New Beginnings

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

IF YOU CAN’T GET A JOB, IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!!!!! THE SYSTEM IS DEEPLY BROKEN!!!!!!!!

The hiring process has never been great, but in the past couple of years it’s hit rock bottom. Ghost jobs probably outnumber real jobs on job sites. Recruiters and HR use AI which throws out 90% of resumes before a real human being sees them. And most companies are hellbent on holding out for a unicorn candidate- meaning someone who already knows how to do the EXACT role without any training while also accepting entry level wages- instead of investing in new people.

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

"I review books for a living, and I’ve noticed a worrying trend of what I call “instagramming the Holocaust.” (1 / 9)"

"Bestselling novels about the Holocaust tend to be “uplifting” and sentimental. They have romantic subplots. Jewish characters only exist to be rescued by the (often American) protagonist. The cinematic, three-act structure culminates in a redemptive ending."

"What these books offer (and they sell in the millions) is a sanitized version of the Shoah in which brave Americans bravely battle Hitler, the reader learns a lesson about Kindness and Not Being Prejudiced, and there are no sticky questions about who did the killings, and why."

"Jewish novelist Dara Horn has observed that memoirs and novels written by actual Holocaust survivors typically don’t sell—because there are no pat resolutions, no redemptions, no heartwarming moments where the Jewish prisoners see the good in their Nazi captors."

"Anne Frank’s (excellent) diary became the entry point into the Holocaust for most of us because she had not yet experienced the worst of it – because she hadn’t yet learned that some people aren’t “truly good at heart.” It’s just safe enough not to disturb us."

"And we love “uplifting” Holocaust novels because we don’t want to be disturbed, not really. This is the real reason why books like Maus offend the sensibilities of middle-class parents, because they bear witness to a truth about human nature that we don’t want to confront."

"And the “message” of the Holocaust is not that people are truly good, or that we need to be kind and tolerant (though that is true). The message is that six million people were murdered, and millions of ordinary folk were complicit, and millions of others looked away."

"This compulsion to sanitize the past, to sanitize the world, is one of the overlooked roots of white nationalism. We want to seal ourselves away from the experiences of others because we fear what they might say to us. We want reality to be pastel-hued and instagram-filtered."

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

The researchers emphasize that this does not mean microplastics are not a real problem.

“We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none,” said McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering, and the Program in the Environment. “There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem.”

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Also books are not the same size, at least in France there is no standard sizes for books, there's no standard paperbook or hardcover sizes. The sizing and dimensions of a book depends on the publisher, the collection, and what the printer is able to make

It’s actually kind of a thing: you can spot indie self publishers because they do have a specific size they’ve been pushed into by the industry because those are the places that give us access to the global market.

(It used to be you could also tell who was self pub based on paper quality, because self-pub authors tend to opt for nicer paper quality to look more professional, while trad-pub goes for thinner, less white paper.)

Indie trade paperback are usually uniform sizes, as are hardback. The only major variable is usually the spine width due to page count, paper weight, etc

Which is taken into account by the printer when they generate a template for you to fit your cover design into. This step is usually automated by a computer.

So they generate the template based on whether you’re doing paperback, hardback and what your page count, paper weight, etc is. You make your cover wrap fit the template. You follow their guidelines exactly.

And then, very nearly every time the thing that scans your upload will tell you it’s wrong. Where is it wrong? Couldn’t tell you, chief. It’s just wrong.

Okay, so you try again, once again using the template they generated for you. If you’re me you’ll have emailed customer service by this point to ensure the automated template is correct. It is. The computer didn’t make an error. You did. Where’s the error? Guess :)

If you’re lucky it’ll work the second time. What did you do differently? No idea. You just fiddle-fucked with it slightly and now it works despite following the exact same outline as before.

And then you have to do this across multiple platforms for mass distribution because everyone has different printers that require different things. Sometimes 3-4 times depending on which markets you’re trying to reach.

And then some of the front cover will still wrap around onto the spine or be printed crooked. So then when you do reprints you alter your cover design to stop that happening.

They will say “don’t you want them to go to the grave without debt”, they will try to guilt you, they will take advantage of your vulnerability.

Source: when my father died, he had some credit cards that my mom wasn’t on that she had no access to. The companies contacted her while she was sorting through the bills and getting a handle on how to run the house alone, badgering her with his credit card debt.

She wasn’t liable for any of it, but if she had ever agreed to pay before finding out that she didn’t need to, she would have been considered to have taken on his debt and would have HAD to pay it. It’s slimy, it’s predatory, and it’s entirely legal for them to do this.

One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."

(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)

But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.

It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.

A baby is never doing something to upset you. They don't act up to piss you off. They act in the only way they know how, and yes, sometimes the behaviour they're drawn to isn't great! That's why you guide them and comfort.

Me, at the time, a 19yo with very little understanding of the law: “I mean…was it?”

Fandom Friend, who was a 40-something lawyer: “I’ll tell you the same thing I told everyone in that bar. No one was violating anyone’s free speech. Bitch was just being rude, and worse, obnoxious about it. You ever act like that in public, be aware you’re not changing anyone’s opinion. You’re just giving them a brand new opinion about you.”

It was a very formative conversation in my young adulthood.

take this test (https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/), then come back here:

it doesnt have to be a good score, you dont have to take it multiple times, you dont have to get on a good screen, etcetera. just gimme your score please this is my final project grade :)