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when you remember you're technically an adult and have to make big grown-up decisions that can alter your life completely but at the same time you really don't feel like an adult and just want to lay down

here’s a self-care idea: lay on the floor.  just lay on the goddamn floor, I don’t know.  aim for the carpet, or maybe put a blanket down first.  if you lay on your back you can look at the ceiling, if you lay on your stomach you can put your ear to the ground and listen to the building and your pulse, think about cleaning everything, then don’t do it.  I don’t know.  just lay on the floor for a while, see what happens

when you wear a sundress and one of the straps is loose so it slips off your shoulder and u feel… how shall i put this… harlotrous

HOLY SHIT, IT WAS THE ORIGINAL ONE

MAKE A WISH

date of origin: 2013

FUN FACT: I’m actually *further* to the left now than I was in my 20s!

I saw someone write recently (paraphrased), “They said ‘you’ll get more conservative as you get older’ and what they didn’t realize they meant was ‘you’ll get greedier and more paranoid as you get richer’ [which is true, there are psych studies] and what they didn’t count on is that no one gets rich any more”

I’ve had this same dilemma too many times

What makes you so special?  Nothing. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.

HAPPY 102ND BIRTHDAY STEVEN GRANT ROGERS ↦ JULY 4 1918

To all the girls who “Love adventures”

A trip to 7-11 at 12:am is most definitely an adventure

If y’all don’t know how to treat mundane life experiences with awe and wonder at the world then maybe it’s *you* that’s probably boring that’s all I’m sayin

Who made this goddess? I love her! The eyes,nose,lips and that haiiirr

anyone know the artist?

looks like Mark Newman. 

http://marknewman.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=/

^^ this one is called “Grandpa’s Favorite”. 

^^ this one is called “Iris in Bloom”.

he’s awesome. 

You never see classical inspired sculptures with POC.. So this is really something to me. Absolutely beautiful.

Marvel Comics #1000: We’re Calling Him Ben

I feel this is an important addition. He saves so many people on a regular basis that this just keeps happening. And he feels so much for his uncle that the answer is always the same.

OKAY YEAH I REMEMBER THIS ONE Basically it came from a survey done by Bank of America.  Of only their customers.  Of only those customers that had a long term savings account with them.  And only surveyed 1500 of them.  And that, friends, is how statistics is used to lie!!

Always ask who ran the survey, the study, the poll, ask how many people were involved, and ask about the breakdown of the demographics.

As someone who had to study statistics, this is important to know. So important that it’s one of the first things they taught me. “You can prove anything with statistics.”

your heroic US military

There is no excuse for it and it should be prosecuted strictly.

Not to be all “im bitter and jaded because I tried holding my rapist accountable, got coerced into saying I made it up, then got arrested for filing a false report” but yeah the US military does not give a fuck about women

#but we fight in the wars while you stay at home

You really think the war stays “out there”, buddy? Cause I got news for you. You started this, and we suffer the most for it.

A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:

When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).

But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.

So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)

So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.

But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.

So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.

“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”

Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.

Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)

(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)

Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”

And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”

And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”

“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”

So. There.

If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.

ATTN: ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS EVERYWHERE PLS READ

HEED ATHENA AVATAR’S WORDS BBCAKES EVERYWHERE.

As an academic working in academia: this this this. Never buy into the elitist bullcrap of ‘oh, you wouldn’t understand.’ And never perpetuate that crap yourself, either out of pretension or even simple laziness. If you can’t explain it to a ten-year-old, go back and hit the books again cause you’re not there yet.

Also i feel like if you’re not bursting at the seams to tell anyone who’ll listen what you’re doing for a thesis, you need to be reassessing if you’re actually interested enough in that subject to be bothering with doing a thesis.

Lesbians and ice cream

life is hard for this dog

how do i explain plato’s allegory of the cave  to a dog

We’re only finding out recently that a lot of animals have colors and patterns that we cannot see because they’re outside of our visual range. It calls to attention how much of the world we can’t experience because our senses are limited. When we shine UV lights on them, they glow pink or blue, but these are the colors that we CAN see…. they could be a bunch of different colors, which we SEE as all pink. It’s also interesting to consider that most of these animals are not aware of having glowing patches on their bodies…. isn’t it also possible that we have skin or hair patterns that were not aware of? . . (There is actually some research out there to support the idea that our own skin fluoresces as well and that there are gender differences in the pattern and glow.) Other places to see my posts: INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / ETSY / KICKSTARTER    

Humans do have invisible stripes!  They’re called Blaschko’s Lines, formed as  skin cells divide at the embryonic stage.  Normally we can’t see them at all, though certain skin conditions follow those same lines. 

Apparently this is roughly what we’d look like, if our eyes could see in a different spectrum:

Dunno about you, but I want to use this in a story someday.  Aliens can see our stripes and we can’t!  Magical transformations follow Blaschko’s Lines!  A subtle sign of lycanthropy is darker hair there!  Wizards are bald with that cool spiral on their heads!

Speculative fiction is so much more fun when you can speculate about something strange but true. 

THIS??? IS THE COOLEST???? SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY EVER??????????? AAAAAAAA THAT IS FLIPPING AWESOME!!!!!

I mad agree with this.

This reminds me, if y'all haven’t heard of therapyforblackgirls.com please visit if you need a therapist. You can search by mental health need, location/distance, insurance, etc. I believe there are some that provide a sliding scale payment method for those without insurance.

If you’re not quite ready to make the jump, there is a podcast you can listen to as well as articles and links to help answer some of your questions about mental health and/or therapy.

The purpose, as I understand it, is to provide a place where black women can go to find culturally sensitive therapy. Some specialize in family/couples as well.

Take a look.

For any black Women following me! 

Taking care of your mental health is another important factor in your overall health. Fighting for good mental health is a fight worth doing, and is just as difficult, if not moreso, than physical fighting. 

-FemaleWarrior, She/They 

Isle of Eigg, Hebrides Island, Inner Hebrides, Scotland (Martin Parr)

“Attracted to them books” LMFAOOOO

@carrie-frances​ im screaming 

Ok this is cute but this octopus is living in a brick… Stop polluting our oceans

This brick probably is just junk but it’s worth noting that sometimes “pollution” seen in footage like this isn’t actually garbage. There’s a lot of organizations that take old cars, ships, etc and strip all the paint and other harmful components and then place it in the bottom of the sea for new coral reefs to grow on. Besides that there will unfortunately always be pollution and I would rather it be a brick an octopus can make a home from than plastic bags that sea creatures will die from eating.

Artificial reefs are pretty cool!

They’re often used to provide habitats for corals, fish, and other marine life where the natural ocean floor has been eroded or disturbed by human use. They can be purpose-made like those reef balls up there, or they can be made out of recycled objects like cinderblocks.

While not all human-made materials are safe for reef use (tires used to be a popular choice, but then it was discovered that not only do they not stay put, they tend to leech toxins), sometimes marine life doesn’t actually care- they adapt to what we put in the water. A good example of that is the Rigs-to-Reef program, which takes offshore oil platforms and decommissions them by turning them into artificial reefs. While oil platforms are in use, sea life congregates around them, so instead of abandoning these platforms or removing them, which would disrupt what has become the “new normal” for these animals, they’re toppled and coral grows on them. 

Anyways, I realize that I’ve totally derailed the awesome octopus and its teddy bear, but I just think that artificial reefs are neat!