A handy guide to where and when the crew were born, from IDW comics

Spock and McCoy. What is not to love?

A handy guide to where and when the crew were born, from IDW comics

shes literaly an angel im so ashamed that she came here and had to deal with our american nonsense

long before Marie Kondo  William Morris (1834-1896) gave us a maxim to live by... 

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

I think the two approaches go very well together.  

Bonus:

Such a wonderful scene.  If your going to almost certain death of course you want to say goodbye . As far as they are concerned there may, indeed,,be no tomorrow..  Of course Kirk and Scotty’s reactions are pur gold.  

It’s annoying that bookstores and streaming services often lump science fiction and fantasy together. Space ships and robots are not equivalent to magic elves and witches.

I like both, but I don’t want to have to dig through sprites emerging from a pond to tell some girl that she’s actually a secret princess and shit when I just want to see some alien invasions.

Yes, yes, yes...that drives me nuts.  Even the library does it.  Fantasy is not science fiction. 

— Henry Jenkins (Director of media studies at MIT)

LOVE THIS.

(via flootzavut)

Amen to this. 

S’chn T’gai Spock     Leonard Nimoy   |     Zachary Quinto

Looking at these you can see that Mr Quinto really did his homework.  

Behold! The definition of gorgeous. 

How I get so much stuff done.

Excellent advise very clearly expressed with coll artz as a bonus. 

this whole thing is way too good to be giffed you need to expirience it 

There are so many things that are TOP quality about this. The business with the mic rope. The bounding across the stage like an excited puppy or a newsie. The Voice™️ that is so synonymous with John, you know, the voice of a guy who sells ice cream at the soda fountain in the 50’s. The analogy itself.

It’s all so beautiful, such peak humor and content.

Some Photoshop Tips

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

homeless man, bradley grimes: i sleep outside because i dont have a house

the UK: how about we criminalize u for being poor

Bradley Grimes:

The UK:

Also The UK:

Same shit here in the US

Sing it ...this is my day to day. 

Reblog if you are a fic writer who welcomes moodboards, playlists, remixes, art and any other type of gift based on your stories.

The loveliest thing anyone’s done was make me mood boards for two fics. Like, it meant someone had read them and not just laughed and it still makes me all 😳😍

Such things are gift of great value.  

Gifs Show How Mushrooms Grow

Mushrooms are fast-growing organisms that quickly pop up after the rain. These mesmerizing time-lapse gifs record the mushroom buds bursting through the soil and elegantly expanding their caps.

I have a deep appreciation of fungi. They are endlessly varied and fascinating 

I did write a wedding fic many moons ago.  It is definitely in keeping with the spirit of this discussion, because I agree traditional weddings just don’t cut it for Nyota and Spock.  

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5936728/1/The-wedding 

Government, Monty Python Style

Still brilliantly funny all these years later.

BEST INSULTS

whenever i find monty python casually just on my dashboard i just blink a few times and then get super fucking excited because i don’t see them as much as i’d like to on tumblr

If I don’t reblog Monty Python when it crosses my dash, assume I’m dead.

Look I didnt watch it but the guys’s got a point

Politics 1.01

Can anyone recommend a spock x uhura story following Star Trek Beyond, where Spock is trying to win Uhura back?

Seconded @youralienarms , if you can handle pure angst USS-Enterprise A Linguist’s Proposal is a great Nyota centric one!

Hmm? Nothing to see here, nothing but me celebrating making one of @lucystillintheskywithdiamonds lists *uncontrollable cheesing*

How to read a scientific article

Hey y’all! This post is aimed at people who are making the transition from textbook-based science classes to article-based science classes. Scientific journal articles are dense compared to textbooks and aren’t written with the intent to teach basic concepts but rather with the intent to expand scientific knowledge. It can often be very confusing to figure out what is going on. Here’s how I was taught to read them 10+ years ago and how I still approach them today. 

(I) After reading the title, start for real with the Results section. 

Why would you do this when you know the abstract will give you a basic overview of the study and the introduction will set the context? Because you want to be an active reader. You want to figure out what happened in this study in a way that makes sense to you rather than be able to parrot what the author’s say happened. This is the major difference between reading a textbook (where you need to regurgitate the information later) and reading an article (where you need to be able to intelligently discuss the content either in class or in writing). 

Look at the tables and figures first. Can you tell what the independent variables were? What the dependent variables are? What might the relationship between them be? What trends or patterns do you see? Depending on your style, it may be a good idea to mark up your document with this information or jot some notes down somewhere else. 

Now read the text part of the results. What parts of the figures are the authors choosing to highlight in the text? Are there any results buried in the text that you can’t connect to part of a figure?   

Now pause and think. What is the most important result of the study? Highlight where this appears in the text and figures. Remember that important doesn’t necessarily mean statistically significant! A good p-value doesn’t signify real-world meaning; you need to make that connection yourself. Take a moment in this step to notice what results still don’t make sense to you– no need to panic or write questions down yet because you haven’t read the rest of the paper. 

(II) Get the gist of the Methods. 

Chances are your professor did not assign you this reading with the intent to make you replicate the study. You don’t have to understand every sentence (or even most sentences!) of the methods unless you’re an advanced graduate student. You do have to be able to explain in layman’s terms what the researchers did. 

Particularly important questions to answer that can be found in the text include: What were the independent variables? What were the dependent variables? What variables were controlled for, either statistically or through researcher manipulation? What statistical methods were used to look for an association?  In health research, we use the acronym PECOT to deconstruct method’s sections.  

(III) Read the Introduction. 

Now that you have a very good idea about the design and results of the study, you’ll be better able to understand the introduction of the study. The basic goal of an introduction in any scientific paper is to explain why the study happened. The background may give you some helpful context, or it may be redundant at this point. I typically don’t spend much time on the introduction except for the end where the study purpose/research question and hypotheses are usually written. Mark these in the text! You should already have a good idea of the study’s purpose from the methods and results. Here’s some questions you should answer internally or in your notes at this point: 

(IV) Read whatever is at the end of the article: Discussion, Conclusion, Reflection, Limitations, Research Implications etc. 

It is very important that you save these sections for last because these sections are where researchers tell you what to think of the results. You need to be prepared to critically engage with their interpretation of the results by already having your own. That’s what the three questions above are about! Of course, the discussion was probably written by multiple advanced scientists and you are but a lowly student. That doesn’t mean you should accept their conclusions without seeing their logic. As you read the discussion, think about these questions: 

(V) Synthesize it. 

Try to boil down everything in the paper to just a few sentences that an 8th grader could understand. Whether you think through it internally or write it down is up to you. I usually print out my readings and write my synthesis on the blank back page using the following sentences starters: 

Taking the time to write the synthesis and any lingering questions you have can be really helpful if, like me, you do reading far in advance of class and need a quick refresher to glance at before class starts. It can also be helpful for paper writing or exam studying later. Consider revising your synthesis after you participate in the class discussion or hear your professor’s take on the article in lecture. Don’t rely on the abstract– that’s someone else’s synthesis, not yours.

— 

I hope this was helpful!! Don’t feel bad if this process is ridiculously time consuming. I have spent probably 3-4 hours on a 5-page study before. The goal of science writing is to be as concise as possible, which makes reading short articles more difficult than longer ones. I am a graduate student at a top American university, and I typically read 9-12 articles per week this deeply. If a professor assigns more than 4 research study articles per week for a regular course, make sure they explain what students are supposed to be getting out of each article so you can target your reading better. Chances are, you can skip some sections and focus on coming to class with clarifying questions rather than a firm understanding.

Happy reading!! 

@phd-one-day

Should be compulsory reading for undergrads.