opposed the construction of an enormous law enforcement training facility in the area often known as Cop City. What Tunick didn’t know, according to his lawyers, was that he’d been placed on a watch list for his actions and that Customs and Border Protection had discussed over email plans to detain him upon his arrival back in the US for “suspected terrorism activities.”
