Pep, 24, she/they. I'm an adult and will treat this blog as such. No gods, no cops, no nazis, no problems. No antis, no exclus. ao3: ColoredGayngels. header by khaliissa.
Note: Due to time zone restrictions, I typically watch episodes the following Tuesday on YouTube. I will tag spoilers for 1 week for general episodes and indefinitely for major events such as character death, major plot points, etc.
it could be worse. i could be a sophomore in high school
if youre a sophomore in high school just know that youre literally at rock bottom right now i promise it gets better from there
hey can you do me a favour?? Can you go get that nice pristine sketchbook or journal you've been hoarding and put some kind of mark on the first page?
Anything will do, like a smudge of graphite or a blob of ink, or perhaps a very scribbly dinosaur. Just put something there. Please, or the dinosaur will be sad.
I was SO SAD for this dinosaur that I grabbed the nearest notebook (a calendar) and drew a little sailing ship for him
oh thank goodness!
SKETCHBOOKS ARE FOR MESSING UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THEY ARE!!!! It's right in the name! Like @sleepnoises said a while ago, they're for the quick putdowning of ideas! to catch the stuff that comes out of your brain!
(I don't mean to say that pretty sketchbook pages are bad, but it's important for your health to do quick scribbly stuff too. if not in a book then perhaps on small scraps of paper)
The dinosaur is very glad to see so many doodles in the notes!
Also lots of comments with very good suggestions for people who have a hard time starting, like starting on the second page, just signing & dating it, numbering the pages, or using the first page to put samples of all your usual pencils and pens and such.
Here's how I started my new sketchbook, which I got for 5 dollars at Dollarama.
I would have drawn on that first blank page instead of just signing it, but it was partially glued to the endpaper and wouldn't lie flat.
(Also, since the sketches are about making velvet mites with little wired legs, I must mention that if/when I get around to doing that it'll be posted on @vincentbriggs where all my non-dinosaur arts go.)
not me realizing that with tumblr moving the icons to the side, it eliminates xkit, which was situated at the top. what a scumbag move
xkit rewritten, which should be used instead of the shambling corpse of old xkit, lives in the addon bar of your browser! And it handled the new layout like a champ, removing all of the garbage (if configured to do so). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xkit-rewritten/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkit-rewritten/ehgbadgnkmeeldglkmnplolneidgpbcm
they call it budew cause you look at the bud and go ew!
You will go to hell when you die.
There's a handful of notes on this going "well fuck you, do you know how hard it is to BE the speaker and not have anyone greet you?" and uh, yes, yes I do, because I did those stupid ass soft skills/resilience/insert other assorted nonsense workshops for schools for a living for a while, and I still agree with this.
The key to being an effective speaker is the ability to understand your audience. You need to understand people in order to build a rapport with them. And you need to build a rapport with them in order to effectively guide them from where they are, to where you need them to be.
So. Here is the situation from the perspective of the audience: this random person, whom they have never met before and do not care about, is being paid by employers/school powers that be to come speak on a thing. In other words, the speaker is the one benefitting from being there. Meanwhile, the audience has likely been ordered to be there, for no immediate, tangible benefit in return. It is early in the morning, they are sleep-deprived and under-caffeinated, they have a shit ton of stuff on their to-do list, they are unconvinced whatever the speaker is going to say is going to be of any use or relevance whatsoever, and so they see this talk as a waste of time that they could instead be spending on sleep or at least finishing off things that are actually necessary for work/school. And now this rando, whom I repeat, is supposed to be the service provider, whose presence is already a pain, is asking for even more effort on the audience's part by asking them to smile and be chipper. All before saying a single other word that might convince said audience that they are going to get any benefit whatsoever out of being there. Fuck that.
You gotta understand, you are not some rock star that people are already invested in and actively want to see. Those get to do the "scream! I can't hear you! LOUDER!" thing. The fact of the matter is, you are probably someone your audience has no interest in seeing, and until you give them a reason for wanting to be there, you cannot ask them for even more emotional effort. That's not going to endear them to you.
I am by no means a particularly great speaker, but I can tell you now that I have gotten far more immediate rapport and engagement by simply going "hello hello, morning, how is everyone?" and then when I get the predictably unenthusiastic mass groaning and grumbling, and unenergetic "morning"s back in return, replying "heh, big mood. It's final project season innit; how sleep deprived are y'all? --yeouch, intense, well I'll try my best to keep this as painless as I possibly can; I'm here today to talk about--" etc etc. Simple, sympathetic, and while it's not the most energetic and enthusiastic thing in the world, it puts me on "their" side and opens a connection that I can build on for the rest of the talk, instead of instantly making my audience feel 10x more tired and hostile.
If you are not a speaker being paid to be there, but are instead someone giving a presentation for an assignment or presenting a paper or whatever, then I've found that being sincere and a little self-deprecating, possibly just a tiny bit vulnerable works pretty well: "Oh god, so full disclosure, I don't speak very often and I'm sweating bullets right now, and also I tend to babble like a bullet train when I'm nervous so if at any point you cannot understand me please ask me to slow down, but I have a thing I need to present, and I think it's pretty cool, and hopefully you do too." Your audience has probably been in your shoes before, and are now inclined to be nice to you out of sympathy.
In both cases, it's about understanding your listeners and where you stand in relation to them and using that to build that initial connection. You cannot demand connection; it never fucking works.
draptorronin asked:
Why do scientists always talk about radiocarbon dating, but never radiocarbon marriage?
facts-i-just-made-up answered:
When you have a half life of 5,730 years, monogamy can be a pretty bleak prospect.
i was gonna say it Does have a tail thats what the cord is thats why its called a mouse!!!! and then i remembered most mouses are cordless now and got fucked up bc IT IS A HAMSTER and now immfucked up bc like. technology has advanced so must thay mice have changed species
it matters to me that you all know i was wizard high when i wrote that
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
A warrrior with abundant osteoptimism and one more skeleptical re: bone toughness.
Op I want you to know that “I don’t drink enough milk to be that confident in my bones” is now something I will say at every opportunity
This is going to be an unpleasant post but I need to talk to y’all about heat stroke in dogs. I am an ER vet and I am seeing firsthand the death toll that this heat wave is taking on our pets. In the past two weeks, for every single weekend shift I have worked, we have had at least one DOA with a body temperature over 107 degrees. One of them had simply been on a 20 minute walk at 5pm. All of them were brachycephalic (short faced breeds like pugs and french bulldogs). Their owners were in shock that this could happen so quickly, and their grief lingers with me.
If you have a dog, and especially if you have a brachycephalic dog, you need to familiarize yourself with the signs of heat stroke. Do not take your dogs out in the heat of the day, be aware of the pavement temperature, and always have fresh water available for them. When I am outdoors with my dog I am checking on him constantly. This heat wave is extremely serious; I need you to keep yourself and your pets safe.
