Št'astny_sova

and i need to show you all some of these because ?????

So, esrlier today I was eating lettuce off rhe ground like a borse

I have 33 husbands. One for each day of the month

Fanfic- my dad is regina george

"Noo don't shoot i have a family" rvrryone has a family you idkot. I bave a family of dormice living in my grand pisno anr like z7 uncles. youre not special

When your dreams was to open a flock of seagulls here but there's already a flock of seagulls here

and everyone is posting their 4th of july manis

except this year its very few american flags and red white and blue and stars.

and a LOT of pond scum inspiration

not only did our families live through the horror that was the ussr but now we gotta be reminded of that shit constantly in the community that we're supposed to share as queer people

not to mention that the ussr wasnt even communist it was just fascist. why are u communists using the symbols of fascists. it just looks like ur idolizing a fascist state.

off the top of my head:

the rose (which is more a demsoc/socdem symbol but is a cool looking one)

the three arrows (a very standard 'anti authoritarian leftist' symbol which represents being against fascism monarchy and authoritarian 'communists')

the black cat (a symbol very often used by syndicalists)

the symbolless red and black flags (or any of the diagonal combo anarchist flags)

the raised fist (commonly associated with BLM nowadays but has historically been connected to left wing stuff in general)

or if youre a complete weirdo like me some people identify with the chaos star (most commonly seen in warhammer 40k but originally created by noted anarchist fantasy author michael moorcock)

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

crunchyroll is getting rid of typesetting in their subs. they're going from the good, modern subbing standard (aegisub/ass) - which lets you position, motion-track, and color code text anywhere on the screen - to one worse than what they had 16 years ago (back when their renderer couldn't handle anything fancier than 9-position placement and overlapping text). the one they're moving to (ttml) doesn't let you do any special formatting, just plain text at the top or bottom of the screen. they're doing it because a) they have exclusive licensing rights to a lot of anime, so there's no competition b) they want to make money off of sublicensing to netflix and amazon, but netflix and amazon use the garbage subbing standard c) sony bought crunchyroll a while back and put funimation in charge, and funimation has never given a shit about anime

for a while they were paying their subbers to convert their good subs to the netflix/amazon shitty ones, but they have decided that instead of paying to make good quality subs for their own platform and shitty ones for netflix/amazon (or demanding that netflix/amazon update their subbing standards in order to sublicense the shows, so that everyone has the good ones), they're just going to stop bothering to make the quality subs at all. worse, it seems like they're going through their backlog and converting shows that used to have good subs over to the bad ones.

the article has a TON of examples of shows that would be seriously impacted by this change. two of my faves it mentions are kill la kill (which makes HEAVY use of onscreen text for its punchiness and humor) and komi-san can't communicate (have you tried watching the netflix subs of this? they make the show literally unwatchable. the whole premise of the show is that komi has selective mutism and talks by writing things down, and the netflix subs just... didn't bother subbing any of the text. whole entire key conversations become extended shots of characters scribbling back and forth while you have no way to know what they're saying). some others it doesn't mention that i immediately thought of were shoujo kageki revue starlight (color-coded subs along both the side and the bottom come in clutch for tracking the revue duets simultaneously with the duet dialog) and yuuki yuuna wa yuusha de aru (you need motion-tracked subs for any on-screen group chat conversation to be readable, and yuyuyu has a bunch). and the article's got a bunch more examples from shows i don't know as much about. probably you can think of some of your own faves that this would ruin worst of all, the english fansubbing community has cratered since crunchyroll came on the scene. there's a lot more anime coming out each season, and audiences are used to day-of simulcast, and most of the really good fansubbers went pro or retired and not a lot of new ones have stepped up. so even torrenting or streaming bootlegs won't be viable for getting the speed, quality, and coverage of subs we're used to these days.

the article exhorts you to kick up a fuss - spread the word, complain on social media - and to cancel your crunchyroll account and give "subtitle quality" as your reason. it cites how back in 2017, crunchyroll tried to reduce their video quality, got slammed by their users, and rolled back the change. unfortunately, the sony/funimation takeover happened since then and that leadership doesn't seem to care at all about the quality of their product or what the fans think, so i don't expect them to respond to anything but a credible threat to their bottom line. so, maybe, if we can make a big enough dent in their subscription numbers, then they'll pay attention

and the article doesn't say this, but i'd add: complain to netflix and amazon, as well. any anime you see on those platforms, report the subs and say the quality makes the show unwatchable. consider canceling your subscriptions to those platforms as well, and citing the awful subtitle quality in your reasons, if the main thing you use them for is anime

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"