#doing these on terrible paper with a random pen and highlighter i found at the office felt very good and organic

[alackofghosts]

life's more bearable with u!

[scooby-snacs]

Marauder Characters Studying and Reading habits

Lily Evans - dog ears her book pages. she never uses a book mark as an actual bookmark (mostly because she looses them constantly or they fall out). it’s always a random item like a spare piece of parchment, a sticky note, a receipt, old homework notes, a gum wrapper, and a bobby pin at one point. she can and will use anything really. she also has random spurts of reading. she will go from three months to a year without touching a book outside of classwork and then devour anywhere from six upwards to ten novels consecutively in the span of a week without pause.

Regulus Black - annotates his books with a fountain pen, especially his novels. sometimes it’s just scattered commentary throughout, other times it’s underlined phrases. he also uses little coloured tabs to mark certain pages or parts that resonate with him (though never the orange coloured ones!) is always reading something (whether a novel for enjoyment or a textbook for class) though he often takes his time when doing so, he reads before going to sleep at least a chapter (though often this causes him to stay up and finish said book rather than sleeping but he’s working on it). likewise, he is never able to stay strictly to one book and often has five or six on the go all of them at varying locations so he always has one handy when his peers become boring with small talk or he just needs to escape for a little while.

Remus Lupin - ruthlessly cracks the spines of his books, likewise he folds them over when he’s reading. he refuses to buy hardcovers and is strictly into paper backs. somehow Sirius always manages to spill some sort of juice or melted sweets on the pages or covers. Madam Pince refuses to let him to borrow any books outside of the library because of it. he reads at a super speed like pace but has terrible retention to what he just read. he’ll remember that he enjoyed it or he hated it, though he would be screwed if you asked him about any plot points or anything that happened within it specifically. he struggles with very large fonts and staying invested into the reading. likewise he is a sucker for when the author includes a map at the beginning and has to show it to anyone he comes across becuase ‘look at this cool map! i love maps!’

Severus Snape - reading for enjoyment includes history texts, and medical/apothecary/potions journals. he subscribes to at least three muggle medical journalists and critics back home and reads them over the summers as he can’t during the school year. he enjoys ruthlessly marking up the margins of any and all books with his own substitutes and ideas on how to better it, alongside where they went wrong, or what he thinks should be tried instead. his hand writing is nearly illegible (very slanted and squished looking). lily got him addicted to black pens when annotating (it got worse when he found out there were red pens too!) he is a very avid reader but refuses to have more than one on the go at the same time which makes handling his classwork rather tricky at times and one of the reasons he marks up and goes through most of his textbooks before the school year starts so he has more time in the library at school to peruse what he wishes to.

Pandora Ollivander - that annoying person who remembers what page they were on when reading and doesn’t need a bookmark or such to hold their place, ever. she only buys hard copies, and refuses to mark it up in any way, shape or form as she finds it distracting to the information. on the other hand, her homework is filled out in shimmery and/or glittered fountain pens. she often charms her textbooks with her wand to highlight certain specifics she finds worth memorizing but charms then back to normal after exams before donating them. she reads sparingly more so when she feels the need to and not in some inexplainable drive to. she has an entire bookshelf at home filled with books she has yet to read but has no desire to start yet because she doesn’t know if it’s the right ‘time’ yet.

[greenishbucket]

Caitlin Farmer and the Dollar Store

Cait can never resist the dollar store when she goes by. 1.4k. Also on ao3.

Inspired by @chocolatechipcookiesplease‘s super cute post! Hope this was okay.

Cait can never resist the dollar store when she goes by.

It’s unfortunate, since it’s nestled right between her favourite grocery store and the go-to second hand bookshop so she goes past it quite a lot. Luckily, it’s a dollar store so she isn’t sweating the amount of spending yet; equally luckily, people seem pretty touched when Cait presents them with a gift apropos of nothing, else her desk would be covered in all the random crap she picks up.

So far, she’s gifted March three pomegranate face mask sachets, April three whistles on multicolored string, Nursey a pair of toothbrushes that he’d been mock-offended by, Chris a ten-pack of bouncy balls, Dex a balloon pump with the outline of Minnesota on it, and the girls on the team enough plastic cups and cutlery to last at least two parties and three barbeques. She’s got her eye on a set of the ugliest colored paints she’s ever seen for Lardo and a whisk with a cowboy on it for Bitty, but Cait is pretty sure they’re going to get slapped with an extra-reduced sticker soon enough.

It’s only the second week of the semester. Cait admits she might have a problem, but what’s a few dollars that she’d probably only spend on something temporary like food when she could be buying cheap and/or ugly and/or semi-useless junk for her friends.

So she’s in the dollar store again after her afternoon lecture lets out – because she’d been meaning to go to buy a new loaf of bread and especially so after she’d had to carefully cut away the mould on her toast that morning – and that’s when she sees it, right near the door: A shark-patterned notebook.

It’s entirely not fit for purpose. The paper quality is terrible, the pages grey and thin as rice paper when Cait flips it open, the kind prone to shedding into the roller of a ballpoint, and there are probably about forty sheets total. It would last maybe two weeks of the life of a college student, tops. The spiral bind looks simultaneously weak enough to barely manage holding the forty pages in place and mean enough to leave a mark for hours.

But it’s got sharks on it. Little cartoon ones in diagonal lines across a blue background, entirely anatomically incorrect and with the shittiest printing quality she’s seen in a while but still. Chris would love it. That is, not it; Cait knows it’s an objectively crappy notebook and that Chris will know it’s an objectively crappy notebook. It’s not about the notebook, just like none of the other little gifts she’s collected over all the trips to the dollar store were actually about the thing itself.

As the saying goes, it’s the thought that counts. Cait loves to let people know she’s been thinking about them even when they’re not around and she loves to buy them cheap and ugly things and watch the small joy people find in them. The little nudge of love in a gag gift.

And she knows Chris loves them. For her birthday he’d handed her six separately wrapped gifts and they were all from the dollar store and that would have been enough for her – she’d almost cried over the tiny plastic scuba diver in a glitter globe because he’d remembered, he’d remembered that time she’d talked for a half hour straight about when she was a kid and wanted to scuba dive for mermaids – except he’d also made her a lopsided cake with Bitty and then mini-golfing. They’d seen an ugly cute cat on the way back and stopped for twenty minutes to coo at it and stroke it’s ugly head. It was the best birthday.

The point is, Cait loves to give small gifts and she loves Chris and she loves to give him small gifts to let him know she loves him. And both of them love sharks, she’s got more shark-and-Sharks-themed belongings than she knows what to do with at this point and half of them are Chris’ anyway, shyly given and taken after dates and proudly bestowed out of the blue. It’s their thing.

The point is, she’s wasting another $1.50 on dollar store crap for her boyfriend and no one is going to stop her.

Cait has time to run back home for a snack and then run to practice. It’s late by the time they’re done and she’s tired but she needs to fit in studying so she heads over to the group study space so her and Chris can study together, and so neither of them will be distracted by their loud housemates or the call of a soft bed. She stakes out the pod with the comfortable chairs that can spin but aren’t broken and don’t randomly drop their height mid-studying and spreads her books and laptop and water and snacks across it until Chris arrives. Some people give her dirty looks but it’s ten at night on a Tuesday and everyone knows study space rules don’t apply at ten at night on a Tuesday.

Cait’s almost forgotten about the shark notebook she’d bought until she spots it fallen to the bottom of her rucksack, probably getting a little rough around the edges with all the crumbs and flotsam that hang around down there.  She tucks it under her actual notebook, ready for when Chris arrives. She’s already trying not to smile thinking about how he’s going to react.

When he finally does arrive he looks just about ready to go to bed but the loud thunk of his backpack on the table lets her know he means business. He gives her a kiss on the cheek and then pulls out three different textbooks and a massive pad of lined paper, plus a separate pad of squared paper, and four different colored highlighters, and a calculator. Then his laptop and two bottles of water. Then three different pens and two worn-down pencils.

“All right, I’m ready,” he announces, looking at all the things with no small amount of alarm. “I’ve let all my studying slide this week, but tonight’s the night! I’m going to get it all done.”

Cait can relate; she already feels about four weeks behind where her professors expect her to be and she’s not quite sure how she’s got there. At least her and Chris can support each other emotionally in this trying time, and physically by poking each other awake, even if some of the courses he’s taking are indecipherable to her and Chris is no marine biologist so there’s not much in the way of academic support.

And speaking of emotional support:

“Well I got you a little something to help,” Cait says, pulling the shark notebook out from under her work. “Look! Isn’t it cute?”

Chris stares at the notebook. And he stares at the notebook. He stares a bit more and Cait starts to wonder if maybe she’s found the one ugly gift Chris doesn’t like when his face breaks into a smile, the kind that makes her feet feel grounded and her entire chest feel warm.

“Oh my God, I love you,” he says, and he takes the notebook from her hand, inspecting the cover and the useless pages. “Oh my God, Cait, I love you.”

Cait feels herself going pink even as she says, “Okay, it is pretty cute and you know I love you too, but I didn’t really think it was that cute?”

But Chris is laughing now and rooting around in his endless backpack only to pull out–

The shark notebook. The dollar store shark notebook that he just took from Cait and is still holding in his other hand.

“Oh my God,” Cait says, taking the notebook from him. They bought each other the same fucking ugly dollar store shark notebook. This is a moment – forget every other instance where she’s looked at Chris and thought there’s no one else that gets me like this, forget every sweet and thought out gesture, forget the sex. They really are soulmates. “Oh my God, Chris, I love you.”

Between studying, they use up six pages of one of the notebooks playing hangman and three playing a hard-fought, best of three noughts and crosses with Cait cheating because he knows how ticklish Chris is and she never said she was above fighting dirty. A good fifteen pages of the other notebook are lost when Chris knocks over his water bottles trying to escape the tickling.

Everyone is giving them dirty looks at that point, but Cait is still giggling as her and Chris move their non-dollar-store-items to safety and run to the bathroom for tissues. The next morning she gives her notebook – the water-damaged one, thanks Chris – pride of place in her corner of dollar store crap on her desk.

[rinari7]

Tagged by @ciara-jane. Thank you, meine Fledermaus. :)

1) Do you have a certain place at home for reading? More often than not it’s on my bed lying on my stomach, but that’s just because I don’t have an overabundance of room and my bed is comfy. It’s my retreat.

2) Bookmark or random piece of paper?   Whatever is lying at hand. I officially own some pieces of paper that are intended to be used as bookmarks (e.g. printed, whatever) but I don’t think I’ve ever used them. Currently what’s lying at hand is predominantly gum wrappers and library checkout receipts, though I have also used a pen, a rubber band, or my phone to temporarily mark a place until I could find something flat to take their place in the longer term.

3) Can you just stop reading or do you have to stop after a chapter/a certain amount of pages? I used to be able to just stop reading because I had books with me everywhere and it was kind of a necessity. Now I prefer to find a natural break in the tex,t but that doesn’t have to be a chapter: just the end of a passage, the end of an event, a point of view switch, or something similar.

4) Do you eat or drink while reading? All the time. Only way my mother found to keep me at the table long enough to eat when I was younger. (I really hate being bored.)

5) Music or TV while reading? Sometimes music, but rarely, and no TV. I’m here to pay attention to the book, dammit.

6) Reading at home or everywhere? Echoing Ciara here: Everywhere!

7) Reading out loud or silently in your head? And here: Silently in my head.

8) Do you read ahead or even skip pages? Nope. Never. Sometimes I skim passages, if it’s self-congratulatory flowery descriptive prose that’s not actually important to the plot or character development. But I don’t read ahead. (In fact I often have trouble rereading; knowing what happens kills part of the spell for me.)

9) Breaking the spine or keeping it like new? I don’t go out of my way to break the spine, but it happens over the natural course of use, I think; I don’t go out of my way to obsessively prevent it, either. I also used to be terrible about leaving paperbacks open face-down instead of using a bookmark, which I know increases wear and tear on the spine.

10) Do you write in your books? Never, unless I was required to for school. Who would do such a thing? Even underlining or highlighting really makes me cringe. Post-It Notes or such are acceptable. Tagging whoever would like to do this, but in particular @flootzavut @viennainspringtime ;) @onekisstotakewithme @keekmenta if you might like to!

[elevatorupcompany]

Sketch, draw, doodle: just do it

Drawing, sketching, doodling: the act of making an idea or thought visual. These are tools we’ve known our whole life and I argue valuable enough to be revisited. Put aside the intimidation of being good at “art”. Forget the preconceived notions that doodling is equivalent to being bored. Rethink how drawing can be used as a tool across all aspects of your team, not just the creatives. ~ Emily, Designer The act of making something visual is a part of every human’s make up since the beginning of time. As children, we constantly created. Meander back to the freeing mindset of early days and forget any notions that only artists draw. Throughout this, I’ll be jumping back and forth between a few methods of making things visual: doodling, sketching, and drawing. By definition, they are all different. Sketching and drawing are typically differentiated by the level of fidelity. Drawing is thought of as the polished form whereas sketching is often referred to as the preliminary stage of drawing. Doodling is the red-headed stepchild, unlovingly defined as “to draw or scribble idly” or better yet, “to waste (time) in aimless or foolish activity.” In defense of doodling and in support of all three, we’ll explore how they benefit us in our day-to-day.

Thinking visually is a powerful tool in connecting, creating, communicating and comprehending the world around us. In an article highlighting cognitive benefits of doodling, Sunni Brown, author of “The Doodle Revolution”, warns us of the mindset which stops people from creating,

“To make the practice (of doodling) into something that requires savvy would be as dangerous as suggesting that only people who excel at writing should ever compose sentences.”

With that, consider these as tools in the following ways:

Getting visual an icebreaker: Because of our apprehension to create, it can be awkward. Relating to others over something universally discomforting can be oddly comforting. 

Getting visual as a way to come up with new ideas: Drawing fast and loose allows us to have half-formulated ideas with room to grow. 

Getting visual as a communication tool: We connect to images we recognize; let your ability to rough out forms help people relate to your ideas. 

Getting visual to better comprehend and understand your learnings: Making things visual is tool for comprehension, reinforcing what we hear.

Connecting

The very thought of creating something and then showing it to others heightens a sense of vulnerability. With vulnerability comes great opportunity to smash down walls. Use sketching as an icebreaker to connect with new teams and new clients. It’s a great way to unleash a little silliness and level the playing field of any room you’re in. 

Imagine if you can, you’re to plan the menu for your best friend’s wedding...with Gordon Ramsay. The thought is actually quite terrifying. “He’s going to make me cry and we haven’t even met yet”, you think to yourself. You’re well aware of what your friend likes and you have heaps of ideas. As the planning begins, shaking in your boots, you’re feeling inferior and you don’t speak up. This is a problem.

In far less hypothetical scenarios, people feel this level of doubt and fear within new groups all the time. Do these people know more than me? Are my ideas valuable? What if the topic was already covered? The very thought of being wrong or making mistakes is enough to silence meaningful voices. There is plenty of merit in telling people there is no right answer and to embrace just doing. Sketching is an interactive way to reinforce that notion. When you take time to recognize no matter who you are in that room, your different skillsets and different point of views, we remember that we all share a common language. 

Icebreaker activity: Everyone is given a blank piece of paper and a pen or pencil. At random, a letter is drawn. If the letter drawn is a “P” everyone is to take two to three minutes to draw everything they can possibly think of that starts with the letter “P”. When the time is up, pair up with someone and compare. There are a few lessons bundled in this activity:

First, we recognize the quickness of the activity. Rest easy knowing in under five minutes, everything is going to be unpolished.Next, we realize even our chicken scratch can be understood. It might be two ovals and a triangle, but every person recognizes it’s a penguin. Patterns will surface of the things people automatically gravitate toward, multiple people drawing the same object from one letter.The walls of uncertainty and self doubt fall as we laugh together and find we all can find common ground. 

Shout to to Lori over at Mutually Human for telling us about this.

Creating

Getting the wheels spinning and kicking off the creative process can be an overwhelming feat. When the world is your oyster it’s hard to know where to begin. Often we have ideas but the inability to express what we have churning in our mind stops us in our tracks. Engaging with our visual language helps us gain access to parts of our brain not easily accessible when we’re operating in linguistic mode. Sunni Brown speaks to this block: “Most of us use reading, writing, and talking to brainstorm, but the human mind is very habit forming. To break that habit, you have to think in an unfamiliar medium, a visual medium.” Breaking our habits helps up break the mold of old thoughts and discover new ideas. 

Much like creating a mind map, drawing (sketching and doodling) helps us build on ideas and find connections. Your teammate might draw something but you see it from a different angle and build on it in a new light. Drawings, like actions, often speak louder than words could ever do. The world is full of complexities and emotions without definitions. Making it visual allows us to speak in words the English language has not yet formalized.

Ideation activity We call this the bad idea blitz. Sometimes it takes clearing your mind of its crazy to unveil a shiny nugget of brilliance. This works alone or with a team. Do this at the beginning of ideation or when your team is feeling low on creative juices and ideas. First step is to know what you’re ideating for; is it an overall solution or the springboard of where to begin? Take a piece of paper and fold it so you have six rectangles. Give yourself one minute to come up with six terribly wonderful ideas. At the end, you likely didn’t come up with your final solution but you have pushed yourself to think outside of the box and loosened up those creative thinking muscles.

Communicating

Stick figures, scribbles, arrows, these are visual marks predating anything our verbal language could say. Drawing is a communication mechanism used by artists, architects, mathematicians, and careers spanning far and wide. Drawing can be a tool for communication when there isn’t a common language. Where words fail, imagery prevails.

Examples from many moons ago. My dad was in Paris when he was approached by a French man hoping to send his love letters to his girlfriend in New York. Their language barrier was much less of a barrier once they began drawing.

Comprehension

Comprehension is where doodling takes the stage. Doodling has been widely researched in its relation to comprehend and remember information. Published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, researchers found people that doodle find it upwards of 29% easier to recall dull information, than people that do not doodle. There is much more time to daydream when you’re not doodling. In class, during lectures, or in meetings are great times to doodle.

“Few of us can effectively take point-by-point linguistic notes while listening to people talk, because the auditory information competes with the written information. But visual attention is like a learning loophole; it doesn’t compete with what we hear. That’s why doodling in school can actually help you learn.” -Sunni Brown

Comprehension activity: Sketchnoting can be thought of as purposeful doodling or as a method of note taking. At the core, it is just that: taking notes though a series of synthesized thoughts using doodles of shapes, words, and connectors to help remember information later down the road. An article in Core77 wonderfully breaks down the parts of sketchnoting and is a great jumping off point for your first sketchnote experience.

Core 77 breaks sketchnoting down into 7 elements:

Text: meaningful points, quotes, and quips. Use typographic treatments to make important information pop.

Containers: enclosing ideas, words, icons, into one structure. This helps identify grouped information.

Connectors: Lines, arrows, visual indicators to show linked information.

Frameworks: Some presentations might have an obvious structure. Frameworks help you synthesize into your own underlying structure.

Icons: Icons help represent an idea as simply as possible.

Shading: Add emphasis and contrast to your notes with shading. Color: Once you’re ready, add color. This helps distinguish different information.

From EU’s first go at sketchnoting to a Ted Talk.

Drawing, sketching, doodling: the act of making an idea or thought visual. These are tools we’ve known our whole life and I argue valuable enough to be revisited. Put aside the intimidation of being good at “art”. Forget the preconceived notions that doodling is equivalent to being bored. Rethink how drawing can be used as a tool across all aspects of your team, not just the creatives.

~ Emily, Designer