#no. exploit it.

[veveisveryuncool]

it's not often, but even kirby gets spooked sometimes

[visenyaism]

do you have any ideas about why so many students are struggling with literacy now? I know that illiteracy and reading comprehension have been issues for years and most americans read at like a 5th grade reading level but I’m curious why it seems to be worse now (pandemic? no child left behind?)

It is everything. There’s not one answer. I could talk about this forever so instead I set a five minute timer on my phone and wrote a list of as many of the many things that are causing this on a systemic level that I could think of:

It’s parents not reading with their kids (a privilege, but some parents have that privilege to be able to do this and don’t.)

It’s youtube from birth and never being bored.

It’s phasing out phonics for sight words (memorizing without understanding sounds or meaning) in elementary schools in the early aughts.

It’s defunding public libraries that do all the community and youth outreach.

It’s NCLB and mandating standardized tests which center reading short passages as opposed to longform texts so students don’t build up the endurance or comprehension skills.

It’s NCLB preventing schools from holding students back if they lack the literacy skills to move onto the next grade because they can’t be left behind so they’re passed on.

It’s the chronic underfunding of ESL and Special Ed programs for students who need extra literacy support.

It’s the cultural devaluing of the humanities in favor of stem and business because those make more money which leads to a lot of students to completely disregard reading and writing.

It’s the learning loss from covid.

It’s covid trauma manifesting in a lot of students as learned helplessness, or an inability to “figure things out” or push through adversity to complete challenging tasks independently, especially reading difficult texts.

It’s covid normalizing cheating and copying.

It’s increasing phone use.

It’s damage to attention span exacerbated by increased phone use that leaves you without an ability to sit and be bored ever without 2-3 forms of constant stimulation.

It’s shortform video becoming the predominant form of social media content as opposed to anything text-based.

It’s starting to also be generative AI.

It’s the book bans.

what did I miss.

[kapitaali]

[sadclowncentral]

for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the "question only a human can answer" which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[lilbreadbun]

And then I noticed that jinx’s balloon she flies in on has bunny ears painted on it. And markings on the side to match her little goggles

Pain. Suffering even

[nugothrhythms]

Just one more reason to not use Spotify -_-

Link to story here

[emperornorton47]

[eff-plays]

Scene I can't put into my fic #5748574: Hiraeth bullying the elderly

[alwaysbewoke]

Congo💔🕊️

We really cannot be free until we all are free.

[feathered-serpents]

If anyone gets this ask

This is fake

This is a false story using a separate real fundraiser you can find here's, words and an amalgamation of images on a new blog to scam people into donating money.

The "donate to help my cat/dog" scams have upgraded to exploiting an ongoing genocide to try and scam good people out of their money. This is disgusting. This is one of the most heartless scams I have ever seen

[rainbowpopeworld]

[tiger-grace]

Steph: I think we should eat the rich

Bruce, a billionaire, sitting in his grand dining hall with his expensively hobbied family living in a multi million dollar manor, being attended to by a family butler: …that’s great, honey

[punk-rockdyke]

born to be a 90s teenager working at blockbuster, who recommends customers the weirdest goriest horniest movie they have ever seen. forced to post on letterboxd.

[platoapproved]

armand & louis playing out echoes of his relationship with marius

[chaoticdesertdweller]