Fav bit of news today is that the corporate Adobe account on bsky made their first post and almost immediately deleted it bc artists piled up on them and were absolutely RUTHLESS. I love violence and revenge

(For those like me who are procrastinating setting up a bsky account: https://futurism.com/adobe-bullied-bluesky )

For reference

I believe this is what the children refer to as "a ratio".

Some folks were also cursing them.

A pop-up space-age bar. A redesign of Joe Colombo’s from the 1960’s

That is awesome.

If Trump can disappear green card holders for protesting war, he can disappear you. If he can disappear visa holders for criticizing him, he can disappear you. If he can disappear asylum seekers for tattoos, he can disappear you. We must speak out now — before there is no one left to speak out.

James Somerton is working as a wedding photographer with a plagiarized portfolio, btw

YoutubeDrama thread where this came out.

He truly seems incapable of not passing off others work as his own.

Club Bingo, 21-23 Fremont St, Las Vegas – 1962

"Club BINGO" is extremely the name I'd come up with on the fly for a generic high roller casino in a game I was running.

Dear Game masters, don't ever feel bad about a terrible name you give something on the fly.

'Shelob', the giant spider from the Lord of the Rings, illustration by Ted Nasmith, 1987.

Of course this just triggered Shelob's transformation sequence and second health bar.

Arc Droid by YeongJin Jeon

Concept art for Treasure Planet (2002)

Treasure Planet was an underrated movie, but that's the fate of most sci-fantasy.

Dragonrider

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.

For those of us who aren't from the states, what - apart from apparently a shitty law - is that?

A law passed by Bush that cut funding to public schools whose students didn't improve every year on a set of standardized tests- meaning not that each student was supposed to improve during their time in school, but that this year's first graders had to do better on the tests than last year's first graders, and next year's had to do better still. Obviously this was really difficult over the short term and completely impossible over the long term.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

The program also incentivized schools to cut their losses on struggling students, expelling or encouraging them to drop out to bring the test averages up instead of being able to spend the effort to actually help them.

No Child Left Behind was an absolute disaster for education, poorly hidden behind an insidious name. The real goal of it was not just to defund education (in order to reallocate those funds to appease Republican lobbyists), but to stop teaching critical thinking. Not only did struggling students get left behind, but by prioritizing students who did well on standardized tests, the focus shifted entirely to teaching students memorization without understanding context, and how to guess their best on a test in order to pass. The focus became passing tests, not actual learning. In the process, students were taught that they don't need to understand the material, they just need to know how to follow directions and give the answers deemed correct by the school boards. They were deprived of agency in their own educations.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

No Child Left Behind was devastating. We knew it then and we see it now.

Its even worse now that they stopped teaching phonics while prioritizing "sight words"

Theyre literally teaching kids to recognize words they want them to know while preventing them from ever learning how to read, which means you can't learn new words, you can't sound it out and ask someone what it means - the kids can't fucking read. Gen alpha can't fucking read. They can only read "approved sight words"

I was in education during No Child Left Behind, before my medical career. I remember how much of a clusterfuck the scheme was. The idea was to have yearly incremental improvement, each year a school was to improve the number of students who passed the standardized test. If a schools improvement numbers stagnated or went back for a certain number of years the state would intervene and take over the school and implement restructuring. This could mean firing all administration and staff. This could mean privatization. It really meant increase of funding for the school. The most ridiculous thing was this was to culminate in a year (I think 2012) in which it was expected that 100% of students would pass the standardized test. Everyone was to pass, EVERYONE. Which is impossible. This included students with severe developmental disabilities such as severe autism, downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, etc. This included students with severe behavioral disabilities. This included students with issues that are out of teachers control such as poor home lives, abuse, neglect, or poverty.

The result was that schools across the country were failing their mandate. Many schools were caught fudging the numbers. In fact I think the only schools that were meeting their mandate were fudging the numbers. The scheme collapsed after that.

Death (1902) by Jacek Malczewski