Haven't done an icon set update in a bit. They're coming along pretty well! Got ~120 of em scanned and cleaned up, with maybe 50 left to process.

the great stand ⬆️⬆️⬆️

celebrity up to bake off cancer

Big fan of FireAlpaca's new free timelapse feature, except you can only export your timelapse in GIF format so now I have an almost 1GB 6 minute gif of me drawing block men

patch notes 1-4

( '!' and '!!' indicate larger changes that you might be more inclined to go back to read - '!' is more little additions, '!!'' is more substantial changes to existing content/larger additions)

(chapters are also linked for ease of access)

overall: -dialogue edited to be more natural/in-character - long paragraphs broken up so they're easier to read - ik's internal monologue made more consistent with her characterisation - several chapters titles changed to either be funnier, more concise, better in general, or some combination of the three

ch one: - removed/changed some of the more dated references/jokes (left in the 'who the fuck are you' joke though) - cut some of ik's conversation with mammon about religion towards the end of the chapter

ch two: - made asmo helping ik with her uniform a bit more concise of a scene (also added a little exchange towards the end of the scene that i think is cute :) )

ch three: - !! a lot of levi's tsl info-dump has been changed, and he and ik have some more dialogue with each other separate from just the info-dumping - ! lucifer and ik have a new little interaction when he wakes her from a nap in the latter half of the chapter

ch four: - satan calls ik 'imp-sized' instead of just 'tiny' in their conversation in the first half - corrected solomon and a demon in the class accidentally misgendering professor elderflower - ik does some more thinking before texting solomon to ask about the apparent tax evasion

please tungle why won't you allow levels of indented bullet pointsssss T^T

finally getting around to HHhH and feeling simultaneously sort of charmed and genuinely confronted by this reading experience……..mister binet what are you cooking

They redesigned the messaging window on web and I hate it. Not any of the layout changes but specifically that the background colour is no longer the background colour of the blog you're talking to. I want to sit in my mutual's house!

btw best time-wastey thing in the world is going onto neocities and checking out all the recently updated sites bc u can get anything from crypto-promotion pages to 13 year olds who made a site to showcase all their anime fanart

You cannot resist the whole of the military industrial complex, especially the US American sector, without holding compassion and sympathy for veterans.

I think your new format for Devotion looks very neat! Have you tested how it looks on mobile/in a mobile format? I'm asking because I read almost exclusively on my phone and sometimes you come across fics that clearly look incredible on web, but are (practically) unreadable on a mobile browser.

thats actually my main concern about this! i also read fic exclusively on my phone, but i write on my laptop. ive been trying to figure out how to get the right-edge-aligned text to look as natural as the left-edge, but im actually not very tech-savvy..... ill have to figure out a way for it to look less weird when characters on the right side talk. right now, on mobile, it looks like this, which is a little wonky

i dont know how to make the text stay purely to the side of the image. im wondering if theres a site out there that makes fake pmd textboxes, it would make my life easier. im gonna look around for that after breakfast today

someone on the fanfiction subreddit is throwing a hissy fit about justified text saying it makes the spaces between words different sizes but I use that formatting always, everywhere, and I've never had different sized spacing between words??

is that a thing that happens? like I've legitimately never seen what they were describing

hey does anyone know if there's a way to put text in columns on ao3...

tumblr changed the alignment of the blog dropdown on the mobile notifications screen and i physically recoiled + "eugh"'d

Why Kids Aren't Falling in Love With Reading - It's Not Just Screens

A shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story. A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984. I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis, said LaGarde, who taught that age group. A friend recently told me that her child’s middle-school teacher had introduced To Kill a Mockingbird to the class, explaining that they would read it over a number of months—and might not have time to finish it. “How can they not get to the end of To Kill a Mockingbird?” she wondered. I’m right there with her. You can’t teach kids to love reading if you don’t even prioritize making it to a book’s end. The reward comes from the emotional payoff of the story’s climax; kids miss out on this essential feeling if they don’t reach Atticus Finch’s powerful defense of Tom Robinson in the courtroom or never get to solve the mystery of Boo Radley.

... Young people should experience the intrinsic pleasure of taking a narrative journey, making an emotional connection with a character (including ones different from themselves), and wondering what will happen next—then finding out. This is the spell that reading casts. And, like with any magician’s trick, picking a story apart and learning how it’s done before you have experienced its wonder risks destroying the magic.

-- article by katherine marsh, the atlantic (12 foot link, no paywall)

can someone with a twitter account at the anarchist library for me and ask them to add the option of aligning text to the left in their bookbuilder? justified text is difficult to read for me and plenty of others with various learning disabilities. Also if you didn't know the anarchist library has the best free bookbinding layout maker out there and countless books to use it on so if you wanna get into bookbinding or just prefer reading your theory on paper and have a stapler I highly recommend checking it out