#Leo’s abilities are so insanely convenient

[turtleblogatlast]

There is no way that, after a few years of competent portaling, everyone doesn’t start treating Leo’s portals like a portable storage unit. Bro can grab anything they need whenever so long as he knows where it is, you pretty much only have to pack emergency items on the off chance his powers go out of wack but every other time? He’s got the equivalent to hammerspace.

[p3t3rjasonquill]

Easier- Part 1 (Bucky Barnes x Reader)

A/N: I haven’t written anything in so long, so this is probably hella rough and choppy. BUT, I had this idea for awhile, and hopefully it works? I crossed over themes from Lucifer into the Marvel universe, and well, Bucky’s the devil (; Heh. If anyone likes this, I’ll continue it. If not, it’s just gonna die out into nothing. All the while, it was super fun to write and I feel like I’m getting somewhere again. The song “Easier” by 5SOS is a huge contributor to the development of this, so bare with me here. I hope you guys like this. If you would like to be tagged in future parts (if it’s a thing) let me know by either commenting here, slide into my asks, or inbox me. ~

Word Count: 1148

Warnings: If you don’t like the devil, oops.

“Is it easier to stay? Is it easier to go?

I don't wanna know, oh

But I know that I'm never, ever gonna change

And you know you don't want it any other way”

 ~

Los Angeles: the city of Angels, so they say. You were about to find out how true that was, whether you wanted to or not.

You worked at the LA Times as a reporter. Usually, your boss, Leo, managed high-profile stories, such as the one that was assigned to you today, but had decided that it was time for you to get into the larger stories. After all, he was close to retirement, and you would be taking over as the head reporter once he left should you be able to prove yourself.

“Remember the mission,” you muttered under your breath repeatedly as you straightened your blouse and blazer nervously. The elevator in front of you dinged open, and you cautiously inhaled and stepped inside of the small space. The last thing you had expected to be doing was interviewing the one and only Bucky Barnes regarding his new nightclub that had skyrocketed in popularity during the past few months, catapulting him into the public eye as a self-made billionaire and inspiration to all. That didn’t take away from the fact that he was insanely attractive, and ten times more intimidating. Too soon, you reached your destination: his penthouse.

The location was conveniently at the top of the building in which his nightclub was located, so you snapped some photos of the luxurious club before the time of your interview. Stepping off the elevator into the penthouse, you were greeted by an all-black cat. Its beautiful, shiny coat glistened in the sun that peered into the room, and soon you found the cat coming towards you to investigate. “Well, aren’t you just beautiful” you marveled to yourself softly, not noticing that you were no longer by yourself in the entryway. “He usually doesn’t like others, but it appears you are a rare exception.” You shrieked loudly and backed into the wall clumsily as you placed a hand on your chest. “Jesus Christ,” you cursed as you waited for your heart rate to slow down.

“Definitely not Jesus Christ. Pardon me, I did not intend to startle you, ma’am” Bucky Barnes said with a smirk as he approached. “Of course, you know who I am, but I do not know you. Leo usually interviews me.” You felt the tension and nerves slip away as you locked eyes with the mysterious man in front of you. He was even more breathtaking in person: crystal blue eyes, brown tousled hair, and the faint hint of stubble on his strong and chiseled jaw. You found yourself thinking of what it would be like to touch it, to run your fingers across his jaw and into his hair. You noticed the metal arm other news outlets and reporters mentioned. Sun reflected off the metal brightly, in a somewhat beautiful yet twisted way. You wondered if it was cold to the touch, and what it would be like to tangle your fingers between his.

“Ahem,” he coughed, bringing you abruptly out of your fantasy. You blushed a deep red, and your eyes immediately darted down to the floor. He made his way to the large mini-bar to your right, mixing himself an Old-Fashioned. “Sorry about that, uh, my name’s (Y/N) (Y/L/N). Reporter under Leo, LA Times.” He smiled warmly as if your timid demeanor was endearing to him. “Would you care for a beverage, doll?” he questioned, gesturing to the large array of liquors and mixes that accompanied them. You managed to shake your head no, still somewhat intoxicated off his presence. He finished making his drink by adding a maraschino cherry and a cocktail straw.

“We can do the interview in the living room, it’s just this way.” Bucky extended an arm, offering to lead you to the room. Was he always like this with his guests? You decided to believe he was, especially since the tabloids all marveled at his ability to charm any woman with a simple smile and flip of his hair. “I can just follow you, no need for the excess manners” you said bleakly. The charms had now worn off you and left you feeling foolish as well as annoyed. You would not be another one of his many one-night stand that were talked about in Playboy. He was the ladies’ man of Los Angeles, for goodness sake.

After you had a messy break-up with a man named Clint not too long ago, you had sworn off dating, flirting, anything that meant romance. You had been cheated on for a year, and of course it was his co-worker Natasha that had stolen his heart, among other things. A five-year relationship down the drain because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. There was no way in Hell that you would even consider flirting with this man. This was work, and you were here for the dirt on how he got the money so quick.

You sat opposite of Bucky on a leather chair, and a coffee table separated the two of you. You pulled the recorder and your notebook from your purse and started taping. “I am here with Bucky Barnes, one of Los Angeles’ new powerhouses in the club industry. Many say that your wealth and fame have come from dirty hands. Would you say that is true?” you asked pointedly, your reporter voice thick with accusation and curiosity.

Bucky simply laughed. He laughed as though this was the funniest joke he had heard in his lifetime. “Mr. Barnes, would you care to share what has you acting this way?” You were livid now, why was he laughing? Did you ask a stupid question? No, it couldn’t have been the question. Many other reporters had asked him the same question, but never got an answer. “Doll, since you asked me so nicely, I’ll answer. I do favors for people, and well, they reciprocate by means that helps me live comfortably.” He took a sip of an Old-Fashioned that was on the coffee table, and you mulled over this answer. “So, you’re a saint of some sort?” you snorted. This answer was pathetic. What were you to do with this? What kind of favors? The mob? That’s what had been speculated more than anything. This question prompted an even larger chuckle, and he leaned back in his chair as the cat joined him on his lap.

“My father would keel over at that assumption. I’m far from a saint, doll.” You gritted your teeth as your irritation grew. Your patience was already lacking, but now he had made it a point to call you doll. “Mr. Barnes, can we refrain from pet names during a formal interview? I don’t have all afternoon, and you keep beating around the bush with my questions. What are you, then?”

Bucky didn’t even hesitate with the next answer to your question. His lips curled into a sinister smile, and you swore you saw a flash of red in his eyes for a moment.

“I’m the devil, darling.”

[ambitrary3]

The Relationship Between Creativity and Mental Illness. The science behind the “tortured genius” myth and what it reveals about how the creative mind actually works.

By: Maria Popova

Source: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/21/creativity-and-mental-illness/

“I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Katherine Anne Porter confessed in a 1963 interview. “The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.” While art may be a form of therapy for the rest of us, Porter’s is a sentiment far from uncommon among the creatively gifted who make that art. Why?

When Nancy Andreasen took a standard IQ test in kindergarten, she was declared a “genius.” But she was born in the late 1930s, an era when her own mother admonished that no one would marry a woman with a Ph.D. Still, she became a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and made understanding the brain’s creative capacity her life’s work. Having grown up steeped in ambivalence about her “diagnosis” of extraordinary intellectual and creative ability, Andreasen wondered about the social forces at work in the nature-nurture osmosis of genius, about how many people of natural genius were born throughout history whose genius was never manifested, suppressed by lack of nurture. “Half of the human beings in history are women,” she noted, “but we have had so few women recognized for their genius. How many were held back by societal influences, similar to the ones I encountered and dared to ignore?” (One need only look at the case of Benjamin Franklin and his sister to see Andreasen’s point.)

Andreasen didn’t heed her mother’s warning and went on to become a pioneer of the neuroimaging revolution, setting out to understand how “genius” came to be and whether its manifestation could be actively nurtured — how we, as individuals and as a society, could put an end to wasting human gifts. She did get a Ph.D., too, but in Renaissance English literature rather than biochemistry — a multidisciplinary angle that lends her approach a unique lens at that fertile intersection of science and the humanities.

In The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (public library), Andreasen — whom Vonnegut once called “our leading authority on creativity” — crystallizes more than three decades of her work at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and cultural history.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book deals with the correlation between creativity and mental illness, bringing scientific rigor to such classic anecdotal examples as those evidenced in Van Gogh’s letters or Sylvia Plath’s journals or Leo Tolstoy’s diary of depression or Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. Having long opposedthe toxic “tortured genius” myth of creativity, I was instantly intrigued by Andreasen’s inquiry, the backdrop of which she paints elegantly:

Did mental illness facilitate [these creators’] unique abilities, whether it be to play a concerto or to perceive a novel mathematical relationship? Or did mental illness impair their creativity after its initial meteoric burst in their twenties? Or is the relationship more complex than a simple one of cause and effect, in either direction?

She cites the work of Havelock Ellis, one of the earliest scholars of creativity, a Victorian physician, writer and social reformer ahead of his time. In 1926, in his late sixties, he published A Study of British Genius, an effort to provide a scientific assessment of the link between genius and psychopathology by studying a sample of people found in the British Dictionary of National Biography — a compendium of about 30,000 eminent public figures, whom he sifted through a set of criteria to identify 1,030 displaying “any very transcendent degree of native ability.” Andreasen recounts his findings:

The rate of “insanity” noted by Ellis is certainly higher than is usually recorded for the general population, for which the current base rate is 1 percent for schizophrenia and 1 percent for mania. These are the two most common psychotic illnesses. The rate of melancholia — or what we currently call depression — is similar to current lifetime population rates of approximately 10 to 20 percent.

Once she became a psychiatrist, having come from a literary world “well populated with people who had vividly described symptoms of mental illness,” Andreasen decided to apply everything science had uncovered in the decades since Ellis’s work and design a rigorous study on the relationship between creativity and mental illness. Andreasen had attended the University of Iowa Medical School and had completed her residency in psychiatry there — a somewhat fortuitous circumstance that presented her with the perfect, quite convenient sample pool for her study: the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious creative-writing programs in the world, which has included such distinguished faculty as Kurt Vonnegut and Annie Dillard since its inception in 1936.

Andreasen’s study had a couple of crucial points of differentiation over Ellis’s work and other previous efforts: Rather than anecdotal accounts in biographies of her subjects, she employed structured, first-person interviews; she then applied rigorous diagnostic criteria to the responses based on The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of modern psychiatry. Andreasen writes:

In addition to incorporating diagnostic criteria, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Study also improved on its predecessors by including a group of educationally matched controls. The Writers’ Workshop has a limited number of permanent faculty members (typically two poets and two prose writers). The remainder of the faculty in any given year consists of visiting writers who come to Iowa, drawn by its pastoral tranquility and an opportunity to be “far from the madding crowd” for a time of introspection, incubation, and isolation.

[…]

I began the study with a perfectly reasonable working hypothesis. I anticipated that the writers would be, in general, psychologically healthy, but that they would have an increased rate of schizophrenia in their family members. This hunch made good sense, based on the information that I had at that time. I was influenced by my knowledge about people such as James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Einstein, all of whom had family members with schizophrenia.

But as she began administering the interviews and applying to them the diagnostic criteria, her working hypothesis quickly crumbled: To her bewilderment, the majority of the writers “described significant histories of mood disorder that met diagnostic criteria for either bipolar illness or unipolar depression.” Most had received treatment for it — some with hospitalization, some with outpatient therapy and medication. Perhaps the most startling contrast with her initial hunch was the fact that not a single writer displayed any symptoms of schizophrenia.

And this is where the monumental importance of her study shines: What Andreasen found wasn’t confirmation for the “tortured genius” myth — the idea that a great artist must have some dark, tragic pathology in order to create — but quite the opposite: these women and men had become successful writers not because of their tortuous mental health but despite it.

Andreasen reflects on the findings:

Although many writers had had periods of significant depression, mania, or hypomania, they were consistently appealing, entertaining, and interesting people. They had led interesting lives, and they enjoyed telling me about them as much as I enjoyed hearing about them. Mood disorders tend to be episodic, characterized by relatively brief periods of low or high mood lasting weeks to months, interspersed with long periods of normal mood (known as euthymia to us psychiatrists). All the writers were euthymic at the time that I interviewed them, and so they could look back on their periods of depression or mania with considerable detachment. They were also able to describe how abnormalities in mood state affected their creativity. Consistently, they indicated that they were unable to be creative when either depressed or manic.

More than that, her study confirmed two pervasive yet conflicting ideas about the relationship between creativity and mental illness:

One point of view … is that gifted people are in fact supernormal or superior in many ways. My writers certainly were. They were charming, fun, articulate, and disciplined. They typically followed very similar schedules, getting up in the morning and allocating a large chunk of time to writing during the earlier part of the day. They would rarely let a day go by without writing. In general, they had a close relationship with friends and family. They manifested the Freudian definition of health: lieben und arbeiten, “to love and to work.” On the other hand, they also manifested the alternative common point of view about the nature of genius: that it is “to madness near allied.” Many definitely had experienced periods of significant mood disorder. Importantly, though handicapping creativity when they occurred, these periods of mood disorder were not permanent or long-lived. In some instances, they may even have provided powerful material upon which the writer could later draw, as a Wordsworthian “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Andreasen’s seminal study inspired a series of related research, most notably a project by British psychologist Kay Jamison, who examined 47 prominent poets, playwrights, novelists, biographers, and artists to find that a significant portion of them had mood disorders. Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Schildkraut found even starker evidence of the same tendency in a study of 15 mid-century abstract expressionists — about half had “some form of psychopathology, which was predominantly mood disorder.”

Andreasen returns to the question of why mood disorders are so common among writers, but schizophrenia — which she initially expected to find — is not:

The evidence supporting an association between artistic creativity and mood disorder is quite solid, as is the absence of an association with schizophrenia. The nature of artistic creativity, particularly literary creativity, is probably not compatible with the presence of an illness like schizophrenia, which causes many of its victims to be socially withdrawn and cognitively disorganized. An activity such as writing a novel or a play requires sustained attention for long periods of time and an ability to hold a complex group of characters and a plot line “in the brain” for as long as one or two years while the novel or play is being designed, written, and rewritten. This type of sustained concentration is extremely difficult for people suffering from schizophrenia.

Creativity in other fields may, however, be compatible with an illness like schizophrenia, particularly those fields in which the creative moment is achieved by flashes of insight about complex relationships or by exploring hunches and intuitions that ordinary folk might find strange or even bizarre.

(The famed Russian composer Tchaikovsky, who some scholars have speculated had symptoms of schizophrenia, articulated those “flashes of insight” spectacularly in his 1876 letter on the “immeasurable bliss” of creativity.)

Andreasen considers the unique psychoemotional constitution of the highly creative person, both its blessing and its curse:

Many personality characteristics of creative people … make them more vulnerable, including openness to new experiences, a tolerance for ambiguity, and an approach to life and the world that is relatively free of preconceptions. This flexibility permits them to perceive things in a fresh and novel way, which is an important basis for creativity. But it also means that their inner world is complex, ambiguous, and filled with shades of gray rather than black and white. It is a world filled with many questions and few easy answers. While less creative people can quickly respond to situations based on what they have been told by people in authority — parents, teachers, pastors, rabbis, or priests — the creative person lives in a more fluid and nebulous world. He or she may have to confront criticism or rejection for being too questioning, or too unconventional. Such traits can lead to feelings of depression or social alienation. A highly original person may seem odd or strange to others. Too much openness means living on the edge. Sometimes the person may drop over the edge… into depression, mania, or perhaps schizophrenia.

She considers the cognitive machinery common to both creative thinking and mental turmoil:

Creative ideas probably occur as part of a potentially dangerous mental process, when associations in the brain are flying freely during unconscious mental states — how thoughts must become momentarily disorganized prior to organizing. Such a process is very similar to that which occurs during psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia. In fact, the great Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who gave schizophrenia its name, described a “loosening of associations” as its most characteristic feature: “Of the thousands of associative threads that guide our thinking, this disease seems to interrupt, quite haphazardly, sometimes single threads, sometimes a whole group, and sometimes whole segments of them.”

Of course, we now know that this crossing of the wires that combines seemingly unrelated concepts is also the essence of creativity — or what Einstein once described as the “combinatory play” at the heart of ideation — and why dot-connecting is vital for great art. Andreasen writes:

When the associations flying through the brain self-organize to form a new idea, the result is creativity. But if they either fail to self-organize, or if they self-organize to create an erroneous idea, the result is psychosis. Sometimes both occur in the same person, and the result is a creative person who is also psychotic. As [schizophrenic mathematician John] Nash [who inspired the film A Beautiful Mind] once said: “the ideas I have about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did, so I took them seriously.”

This failure to self-organize stems from what cognitive scientists call input dysfunction— a glitch in the filtering system we use to tune out the vast majority of what is going on around us. Andreasen explains:

All human beings (and their brains) have to cope with the fact that their five senses gather more information than even the magnificent human brain is able to process. To put this another way: we need to be able to ignore a lot of what is happening around us — the smell of pizza baking, the sound of the cat meowing, or the sight of birds flying outside the window — if we are going to focus our attention and concentrate on what we are doing (in your case, for example, reading this book). Our ability to filter out unnecessary stimuli and focus our attention is mediated by brain mechanisms in regions known as the thalamus and the reticular activating system.

Creative people, Andreasen notes, can be more easily overwhelmed by stimuli and become distracted. Some of the writers in her study, upon realizing they had a tendency to be too sociable, employed various strategies for keeping themselves isolated from human contact for sizable stretches of time in order to create. (Victor Hugo famously locked away all his clothes to avoid the temptation of going out while completing The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1830, which he wrote at his desk wearing nothing but a large gray shawl.) And yet for all its capacity to overwhelm, the creative mind remains above all a spectacular blessing:

Our ability to use our brains to get “outside” our relatively limited personal perspectives and circumstances, and to see something other than the “objective” world, is a powerful gift. Many people fail to realize that they even have this gift, and most who do rarely use it.

The Creating Brain is a fascinating read in its entirety. Complement it with a brief cultural history of “genius,” Bob Dylan on creativity and the unconscious mind, the psychology of how mind-wandering and “positive constructive daydreaming” boost creativity, and Carole King on overcoming creative block.

[thethoughtcatalogs]

4 Interesting Facts In June To July 2022 About Each Sign Of The Zodiac

ARIES They are the pickiest daters out of all the zodiac signs. They say the word 'I' more than any other zodiac sign, every little thing has to do with them. It takes them more time to choose what they're having for lunch than it does to make an important life decision-- they are very impulsive. When they promise to do something they do it, however more often than not they do something very wrong as well as regret it later. TAURUS 1. Taurus is the most effective at long-distance partnerships, they don't see what's so difficult concerning them. 2. The only time Taurus feels complete is when they are in nature. 3. They can be extremely, very careless. They appreciate the days when they do not do anything even more exhausting than getting some food and also the television remote. 4. They are straightforward people and appreciate the easy things in life: resting, alcohol consumption, consuming ... Primarily eating. GEMINI 1. One minute of doing nothing drives them insane. They also get tired conveniently. 2. They are extraordinary at multitasking-- the problem is they hardly ever complete what they begin. 3. They such as to see both sides to every tale so they might seem dishonest, however they are devoted. 4. As opposed to popular belief they do not have 2 faces, they have numerous. CANCER  1. Cancer seldom forgive and also never forget. 2. They keep whatever. They never throw stuff away. Do not be amazed if they have something their kindergarten crush provided. 3. They love everything vintage and also uncommitted a lot for modern technology. 4. They comfort consume regularly. Food is love for them, and when they feel low they look for convenience in food. LEO 1. They will certainly sometimes do anything necessary to accentuate themselves. 2. They are not as self-indulgent as they show up. Leo will do ANYTHING to assist a good friend, even if that implies making themselves look bad. 3. They are one of the most generous of all the zodiac signs-- they enjoy buying gifts for people. 4. If Leo is not the leading top priority in your life, you're doing something extremely incorrect. VIRGO 1. You do not need to ask Virgo if their glass is half full or half empty, for them, it's constantly dirty. 2. They have very detailed ways things need to function ... If their bed linen isn't excellent they won't have the ability to rest at all. 3. They stay clear of stepping on the fractures in the pavement so they won't disrupt the order. 4. They will certainly complete a task no matter how much time it takes-- 10 mins or 10 hours. LIBRA 1. Libra delights in looking for equilibrium more than really discovering it. 2. Libra's greatest worry is being unfair to a person. 3. You may ask yourself if Libra sleeps on their feet-- that's exactly how brightened they always look. Seriously, they pay a great deal of interest to their look. 4. Do not be too pleased if Libra provides you a compliment-- they are extremely tactful as well as do not such as to annoy anybody. SCORPIO 1. Scorpios recognize whether they like you or otherwise right away, they are extremely mentally extreme. 2. The first individual to ever create a conspiracy concept was possibly a Scorpio. They appreciate checking out points. 3. They don't rely on people. Even if you have known them for many years you most likely don't recognize that much intimate information regarding them. 4. They wish individuals will certainly be entirely truthful with them, but they would not understand what to do with all the added time if that took place. SAGITTARIUS 1. Telling Sagittarius what they can't do will drive them insane. There's no way they will certainly pay attention though. 2. They are absolutely the biggest thinkers in all the zodiac. They can talk about ideas for hrs (they rarely do anything regarding them though, they are uncommitted sufficiently). 3. They don't live in the past and they do not reside in their existing. They are ALWAYS focused on the future. 4. They are not judgmental, yet they know quite soon if they such as a person-- they pick up on feelings and energy. CAPRICORN 1. They are the ones that obtain wed late in life. They are self-adequate. 2. If you're preparing to break up with them yet do not know how simply suggest doing something hugely adventurous. They'll run before you have completed your sentence. 3. They rarely make the first relocation. Don't recognize what this has to do with. 4. They have NO tolerance for individuals that decline to make use of sound judgment. AQUARIUS 1. Aquarius was the initial person ever to state that "rules are meant to be broken"-- I can assure you this. 2. They are free spirits as well as have very few inhibitions. They're very open-minded and also the least judgemental of all the signs of the zodiac. 3. They care about each person's well-being similarly. 4. They have two sides to their character, one timid and scheduled and also the other really loud and also gladly taking charge. PISCES 1. Don't be stunned if they have an imaginary friend-- their whole world remains in their creative imagination. 2. They are the one indicator more than likely to be made the most of. 3. They can be either extremely fashionable or have no fashion sense at all. 4. They have no concept of what they had for lunch, yet they can quickly keep in mind something that took place 5 years earlier. Read the full article