Greetings, Sweetlings.

I'm so excited to be doing the @creatingblackcharacters Melanin Beam Challenge again this year! Last year's piece is still one of my favorite digital paintings I've ever done, and all the amazing art that comes out of the challenge is so inspiring ✨️

Hiei and Yukina for @creatingblackcharacters' Melanin Beam Challenge this year! Happy birthday!!

Last year I drew Kurama, because I'm able to draw him (and Hiei) from memory, so it let me focus on the research and design adjustments (rather than having to also learn a new character from zero). But also like...while I don't follow the tags, I do occasionally run across YYH fanart, and I've noticed that when people change any of the guys' skin tones it seems to always be Hiei (and/or Yusuke) who they make darker. Which reeks of colorism (in the "darker = more aggressive" manner), so. Fuck that, pretty boy Kurama got to be unambiguously Black and beautiful last year.

This year I went for the twins, because...well, I'll grant that usually folks are only drawing the main four guys, at least from what I've seen, but. Hey y'all who usually draw Hiei with darker skin...how would you draw Yukina, if you haven't yet? If your instinct is to make her look different from him, why is that?

My process, rambling thoughts, and a version without the deckled edges under the readmore!

The fifth post for @creatingblackcharacters Melanin Beam Challenge is a double (because they're both from disney movies), Captain Amelia from Treasure Planet and Cody from The Rescuers Down Under! She was such a cool character with so much energy, you've got to respect her tenacity and leadership skills, but she's also incredibly funny and quick-witted. Treasure Planet had a lot of unique spins on classic aspects of the story, but she's distinctive as a new character, she helps redefine the whole thing. Cody is so believable as a "real kid", even when he's in fantastic situations- and what kid wouldn't love to save a giant (almost mythological) bird, and get to soar through the skies! Because Cody saves the great golden eagle with kindness, she not only rewards him with a beautiful flight, she trusts him enough to share the location of her nest and precious eggs~

The short answer is no. To elaborate, in some of the notes we find in chapter 11, Mahalia talks about Honey. The boat his mom escaped from disappeared in the 1840s, for a general timeframe of when she was alive. Bunny's daughter, Cherie, died in 1982 (based on the second note in chapter 1). Judging by the paintings in her weekend home, Bunny looks to have been in her 20s or so, and thus would've been born in the 1960s, give or take. That's ~120 years between the boat disappearing and Bunny being born, and while we know Mythical Creatures can live extended lives, there's no indication that Weavers can.

More critically, Mahalia's note "A Bittersweet Reunion" closes with "as I near the end," and her "Final Message" sounds like her wanting to pass along some of the most important life lessons she learned before she dies. The final note is found just before the pier where a vision and some dialogue indicate that her actual, physical, personal lantern was left there, after being used to signal Shakin' Bones to come pick her up. All together, it paints a picture of her passing on peacefully, knowingly, when she chose, and with at least one friend close by.

~

As a related aside, I believe a couple things suggest that occasionally, (one of) the heron(s) we see on our path is her spirit, guiding Hazel. The first clue is in the prologue/very first book animation we see, with the heron flying through the sky in the same direction Mahalia is going (right after Catfish says she "vanished long ago"). It's reinforced by the way the heron shows up in a few other chapter animations, and their most frequent presence while Hazel learns the jump-related skills, I think. Plus, the indication that the owl we occasionally follow is Trey's spirit guiding Hazel as well, which establishes the idea as a motif that could be used for other folks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8G7425lfKs

Junichiro Jackson is a 26 years old yokai hunter/private detective in Brooklyn and the eponymous character of the series. The video dropped just days ago.

The kickstarter is already fully backed but still has over a month open. I’m excited to see more. They also have more info there.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teamto/jj?ref=discover_saved_projects&category_id=47

Doctors are to black women what police officers are to black men. That may seem controversial but I believe it to be true and I speak from personal experience.

If you've seen this TikTok you know that a 2016 study showed that 50% of medical students and residents thought that black people couldn't feel pain the same as white people.

And we learned from this video that because of a 1999 study, to this day, there's a black correction factor for the creatinin levels in black people's kidneys, meaning we're less likely to recieve a kidney transplant if needed.

So if you go to a doctor, feel you aren't getting proper treatment or they refuse the treatment you've requested, say to them the following:

If you weren’t already going to spread this advice because black women are at risk, then spread it because it’s applicable to everyone else as well, including you reading this.

Some notes:

1) Posting will occur between August 7th and August 9th!

2) If you want your piece to be queued earlier than that, send it to me via the ask box! I recommend that you keep your descriptions short and simple, that way we can focus on your hard work!

3) If you want your work to be front and center (instead of constricted to my asks, completely valid), you can always post it yourself and then just send it to me/tag me! If you still want your piece to queued, then I ask that you at least wait until the week of the event, and then send it so I can queue it.

4) if you want to write a story! That's fine! Same rules apply- ideally, put it under a readmore, or give us a link and a summary. You know, let the story entice us some lmao.

5) yes, any form of art counts (gifs, yarn items, dolls, whatever) as long as the character involved is 1) Black, Black-coded, or a Black edit and 2) it's respectfully done. That's all!

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"

So, in Hazel's room, she's got a few posters based on real-world musicians: totally-not-Megan-Thee-Stallion, and totally-not-Blink-182. The implication seems to be that these are the SoM universe's version of their real-world counterparts, as well as giving us some sense of Hazel's taste in music.

Later on, there's an old poster for Shakin' Bones—or rather, Waylon "Shakin'" James—that can be found on the Belle of Prospero. Similar to the other posters, it's visually a nod to Lightnin' Hopkins. In this case, however, the Belle of Prospero disappeared in the 1840s, well before Lightnin' Hopkins was born. So this one seems to be more of an easter egg, rather than a potential equivalent like Hazel's posters. (Or I suppose there could just be some time shenanigans. But, while I'm here noting nods to old blues musicians, the name for chapter 11 references another: Muddy Waters.)

Then, in the Town on the Tapestry, all of Roux's posters are based on some of Cab Calloway's. (I'd link something more specific, but Roux has so many base poster designs, and I've not found a collection that includes all of Cab's relevant ones.)

Which, for me, raises the question: is Roux their universe's now-immortal totally-not-Cab-Calloway? Or is he someone else who was a fan of not-Cab, and decided to base his own (magic) promo material on his stuff? This set of posters and their implications are harder for me to be certain on. Both due to the nature of the town, and that Roux shows he can use his illusion magic to create or change signage at will, as opposed to the printed posters.

I realized that, while references to Kooshma exist all the way back to Hope's Crossing (per one of Mahalia's notes, "Sleep and Smoke"), there's no reference to Roux until...well, sometime between 1973 and 1982, by my estimation, via cross-stitches that people made of his symbol. So that's probably the timeframe when he became what he is now.

Details of the points of evidence I've found under the cut, 'cause my post got long again:

-> Phonics For Adults <-

This is highly likely to further exacerbate our water shortages and power outtages. The petition is organised by Syam Nath and our demands are to:

call on the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to suspend approval of large-scale AI data centres until comprehensive environmental, water resource, and infrastructure assessments have been completed, independently reviewed, and made available for public consultation.

The link: https://c.org/DBqKPGTcGx

I really hope that as a country we can actually organise protests and show up. I don't know how much a petition can weigh in on a decision like this and I don't know how willing people are to take the time out of their day to fight against this. This is all we have at the moment.

--

TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

What would you do if you were a queer Black teen girl in the 2010s midwest that suddenly became a witch after reading from an ancient tome?

Now you've got to fight monsters , face off against an evil that's after you ... and also two vampires have feelings for you ( and they dig each other a bit too) . Check out this Black Queer YA Coming of age Magical Girl Witch in the midwest story! The Three Tomes. Live on Kickstarter Card Captor Sakura and Sailor Moon x Twilight and The Vampire Diaries ( minus the racism).

Too often in media, Black women and femmes are seen as disposable. They're stepping stones on the path to the " true relationship". They're the side best friend, they're killed off for the narrative.. Too often in media Black people period are questioned for why they're in fantasy, or supernatural stories. " Why is a mermaid Black?" " Why is that dwarf Black?" " Why is that knight Black?" There's rampant biphobia and questioning of people's queer idenity as nonbinary or fear of being open about your Black queerness period... Too often in media our stories as Black people are only accepted if it centers our pain. Very rarely are we given opportunity in mainstream media to have our whimsical and fun coming of age stories without black trauma at it's core. Our history is part of us, but we can have our " Juno's " , our " Twilights" , our " Hunger Games" ...etc.. too. We are able to be and should be present in all genres and tell all kinds of stories. The Three Tomes aims to dismantle all of this. It's a Queer YA coming of age story about Tammy Harris, age 17. She lives in the Chicago Suburbs and is having her own adventure and dealing with grief and change through the magical lens of witches and vampires. The story centers on her, and a host of queer black and brown characters taking the lead. A Lesbian Witch, A gay Vampire priest, a gay Vampire villian, two bi, and pan vampire boys ( tammy's love interests) and Tammy's best friend who is nonbinary and black/indian mixed. Character Bios here Black people can be whimsical, magical and we deserve to be in fantasy stories.

Support The Three Tomes on Kickstarter as we push towards our stretch goals for full animation of scenes and episode 3. To check out episode one and learn more about the world of The Three Tomes. Check out THE MASTER POST here.