it's a leap of faith

this is emmett and cullen they are best friends

Stay committed to the state of already BEING IT.

Walk, talk, eat, dance, wear makeup, dress, treat people as you ARE ALREADY THAT PERSON.

EMBODY that state.

FEEL your way into that state.

You will BECOME IT. You are already it.

Getting up at 5:30 every morning because having time to myself in the early hours helps me center myself before starting the day.

Cooking a healthy meal every noon no matter how tiring my day was because providing my body with the nutrients it needs keeps me strong.

Doing my chores every single day because it prevents tasks from piling up and overwhelming me.

Reading, making art or doing handicrafts instead of mindlessly scrolling social media / watching Netflix because it keeps my mind clear and grounded.

Finding different ways to rest instead of napping because sleeping during the day gives me trouble sleeping at night.

"The cost of procrastination is the life you could've lived."

Nov 15.

Day 22/180.

These photos are from last week. I think reallocating time away from work and toward school will help. So thankful for the wisdom and encouragement I’ve gotten from my short time on studyblr today

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that's okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece's black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Simplified)

Disabled Person: YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FOOL!

The United States Government:

In order for disabled people to receive any sort of financial assistant for their housing, food, bills, medical supplies, etc., they cannot ever have more than $2,000 of resources to their name. Ever.

It doesn’t matter what it’s for.

You’re saving up for a new wheelchair?

For college?

To put a downpayment on a house?

Hell man, you just happen to budget for once in your life so that you can have some extra money in case something bad happens?

Your benefits immediately get cut off if you’re a cent over $2,000.

And, even worse, you usually end up having to pay back every dollar the government gave you that month.

So say you get $400. If they find out you’re twenty dollars over the resource limit, you have to give them all $400 back and you undergo an investigation of your funds to see if you will continue getting money.

“What if I spend the money that day?”

Doesn’t matter. In fact, from what I can tell, people who do this are actually put under investigation for fraud.

before the movie came out, Marvel gave him an exclusive preview screening. SOme people were upset because they felt if Marvel was really wanted to thank mantlo, they should have donated money to Mantlo’s family.

Sometimes, at the end of the month, he has no idea what to do with his money because the whole month went by and he still has 400-ish bucks in his account, and he fucking panics because he doesn’t want to get anywhere near 2,000.

And here’s the funnest part of the story!

One day he did a huge commission on Second Life and wound up earning 1500 bucks off of it, and he told the guy to donate it 500 bucks at a time over 3 months. The guy didn’t want to, and just donated all 1500, which put my brother at 2,036 bucks.

The state IMMEDIATELY (I’m talking less than an hour) called him up to tell him over the phone that they were canceling his SSI, because they noticed he had gone over the 2,000 buck threshold. He had to tell them that someone had made a charitable donation to him and that this was not a common occurrence in any way shape or form, and upon not believing him, my mother had to call to talk to them as his legal caretaker and say basically the same thing until they called off the cancellation of his SSI money.

He also had to cancel his renter’s assistance because it put him to 1,062 a month, so if he went 30 days without spending any money they’d cancel his SSI altogether. Like, none of us in the family have any fucking clue why that regulation is in place and it’s the stupidest shit in human history.

You will start getting more and more aches and pains and you will naturally assume aging is to blame. That your body just isn't as resilient as it used to be. That this is simply the natural consequence of getting older, and there's nothing you can do to fix it.

But before you become too complacent, consider:

Is it really your aging body that's the problem?

Or is it your aging furniture?

.

You do not have to simply accept your fate.

Do not go gently into that good night.

At least not before you try out that one gel seat cushion from the infomercial. You know, the one where the actor sits on an egg and it doesn't break?

Neurallink is a fucking awful company whose marketing materials and CEO are outright lying as to their products' supportable potential. But they're not big enough to actually have killed 3,000 primates. Most significantly, we know that the the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against a UC Davis lab for invasive and deadly brain experiments on 23 intelligent primates.

The Physician Committee points out in its complaint that Neuralink and UC Davis staff failed to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care, used an unapproved substance known as “Bioglue” that killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains, and failed to provide for the psychological well-being of monkeys assigned to the experiment.

I worked in a neuroscience lab that did work with one (1) rhesus monkey. His name was Beckett. Beckett had better healthcare than a university undergraduate. Hell, it took less hoops to get some experimental studies involving undergrad volunteers up and running than it was to do one experiment with Beckett wherein he got to sit in a chair and eat grapes.

See, the paperwork regarding experiments with animals was intense. I spent three days filling out the forms and going back and forth with the ethics board to let us do experiments on terminal mice wherein they'd peacefully be put under anesthesia and never wake up from surgery. As in we were putting a sick mouse to sleep and had to be 100% sure it would not be in any pain or distress. Screwing up and causing a mouse harm or killing it outside of these exact bounds? You'd be lucky if you ever got to work with a mouse again.

Not only that, but since an animal was expected to die in the experiment, we had to report how many we needed in the experiment and then how many actually died. And if the latter number was higher, you better believe the ethics board would be on our case demanding to know what the actual hell happened.

(There's a plaque, by the way, in the labs, in remembrance of all the animals whose lives we ask for in the pursuit of science. It's right there when you walk in.)

The paperwork and restrictions get more and more complex and strict the higher up the "evolutionary chain" you go up. If you MUST use an animal model, you use the lowest one on the chain that can meet your requirements. As in, why use frogs if you can use zebrafish? Why use fish if you can use fruitflies? Why use a living creature at all if your computer simulation is good enough? And if you can't give a good answer, your proposal should be denied.

Back to the monkeys and Beckett. Monkeys, or "non-human primates" as they're often known as, are usually at the top of this chain. Ideally, you treat them like humans who are unable to consent for themselves. Which means they need advocates for them. Beckett pretty much had a vet assigned just to him. If he so much as had a sniffle, the vet had the power to veto any and all experiments he'd be involved in until he was feeling better.

This was important because if your lab had a monkey and that monkey died for reasons other than "natural causes" that the ethics board did not okay? There was going to be an investigation and if they didn't like what they found, not only would your lab never get another monkey again, but there was a damn good chance you'd be barred from working with any and ALL animals.

So from this perspective, "23 monkeys dead" should be read a very specific kind of shock and disgust. One dead should have made any kind of ethics board hit the breaks on this shit and start asking pointed questions as to "why".

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, there is an answer to the question of "what happens to monkeys who can't be used in research anymore?"

They're sent to the farm.

Some personal updates that inspirado this moodboard.

I've been planning my book journal for next year.

Also been cheking new organización systems

I've started studying norwegian, and i am EXCITED

And also started preparing for this season finals

Blue/purple lips and fingernails is a symptom of low oxygen in lighter skin tones.

In darker skin tones you're looking for grey or white lips and fingernails. Other places where this may be not evidence is the tongue and gums.

Figured since everyone gets taught what low oxygen looks like on lighter skin. Everyone should know what it looks like on dark skin too.

The 911 woman asked me if she was blue, and I looked at this young woman and what came out was “well, in normal life she is a person of color!! and now her mouth is grey, which I don’t think it normally is! Ahahaha!” And the dispatcher was like, tell me more about this, is it blue? And I’m going, “technically no! But it is not a great color! Help us now!” while the student was crying saying WHY ARE YOU SAYING THIS ABOUT ME, and I was trying to explain that it did not look like the right color to me, while assuring the student that I wasn’t judging in the least but she actually looked quite unwell, etc.

To conclude the story, soon enough she went on the ambulance and they said it was very serious but all fixable, and some of the responders said I’d behaved correctly and done things Right, possibly because I was in a state of high tension myself at that point.

I later went and obsessively read about low oxygen in people of color, came up with a better script and endlessly tried to replay the conversation along a better script so that I’d be ready next time.

Unfortunately this formed a core memory. My mind frequently returns to it and the horrible assessment of this student turning more and more cold and grey, while a woman yammered in my ear about whether she was blue and how blue she was, and what I should have said instead, and what I should have done instead, and whether I could have optimised this 5 second exchange to get an ambulance faster. It’s the kind of thing where you’re dreaming, and you turn left and walk into it again, and even though you practiced the Good New Script you’re in a nightmare and can’t express it properly. Or you wake up at 3 am with someone’s mean comment ringing in your ears and you turn over AND THEN ANOTHER THING: you weren’t very fast or clever in that situation with that one 911 dispatcher, were you? It feels pretty bad to not be equipped to respond well, when someone is hurt.

16.10.22 | Strolling down autumnal paths 🍁🍂

18.11.2022 📚 Study Day at the Boston Public Library 📚

One last push before the holiday season can begin!