doctorletmebebrave - Tumblr blog

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The Shawn & Gus dynamic in Psych is so subtly yet beautifully shaped by the fact that they cast a naturally deadpan introvert to play the world's most hyperactive attention-seeking detective, then cast a chronic theater kid to play his supposedly boring, reasonable best friend

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Henry Ossawa Tanner's depiction of the Annunciation will always be my absolute favourite but I really do think there is something so ethereal and endearing about his study before the official artwork was completed.

The way Mary sits with almost no visible features but you can still tell that her hands are clasped in prayer- the angel Gabriel manifesting as a single stroke of light as the paint and room seems to contort around him. Easily one of the all timers.

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Illustration from G. E. Mitton’s ‘The Book of Stars for Young People,’ 1907 Courtesy of AAVSO

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The difference between 2014 and 2019 is insane in my mind and the jump from 2019 to 2024 both feels like it was yesterday and also like it was a different universe

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When you go to school for computer science, one of the things they try to teach you is that a computer can be anything. It doesn't have to be a bleepity-bloopity thing, stimulating rocks with canned lightning. It doesn't have to be a room-filling automaton made entirely out of fancy light bulbs. And it sure as fuck doesn't need to be some rocks that you move along on a piece of wood to count things. No, a computer can be anything, as long as it follows some basic rules. A dog can be a computer.

Recently, as part of my court-ordered requirement not to touch electronic computers and mobilized smart telephones, I've been training the neighbour's dog to access the internet. You might think that this is difficult, or impossible, but again: computer science theory says that the dog can do it. Rufus can be a computational device. At the very least, I can train him to run over to the neighbour's computer and read my newsgroups for me.

You might think that this is difficult work, but time is on my side. Without the cruel bonds of "productive employment," I can spend all day leaning out of my kitchen window and yelling random words at the dog. Eventually, I seem to hit on what I assume is some kind of command-injection fault. Rufus stands shock-straight, looks at the sky for a moment, and immediately bolts inside the house. Minutes pass, and then he emerges with a print-out of alt.autos.plymouth-volare, which has not seen any posts since the last time I checked. It's almost as if nobody else is posting there, but I feel relieved having reconnected to my people.

There's just one problem: Rufus, it turns out, is a narc. He has made more than one printout. In the time he was gone, he was delivering the other one to my parole officer. The judge doesn't appreciate my clever application of theory to practice. It wouldn't be so bad, except that from my prison cell, I can look out the window. It's there that see and hear the dog receive a medal from the Mayor Himself for valour. This is bullshit. He's no hero. He was just following orders.

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Hey, sorry if you’ve been asked this before, but I have ADHD and I’ve been following your comic for years and just now have started to write my own comic (partially because you really inspired me). But I’m really struggling with staying on the project even when it’s boring and getting myself to work on it in the first place. Do you have any tips on how to keep your brain invested or just to make yourself do the work at all?

I have excellent news, I literally just figured out something really important about this.

So when you're an ADHD kiddo or otherwise have difficulty staying on task in a structured environment where Task is the Priority, the main way people try to MAKE you stay on task is by removing your access to anything that is not The Task. No phone, no TV, no doodling, no going outside, etc. In practice, this just makes us miserable because it takes the boredom that's always simmering around a 2 or 3 and cranks it all the way up to 11. In the same way that you would have difficulty staying on task if you were in physical pain, this crushing existential monotony makes it very difficult to work. The work might get done simply because you have no other options, but it will not be done quickly or well, and it will take a while to recover from how much it hurt.

What I realized earlier this week is I caught myself doing this to myself. I had 42 pages of background colors to do, and I thought to myself "this sounds really tedious, but I suppose I have nothing better I can do." And I realized what I'd just thought, and got very alarmed.

Because back when I was an ADHD kiddo imprisoned by school scheduling and a million little factors that keep children immobile and restrained, I couldn't stop thinking about how big and exciting the world was, and how much I wanted to be anywhere but here. When I was feeling really crushed in I'd pick a random spot on the maps on my wall and just imagine being there instead of my bedroom. This was the impetus behind almost all of my creative energy. I've said it before - anything is a prison if you can't leave, and being in a prison makes it easy to imagine how amazing things could be outside of it. Aurora's initial worldbuilding was forged in the crucible of fifth grade misery. My enthusiasm for art and my creative drive are inextricable from my sense of wonder and yearning for excitement in the real world. Not escapism, but appreciation. Wonders unimaginable are out there, and I gain just as much joy seeking them out as I do conjuring them up in my head and sharing them with all of you.

So now that I'm a grown-up with actual freedom in every way I've been able to get, the idea that I was staying on task by making myself believe the world was small and not worth seeing was extremely alarming. It could keep me on task for an afternoon, but at the cost of slowly extinguishing the thing that made me want to make art in the first place - the hunger to experience and draw inspiration from all the myriad complexities in the world.

So what I've been doing is I've been purposefully and intentionally taking excursions whenever I catch myself thinking "I could take a break but it wouldn't be worth it, it's the same outdoors as always, I'll be uncomfy and unproductive and tired." Because that is never true. Every time I've put down the stylus and gone out, I've been renewed in one way or another, and when I come back to comfort fully recharged I get a lot of shit done. Because it is easier to work on anything if you remember why you wanted to make it in the first place, and it is self-defeating misery to just lock yourself in with it and tell yourself you're a bad person if you can't get it done.

I honestly don't know how widely applicable this is. I have worse wanderlust than anyone I know, so for me this has always been modeled as imprisonment vs freedom. I've also been extremely lucky to find myself in a profession that lets me set my own pace on literally everything I do. But I genuinely believe that when it comes to making art with ADHD, you need to give yourself freedom to move laterally, not just in the direction of obvious forward progress. We don't think linearly in any other part of our lives - art is no different.

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saguache county, colorado

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Morning Coffee before the sun peaks over the hills.

@bentommat on Instagram

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do u ppl say ‘etic’ or ‘eee tee sea’ when u read this?-> etc.

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Fagradalsfjall, Icaland 2021 l jvn.photo

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images of hands working by the usda forest service & forest health protection, 1970s.

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on hold with the pest control company for work, and their hold message seriously just hit me with

"did you know there are a million ants for every human on earth? someone will be with you shortly"

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not to be maya on side but please do not call someone or something “mayan” when talking about our people, culture, etc. “mayan” refers to our language family (a language FAMILY, in which there are plenty of unique languages). we are the maya, not the mayans. i am maya, not mayan. it is the indigenous maya community, not the indigenous mayan community. 

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NEW VOID POST!!

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Just saw this on the lord huron subreddit in reference to the new void post- HELLO??? WHERE DID THIS COME FROM??