Learning Experiences

I've seen quite a few posts now where someone says that Iron Lung was their first horror movie, and that they're thinking about wading a little deeper into the ocean of blood that is this genre. So, off of my list of 300+ horror movies, I offer a few select recommendations.

If you liked the practical effects blood and grossness: check out The Void. This 2016 cosmic horror nightmare crowdfunded its creature effects for a little more than $80,000...and frankly they did miracles with it. Grotesque, horrible miracles, but miracles nonetheless! An additional rec, though for a much higher budget ($15 million in 1980), is 1982's The Thing. Practical effects and sticky, slimy, horrific monsters. Good stuff.

If you want another slow burn locked-in nightmare: watch Skinamarink. Instead of a grown man in a submarine, it's two tiny children in a house where all the doors and windows have vanished...and something is in there with them. Warning for harm to very small children. I recommend watching with headphones, in as dark a room as you can stand, with your phone out of arm's reach. This one was divisive in the same way that Iron Lung has been divisive: people called it too slow. I loved it for that exact thing.

Want to visit another ocean with big fucking fish monster? Check out Underwater. Survivors of an accident on an underwater drilling rig must cross the ocean floor with rapidly dwindling oxygen to reach safety...but, of course, they're not alone. I cried over a stuffed bunny rabbit toy in this one, y'all. For a slightly different take, watch Sea Fever. The crew of a fishing boat runs into trouble far out on the ocean. While it takes place predominantly on the surface, it still has the elements of ocean isolation and Big Fucking Fish Monster.

For an experience of apocalyptic space survival, try: Silent Running. This 1972 flick isn't really classed as a horror movie, but it has some powerful horror elements nonetheless. One man (and his two voiceless robots) drift in space in a greenhouse carrying some of the last of Earth's trees. The ending of Iron Lung reminded me STRONGLY of the ending of Silent Running. And for a very realistic story, watch the historical drama Apollo 13 from 1995. The tension in that movie is on a par with Iron Lung's. The potential apocalypse is going on in the background, because the movie is implicitly set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the less-than-noble reasons behind early space exploration.

And if you want to trip balls in a locked room: watch 1408. It's one man locked in one evil fucking room as he tries to prove that it's not actually haunted. (It's no spoiler that he's about to be proven violently wrong.) Strong comedy elements here, but they don't break the overall tension and drama. Never thought I'd be so freaked out by a mint on a pillow, but here we are!

How to identify, and then deal with, your emotions

Emotional regulation skills

Conflict resolution skills

Creating and enforcing boundaries

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy skills

Emotional intelligence ideals to aim for

Axes of self-care/wellbeing

Self-care self-evaluation (find out where you’re starting)

How to make a self-care checklist

How to start a self-care habit

Reparenting resources

Crash Course Psychology

KhanAcademy: Understanding the Self and Society (some units more relevant than others)

Emotional education activities for children and teens

Free Website has been updated to v1.7.1 and it's still as free as ever. It's a CC0 one-file website that's also its own guide to learning basic HTML.

Free Website has been updated to v1.7.1 and it's still as free as ever. It's a CC0 one-file website that's also its own guide to learning basic HTML.

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

iFixit

iFixit is a wiki-based site that teaches people how to fix almost anything. It was started in 2003 by Luke and Kyle, in a dorm room at California Polytechnic University when they tried to fix an old iBook together. With no instructions, they tinkered, fiddled, broke some tabs and lost some screws. But they fixed it. When they decided to start selling spare parts themselves, iFixit was born. It now hinges around its step-by-step repair guides, which are free to download and use under Creative Commons licenses.

Now, anyone can create a repair manual for a device on iFixit and anyone can edit the existing set of manuals to improve them. The site’s founders say that thousands of people make use of the guides every day.

“We’ve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids,” say the pair. “From New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff.

“Our philosophy is that if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Once you disassemble, repair, and put back together your laptop or iPod, you have a much better understanding of what goes into it. It’s astounding how just 20 minutes of work can make an iPod good as new – but most people have no idea that there are instructions available to make the work easy. And why should they? Apple tells everyone that the battery isn’t user-serviceable.

“That’s where we come in, filling the ecosystem hole that Apple created by manufacturing a device without an end-of-life maintenance and disposal strategy.”

Restart Wiki

This is a place where members of the Restart community share tips for mending appliances and gadgets with people who are starting out, or whose knowledge lies elsewhere.

This wiki won’t show you how to fix a particular make and model of device: they leave this to the various fix-it websites and disassembly videos. (You can also get help with a device on social media using #SOSRestart). Rather, contributors to this page concentrate on basic and widely applicable principles, for example soldering and how to stay safe while fixing things.

The site is aimed at anyone with a curiosity about how things work and how to fix them. No prior knowledge is assumed. In the spirit of spreading knowledge as widely as possible, everyone is welcome to read it – and to share it. Anyone is welcome to reuse anything on the wiki, under the terms of the Creative Commons ShareAlike Licence 3.0.

it creates a temporary email address that will delete itself after ten minutes (though you can extend it if you need it longer)

It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.

Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.

Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.

Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)

Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!

You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!

If you want it in a simple phrase:

Guilt and shame are NOT the same emotion!

Theyre very similar, but theres a key difference. Guilt comes from an internal source and shame external.

What do I mean? Well, when you feel guilt, its because you've betrayed your own morals. Youve done something you view as bad, and you feel guilty for defying your own moral code.

Shame, however, is external and comes from our individual societies, and has nothing to do with moral codes (in the way guilt does). Shame comes from how OTHERS perceive you. You go to school, and wet yourself, you feel shame because the other kids point and laugh, they think less of you now. You may know it was an accident, and accidents happen, and thats okay! But because other people now think less of you for it, you feel bad.

Typing this from Graphene now, in fact. But, both of those take the Android Open Source Project, without all the bloatware--and largely de-Google the whole thing. They give you much more control over privacy and what the apps you choose to install can do and access on your phone.

I know Graphene sandboxes everything, including the optionally installed Google Play Services which a lot of apps unfortunately require to run. (Lineage uses an alternative to Play Services instead.) So, you can install what would normally be unacceptably intrusive apps and just lock them away from pulling any funny shit with your data, or phoning home. Including the couple of Google things I do still keep around.

I also prefer running much more transparent, privacy-respecting open source apps where possible. Besides the transparency, I'd rather avoid the shitty tech corps entirely where I can. There are pretty good alternatives available for a lot of the usual suspects.

An alternative app store:

My credentials are that I have 700 songs I didn't pay for on a refurbished ipod from 2007 and it's AWESOME. (PS backmarket.com for refurbished tech they have lots of old ipods if you're into that. But also phones and laptops and shit for cheap.)

First off. Reddit.com/r/piracy forever and ever. Go through their masterpost they have literally anything you could ever want. You will never pay for media of any sort again. The people of reddit are smarter than me.

If you currently use Spotify and wish to stop, here is where I would start:

1. Bandcamp!! If you want to financially support your favorite artists it's Bandcamp.

Plug your playlists into merch table they will do the hard work for you here <3

2. Spotidownloader

Put your playlists in they will spit a download link out it's so easy. All the metadata is there and everything.

They can only do 100 songs at a time so it's not ideal for a bigger library but it works fine for what it is.

3. Lucida

Awesome for full albums or individual songs if you're just looking for a few things and not transferring a whole library.

3. Newpipe

https://spotalike.com/en

A handy youtube clone that's good for streaming or downloading music and videos.

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

I started doing it when after brain surgery my husband had trouble forming responses to questions for a while, and realized that the habit was helping my students engage more truthfully with me.

Some examples:

Yes/No: “Did you clean up your room like I told you?”

This/That: “Did you clean up already, or do you still need to do that?”

Yes/No: “Are you going to sit quietly?”

This/That: “Are you ready to sit and do our quiet activity, or do you need some time by yourself first?”

Yes/No: “Are you doing anything fun for your birthday?”

This/That: “Are you having a party on your birthday, or are you going to relax?”

I think many children (and adults!) are averse to telling adults “No,” especially when a command is implied. (“Did you clean your room?” “Are you going to sit quietly?” Hmmm if I say ‘no’ I will be in trouble with the adult.) So they are actually pretty likely to just lie and say what they think you want to hear.