Hate how lighting a candle does wonders to my mood. Like wowwww. Grug like fire? Grug not sad anymore because Fire in Cave? Wow. Real predictable of Grug.

ARIANA GRANDE Photographed for W Magazine (January 2025)

I’ve been engaging in behaviours not beneficial to my wellbeing

You don't have to force yourself to bounce back so quickly. I read something recently that said "when you come in from a rainstorm, you don't expect yourself to be dry and warm right away", and it really resonated with me. It's okay to take time to dry off and warm up. Take the time you need to process what happened to you.

Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on

Nobody:

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

I drew 14 pictures during the day, and wrote 32 pages a night. Now I can’t do shit.

A huge part of this is because you've gotten better! And now, when you're drawing/writing/doing whatever creative task, you're not just mindlessly throwing thoughts at your paper, you're thinking as you do it. Children can churn out a lot more work because it's not yet refined, but when you're older and have more practice, you work with all these thoughts running through your head about form and shape, color palettes or word choice. Now, you're making a dozen decisions with every moment of work, and you're also questioning the decisions you've just made, wondering if you can do it better. Don't beat yourself up about producing less work now than you did back then, because every sentence or shape involves a lot more effort for you now, than it did when you were ten and brand new to this hobby.

Also you have a job now and the never-ending bullshit that is laundry and dishes and feeding yourself.

okay, I actually really needed to hear this

there’s so many fun expressions of surprise and frustration that we’ve just left by the wayside over the years. nobody says “Phooey!” anymore. we gotta bring that shit back.

2025 is a good number, it’s a quarter of the way through the 20 hundreds and it’s got that nice set of 2s separated by only a 0. not bad. whatever happens this year at least it’ll be happening during a good number 😌

and IT'S A SQUARE. IT'S 45 SQUARED. THE LAST TIME THIS HAPPENED WAS IN 1936 (44 squared) AND IT WON'T HAPPEN AGAIN UNTIL 2116 (46 squared)

It's not just any square, it's the square of a triangle number - 45 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9. (Which is also the sum of all the squares in a Sudoku grid, an inescapable tool if you like to do more mathematically intense sudokus.)

The squares of triangle numbers, also known as Nicomachus numbers, have a very interesting identity - the square of the sum is equal to the sum of the cubes! So we have

The previous Nicomachus year was 1296, and the next is 3025 - and given that the Gregorian calendar wasn't in use until the 16th century, I'm not holding my breath for a second Gregorian Nicomachus year to happen at all.

Happy New Year, Charlie Brown (1985) dir. Sam Jaimes & Bill Melendez

Really been mulling this over a lot lately.

Transcript of Tiktok by stevetomjohn, in response to a stitch that says “but I am not going to hang onto every CNN breaking news…”:

This is one of the few times when I’m actually going to weigh in with my expertise, I did my PhD dissertation on North Korean propaganda. North Korea is, contrary to popular belief, a right wing authoritarian ethnostate, and there are a lot of reasons why that is that I’m not going to get into in this video. 

But as someone who thought a lot about propaganda, I have some things that I want to share. The main thing is exactly this point, that it’s a bad idea to pay attention to every little thing that you see. A lot of people think of propaganda as something that’s trying to teach you something that you end up believing, so it’s like “profits are great now, profits are great now, profits are great now!” and then all of a sudden the audience is like “oh yeah, profits are great now,” but that’s actually not the case most of the time. 

One of the articles that really broke my brain about this is, again, this is a very academic article in 20th century music, called “Stalin and the Art of Boredom” by Marina Frolova-Walker who specializes in soviet propaganda of sort of the mid 20th century. And she argues that the point of a lot of propaganda is not actually to convince you of anything, but to bore you into submission by basically filling up your brain to the point where nothing else can take up that space. So like, if you see a statue of Stalin in the courtyard, it doesn’t actually inspire any feelings about Stalin, but what it does do is fill up that “statue” position with something of Stalin so you cannot image something else being there. 

So, if you’re someone who wants to see a different world, staying on this outrage wheel, obsessing over the people that you don’t want in that position, actually has that effect on you, it prevents you from sort of imagining and planning what you would actually want the world to look like, because you’re spending too much time obsessing over the way that it looks now. Just one of the many ways that I would advise you to protect your mental health in the world and help you build the world that you want to see.

I use Canva for work and I am losing my mind over this image when you search for “fellowship” and “teamwork”

idk man

This is a very interesting case where cultural differences come into play. I see this and yes, immediately what I see is the visual representation of “fellowship” and “teamwork”!  But to people from other cultures this can look like a bunch of people grabbing someone’s butt.

As has been evidenced by other Catalan people in the notes, this is very easily recognisable for us as the base of a castell.

Castellers (which in the Catalan language means “castle builders”) are people who climb on each other to make this “human castles”. It’s one of the most beloved Catalan traditions. It symbolizes the spirit of teamwork and inclusion, because all people come together to reach for the sky, which they could not be able to do alone.

Nothing symbolizes teamwork and belonging better than dozens of people holding your ass to give you strength!

Thank you, useless-catalanfacts, this knowledge enriches me.

holy shit????

Rewatching Fantasy High and remembering that one of my favorite things about Brennan as a DM is that he consistently rewards kindness. Show some empathy to that random werewolf? You get a trusted mentor. Save that kid who was just trying to kill you? Lifelong friend. Rescue your evil sister? Redemption and shared healing. The final fight of Starstruck is full of people who showed up to help because, at some point, a character chose to be kind when they didn't have to. Even in brutal universes, kindness is harder to give, but it's still possible and still pays off in material ways. I love it.

it's so fucked up you cant start working on your life at 3 am. when it most matters

god I would be UNSTOPPABLE if I was capable of consistently initiating tasks. just you wait. you'll be waiting a while but just you wait

even "mild" chronic pain can suck. really bad. your body just aches constantly and even though it's minor, it can eat away at you. please take your pain seriously no matter how bad you think it is. no one deserves to endure it if it's not something that can be treated or mitigated.

I joke that I'm the human equivalent of driving with your check engine light on and I forget this most of the time. I make other excuses for why I'm tired or stressed or cranky, the truth is I've forgotten how much pain I'm constantly in. It's not debilitating and therefore it's forgotten most of the time. The truth of the matter is I don't remember what it's like to just ...not be in pain somehow.

I've had some kind of chronic pain as long as I can remember - I was 20 when I found out it's not normal to Always Have A Headache - I just powered through and figured I had a relatively high tolerance.

But these last 6 mos, I got a couple of new complications and it's suddenly debilitating. There's no powering though when it flares. And now I can see how much pain has always taken from me, how little reserves I have now.