Two fields off from the scarecrow

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(unofficial artfight revenge attack on @lux-et-astra, feat. her version of Birdie from this post and her lovely fanfic!)

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.

A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.

This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.  

THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.

You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind. 

People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.

In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture. 

Therefore, I present to you: 

THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS

–Go on a walk

–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.

–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching

–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind

–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift 

–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:

–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.

–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see. 

–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in. 

–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.) 

–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety. 

–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel. 

–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless. 

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:

–List the capitals of all the U.S. states

–List the capitals of all the European countries

–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors. 

–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.

–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.  

Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself.  I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too. 

Where is Montagu?

We’re making a big change to how account deletion works on Tumblr, and we’re really excited about it, because this is something that some of you have been requesting for… well… a literal decade.

Before today, when you deleted your Tumblr account, it was immediate and permanent. Occasionally, this resulted in Very Sad Times. Even though we’ve tried to make it super difficult to accidentally delete your account, this is something that still happens a lot. Like, a lot. There’s also plenty of folks who delete their account on purpose, but then regret it shortly afterward. Worst of all, if your account was hacked, and then deleted by the hacker, there was no way to get it back. 

All of these problems are *poof* no more. As of today, when you delete your account, we will keep your data for 30 days. Your account will remain recoverable during that time, and you can contact us within that 30 day window if you’d like us to restore your account.

Eventually, we hope to make this process a bit easier, and allow you to restore your account with a single click of a button. For right now, though, you’ll need to contact us via tumblr.com/support and choose the category “Account Access” > “I have deleted my account or blog by accident”. 

FAQs

How do I delete my account? Does that process look different now?

You can follow the steps here to delete your account on the web or through the mobile app, which works pretty much the same way as before. You’ll notice we’ve updated the confirmation screen to reflect the new process, though.

Does a deleted account still appear on Tumblr during this 30 day window?

Nope. As soon as you submit the request to delete your account, all of your blogs will no longer be accessible (they’ll 404), no one will be able to message you, your posts will no longer appear in search results, and you won’t be able to log in anymore. This happens right away, not 30 days later. Deleted accounts still behave exactly as they always have.

What about my email address and username? Will those become available again immediately after account deletion, like they did before?

Notably, no, they will not. In order to make it possible for the account to be restored during the 30 day window, the username and email address must remain associated with the account during that time. So they won’t be available to register again until 30 days after you’ve deleted your account.

If you’re deleting your account, and you already know that you’d like to use the same username or email address on a new account immediately afterward, we recommend that you change your username and email address before deleting the account. That way, they will become available right away, instead of being on hold for 30 days. 

What if I’ve accidentally deleted one of my sideblogs, but not my entire account?

If you delete a sideblog, it will be deleted right away, and cannot be restored. We can only restore an entire account (which will restore all of its blogs along with it). 

Is this feature retroactive? Can you restore the account I deleted two years ago?

As much as we would like this to be possible, the answer is no. We still haven’t perfected the art of time travel, so all accounts deleted before today are still deleted for good. This new change will only apply to accounts which are deleted after this announcement is posted.

Where can I learn more about the account deletion process?

being brave and joining in for doodle time!!!! alas the one i did for you was less good than the practice doodles so here have some frogs