(project hail mary spoilers)
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ROCKY COMING OUT OF HIS SUPER HAMSTER BALL INTO EARTH ATMOSPHERE TO SAVE HIS WEIRD ALIEN BLOB FRIEND AT THE RISK OF HIS OWN LIFE, AVQIWKJDVSLEOG FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE AND KINDNESS STRETCH ACROSS TIME AND SPACE 😭😭😭😭😭❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️💗💗
Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."
And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.
This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?
"It's red on the inside?"
Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.
"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."
And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.
If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.
Yep.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.
If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]
I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.
My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.
Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.
When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.
He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.
Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.
Last thing to blog for the day then I need to pretend to be productive. Little Miss has multiplication she’s still struggling with. Anyway - I was promoted at work and asked to fix the injury and accident problem in a particular warehouse. I was “the safety guy” and I was really really good at my job. When I went in I had to find out “why are these folks having more injuries per 100,000 hours than the rest of our facilities” and so I dug in. This facility was having 2 - 3 injuries reported A DAY. Was it the people? Nope, same hiring pool as others. Hours? Nope, almost every station has the same hours. Lets check the training for our new hires. Let me see their training packs. “Uhh... let me find them” Excuse me? You should be training them you should have them here with you. Okay, what are the four options for loading a package? “ummm....” DUDE you’re supposed to be training these folks and you don’t know. Who trained you? “I never loaded before” Okay fine, who trained you how to be a trainer. “no one” ... See where this is going? So now all of a sudden I’m holding training classes for the top-level management team all the way down to the front-line supervisors to make sure THEY know the job that they’re supposed to be teaching to others. We broke it all down to the very basics and slowly, day by day. But you know what? The first few months, reported on job injuries went up because we raised the awareness and stopped management team from hiding the injuries and just giving a couple days off. We’re reporting them, recording them, getting treatment and care where needed. Then we went a week with no injuries. Then a month Darn broke out streak. Why? What happened, where was the breakdown? Another week. A month WE MADE IT A YEAR Then another six months Then I got promoted again and replicated this across the country and that original operation went nearly 3 years without an injury. So start at the very beginning if you’re having trouble with something or having trouble teaching someone something. If they want to write, they have to be able to hold the pencil.
I finally found a post I can contribute a story to ^_^
I have a learning disability called dyspraxia and I won't get into all the details but the relevant part is that it affects my fine motor skills, particularly the ability to handwrite. This meant my handwriting was absolute chickenscratch.
Throughout school, I routinely got bad grades. D's and E's across the board, and in order to get into trade school I needed a C in English.
The first time I took the exam, I got a D.
The second time I took it, I got a D.
The third time I took it, we tried something different. Instead of taking it by hand, I was allowed to use a computer.
And I got a B. On one piece of coursework, I got an A.
The problem wasn't what I was writing, it was the fact that no one could read it.
I can only imagine how different my grades in other subjects would've been had I had these accommodations all along.
I finally found
a post I can contribute
a story to ^_^
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
*jazz hands*
I sculpted a Rocky! I tried seeing if he could hold things in his little hands but sadly he cannot u_u
Ryland choosing not to save Earth because of fear.
Ryland choosing to save Erid because of love.
I am a leaky space blob 🥺🥺😭😭😭
both project hail mary and everything everywhere all at once said that people should be kind and love is the core of humanity. that even if you are in the worst of circumstances IT ALL DOES BOIL DOWN TO LOVE. that's the only thing that matters. we are here to be kind to each other and to hold each other and to cry with each other.
and both times it restored my faith in people
Just finished reading Andy Weirs book Project Hail Mary and I would die for Rocky
we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.
when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.
the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.
my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.
when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.
and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.
in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.
I imagine that the last generation to really feel this way, to really feel a before-and-after kind of world, was at the last turn of the century, which had 3 huge, life-changing inventions happen all at once.
In 1890, everybody rode horses, used candles to see at night, and communicated through letters.
By the 1920s (only 30 years later!), everybody had automobiles (or access to another form of 'self-driving' transportation like busses or trams) and nobody had horses. Nearly everyone had electricity in their houses. Nearly everyone had a telephone, or access to one.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine growing up, being taught by your parents all about how to ride horses and care for them and hitch them to a wagon, only to...not ever use that knowledge as an adult, because you have a car? Can you imagine learning how to make candles, finally getting good enough at it to be useful to your family as a teenager, only to flick a switch to turn on a light bulb as an adult?
I feel like that last huge change in technology is the same thing we are going through. I know how to read a paper map. I will never need to use this knowledge. But it's still in there; including the many patient hours my mother spent teaching me, and a lot of fond memories I have of her doing it. I know how to research a topic in a paper library, with actual books. Pretty sure I will never do that again. I memorize phone numbers, 'just in case'. In case what? The automobile (smartphone) gets un-invented? But I hold that knowledge in my head. It's there. It's part of me.
I wish I could speak to my great-great-grandmother, who had her first baby in 1900. To ask her, if what Millennials now are going through is what it was like for her Centennial generation. The absolute whiplash, from one way of life to another.
Kids born in 1890 knew how to make candles, and kids born in 1920 could not fathom why you would need to know this.
i would describe myself as fun and light hearted and unburdened. please ignore the blood in my mouth
sometimes I wonder how we all survive and then I look at my best friends and I go “oh, I survive because I don’t want to leave you yet” and it makes sense. life is so hard a lot of the time, but I want one more bowl of pasta with you.
the whole “it takes a village” thing needs to translate into adulthood too bc i need support!! i need people i can lean on! i need people i can share my thoughts with!! i need a village of mfs who love me!! idc idc idc
No actually I have so much to say about this they killed off Orlo???? He was Catherine's first real supporter. Velementov was half in love with her, Marial was condescending and saw her as a naive child, Archie is after his own agenda, and Betty's loyalty is fickle. Orlo was the first one to support her not because of a crush or for his own interest. His position at court was stable, he was described by many as savvy, he may not have been Peter's favorite but he knew how to play the game. He was fine and he would have been fine without Catherine. He followed her because he believed in her, because their dreams and values were aligned. They built a friendship based on mutual respect and understanding. And then he fucking dies at Catherine's hand and gets left behind to be eaten by fucking bears and she doesn't even know she's the one who shot him? That's what Orlo is worth??????? I am livid.
i am just an animal why am i doing all this
evolution literally went "let's take these apes and give them hella anxiety" and we've all just been dealing with that for 300,000 years
people have got to learn the difference between I didnt like it and It was bad
+ a secret, third thing
Love that they put “a sense of impending doom” as one of the symptoms of a heart attack, like girl, that’s just how it is to be alive these days, you’re gonna have to be more specific
This made me chuckle but after scrolling away I felt the need to come back to it.
Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.
I've only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It's hard to even put it into words. It's not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.
Especially if you have anxiety you'll know the difference honestly. It's so much worse. It's every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there's something horribly wrong in a way you've never felt. It's your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.
I can not stress how important it is to get yourself to the ER if you feel this way. Especially if your having other physical symptoms.
This is amazing and incredibly helpful, oh my god. Thank you.
the sexual tension between a 20something year old and having emotional stability
my favorite part about being a 20something year old is thinking i’m emotionally stable and then having an absolute breakdown 2 seconds later
