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remember that interviews are not about giving a good and honest first impression that they'll carefully consider. interviews are about saying the special words and phrases they're looking for that give you points and when they tally those up whoever earned the most job points wins

they don't want to "know you" they want you to walk in there and regurgitate everything the job description said

isnt even a joke btw if you're autistic and/or unemployed and nobody taught you this yet i'm really sorry

How bad is Covid-19 in your county right now?

We all (hopefully) know the at home tests most people rely on have high probabilities of false negatives and that even positives are almost never reported. This underreporting means it can be hard to get an accurate idea from patient tests alone of how prevalent Covid infections are.

Enter wastewater testing. Here's a website where you can check the wastewater data for your county every week to see a more accurate assessment of the Covid19 infection rate.

Look. Look. I think the hardest thing about your twenties is the shift from getting shoved towards new frontiers of maturity by, like, puberty and education and the logistics of gaining independence, to you having to shove yourself. It’s a mental recalibration from “you grow up whether you like it or not” to “you can and should keep evolving, but now you have to choose it. And you have to choose it a half-dozen times a day in increasingly annoying ways. And this sucks but the reward is that you get to be a person in the world.”

For years I would look at posts and questionnaires about neurodivergence that takes about being so focused on something that you forgot to eat and be like, "Couldn't be me. Being hungry is so uncomfortable! Your stomach is growling and cramping? How do you ignore that?"

Then someone informed me that neurotypical people have a whole bunch of "hungry" sensations before they get to that point.....

They what

Yeah, I don't get it either, but apparently this is a Whole Thing.... Like they somehow detect blood sugar dropping and go, "Ooh, time for lil snack!"

See also: there is a feeling of "oh, I need to pee" that happens before "fidgeting around in my seat to finish this thing before running to the bathroom"

I read this and was like, "this can't be real" and then I looked for sources and like--

WHAT??????

what the fuck

... stomach cramping isn't the first sign of hunger? Is this why so many people eat more than one meal per day?

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help

me: my what

What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.

when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much. 

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks. 

so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings! 

How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense

https://youtu.be/pMC0Cx3Uk84

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

:3

Reblogging to save a wrist

if someone ever publicly shares ur nudes (even if they're fabricated/deepfakes), u can go on https://stopncii.org/ to have them removed from the internet. this service is available for ppl all over the world. the image never leaves ur device (only a hash of it does) so no one will be able to see the nudes u uploaded to their site. stay safe.

hey I want to see something

take this quiz (https://dlcincluded.github.io/MQ/) and then tell me about your score.

check out the monotropism theory of autism (https://monotropism.org/)

i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i've seen people saying things like "well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it" and it's like, that's not the point. it's that companies /shouldn't/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i'm still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn't have to begin with though?

adding this to the post because, 100%, just there's a fire doesn't mean you should pour gasoline on it

I have like ten different ad and/or tracking blockers on my PC and phone... just out of pure spite

Can link it? I wish to hop aboard that train.

@drunkenbartend

Is there any benefit to using multiple ad blockers at once? I honestly don't know, but I haven't seen a single ad on the internet in ages and I get to use this image:

Updated Reading List 6.3: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish History

Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish History (THESE are the parts of Jewish History which are…not as prominently featured or acknowledged in mainstream American Jewish culture and memory as they SHOULD be)

Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America by Marjorie Agosin

Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (The Modern Jewish Experience) by Miriam Bodian

Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era by Julia Phillips Cohen

Sephardim: The Jews from Spain by Paloma Diaz-Mas

The Damascus Affair: Ritual Murder, Politics, and the Jews in 1840 by Jonathan Frankel

Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience by Jane S. Gerber

Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies)by Emily Benichou Gottreich

Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800 by Richard L. Kagan and Philp D. Morgan

History of a Tragedy: THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN (Hispanisms) by Joseph Perez

After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry by Jonathan S. Ray

Jews and Muslims: Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Modern Times by Aron Rodrigue

Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries (Jewish Communities in the Modern World) by Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue

The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times by Norman A. Stillman

A Global Community: The Jews from Aleppo, Syria (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology) by Walter Zenner

Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times by Zion Zohar

NOTE: I’m an Amazon Affiliate; I will receive a small portion of the proceeds from ANYTHING [hint] you purchase on Amazon via my links. I am an independent scholar, and need $$$ to pay my translators etc for my book on Jewish women’s Holocaust resistance, so anything you can do helps! If you’d rather not give your $$$ to Amazon but still want to help this independent scholar out, my paypal is here.

If you're waiting for public officials to tell you that covid is in fact still here and that you should in fact still be masking & regularly getting tested, it would already be too late by then. I need more people to let it sink in that the US government's first and (probably only) priority is the economy, as opposed to being honest about covid.

Rich people and government officials like the PotUS are still making it mandatory to mask when interacting with them.

Rich people and government officials like the PotUS get PCR tested and make it mandatory for everyone to do the same before interacting with them.

Rich people and government officials like the PotUS are making it mandatory to make sure everywhere they go has filtered, clean air.

They are protecting themselves and still taking precautions during this on-going pandemic while lying to our faces that the pandemic is over. They may be maskless on camera, but they're sure as fuck rushing to get tested after the fact.

If you're waiting for these people to be honest with you about covid & to tell you how to protect yourself, it would already be too late by then.

character who is sun-coded but not in the traditional ray-of-sunshine way. character who is sun-coded in the sense that they burn hot and bright and powerful, that they're a raging fury of fire and passion, and that maybe, just maybe, they are destroying themselves as they do so.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-22/food-plant-solutions-malnutrition-farming-edible-plants/12580732

https://fms.cmsvr.com/fmi/webd/Food_Plants_World

This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.

The database is a little clunky to use (especially on a phone), but still loads of excellent information.

Here’s their website - Food Plant Solutions - and they can use volunteers! And $ of course. What they really need help with is connecting with NGOs/groups on the ground already working in countries, to get them access to the database. They also need help from formally trained agronomists, people good with website stuff, and people good at marketing / getting the word out about their project.

chrome users, your browser is about to start targeting advertising for you

have fun

this does not necessarily apply to chrome-based browsers but it very well can. ymmv

Click here to get firefox, and once you install it, firefox will ask if you want to import all of your logins, bookmarks and settings from Chrome or whatever else you browsed with. Then go here to add firefox’s best adblocker: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

Please do not use AdBlock Plus, they sold out years ago and allowed advertisers to "whitelist" certain ads.

uBlock Origin is the correct "best adblocker"

However, there is also AdNauseam which is built atop uBlock and will silently click on every ad it blocks so you can fuck with advertising companies. Essentially, this poisons whatever information profile they've built up on you. AdNauseam was even banned on the Google Web Store in 2017, so you can tell it works and that Google fucking HATES IT.

While the CDC has given up on providing any guidance on risk control measures for covid, The People's CDC is filling the gap and continuing to track and update guidance as the situation evolves. Here's where you can download their Safer In-person Gatherings Toolkit:

Here's an extremely detailed guide on what to do if you have covid that includes how long to isolate for, how to set up your house with hepa filters and ventilation, what supplies to have on hand, when to go to the hospital, and guidelines on how to pace from the MEAction Network in the event you end up with long covid:

The work these guys are doing is amazing. They're still tracking wastewater data too so you can still figure out transmission levels in your area and not just the hospitalization levels. Check them out!

the hardest task is always forgiving ourselves. letting go of grudges against our past selves, of what we “could have been”. often we don’t think we’re worthy of redemption, or maybe we trick ourselves into thinking we’re way beyond redemption, but if you’re reading this… it’s not too late. it’s not too late to become the person you want to. but most importantly, it’s not too late to let go of the person you were. to forgive that person. to move on.

it’s not “am I good enough to do it?”, it’s “do I like it enough to be bad at it?”