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aspiring

@whitherwaywill

for what, you may ask? really, who knows...

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

Just looked up what time I was born and I'm so relieved that I can finally clear some things up! For those who have been asking, I'm an INTJ sun and an ENFP moon.

While I profoundly dislike astrology I can recognize that the vast majority of people who are into astrology are probably just having fun.

MBPI is a different story. If you're someone who is really into your Meyers Briggs type and are, like, assigning celebrities Meyers Briggs types you are exhibiting Behaviors (tm) that tell me you are at all times five seconds away from recommending that I watch a video on body language analysis.

Being really into MBPI types is like saying you think astrology is bullshit so you rely on scrying to get a feel for new people.

"I'm an INTJ so I'm suuuuuper unbiased and rational."

I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

I had an employer that made us do those tests. Like they paid a company real money to analyze all of us and tell us what our strengths and weaknesses were.

I purposefully picked all the "wrong" answers to avoid getting the one I always get (INFP or whatever the 'mediator' is), and I wound up with the 'executive' (I don't recall the designator). The one that's good at administration and keeping everyone around them on task no matter what.

And despite having worked with me for five years and knowing I was an absolute chaos gremlin (thanks, undiagnosed ADHD) my supervisor was like, "Oh wow, yeah, you totally are. I see it now. We should reassign you."

Like Karen (her actual name), I just took the equivalent of a Buzzfeed personality test rooted in white supremacy and eugenics. For the love of god, do not restructure the company based on this. Just ask me my star sign and project your biases onto me like a normal person.

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• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

A zeugma walked into a bar, my life and trouble.

I am fucking haunted by a terrible piece of writing that was shared on Livejournal (though it from an older actual published book) sometime in the early 2000s

If anyone knows what it is or can find it PLEASE let me me know as I need to read it again

Its an excerpt from a story about a woman and the fey? And there is a moment where the fey king? Prince? Casts a spell on her and then there is this long ass section of the worst purple prose of your life

Dude uses like 5 metaphors for every single body part! Like this isn't an exact quote but it's like "her toes were like snails, small white stones delicate bones, small white shells"

And the dude describes her ENTIRE BODY like that feature by feature!

This was posted in a writing group and blew up

There was a dramatic reading!

There was fan art!

AND I CAN'T FUCKING FIND ANY TRACE OF THIS TERRIBLE WRITING ONLINE

It's SO bad and I need to 1. Read it again and 2. Make sure Tumblr is aware of it because good god

This is ringing a vague bell for me but I can’t place it. Any of my fellow LJ veterans remember?

The full thing is here!

I'm so fucking happy rn you have no idea!

Ey! mission accomplished.

Been slowly scrolling back through my inbox and queuing up answers. Finally got back to two weeks ago when I mentioned the hospital gave me fentanyl, and the number of "alarmed" messages I got from non-followers lecturing me about taking such a "dangerous drug" has me rolling.

Like c'mon. First of all, it was a one-time dosage to knock me out for a procedure that didn't even knock me out, and second of all, I'm not a fucking cop <3

Just so we're clear, anyone can get addicted to drugs, and it can be devastating. This post is not making fun of addicts.

It's taking a knife-swipe at people who swallow copaganda and spout all kinds of anti-medication rhetoric at me and people like me any time we mention managing our pain with anything other than "positive vibes" and exercise.

I've lost so many friends to the opioid crisis -- not from opioid use, but because the response to the opioid crisis was to start denying people (like me) adequate pain management, and they ended up seeking out other means to manage their pain. Non-legal means that killed them.

Me talking about being given fentanyl in a medical setting in an OR should NOT have resulted in as many people as it did, telling me I'm a bad person for "using drugs." (I kept scrolling and found even more, just like wtf)

And also, people who misuse substances are not bad people. They're sick. Usually in immense amounts of pain, be it physical or mental, and they deserve compassion and help.

Do not believe copaganda. Do not send people these kinds of weird moralizing messages about their healthcare because you've swallowed the copaganda. Use your heads.

The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.

Julia Armfield, from 'Our Wives Under the Sea'

okay i need to fight armfield right now. the ocean is a haunted house because HUMANS ARE THE SUPERNATURAL INTRUDERS. the ocean depths are where WE go to die. the deep black water is home to uncountable beautiful creatures living their lives very comfortably and WE are the uncomprehending malevolent specter that pierces through. the ocean is a house and we're the ones haunting it. come on,

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.

Addendum from the linked page :

In case the Oct. 4 test is postponed due to widespread severe weather or other significant events, the back-up testing date is Oct. 11.

Other good notes

I love this site because you could post a picture of like. a fridge you saw being thrown out on the corner of a street and some blog you've never seen before with a fridge icon called fridgefan87 will reblog it like '#nicely spotted op! #model 37xc 2005 #fridgeposting'

and this too is yuri

Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.

If there is something that you cannot stand seeing in film or TV, then it’s your responsibility to learn about what you want to watch before you watch it. Media isn’t going to conform to your desires just because you try to make them seem like something other than just your desires.

Do your due diligence and stop being a tool of fascism, kids.

there is, in fact, a "platonic explanation for this" if you're not a coward

its so fun to see the diversity of tags on this ranging from "they're literally just standing next to each other" to "deep bonds dont have to be romantic/sexual!" to "yeah friends can fuck nasty, platonically. coward." we're all so correct, there are, in fact, a million platonic explanations for this

Evidence against the argument that Superman's disguise wouldn't fool anyone:

  • Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton look alike contest to a fucking drag queen.
  • Charlie Chaplin once failed to even place at a Charlie Chaplin impersonator contest.
  • Hugh Jackman went to comic con as Wolverine, only 2 people noticed him and one told him he was too tall.
  • Christopher Reeve use to go to a restaurant in costume when filming Superman. When he went in the Superman costume he was mobbed by people all the time. When he went in the Clark Kent costume no one realized he was Christopher Reeve.

Tony Hawk

Thanks for tagging me: this is true!

Since the late 1800s, dinosaurs have been grouped into two wide categories based on their hip structure. The Saurischia, the "lizard-hipped" dinosaurs, and the Ornithischia, the "bird-hipped" dinosaurs. This grouping has some major issues, but first, let's talk about what it means - it's still a useful way to understand dinosaur anatomy on a basic level, and it's still taught to undergrad paleontology students today.

In basic terms, dinosaur hips have three main parts: the ilium (that big upper hip bone), the ischium (that smaller support bone behind it), and the pubis (another pair of supportive bones of the lower pelvis). What we're concerned about here is the pubis - dinosaurs had two main ways the pubis could be oriented.

In Saurischian dinosaurs, the pubis points forward:

Image

And in Ornithischian dinosaurs, the pubis is parallel with the ischium:

Image

In general, this hip structure does help us broadly group dinosaurs into two wide categories. All dinosaurs are descended from a common ancestor, but this hip structure can tell us a lot about which dinosaurs are closely related - all Saurischian dinosaurs are more closely related to each other than they are to any Ornithischian dinosaur. These two groups also share a good deal of common traits, including common dentition types, which means that this grouping is still broadly useful (it's not just about the hips!).

Saurischian dinosaurs include all carnivorous theropods, sauropodomorphs, and all birds. Ornithischian dinosaurs include most herbivorous dinosaurs and those more closely related to them than to true theropods.

Now for the big question: why don't birds fall into Ornithischia, the bird-hipped group? When this classification model was first being developed, they were named "bird-hipped" because their hips superficially resembled those of modern birds. It was thought at the time that Ornithischian dinosaurs were the lineage that gave rise to modern birds, but we now know the opposite is the case - birds are members of the "lizard-hipped" lineage, and their pelvic structure looking superficially similar to the "bird-hipped" dinosaurs is simply a case of convergent evolution. Their pelvis has adapted for flight, which we can see beginning quite a ways back in Maniraptora, the clade of Saurischian dinosaurs which birds belong to.

Today, most paleontologists no longer consider Ornithischia and Saurischia to be proper clades of dinosaurs, and instead use them as a way to loosely group dinosaurs based on similar anatomy and ancestry. The Ornithischian/Saurischian classification was much more useful back in the days when we thought the two groups were so distantly related there was no point in trying to work out how the two lineages fit together, which we now know is incorrect.