#dumbing down of America

[lenbryant]

Gay math teacher FTW!

[spiderlegsmusic]

Carl Sagan knew all this was coming…

[the-football-chick]

[luderailing]

YIPPEEE FANART FOR UR AU *mwah* -> @cowboy-robooty anyway I made a lot more of this idk why it took so long BIG APOLOGIES!! :’i anyway I hope its alright to @transgender-sweden that I drew your rendition of him bc he is perfect ( I AM SO SORRY IF I GOT HIS OUTFIT WRONG ,, also please forgive me idk how to draw cellos(?) ) also I hope its okay I threw in Romania :] i imagine Alfred traded a kit-kat and a few quarters from his pocket for a reading

not my usual style but it fits with the au better I think and its literally so fun to draw I love your art its so fun and shaped and cool :]] I will probably make more I just really wanted to post this lmfao.

[eerna]

oh my god the duality of hearing “look, I didn’t want to be a halfblood“ in a properly 12-year-old-edgy-boy voice while seeing the letter sigma being used as E yet again

[dumbbullet]

me when the male vocalist does a pretty run or a vocal growl or changes up the notes in the song

[cantsayidont]

October 1940. Third on the list of original JSA members who didn't seem straight was Al Pratt, the Golden Age Atom. Al was a student at Calvin College, constantly pushed around for being short and skinny (and implicitly for being Jewish, although that was never spelled out) and rudely dismissed by a girl he liked, Mary James, as a "spineless little amoeba." Dejected, Al buys dinner for a washed-up boxing trainer named Joe Morgan, who suggests that he can "make a li'l Superman" of Al in less than a year. Al suggests that the two of them go to live on his uncle's old farm, where they spend the next year in an intense training regime to build Al's physique.

It's important here to note a conundrum in the popular attitudes of this period: While boxing was considered an appropriately macho pursuit, interest in "physical culture" for its own sake was more suspect and might well have been read as gay (in part because fitness magazines were a way to see nude or mostly nude men that might get past the censorship and obscenity laws of the time). Also, the context is suggestive: Al drops out of college for an entire year to live with a man at least twice his age and spend a lot of time getting mostly naked with him to train. Moreover, after a year, Al expresses his wish for Joe to continue living with him:

In the subsequent issue, Al — who is now so strong he keeps accidentally breaking things — has apparently given up on Mary James, although Joe gives him a push in that direction. Joe seems self-conscious about the age difference between him and Al (and presumably the other Calvin College students in their area), but he and Al continue to live together for a few months. By ALL-AMERICAN COMICS #30 (September 1941), Joe has apparently moved out and started his own health camp. Al resumed his pursuit of Mary, although she was still often contemptuous of him as too meek and timid, unaware that he routinely put on a mask to beat people up and fight crime. They were still dating as of the Atom's final Golden Age solo appearance in FLASH COMICS #104 in 1949.

The modern retelling of the Atom's origin in SECRET ORIGINS #25 makes some changes to the Golden Age version, suggesting that Al merely spent weekends with Joe on the farm for a year rather than living there with him, and asserting that Joe left as soon as Al became the Atom rather than months later. However, in this version, Joe's departure reduces Al to tears and sobbing:

(As alluded to in the above panels, ALL-STAR SQUADRON Annual #1 (1982) tried to link the origins of the Atom, Wildcat, and the Guardian by claiming that Joe Morgan had a split personality and trained all three men under different names. This didn't make a lot of sense — the man who trained Ted Grant, "Socker" Smith, was a heavyweight champion prizefighter, not a trainer, and the origin of Wildcat involved Ted inadvertently killing Smith in the ring after gangsters slipped a poisoned needle into his glove!)

Al Pratt's Silver Age guest appearances in THE ATOM indicate that he was still single by 1968 — THE ATOM #36 has some of his married friends trying to fix him up, and he thinks to himself, "I've been so busy as the Atom in the past--I've sort of let romance pass me by!" Modern stories established that he and Mary James were married for a while, although she died a few years later, and that Grant Emerson (Damage) was their son (although Al thought the boy died as an infant). However, it's hardly uncommon for gay or bisexual men to marry women or even have kids, and the sight of Al sobbing at the departure of Joe Morgan doesn't make it seem like his feelings for Joe were exactly platonic, even if you don't want to read too much into their training montage and cohabitation.

[not-safe-for-democracy]

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

you know where you don’t have to read long texts anymore to succeed btw? the upcoming SAT redesign, which has a character limit on passages of 900 characters including spaces and publications. less than three and a half tweets is the absolute max students will be asked to comprehend (and most of the passages are substantially shorter than that) for a test allegedly designed to determine readiness for college level work.

[chartreuxcatz]

American: “Hey has anyone else had this experience?”

Non-American: “Have you considered that not everyone is American? Do you know that your experiences are not universal? This post is disgustingly American-centric, you stupid ethnocentric nationalistic fat racist-”

[lenbryant]

Oh, Texas. Really? Replace school counselors with unqualified pastors? How dumb does America have to get?

[dragonfruitsoup]

i need everyone to take a hot second and think about rookie hero fatgum who spends two years working in boston and makes it his Identity.

of course he chooses a port city when he gets back to japan. it reminds him of home ('tai, you were there two yea-.' 'HOME!!!!')

[the-football-chick]

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance...

~~Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[axellis-archv-2]

hey *takes what was supposed to be just a visualization in case i ever wanted to draw overhallidays place in the future and then spends 4 hours on it

[wolf-skins]

nvm the americans in the notes going “i live in america you don’t want privatized healthcare” are normies and fine it’s the fucking americans going LISTEN HERE YOU FUCKS

americans stop pretending you’re the main characters in the story and eat my entire ass

[feelingbitch]

just read that the far right party in austria also wants to ban drag shows now :) screams YOU DONT NEED TO COPY EVERY BAD SHIT THEY DO IN THE US IMMEDIATELY IT IS NOT GOOD