I just realized that I never really posted about this but here's a link to the Transformers Earthspark Season 1 episodes on Google Drive! Episodes 1-18 are directly in the folder, and there's a hyperlink to another folder with Episodes 19-26, by @hexingneon.
Full link under cut.
If you can't wash it off, paint over it, replace the item, or buff it out, turn a message of hate into one of love! I would never condone someone to do this discreetly and in mere seconds with a quickly concealed permanent marker, for example on a public bench or bus stop. Certainly not anything like whipping out a tat machine and adding to an unconscious white supremacist's existing tattoo. That would be illegal! :) And, dear followers, I would never encourage you to do something that's illegal. So, please only use this when someone has defaced your personal property to avoid breaking the law! Because that would be illegal, and following in the law is always in everyone's best interest. :) .... :) reblogs and even reposts definitely welcome
Just found out that the dietary calorie is still measured by burning food in a "bomb calorimeter" and then measuring the heat produced. There's no solid evidence that this method is at all equivalent to how our bodies process food (an entirely different chemical process from combustion), the accuracy of this system has been disputed for as long as it's existed, and there are no available alternatives
There are 4800 calories in a kilogram of dry sawdust even though wood is completely indigestible to humans, because calories don't measure nutritional value, just how well something burns
Nutritional "science" is pure bullshit
A good primer on this topic is the Maintenance Phase podcast episode ‘The Trouble with Calories’: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/10671811
Prefer reading? The sources list for that episode is full of goodies:
It doesn’t stop there though, almost everything we think we know about nutrition is kind of bullshit.
It all falls apart the moment you go looking for evidence. It’s such a sham.
Watch on Paramount+ if you can! The episodes are currently out in the US, and there is a free trial option.
YouTube: @/TranformersEarthspark (missing episodes 25-26)
Google Drive by @hexingneon (contains all episodes, preferably download before watching)
VK by @djhashtageditz (contains all episodes, might require you to make an account first depending on what kind of device you're using. Yes, the link does lead to the account with the episodes.)
More sources will be added as they are found.
July 28, 2023
As I promised, some dubs (German, Italian, French) became available on my YouTube channel. P.S. If you don't see the videos, use vpn
Links:
Some episodes were withdrawn from VK "at the request of the copyright holder"
This channel has all the Earthspark episodes on it but it will be blocked in some countries. For now the last two episodes are blocked in USA
grad school is weirdly psychologically straining. idk how to explain it. But my advice is basically. If you're considering something drastic, also consider things that are less drastic. If you're considering quitting, then also consider threatening to quit. If you're considering suicide, consider quitting. Whatever drastic thing you're consdiering because you're about to fail a class or a candidacy exam, also consider just failing and continuing anyway. You know? It's not waht you wanted, but if you're already considering something outside of the sapce of stuff you wanted, consider all the stuff less drastic than it too
good advice, not specific to grad school
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to expanding other people’s knowledge on this topic. Information literacy is a huge topic in high schools and universities, and one of the things teachers and librarians are struggling to help students understand is the fact that their search engine is not free of bias and may prioritize ads (or what it thinks you want to see based on your shopping experience) rather than actual information. It’s made more difficult by the fact that the technology in use is constantly evolving.
Also, big thanks to the folks who reminded me to fix the ref links in the original post. Not sure what I was thinking when I copied it over from FB, but it’s now fixed (can’t vouch for reblogs, this is Tumblr afterall).
Someone accurately noted that the bulk of the above links are databases, not search engines. The initial post called them research sites not search engines. If you want something better than Google, I would usually suggest using Duck Duck Go. Someone in the comments said it skews right, but I have not seen research or evidence to back that up, so proceed as you wish. I would recommend Firefox as a browser, and you could consider one of these search engines.
https://www.qwant.com/ - Search engine with no tracking or advertising
https://www.ecosia.org/ - Search engine that plants trees – has ads and that ad revenue runs the engine while funding tree planting
Here are some of the top sites recommended in the comments.
Academic/Reseach
https://eric.ed.gov/ - Education Resources Information Center, a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.
https://www.jstor.org/ - academic digital library providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - the National Institute for Health’s National Library of Medicine, PubMed comprises more than 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
https://www.researchgate.net/ - founded to address the problems in the way science is created and shared. Connects the world of science and makes research open to all.
https://www.academia.edu/ - platform that shares academic research
https://www.sci-hub.st/ - research publication library – technically pirated content, but please note that the researchers do not get paid for publication, and will often send you a PDF of their research for free if you ask, it’s the publications that want to restrict access to paying readers
Libraries
https://www.hathitrust.org/ – free digitized books from all over the world
https://z-lib.org/ – digital library providing ebooks for free
https://www.bpl.org/resources/history-and-political-science/ - History and Poli Sci at the Boston Library
https://www.gutenberg.org/ - free digital books, focused on works with expired US copyright – note, if you look for out of print books on Google, it will try to SELL you books that you can actually download FREE from Gutenberg (I’ve tested this multiple times)
https://archive.org/ - Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
_
Please visit my Resources for Writers page for other subject areas.
Just one comment. If you find articles on researchgate.net that is only available on request, don’t hesitate to request. The reason some stuff is not readily available there is that sometimes when you publish academic stuff you have to agree to publisher contracts that will keep you from sharing it by posting it for free online, but it doesn’t stop you from sharing it by request, which is why researchgate has this option. I always send my stuff if people ask.
Adding Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/
(old-style search, looks for old-style HTML sites)
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to expanding other people’s knowledge on this topic. Information literacy is a huge topic in high schools and universities, and one of the things teachers and librarians are struggling to help students understand is the fact that their search engine is not free of bias and may prioritize ads (or what it thinks you want to see based on your shopping experience) rather than actual information. It’s made more difficult by the fact that the technology in use is constantly evolving.
Also, big thanks to the folks who reminded me to fix the ref links in the original post. Not sure what I was thinking when I copied it over from FB, but it’s now fixed (can’t vouch for reblogs, this is Tumblr afterall).
Someone accurately noted that the bulk of the above links are databases, not search engines. The initial post called them research sites not search engines. If you want something better than Google, I would usually suggest using Duck Duck Go. Someone in the comments said it skews right, but I have not seen research or evidence to back that up, so proceed as you wish. I would recommend Firefox as a browser, and you could consider one of these search engines.
https://www.qwant.com/ - Search engine with no tracking or advertising
https://www.ecosia.org/ - Search engine that plants trees – has ads and that ad revenue runs the engine while funding tree planting
Here are some of the top sites recommended in the comments.
Academic/Reseach
https://eric.ed.gov/ - Education Resources Information Center, a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.
https://www.jstor.org/ - academic digital library providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - the National Institute for Health’s National Library of Medicine, PubMed comprises more than 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
https://www.researchgate.net/ - founded to address the problems in the way science is created and shared. Connects the world of science and makes research open to all.
https://www.academia.edu/ - platform that shares academic research
https://www.sci-hub.st/ - research publication library – technically pirated content, but please note that the researchers do not get paid for publication, and will often send you a PDF of their research for free if you ask, it’s the publications that want to restrict access to paying readers
Libraries
https://www.hathitrust.org/ – free digitized books from all over the world
https://z-lib.org/ – digital library providing ebooks for free
https://www.bpl.org/resources/history-and-political-science/ - History and Poli Sci at the Boston Library
https://www.gutenberg.org/ - free digital books, focused on works with expired US copyright – note, if you look for out of print books on Google, it will try to SELL you books that you can actually download FREE from Gutenberg (I’ve tested this multiple times)
https://archive.org/ - Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
_
Please visit my Resources for Writers page for other subject areas.
I suggest https://www.startpage.com/ over DuckDuckGo. It’s way better. DDG has gotten slowly worse over time. It now has annoying things like booleans giving you LESS of the thing you tried to exclude instead of NONE On top of that DDG always had less than stellar results with non-latin-alphabet languages. Startpage can tell Japanese and Chinese apart consistently. Amazing. It’s just as privacy focused as DDG and since its based in Europe, has to follow the GDPR.
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
dogpile.com searches search engines
The screenshots are missing the eighth website.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
The information is from a different source. The tweet was made August 14, 2022. Here is a Tumblr post from July 19, 2022, which links to an even earlier list on Facebook (I can't access it as I do not have a Facebook account).
Most of these are academic search engines that are only useful if you're looking for academic papers, and half of them require an institutional login. If you want something that does what Google used to do, which is just search the internet for relevant websites without only showing you ads, use ecosia.org or duckduckgo.com
not a full image description but added the links and part of the descriptions to a textfile, figured i might aswell attach it here too refseek.com - academic resource search, encyclopedia, monographies, magazines worldcat.org - content of 20thousand worldwide libraries, find where lies the nearest rare book you need link.springer.com - access to 10million scientific documents, books, articles, research protocols bioline.org.br - library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries repec.org - 4million publications on economics and related science science.gov - american state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. more than 200million indexed articles pdfdrive.com - largest website for free download of books in pdf format, claiming over 225million names edit: some extra i found in the comments book4you.org libgen.rs archive.org openlibrary b-ok.cc semantic scholar researchgate b-ok.lat - z library project gutenberg - classic books jstor - journals and publications
Some additions:
Imslp - public domain sheet music and recordings
Oxford music online/Grove music online - music history stuff (some resources may not be available without paying)
Not technically literature but its useful:
alternativeto.net - has a bajillion alternative tools (usually free and open source but not always) for different programs, such as Photoshop, word, audacity, and more
Just off the top of my head, I also recommend PubMed for biomedical research (anything labeled PubMed Central/PMC is open access), and I recommend checking out your local library's selection of databases. Some will have more than others, but here's NYPL's selection, for example: https://www.nypl.org/research/collections/articles-databases/featured/start-your-research
i am making a pinned post, and the pinned post is to tell you about my transformers fansite, where i run a few of my tf-related personal projects!
current projects on the site:
i also have a contact page if you have any interest in getting in touch about the stuff i'm trying to do here. i'm especially currently looking for anything relating to TF fanzines i can digitize and archive, so if you have anything you'd like to share, drop me a line? :)
FYI: I've made a few updates recently to this! As well as the prose transcriptions and IDW extras I've added as per the note above, I have now properly linked the IDW creators interview page I was working on, alongside the panels I've collected. I've still only had time to work on Roberts' page (as I already have a large list of interviews to crib off, haha) but it's a start, and where they are available transcripts have been linked for interviews/podcasts that I've collected links together for. (I'm interested in trying to get more things transcribed when time permits...)
Anyway, yeah, heads up, there's a bunch of old interviews getting slowly added to the site now.
you’re hearing it more and more
Spotify Premium ad: “Imagine playing music without interruptions! Infinite skipping! Replay the song you want! And even do it offline? No ads! Whatever songs you want! For a small monthly payme-” Me: *nods, turns off Spotify and turns on my MP3 player and does all the things they offer, but for free and with songs they don’t even have*
For those of you who might not know how to do any of this:
You don’t need to be tethered to an online streaming service for your music. Be free.
You can also rip audio files from youtube and find files all over the internet. It is far easier to come across great and lesser known music if you dont limit yourself to spotify.
Here’s a tutorial on how to get the music and playlists you like with unlimited listening/downloads. This is a free way to do it that I believe is a balance between cost, time, and pros & cons:
If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.
1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.
This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.
2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.
I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3.
3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.
iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.
4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.
MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services. You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).
There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, though they usually have fees for that feature. Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.
You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isn’t much of a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, you can listen to it offline, etc.
I do encourage people to pay for art, especially from small, independent artists. You have to pay for art if you want to keep it alive, but there is debate over if streaming services are really “paying the artist”. Alternatives include buying and ripping CDs, purchasing merch or tour tickets (where artists make a lot of their money), etc to support them with something other than streaming views.
ID. a tweet from Don Hughes @/getfiscal dated Feb 18 21. it reads, “Started imagining paying for Spotify for the next thirty or so years and got a bit dizzy, cancelled a bunch of subscriptions, installed Linux on my computer and then pulled out my old CDs to rip. Going caveman.” End ID.
Seconding MusicBee! Also, you can use a library subscription to access Freegal, which allows (depending on your library system) up to five free downloads a week. Completely free, actually legal, yours to keep, no DRM or any crap like that.
For indie producers, always check if they have something like Bandcamp! Bandcamp lets you download as well, and has significantly higher royalties going to the actual artists (Spotify pays them… very little).
For downloading music from youtube, I use the command line program “youtube-dl”. Get it here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
Then, downloading even an entire playlist is incredibly quick and simple and doesn’t rely on any external sites that try to serve you ads.
its kinda scary how your whole life depends on how well you do as a teenager
oh my god No it doesn’t don’t put this kind of pressure on people?? you can absolutely fuck up in your teen years and continue on to a good life just fine. you can drop out of school, get a GED, still go to college and finish your degree as late as you want. i know people in my school who still haven’t graduated and they’re 26. some older. you can always transfer someplace else, always build yourself up from the ground. after a certain amount of college credits, a lot of schools really don’t care about your high school GED or your SAT scores anymore. if you fuck up in your teenage years you are not a failure!! you can ALWAYS re-invent yourself, always start over. there is always a second chance.
Reblogging this for my followers freaking out over art school/college. I dropped out of high school and never thought I’d get into college as easily as I did. You will be fine!
Fun story my biology professor just told us: When he was 23 he was married to his wife and worked two jobs to support them since she was in college: gas station attendant and construction worker. He worked these two jobs because that was the only work he could get since he was at the reading level of a third grader.
One night he was writing something and his wife noticed he was writing from right to left. Since she was studying occupational therapy she realized he had a learning disability and started working with him. He slowly began to learn to read, and at 26 got his GED and went to college.
His first year of college he took the lowest level math course he could take, 001. Over the years he worked on learning what he needed to, ended up graduating with a biology degree. He then went on to get his masters and PhD, graduating at the top of his class. He is now an extremely accomplished biologist and professor.
So don’t let anyone tell you that you’re future is based on your choices as a teenager.
Seriously. Do not believe this. You aren’t even stuck with your choices you make in your 20s. I didn’t start working in my current field until just after my 30th birthday. It has nothing to do with what I went to school for in my 20s. My husband has a political science degree, and he’s a sports journalist.
You are not tied to anything. Go. Be.
My day job did not exist when I was a teenager. And the idea of trying to be an author was a distant thing on my radar. I thought I was going to be an English teacher. And then I thought I was going to be a music teacher. And then I thought I was going to be a drama teacher.
Also in there: therapist, early childhood educator, then finally: web developer–because by then it was an actual thing that existed. I didn’t actually figure out what I “wanted to do when I grew up” until about eight years ago, when I was 36. I tried pursuing writing when I was 30, stopped, then started pursuing it seriously again when I was 40.
There is always time to change. And don’t let anyone tell you that high school is “the best time of your life” either, because that’s bullshit too.
I was a high school drop out and didn’t go to college until I was within a month of my 40th birthday. While there I changed my major twice. Then I taught art long enough to earn retirement. Before college I’ve worked in dog kennels, as a cashier, a dental assistant, a vet assistant, electronics assembly, a machinist in the military, picking up trash in a state park and as locksmith at a university. After teaching I worked night shift as a securety guard. Life is freaking adventure, not a locked grid you must move from one square to another. Take a chance, If you fail, get back up, dust yourself off and try something new.
Your life is not over at 25. You can continue to learn and engage with hobbies and change your life path and meet new people. Get rid of this idea that what you decide to do at 18 is gonna be what you do for life
I got two Bachelor’s degrees and I used one of them to land an apprenticeship that went nowhere, so after spending a year miserable in retail I went back for a Master’s in a third, unrelated field. And I’m only 25. If I change my mind again, so be it. You’re really not locked in the way it sometimes seems as a teenager.
Colleges/universities at all levels love adult students. They’re motivated, hard-working, and actually really, really want to be there, focusing on a degree over Friday night frat parties.
Some graduate-level programs are more likely to accept students with some real-life experience of adulthood under their belts. Some even tell recent 22-year-old undergrads to reapply in a few years.
It’s never too late. There are always doors, if you’re willing to twist the latch and open them. Youthful mistakes do not define you unless you let them.
(I dropped out of boarding school as a teenager and out of college twice, eventually got my first degree as an international student - the only international student in my program! - and my second degree at 30. I was top of the entire college for the second.)
Over the years, I’ve applied to several jobs, and almost none of them actually cared for my GPA and grades. Even the jobs I applied to right after college didn’t even ask about it during my interview. I was asked about what courses I took when I applied to some aerospace companies, but not my actual grades. Undergrad GPA only really matters when applying to grad school.
Really, the only thing that jobs want to see is that you got the degree. After your first job, work experience matters more than GPA. And for some jobs (like coding) you can learn the skills by yourself, and prove it by passing a coding test.
And if you don’t have the GPA required for a college or university, you can go to a community college, get some credits there, and use their GPA to apply for college. You’ll also get transfer credit, which will save you some money.
I remember being told “high school is the greatest time of your life.”
What bullshit. The ONLY part about high school that was great for me was that I didn’t have any bills and had TONS of free time to learn about things I cared about. Now, I came from a very middle-class family so my dad had a good stable job, so mom and us kids didn’t need to work at all.
The rest of high school sucked. The drama, the cliques, all of that crap - I had no use for it. I had some good friends in high school, but I haven’t spoken to them in YEARS.
I remember being told ‘Make sure you keep a good GPA, it’ll get you everywhere.’
What bullshit. Being considered ‘gifted’ in high school screwed me in college, because we didn’t actually have a ‘gifted’ program at my high school so I was NEVER challenged. At all. I could get everything I needed to pass tests in high school from the teacher’s lecture, and never studied for anything.
Then college came, and that 4.0 GPA in high school was useless because I didn’t have to work for it - and now I needed to learn to study. Which I was eventually able to do, but only after carrying about a 2.9 GPA for my first year. Which was passing, but not very well. I ended up graduating with a hard-fought-for 3.2 GPA…which, for a few jobs, was asked about, but for most of them they didn’t really care. And once you have job experience, it REALLY doesn’t matter.
And just because you have a degree or experience in a field, as noted above, DO NOT let that dictate what you do for the rest of your life. I graduated with a bachelor’s for Mechanical Engineering. My first job had very little engineering involved in it, despite being labeled an engineer.
Then I worked as a substitute teacher. And a machinist at two different machine shops. I also, during this time, took courses towards becoming an actual teacher, which I sometimes wish I’d finished. Then I hired in as an ‘engineer’ at a new shop, but ended up working as an assembler for a good while before a seat opened up in the office for me to start work up there.
And now I am a lead engineer over several product lines at my current job - that I just landed 3 years ago, and I turn 40 next year. I enjoy what I do, and it’s similar to what I wanted to do when I graduated, but I couldn’t find an open position like this back then, because I didn’t know how to look for it.
Long story short, don’t kneecap yourself by believing that your teens, twenties, or even your thirties dictate the rest of your life. There is ALWAYS time to change course - just make sure you stay safe, alive, sheltered, and well-fed.
i’m scared to look on the main tag for spoiler reasons but does anyone have a link to where i can pirate wwdits season 5? as far as i’m aware it literally just isn’t legally available in the uk
