The Mindless

now I know that there's no way for me to respond to this without a bunch of fans of the modern adaptations ruining my inbox for the next week, but there's no evidence of Waluigi - or indeed Luigi - in any of the contemporary versions of the Mario-Wario sagas. The name "Wario" itself is a later invention, held to be a pun on warui that likely emerged after the adoption of Japanese scripts in the Koopa States.

The conflict between Mario and his "boyhood rival" was one over political influence on his home island and Mario's long absences - in particular his trip to Sarasaland. While later Sarasan sources would heavily reference Mario's brother, he is absent from both the preceding narrative and the unrest in Mario's homeland. The historical consensus is that the Sarasaland journey was one of Mario's earliest wanderings, with his brother attempting to manage affairs in his absence and proving unfit. The invention of a separate "Wario" character and its development into an explicit coup d'etat were later poetic creations, as is distancing of the "Wario" figure from the later depictions of Mario's brother as the more cowardly and reserved "Luigi".

(As an aside: "Mario Land" is a mistranslation. The original Mushroomer and Sarasan chronicles are better translated as "the land of Mario", without connotations of ownership. The modern scholastic consensus is that it refers to Yoshi's Island, where Mario and his brother spent their youth and later established a small manor, not, as commonly depicted, a "Mario Castle". The emphasis on Mario as king of "Mario Land" was a mostly successful political maneuver by the Yoshis to retain coequal status with the Mushroom Kingdom heartlands in the face of 18th-century expansionist pan-Mushroomism.)

The National Literacy Institute is selling professional development courses, it is in their financial interest to tell you scary numbers, and they are not transparent about the sources of most of their claims. I'm not accusing them of lying about any of it, because I can't prove it, but let's find better sources just to be safe.

I went directly to the OECD, who have done international studies into what they call adult competencies―reading, maths, and interfacing with technology, considered the skills someone needs "to be fully functional in one's society." These data are especially important because they've been repeated; we know what the world looks and has looked like, in snapshots a decade apart.

You're encouraged to dive into the bar graphs yourself if you're curious, but I'm gonna distill a couple of really scary figures for you that are relevant to the OP. You might want to sit down for these.

Only 44% of Americans and 51% of Canadians have the reading skills necessary to fully function in their society―being able to engage with art, recognize bias in their news sources, and understand the political platforms that they're voting on. Ten years earlier, these were 50% of Americans and 52% of Canadians.

Here's the gut punch, though: 28% of Americans (up from 18%) and 19% of Canadians (up from 16%) cannot read anything more complex than bullet-point lists or short, single-clause sentences.

We tend to think "illiterate" means, like, "doesn't know what the alphabet is," but you can't tell me it doesn't also apply to someone who can't remember the beginning of a sentence by the time they get to the end of it. This is not a learning disability! Broadly speaking, the people reflected in that statistic do not have measurable developmental or physical disabilities; they simply were improperly taught, never learned, and now cannot read the written word.

Tumblr pissing on the poor. Booktokers who "only read the dialogue." Everyone you know who only reads the headlines and never the articles. The odds are good that most of these people are literally, functionally, illiterate. Sorry if this scares you.

Closest match: Hottonia palustris genome assembly, chromosome: 9 Common name: Water Violet

PLAYING FLASH GAMES TO RAISE MONEY FOR MY INCREDIBLE FRIEND CLAIRE BECAUSE SHE NEEDS RENT MONEY HOP IN NOW!!!!!!!!