Ramblings

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goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

So you've decided to jump in and start reading in your target language. This can be daunting, so how do you go about setting up a strategy for reading?

Relaxed Reading

This is an easy way to start. You don't look up vocabulary, grammar, character readings, or anything while you read. This is similar to how you would read in your native language and will take less time because you aren't stopping and looking anything up. The goal is to improve critical thinking and overall fluency, while maintaining the relaxation of reading (no pressure to look things up).

This can be good for someone just starting out reading because you can gauge how much you understand in a book. You can determine if you think that the book is harder or easier than your current level, or just about right.

Pros:

Takes less time than looking things up

Cons:

You might not understand as much as you hoped

If you understand > 70% of the page, and can use critical thinking and existing knowledge to make educated guesses based on context clues, then this would be a good strategy. If you understand < 60% of the page, you might need to find something easier or shorter to start with for this exercise. You want to be able to make guesses for <30% of the information and to be right most of the time.

Active Reading

This is when you want to mine for vocabulary or if you are reading something above your level and want to understand what you are reading but can't without a dictionary. The goal is to enjoy reading but also to actively learn vocabulary, grammar, characters, etc.

Pros:

Learning new vocabulary/grammar/etc.

Comprehensive understanding of what you read

Cons:

Takes more time

This can be thought of as a study session, and you can take notes or make flashcards as you go along. You might also stop to look up grammar points as you go to make sure that you understand them. This method is more about quality than quantity.

Combination

As the name suggestions, this is a combo of the first two methods. You combine active reading (taking notes and looking things up) with relaxed reading (guessing when you don't know a word but can generally understand based on context clues). You can set this up any way you like.

Start out reading a page, a chapter, or a whole book without looking anything up or stopping (the relaxed reading bit) and then go back and actively look things up and take notes (the active reading bit). You can mark where you got stuck by a highlight or a note and then you'll remember where you were tripped up when you do a second read-through.

You can also go along in the relaxed reading strategy, guessing where you think you generally understand things from context, and only looking up things you really aren't sure about.

Pros:

The best of both worlds - recreational reading and study-focused reading

Cons:

This method can take up more time (although you do get to pick how long you'd like to take to read)

Not a biologist, but the evolution of mammals is way more granular than you might expect. Humans are the sole surviving species of the genus Homo, which was a real party before the other ones went extinct. You're in for a fun time.

Domestic cats are believed to be domesticated not from tigers, but from the African wildcat:

Which evolved to be small just because it's sometimes more useful to be small.

And no, hamsters are not off-brand rats. They're part of the rodent order, which includes beavers, moles, capybaras, guinea pigs (yes, also wild) and lots of other fun things:

Authors set out to correct under-representation of female sounds – and found some surprising revelations

When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. But as the annual dawn chorus reaches a crescendo this spring, a new guidebook is urging us to think again – and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong. The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In 2016, just 0.01% of the bird sounds in the global Xeno-Canto sound library were labelled female. Another sound archive was just 0.03% female, according to a 2018 study. But the new book – The Sound Approach to Birding 2 – aims to correct this under-representation and properly explain female birdsong. Female birds sing for territorial displays, to ward off other females and to attract extra males, according to Lucy McRobert, a writer and researcher who studied the issue for the guidebook. The book comes with its own library of 300 sounds from 200 species, accessed via web or app. The clips are drawn from the larger online archive of Sound Approach, a birdsong project founded in 2000 with confirmed recordings of females for 41% of species found in the Western Palearctic, a biogeographical region encompassing Europe, north Africa and most of the Middle East...

Do you want to get better at drawing your favorite winged character? Do you have winged OCs? Just want to learn something new? I can't promise this post will help, but maybe it'll give you some helpful tips.

I know, I knowww, wing tutorials have been done to death. I don't care. This was initially inspired by a conversation on twitter, but actually I've wanted to write down my notes on the topic for a long time lol. Basically wings are one of my special interests so it's very important, for me, to draw them both nicely and also realistically.

On that note, let me first show you my resume *distant sound of floodgates opening*

Like what you see? Read on! (Oh, and I will only be covering feathered/avian wings bc those are the type I know best.)